Antisemitism (alternatively spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism; also rarely known as judeophobia) is the prejudice against or hostility toward Jews as a group. The prejudice or hostility is usually characterized by a combination of religious, racial, cultural and ethnic biases. While the term's etymology might suggest that antisemitism is directed against all Semitic peoples, since its creation it has been used exclusively to refer to hostility towards Jews."Antisemitism has never anywhere been concerned with anyone but Jews." Lewis, Bernard. "Semites and Antisemites", Islam in History: Ideas, Men and Events in the Middle East, The Library Press, 1973.

Antisemitism may be manifested in many ways, ranging from individual expressions of hatred and discrimination against individual Jews to organized violent attacks by mobs or even state police or military attacks on entire Jewish communities. Extreme instances of persecution include the German Crusade of 1096, the expulsion from England in 1290, the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the expulsion from Portugal in 1497, various pogroms, and the most infamous, the Holocaust under Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.

Forms

The Roman-Catholic historian Edward Flannery distinguished four varieties of antisemitism:

• Political and economic antisemitism, giving as examples Cicero and Charles Lindbergh;
• Theological or religious antisemitism, sometimes known as anti-Judaism;
• Nationalistic antisemitism, citing Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers, who attacked Jews for supposedly having certain characteristics, such as greed and arrogance, and for observing customs such as kashrut and shabbat;
• Racial antisemitism, as practiced in the Holocaust by the Nazis.

In addition, from the 1990s, some writers claim to have identified a new antisemitism, a form of antisemitism coming simultaneously from the far left, the far right, and radical Islam, which tends to focus on opposition to Zionism and a Jewish homeland in the State of Israel, and which may deploy traditional antisemitism motifs.

• Chesler, Phyllis. The New Antisemitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It, Jossey-Bass, 2003, pp. 158-159, 181
• Kinsella, Warren. The New antisemitism, accessed March 5, 2006
• "Jews predict record level of hate attacks: Militant Islamic media accused of stirring up new wave of antisemitism", The Guardian, August 8, 2004.
• Endelman, Todd M. "Antisemitism in Western Europe Today" in Contemporary Antisemitism: Canada and the World. University of Toronto Press, 2005, pp. 65-79
• Matas, David. Aftershock: Anti-Zionism and antisemitism, p.31. Dundurn Press, 2005.