Are antisemitism and white supremacy manifestations of a general phenomenon? Why didn't racism
appear in Europe before the fourteenth century and why did it flourish as never before in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Why did the twentieth century see institutionalized racism
in its most extreme forms? Why are egalitarian societies particularly susceptible to virulent
racism? What do apartheid South Africa Nazi Germany and the American South under Jim Crow
have in common? How did the Holocaust advance civil rights in the United States? With a rare
blend of learning economy and cutting insight George Fredrickson surveys the history of
Western racism from its emergence in the late Middle Ages to the present. Beginning with the
medieval antisemitism that put Jews beyond the pale of humanity he traces the spread of racist
thinking in the wake of European expansionism and the beginnings of the African slave trade.
And he examines how the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century romantic nationalism created a new
intellectual context for debates over slavery and Jewish emancipation.
