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Much historical research has been dedicated to the history of anti-Semitism, and questions of sexuality and gender are often focused in these texts. As sexual images move on an elusive, highly emotional, and phantasmatic level, their analysis should take psychological factors into account. In contrast to historical memory, stereotypes and emotional clichés tend to show an extreme longevity.

The sexual images of anti-Semitism are particularly prominent in racist anti-Judaism as it developed in the nineteenth century in the Germanophone countries where most of the racial anti-Semitic texts were published. This is possibly related to the heterogeneity of Germany as a nation: Unlike France or England, Germany was divided into two religions and many autonomous principalities. The idea of a common blood became the most important if not the only common denominator of the emerging nation. They were aimed to produce homogeneity, and the images of the 'impure' or ‘foreign’ blood of the Jew served to authenticate the myth of an Aryan race. Sexual images contributed significantly to this transfer of representation to corporeality. They invested the idea with a body – and it is in this respect that they played an important role for anti-Semitism.

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