I think there is time to refine the catch-all word Anti-Semitism who is being used as a matra in this discussion.
1) Traditional anti-semitism is about professing a religion, who leads to a set of values and ideas, those ideas leading to the practitioners
of this religion adopting certain behaviours. And the same way that it is legitimate to hate a political idea (nazism, communism) and its practitioners it is legitimate to hate a religion be it Christianism, judaism, atheism or the aztec cult. So in the same way I wouldn’t shake hands with a Nazi (and disinfect my hand if I had done it before knowing he was one) I understand people who wouldn’t shake hands with a Jew. Notice that I am not saying it is right (ie Jews are evil), just legitimate. A key characteristic of religious anti-semitism is that if you break away with that religion, and provided there is no doubts about your sincerity, you become just another member of the community, and your children will not be labelled as Jews. An example of this is Diego Lainez(1512-1565), son of converts, who became General (that is supreme head after the Pope) of the Jesuits.
But Nazism was not about religion but race. People who had converted well before Hitler raised to power and even before WWI, were still hated as Jews, new born babies were still hated as Jews. You could have earned ten iron crosses during WWI you were still hated as a Jew. There was no way out.
2) There are degrees in antisemitism. There is a Polish woman who was a high ranking memeber of a political party whose goal was expelling the Jews from Poland. And still she savied hundreds of Jews during the war. It was not because she liked Jews, she openly told: “I didn’t like them before the war, I didn’t like them during the war and I didn’t like them after the war”. Even between Nazis, there were some who choked on the idea of extermination: one ofb the participants in the conference of Wannsee who advocated sterilization (we must remeber that he had been summonned to discuss how to implement final solution, not to tell “Live and let live”) or the major of a town who saved Jews despite being a party memeber since 1933.
That is why when someone tells such or such of the people
