Nazi hatred of Jews was uniquely irrational even among its genocides

Evidence

Recent scholarship explaining the Holocaust has tended to downplay antisemitic ideology as a factor on its own. Bauman has stressed the forces of modernity and the need within the nation-state to tidy away, by whatever means, those sections that do not “fit” (Bauman, 1989). More detailed work on the Third Reich has emphasized its wider function as a “racial state,” attempting and indeed partly succeeding in reordering the geopolitical map of Europe with huge forced movements of population, genocidal impulses, and the weeding out of the “unfit” (Burleigh and Wipperrnann, 1991). Such work corresponds to the sheer destructive capacity of the Third Reich, although it perhaps understates the ideological animus against the Jews and what Hitler and other leading Nazis perceived as the battle of survival between the Aryans and their ultimate racial enemy. It was, harking back to the work of Langmuir on the medieval period, the absolute irrationality of Nazi antisemitism and its construction of the all-powerful, conspiratorial Jew that singled out their hatred in contrast to their equally murderous assault on the Sinti and Roma, the Slavs and the physically and mentally “unfit.” — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 514

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction that Nazi antisemitism was set apart by its absolute irrationality and conspiratorial construction of the Jew, not merely its murderousness, is a dense, paradigm-shaping analytical claim worth sitting with.