A study of the depiction of Judaism in North Rhine-Westphalian textbooks did not reveal any intentional antisemitism, but nevertheless revealed stereotypes.
A blanket judgment is not possible, according to the final report presented to the school committee of the state parliament in Düsseldorf on Wednesday.
“Very good” descriptions of Jewish history, culture and religion are contrasted with some “problematic findings” – sometimes in one and the same textbook.
“We didn’t come across any intentional antisemitism, i.e. no open antisemitism in the textbooks,” said Dirk Sadowski from the Georg Eckert Institute, the Leibniz Institute for International Textbook Research (GEI) in Braunschweig.
“That would have been scandalous too.” But antisemitism is not only expressed openly, but can also often be expressed subconsciously and very subtly: “It is latent in our society.”
In school textbooks in North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, one finds stereotypical exaggerations, such as in the depiction of Judaism in the Middle Ages, where the »main profession« of the Jews was credited with lending money at interest, or in the role of Israel in the Middle East conflict.
The study was commissioned by Armin Laschet (CDU), Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia at the time, after a textbook review by the Central Council of Jews in Germany in 2018.
A total of 252 NRW textbooks from various subjects ranging from history to geography to politics and religion from grades 5 to 13 were checked for their content.
Central Council President Josef Schuster welcomed the fact that North Rhine-Westphalia was the first state to present a detailed study on the subject.
“The results coincide with our perceptions of textbooks from other countries and it is now necessary to make corrections as soon as possible,” said Schuster of the German Press Agency.
