Antisemitism Was Racialized: Jews Were a Separate Race Undermining the German Race

Besides nationalism and scientific racism, antisemitism was a third element of nineteenth-century thought that eventually flowed into Nazi ideology. In pre-modern times, Christian prejudice against Jews was rooted in religion.... In the late nineteenth century, antisemitism was transformed: it became racialized. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, for example, the son-in-law of Richard Wagner, the antisemitic composer, insisted that Jews were a separate and identifiable race. He and others asserted that the “Jew” was the very antithesis of the “German.” Germans, they insisted, were spiritual, idealistic, heroic, and productive, while Jews were materialistic, immoral, selfish, and cunning. Chamberlain claimed that Germans and Jews were locked in a mortal struggle in which Jews aimed to undermine the German race. For racial antisemites, Jews were always Jews; they could never escape their Jewish origins.

--Catherine Epstein, Nazi Germany: Confronting the Myths, Wiley Short Histories (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 6.