According to Professor Gilman, the term "self-hating Jew" comes from a disagreement over the validity of the Jewish reform movement between neo-Orthodox Jews of the Breslau seminary in Germany and Reform Jews in the 19th century. Some neo-Orthodox Jews viewed reform Jews as inauthentic Jews under the perceived notion that the Reformers identified with German Protestantism and German nationalism. In response, some Reform Jews labeled the neo-Orthodox Jews "self-haters" in return. Today there is still a serious schism between Orthodox and Reform Judaism, but the rhetoric has changed; most Orthodox and Reform Jews do not refer to each other as self-hating Jews.
One of the problems with defining Jewish self-hatred is defining what it means to be a Jew and thus what it means for a Jew to hate himself. Some Zionists define Jews who support most forms of anti-Zionism as self-hating.
The term self-hatred has been applied by a large segment of the Jewish community against a number of Jewish authors who have written material that the Jewish community considers anti-Semitic. The Anti-Defamation League's report on The Talmud in Anti-Semitic Polemics states:
In distorting the normative meanings of rabbinic texts, anti-Talmud writers frequently remove passages from their textual and historical contexts. . . . They are thus able to ignore Judaism’s long history of social progress and paint it instead as a primitive and parochial religion. . . . Are the polemicists anti-Semites? This is a charged term that should not be used lightly, but the answer, by and large, is yes. Now and then a polemicist of this type may himself have been born Jewish, but their systematic distortions of the ancient texts, always in the direction of portraying Judaism negatively, their lack of interest in good-faith efforts to understand contemporary Judaism from contemporary Jews, and their dismissal of any voices opposing their own, suggests that their goal in reading ancient rabbinic literature is to produce the Frankenstein version of Judaism that they invariably claim to have uncoveredhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hating_Jew#Historical_origins_of_the_term