ABSTRACT
Antisemitism became a Protestant as well as Catholic passion due to Martin Luther’s efforts, most infamously in “On the Jews and Their Lies,” a text that Luther angrily wrote after the Jewish refusal to convert to Protestantism. Bracher emphatically connected the long-term intellectual and cultural history of antisemitism to the short-term history of Nazi Germany. The German Dictatorship was a turning point in scholarship that pointed to the need to fill in the link between antisemitic ideology and Nazi policy. The historiography of antisemitism was a necessary but not sufficient explanation as to why antisemitism for the first time in its long history led to a plan to murder all the Jews of Europe and, if possible, the entire world. The historiography of antisemitism of the last half century has demonstrated the ways in which a fusion of the long-term, centuries-old traditions of antisemitism combined with a more radical, conspiratorial and antisemitic interpretation of events.
