This is an actual quote from his book Mein Kampf .
In the Jew I still saw only a man who was of a different religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I was against the idea that he should be attacked because he had a different faith. And so I considered that the tone adopted by the anti-Semitic Press in Vienna was unworthy of the cultural traditions of a great people. The memory of certain events which happened in the middle ages came into my mind, and I felt that I should not like to see them repeated. Generally speaking, these anti-Semitic newspapers did not belong to the first rank--but I did not then understand the reason of this--and so I regarded them more as the products of jealousy and envy rather than the expression of a sincere, though wrong-headed, feeling.
Yeah turns out Hitler wasn't born an antisemite (nobody is) and he was even basically saying things like "the antisemitism of the middle ages shouldn't be repeated". . Turns out the reason he went against jews isn't because of "jealousy" or "religion".
Devil's advocate -- why do you take him at his word here? Maybe he just wants to be viewed as compassionate and nuanced in his politics and is aware of how he could or would be perceived. Optics is hardly a novel political concept, and neither is deception.
Unlikely; antisemitism was all the rage before it was upgraded to extra-ultra-special-racism. Look up what some of the other leaders at the time had to say, including the Allies. Churchill had some rather harsh critiques, for example...despite being a Zionist himself.
Well because its believable. Antisemites don't start off hating jews, in fact many defend jews at the beginning and you can see that in antisemites today some even used to believe in the "god's chosen people" BS before going down the antisemite rabbit hole.
If he was pretending, I imagine he'd be doing it in the opposite direction. That he personally didn't actually give a shit about Jews either way but he wanted power and played up the jew hate because antisemitism was the big populist target of anger at the time, with the people and his party elites. This is what so called "anti-fascist" writers often imply anyway.