Or did he deliberately use them as convenient scapegoats? Or a mix of both?
It's impossible to tell, but the argument leads towards her believed it, Because why else burden the rail network with mass deportation. But Himmler and Göbells were both fanatic believers of Nazi antisemitism
It's impossible to ever know for sure but probably a mix of both. But, if you read his writings, particularly Mein Kampf, you can understand that he really did feel hatred and disgust towards Jews in particular, but all non-Aryan people. Mein Kampf is a good one because you can see his ideas just beginning to solidify.
However much he believed in these views himself and to what extent, he clearly knew how to use them to mobilize and unite like minded individuals in his organisation and growing of the Nazi party.
Hitler wanted, above all else, to unify the German race under a single ideological sphere. Jews were not considered German, and their cultural influence was seen as not only poisonous by the nazi ideology, but directly responsible for:
-the pacifism that helped Germany loss WWI
-the influx of socialism/communism in Germany during the Weimar (pre nazi) period.
-the economic strangulation of the country, including the Weimar hyperinflation and Great Depression
-pretty much everything else. "Jewish influence" could be blamed for literally any issue the Nazi's attempted to move on.
However, he allowed several large Jewish owned companies to continue to prosper under the Reich, as they were seen to be too large and important (in terms of employment and straight up cash flow) to boycott or dissolve as most other Jewish businesses were at the time. Hitler would commonly give speeches that "met the crowd": he would scare poor Catholics and Protestants by telling them of the evils of the big city Jews, but then he'd completely fail to mention Jewish influence in speeches given to important businessmen and moguls, instead choosing to highlight the dangers of socialism and communism.
It is also notable that many individuals which influenced Hitler, men he saw as idols such as the composer Wagner, were also antiemetic and penned well circulated anti-semetic articles and works. The nazis were especially interested in artistic conformity. Hitler detested artistic liberalism, and tried to get rid of all "degenerate" art such as Dadaist or Surrealist art. It was claimed such art came from Jewish influences.
All in all, it was not uncommon for any European at this time to have a variety of antisemetic beliefs, for a variety of reasons that my thumbs couldn't possibly type out In detail here, but the history of antisemetic speech and ideas were so deeply engrained in certain social groups (particularly German youth groups and militaristic men's groups that the Nazis used so effectively to get that cultural hegemony later on) that it would not in any way be surprising if Hitler genuinely believed in the cultural degeneration and subversion perpetrated by Jewish individuals in and out of Germany. However, because of his ability to "read a room" and give different speeches on different things to different people, it's likely he dulled away certain uncertainties in his personal thoughts in order to project a uniform and absolute Nazi dogma, an ideology which required and demanded from its citizens 100% thought policing and conformity to the extent that non-nazi parents were afraid to talk to their children for fear that their kids would rat them out to teachers/the Gestapo.
Source: Richard Evans' wonderful 3-or-4 part series on the Third Reich. It has pretty much all the info on the rise and fall of the Nazis you could ever need.