Anti-Semitism In Film Analysis

Anti-Semitism is dated as far back as 310, when Roman Emperor Constantine I (272-337) converted to Christianity. By the sixth century, most of the Roman Empire had fully converted to Christianity and abided by the New Testament in which Jews were called hypocrites and were blamed for the cruxification of Jesus. At this point in time, is the beginning of when Jews were perceived as different because there were differences between the beliefs of Judaism and Christianity, even though Christianity derived from Judaism. By the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press enabled the of spread anti-Semitism throughout Europe because of the mass production of anti-Semitic books like Hartmann Schedel’s Weltchronik (1493) and Martin Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies (1543); however, even with the release of these books, anti-Semitism still had not elevated to a point of radicalism. Anti-Semitism was clearly present in print; nonetheless, it did not reach its copiously radical capacity until its incorporation into film.

After the video snippets of the Jews in the Polish ghetto, there is fade out then a fade in close-up shot of an Aryan man’s face and the machine he seems to be deeply focused on working on. Then there is an assortment of clips of close-up shots of Aryan people using their hands to craft something. In these clips there is a heavy emphasis on hands because the Nazis compare the Aryan’s man work ethic to that of the Jews. In this case, they want to reinforce the idea that the Aryan man is hard-working and is fully capable of creating their own goods with their bare hands, while the Jewish people make money off their hard work. This in turn, casts the Jews as the oppressors and the Aryan people as the oppressed, implying that they are being taken advantage