History of an Obsession

Reprint of a 1998 book about which Book News wrote: Arguing that while the Holocaust was unique in its scope, it was the product of historical forces that are not necessarily unique to Germany, the author traces the rise of Judeophobia (his revision of the term Anti-Semitism) in Germany as an ideol Klaus Fischer charts the tortured history of German-Jewish relations over a millennium, from migration and ghettoization in the Middle Ages to enlightenment and emancipation in the eighteenth century to varieties of anti-Jewish prejudices in the Second Reich to the rise of pathological Judeophobia in the years 1918 to 1933. The aim of the book is to provide a historical explanation for this change in consciousness that began with a religious prejudice, moved to social and political discrimination, and ended up in annihilatory rage.