Darwin or Lincoln?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's not particularly hard to find the 'roots' of Nazi antisemitism and you won't find it in either the Bible or On the Origin of Species. The ideology you're looking for is German nationalism and the term you're looking for specifically - though certainly not exclusively - is 'Völkisch'. Given how that term is pronounced I suppose that most native English speakers will probably find it difficult to take at all seriously as something extremely sinister and highly dangerous, but language can be deceptive and it certainly was. You should then be aware of the ubiquity of scientific racism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and of the popularity of related things, such as eugenics (c.f. the movement for 'National Efficiency' in Britain, which was pretty much the guiding political principle of one H.H. Asquith - a prick, but not even close to being a Nazi). You can then look at the (very, very successful) attempts of many 19th century arseholes to transform popular anti-Jewish sentiment (which was always previously based on good old fashioned religious bigotry... or, perhaps more accurately, was always expressed in its language) into the new fangled craze known as 'antisemitism', a new product that it made it possible to hate Jewish people while also being a thoroughly and respectably modern member of the new industrial society. You can easily see, I'm sure, how all of this combined at the wackier end of the German nationalist political spectrum (and that was always a pretty fycking crazy political spectrum as political spectrums go) to produce something as excessively and insanely vile as the Nazi variety of antisemitism. You think these people were at all interested in theology, even popular theology? Don't be daft. Actual scientific theory (at a theoretical level) as opposed to popular science? Utterly absurd.