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Secondary antisemitism is a special form of antisemitism that emerged after the Holocaust ended.
Peter Schönbach ‒ a Frankfurt School co-worker of the German Jewish philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno ‒ came up with the concept based on the critical theory (CT).
They drew their inspiration from a qualitative analysis of group interviews in the late 1940s, where they observed that the interviewed Germans still hated Jews, denied their guilt for the Nazi war crimes and saw themselves as the "double victims" of Nazi and Soviet terror. The interviewed Germans held Jews accountable for their hardship under Allied occupation due to the false belief that Jews (1) "applied illegitimate pressure on the Allies" to punish Germany (2) "controlled the black market".
Henryk M. Broder (1946 – ) discussed a commonly quoted description of the concept in his 1986 book Der Ewige Antisemit ("The Eternal Antisemite"), which is reportedly made by the Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex:
Horkheimer and Adorno spoke of "guilt-defensive anti-Semitism" motivated by a deflection of guilt. As per Adorno, some Germans never admitted their role in the Holocaust. Instead, the Germans projected it onto the Jews by blaming them for their own genocide.
They further hypothesized that secondary antisemitism came from "latent" guilt and "blind" identification with their nation, which is classifiable by a mix of individual "guilt complex", sociological "group defense reflex" and nationalism. The three elements altogether made them deny the Holocaust.
Since the end of the Holocaust, Holocaust distortion associated with secondary antisemitism has increased in a number of Eastern European countries, including Romania and Poland.
In the 2010s, Poland passed laws that have been seen as suppressing academic discussions about WWII Polish collaboration with Nazi occupiers, while violence towards relevant researchers Writing for The Times of Israel, Jewish historian Dr. Alexandria Fanjoy Silver believed that the normalization of Holocaust distortion and violence towards the said groups in Poland was caused by secondary antisemitism.
In 2007, German sociologist Werner Bergmann wrote an article about the "semantics" (study of meaning) of secondary antisemitism, where he summarized the features as follows:
Dr. Alexandria Fanjoy Silver, sharing similar concerns to Prof. Jan Grabowski, postulated that secondary antisemitism was "rooted in the psychological process of guilt-deflection", involving a "negation of personal responsibility". Dr. Silver added that Holocaust inversion, and the gaslighting of Jews who faced antisemitic abuses, showed secondary antisemitism to be a systemic issue in Western society, making it hard for Jews to discuss their lived experiences.
For instance, many Jews faced allegations of "talking too much about the Holocaust", being "anti-Palestinian" or "ignoring Islamophobia" for raising awareness about Hamas' atrocities on October 7, 2023, despite Jews having suffered 68% of religion-based hate crimes in the United States (US) in 2023 as per FBI data, while a survey from the Anti-Defamation League found that 46% of the world's adult population (around 2,200,000,000 people) held higher levels antisemitic views as of January 2025.
Dr. Silver considered those accusing Jews of being "genocidal" as being motivated by secondary antisemitism given that the accusers were "so uncomfortable in its immorality" that they had to "twist it into an expression of morality." She also highlighted that secondary antisemitism was statistically the highest in Europe as of 2022 in relation to Holocaust memory, education and commemoration.
Political scientist Dr. Clemens Heni maintained that secondary antisemitism often involved Holocaust inversion, in whose relevant propaganda tends to single out Israeli Jews for perceived wrongdoings. Dr. Heni found that those propaganda usually exaggerated Germans' suffering from Allied bombing operations (e.g. the Dresden bombing in February 1945) and false accusing Israeli Jews of "weaponizing" the Holocaust to "extort" from present Germans, which he classified as "soft-core Holocaust denial" – a synonym for Holocaust distortion.
Those who distributed such propaganda include German author Jörg Friedrich, Martin Walser and sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky, whose ideas contributed to a false claim made by far-right National Democratic Party's parliamentarians at a Saxon State Parliament (Landtag) session that "the British committed a bombing Holocaust against the Germans in Dresden". The post-war expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe was also phrased by the "soft-core" deniers as an expulsion Holocaust.
Case has raised questions about freedom to research Poland's wartime past
An appeals court ruled that two historians accused of tarnishing the memory of a Polish villager in a book about the Holocaust need not apologise, overturning a lower court ruling that raised fears about freedom of academic research.
We have failed to pass on the memory and lessons of the Holocaust to younger generations — the very future of our world.