All religions and religious believers have at some point in history faced prejudice, from either secular rulers, fellow citizens or followers of other creeds. The Jews, however, have experienced this for longer and in more extreme forms than anyone else. From the anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria in the third century BCE through to the Nazi Holocaust from 1939 to 1945, which killed six million Jews, the shadow of anti-Semitism has defined Jewish identity.
Hostility toward the Jews existed long before Christianity came along. The Greeks and Romans both attacked the Jewish people in their midst, accusing them of exaggerated influence, overblown financial control and strange hidden practices, an echo of every charge that was later to be laid in Christian Europe. But the breaking away of the Christian Church from Judaism in the first century CE bequeathed a legacy of particular hatred and suspicion between the two that was only put aside as recently as 1965, when the Vatican formally absolved the Jews of the crime of deicide—killing God.
The Devil’s refuge The leaders of the early Church, anxious to make a clear distinction between themselves and their Jewish roots, stopped at nothing in their condemnation of Judaism. St. John Chrysostom (c.344–407), in a series of eight sermons to the people of Antioch in 387, provided all the weapons used by succeeding generations, maintaining that the Jews were carnal, lascivious, avaricious, accursed and demonic. They had murdered all the prophets, then crucified Christ, and they worshipped the Devil. St. Jerome (c.340–420) labeled the synagogue “a brothel, a den of vice, the Devil’s refuge, Satan’s fortress, a place to deprave the soul, an abyss of every conceivable disaster and whatever else you will.” The first record of a synagogue being burned down by Christians comes in 338 at Callicnicul on the Euphrates.
“The Jew is the very devil incarnal.”
William Shakespeare, c.1596
The demonization of the Jews by Christians was exceptionally vicious. Jews were readily equated with the Devil, Jesus’s adversary in the New Testament. They were accused of carrying his mark and doing his work. One popular notion in medieval Christianity was the so-called foetor judaicus, the foul sulfur smell given off by Jews that was also a sign of the Devil. Another accusation was that Jews kidnapped Christian children to offer their blood as a sacrifice to the Devil. In medieval Christian art, the Devil was often depicted as having a long, hooked nose, supposedly a physical characteristic he shared with the Jews.
Blood libel
Blood libels—false accusations that a particular group, usually religious, is carrying out rituals using the blood of their victims—have been recorded since the first century CE, when the Greek chronicler Apion accused the Jews of sacrificing captured Greeks as part of ceremonies in the Jerusalem Temple. Christians faced the same charge in the next century when their Roman persecutors distorted the symbolism of Jesus’s body and blood in the bread and wine of the Eucharist to claim that the fledgling Church was drinking blood at its services. The first Christian blood libel against the Jews came in 1144, when the Jews of Norwich were accused of capturing, killing and sacrificing a delivery boy. The charges were rejected by a court, but the accused Jews had to escape a lynch mob. The Church later made the boy, William of Norwich, into a saint.
Scapegoating Though the given reason for much of the Christian hostility to the Jews was their alleged crime of deicide—killing Jesus—the real reasons were often more practical. In medieval Europe, a tiny minority of Jews (no more than 1.5 million across the continent) were often over-represented in the professions of law, medicine and finance. Their disproportionate success made them the focus of envy and scapegoating. When a king or a prince needed someone to blame for things going wrong in his kingdom, the Jews were an easy target. In 1750, when Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, a devout Christian woman, needed to raise some extra revenue, she first banned Jews from the Bohemian lands of her far-flung domains, then allowed then back in on condition they paid her a special tax for the privilege once every ten years.
“The Christian demonising of the Jews goes right back to the Jewish rejection of Jesus—the old question of the Jews having killed Jesus. In that the image of the Jews as demons was made.”
Rabbi Norman Solomon, 1933–
Christians were not alone in attacking the Jews. In the eighteenth century, various great Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, defenders of conscience and liberty in every other regard, vilified them for their greed, avarice and even for their habit of marking the Sabbath. In nineteenth-century Germany, scientists prepared supposedly learned papers purporting to prove the inferiority of the Jewish people.
Pope Pius XII and the Jews
Pius XII was elected Pope in 1939, months before the outbreak of the Second World War. He stands accused by Jewish historians of anti-Semitism because of his decision to remain silent throughout the war years about the Nazi Holocaust, even though he knew what was happening. His critics say that he turned a blind eye to Nazi atrocities because he feared that Hitler was the only alternative to Soviet-style communism sweeping across Europe and destroying the Church. It is further charged that Vatican diplomats failed to help Jews escape persecution by getting visas to travel to Palestine because the Pope opposed the idea of a Jewish homeland there. In the immediate post-war period, it is claimed, Pius showed his true colors by allowing the Vatican to be used as a conduit to spirit Nazi war criminals away to Africa and Latin America. His defenders counter that he was not anti-Semitic, that he was unaware of the true horror of the Holocaust, and that he believed (erroneously) that he had to maintain a stance of strict neutrality so as to maintain the independence of the Church and play a part in the eventual peace settlement. In 1999, the Vatican agreed to establish a joint commission with Jewish historians to research its own archives and present a fuller picture of Pius’s role. Two years later, the Jewish members of the committee stood down in protest at Rome’s refusal to open its archive fully.
Islamic tolerance Islam has traditionally been much more tolerant than Christianity of Jews, perhaps because the two faiths, while sharing a monotheistic approach, are not such close relatives as Judaism and Christianity. From the ninth century through to the nineteenth, Jews often enjoyed greater religious liberty in Muslim lands than in Christian ones, though it was the pogroms against them in eleventh-century Spain, hitherto a place of tolerance and mutual respect between Islamic rulers and Jewish subjects, that sent many Jews to a new place of exile in Christian Europe. In the twentieth century, and especially after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 on land that had previously belonged to mainly Muslim Palestinians, some in Islam became notably less tolerant of Judaism.
the condensed idea
Anti-semitism is the oldest prejudice
| timeline | |
|---|---|
| 3rd century BCE | Anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria |
| 1st century CE | First “blood libel” |
| 338 | First record of synagogue burned by Christians |
| 1144 | Murder of William of Norwich |
| 1939–45 | Nazi Holocausts |
| 1965 | Vatican clears Jews of deicide |