Secondary antisemitism

**Secondary antisemitism** is a special form of antisemitism that emerged after the Holocaust ended.

## Origin
Peter Schönbach ‒ a Frankfurt School co-worker of the German Jewish philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno ‒ came up with the concept based on the critical theory (CT). 

### Early research
They drew their inspiration from a qualitative analysis of group interviews in the late 1940s, where they observed that the interviewed Germans still hated Jews, denied their guilt for the Nazi war crimes and saw themselves as the "double victims" of Nazi and Soviet terror. As per Adorno, some Germans never admitted their role in the Holocaust. Instead, the Germans projected it onto the Jews by blaming them for their own genocide.

### Poland
In the 2010s, Poland passed laws that have been seen as suppressing academic discussions about WWII Polish collaboration with Nazi occupiers, and the Polish Jewish community have reportedly increased. Writing for *The Times of Israel*, Jewish historian Dr. Alexandria Fanjoy Silver believed that the normalization of Holocaust distortion and violence towards the said groups in Poland was caused by secondary antisemitism.

## Academic views
 on February 16, 2003, which incorporated both the motifs of "happy merchant Jews" and "Zio-Nazis". The slur *ZIONIST PIGS*was also used.]], 2003, equating the Star of David with the dollar and Nazi swastika.]]

### Werner Bergmann
In 2007, German sociologist Werner Bergmann wrote an article about the "semantics" (study of meaning) of secondary antisemitism, where he summarized the features as follows:

* Holocaust denial or relativization popular in the Middle East
** Exaggeration of WWII German suffering to create a false equivalence to Jewish suffering while a survey from the Anti-Defamation League found that 46% of the world's adult population (around 2,200,000,000 people) held higher levels antisemitic views as of January 2025.

Dr. Silver considered those accusing Jews of being "genocidal" as being motivated by secondary antisemitism given that the accusers were "so uncomfortable in its immorality" that they had to "twist it into an expression of morality."

### Clemens Heni
Political scientist Dr. Clemens Heni maintained that secondary antisemitism often involved Holocaust inversion, in whose relevant propaganda tends to single out Israeli Jews for perceived wrongdoings. Dr. Heni found that those propaganda usually exaggerated Germans' suffering from Allied bombing operations (e.g. the Dresden bombing in February 1945) and false accusing Israeli Jews of "weaponizing" the Holocaust to "extort" from present Germans, which he classified as "soft-core Holocaust denial" – a synonym for Holocaust distortion.

Those who distributed such propaganda include German author Jörg Friedrich, Martin Walser and sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky, whose ideas contributed to a false claim made by far-right National Democratic Party's parliamentarians at a Saxon State Parliament (*Landtag*) session that "the British committed a *bombing Holocaust* against the Germans in Dresden". The post-war expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe was also phrased by the "soft-core" deniers as an *expulsion Holocaust*.

## Related pages
* Historical revisionism
* Holocaust uniqueness debate

## References