Klaus Fischer charts the tortured history of German-Jewish relations over a millennium, from migration and ghettoization in the Middle Ages to enlightenment and emancipation in the eighteenth century to varieties of anti-Jewish prejudices in the Second Reich to the rise of pathological Judeophobia in the years 1918 to 1933.

The aim of the book is to provide a historical explanation for this change in consciousness that began with a religious prejudice, moved to social and political discrimination, and ended up in annihilatory rage.