THE HISTORY OF THE JEWISH DIASPORA begins a century or two before the destruction of the first temple (586 BCE), and the history of antisemitism dates more or less from that period. But historians have quarreled for a long time about whether it is appropriate to use the term “antisemitism” with its medieval and modern connotations when dealing with the pre-Christian era. There is very little we know about these early centuries and the sources are virtually all Jewish, such as the book of Esther in the Old Testament, which reports a failed intrigue by Haman to have all the Jews liquidated: “And Haman said unto king Ahasuerus: There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of thy kingdom; and their laws are diverse from all people; neither keep they the king’s laws: therefore it is not for the king’s profit to suffer them.” The accusation was to occur many times throughout history.
Nor has a single text reached us in the original and there is, to put it cautiously, at least a strong suspicion that those who copied them over the ages “edited” or even rewrote them. The first recorded incident of a major anti-Jewish action is the destruction of the Jewish temple in Elephantine, the Egyptian military colony in 410 BCE. But we know only that the temple was destroyed and can only speculate why. It could have been a political-religious conflict. The Egyptian priests were opposed to the burnt offerings in the Jewish temple and to the Jewish cult in general. It could have been that the Persians, the undisputed masters of the region, treated the Jews living in Egypt more leniently and that this provoked resentment among the Egyptians. But it is equally likely that the Elephantine accident had mainly to do with property conflicts.
That Egypt certainly remained the focus of anti-Jewish feeling during the following centuries emerges from the writings of two historians of the third century BCE—Theophrast, a Greek from the island of Lesbos, and Manetho, a priest at the Egyptian temple at Heliopolis. The former refers to the sacrifice of living animals by the Jews; the latter had been commissioned to write a Greek history of Egypt (of which only a very small part has survived) in which he refers to the age-old Egyptian-Jewish hostility. Manetho deals with the story of the expulsion of Jews from Egypt in a counterversion to the book of Exodus. The Jews were shepherds, a savage people with strange, intolerant customs such as praying to one god only, ignoring or rejecting the Egyptian gods. They did not accept Egyptian customs, kept to themselves, and were lepers. Here the exodus was not a flight for freedom as the Bible described it but an outcasting of negative, impious, and diseased elements.
But Manetho wrote some seven hundred years after the event and what we know about his writings are paraphrases quoted by Josephus Flavius who wrote yet another three hundred years later. Josephus had been a leading politician and military commander in Judea and later joined the Romans and became the chief historian of his period. Nonetheless, according to these paraphrases, many essential questions remain open—whether these lepers were Egyptians or foreigners, and if they were foreigners, were they Jews? Was it a case of xenophobia and ethnic cleansing, to use the language of a later age? These and many other issues are unresolved.
Most historians agree that antisemitism during the whole Hellenistic period existed but was not a paramount issue.
It was only during the Roman period that more detailed and apparently more reliable news has reached us—again through the good offices of Josephus Flavius—and it concerns the city of Alexandria, in which there was a sizable Jewish community. The main antisemitic ideologue of the period was a certain Apion who claimed that the Jews were praying to the head of a donkey displayed in their synagogues. This story may have been based on an even earlier legend that appears in the writings of a Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus, according to whom there was a statue in the holiest Jewish temple in Jerusalem that depicted a bearded man (Moses) on a donkey.
Be that as it may, hostility toward the Jews probably had little to do with the donkey or with the observation of the Sabbath or the ritual of circumcision (which at the time was by no means limited to the Jews) that Apion derided. The hostility has to be interpreted against the background of Jewish relations with the Romans ruling Egypt at the time. The Jews, temporarily at least, enjoyed better treatment from the rulers than the Egyptians and this was bound to create resentment. There were pogroms and riots in Alexandria in the time of the emperor Caligula (38 CE). It is also true that the citizens of Alexandria and above all the Greeks refused to grant the Jews full citizenship rights. The Roman emperor Claudius told the Jews that they should be satisfied with the freedom to live and pray and work but should not claim the rights of fully fledged citizens.
By and large, however, antisemitism during this period was mainly literary in character. The question then arises whether what we know about attacks verbal, literary, and sometimes physical against Jews during the pagan period amounts to more or less normal xenophobia or whether there more was involved.
We do know about a number of Greek writers such as Lysimachus, Posidonius, Apolonius Molon, and Haecateus of Abdera who wrote about the Jews (Haecateus allegedly wrote a whole book). Apolonius Molon called Moses an impostor and noted that the Jews had contributed nothing to human civilization. But again all we have from him are a few fragments; by and large it is astonishing that the Greek historians and geographers (except those living in Egypt) who wrote about small and distant ethnic groups wrote so little about the Jews whom they undoubtedly encountered—not only in Egypt. In these writings the same themes always recur and there is much reason to believe that these writers copied each other. The exodus from Egypt was a common thread (the Bible had been translated into Greek in the meantime). Jews were described as lepers and suspect strangers because they did not pray to the same gods as others but exclusively to their own. They were considered misanthropic because they disliked and hated all people outside their community. They were also attacked because of human and animal sacrifices.
Negative judgments about other people can be found at random in the ancient world. As the historian Zvi Yavetz notes, natives of Crete (and of Sardinia) were described as inveterate liars, Egyptians as villains, Boeotians as drunkards. Syrians were said to have a slave mentality, those from Abdera were referred to as fools. All of them were barbarians and the question arises whether the Jews were somehow depicted in a more negative light than the other barbarians. On this opinions diverge; some historians of antiquity maintain that up to the Maccabean struggle and the rise of the Hasmoneans (that is to say, the expansion of the Jewish state in the second century BCE), there was virtually no negative anti-Jewish comment in Greek. Others find this interpretation too categorical.
In Roman literature the Jewish religion is consistently described as a form of superstition (principally by Quintilianus and Tacitus). Cicero also feared that the Jews had too much influence and that their religion was incompatible with the Roman values and traditions and would bring about general degeneration. Seneca (the younger) expresses contempt for the Jews and was worried about Jewish missionary activities. Traditionally Jews did not go out of their way to make converts; but apparently—also according to other authors—there were Jewish missionary activities in Rome and conversions to the Jewish religion even in the higher strata of Roman society, and these caused Seneca’s misgivings. He was particularly annoyed by the ritual of the Sabbath; this meant that the Jews were wasting one-seventh of their lives doing nothing.
Petronius was a satirist, and he poked fun at the ritual of circumcision and at the Jewish custom of males letting their hair grow longer than Romans and Greeks did. He claimed that the Jews were praying to a “pig god”; why he should have believed this is not clear—perhaps he thought that since Jews were not eating pork, the animal must have been sacred to them. Other satirists, Martial and Juvenal among them, also focused on circumcision—which they found comic—and they referred as well to the attempt of some crypto-Jews to hide the fact that they had been circumcised. Juvenal wrote that there was a secret book originating from Moses and according to which Jews should not show a traveler the way unless he was a Jew too, nor should anyone but a coreligionist be guided to a water place. The Jews kept themselves apart from society and they were a strange element and therefore suspect.
By and large the attitude of the Romans was less hostile than that of the Egyptians and the Greeks. Tacitus, for instance, who had no liking for the Jews at all (calling their institutions sinister and shameful) put more of the responsibility for the rebellion of the Zealots on the local Roman proconsuls than on the Jewish insurgents. Tacitus and other Roman writers even showed some respect vis-à-vis the Jews for sticking to their old customs and traditions and knowing their meaning and origin—apparently in contrast to other Eastern cults.
The Romans thought the Jews a little stupid, willing to believe almost anything in contrast to the far more sophisticated and skeptical Greeks. It is certainly true that ancient Greece had produced a higher civilization, and that there was little in the Jewish heritage at the time comparable to Greek literature, science, and philosophy. There were, of course, the books of the Hebrew Bible but they were less widely known than Greek philosophy. The Romans were not impressed by Jewish monotheism; on the contrary, they regarded it is as intolerant and regressive.
They were not altogether certain about the origin of the Jews, for which Tacitus reports no less than six different versions. But Tacitus tended to subscribe to the story of the lepers’ exodus from Egypt and even the adoration of the donkey’s head. He believed, perhaps correctly, that Jews did not eat pork because the Jews suspected that pigs were transmitters of diseases from which they had once suffered. What bothered Tacitus above all was the clannishness of the Jews, the fact that they behaved well to each other but not to outsiders. They were lustful according to his account but did not sleep with non-Jewish women.
The fact that they refused to worship the Roman emperors and, generally speaking, refused to accept Roman customs only aggravated the situation. But Tacitus seems to have been perfectly willing to tolerate the Jews if they would accept the blessings of Greek and Roman civilization. Educated Jews willing to assimilate were welcome but not the others. All things considered, the Jews constituted a certain danger to Roman society, its values and traditions, because for reasons not entirely clear some Romans seemed to be willing to accept Jewish customs and rituals, such as observing the Sabbath and circumcision.
Intellectual anti-Judaism apart, Jews were for a long time not badly treated in Rome, with some notable exceptions such as the expulsion of 4,000 of them under Tiberius, following the rebellion in Galilee. But the Jewish zealots in Palestine were anti-Roman fanatics, and the Romans, who were well aware of this hostility, suspected and disliked them. Thousands of Jews in Alexandria were killed by Roman soldiers, although earlier on Rome had shown more benevolence toward Jews than Greeks in that city. Roman Jews had to pay a special tax, the fiscus judaicus. Such fines were not unusual and, generally speaking, persecution of Christians on the part of both the authorities and the plebeians was far more pronounced. Economic rivalry did not play a role; there were hardly any Jewish bankers at the time.
Contemporary historians of Jews and anti-Judaism in the ancient world are divided in their overall judgment. One (“functionalist”) school of thought tends to believe that there was a basic difference between pagan (Egyptian, Greek, Roman) antagonism vis-à-vis the Jews and that later generated by Christianity, and that on the whole its importance should not be overrated. In fact, the question arises whether the term antisemitism is not misleading if applied to the pre-Christian world. Their hostility was neither extreme nor consistent; where it appeared in a rabid form (such as in Alexandria), it was political in character. The other (“essentialist”) school of thought believes that the hostility went deeper and had to do with the very character of the Jews and the essence of Judaism. Some Greek authors, after all, regarded Jewish separateness not merely as a harmless and quaint affair but as a dangerous conspiracy against all mankind.
Seen in a wider perspective, however, these differences of opinion concern nuances rather basic issues. There is no doubt that the advent of Christianity and in particular its subsequent interpretation present the turning point in the history of antisemitism and the Jews.
JESUS CHRIST WAS A JEW and so were the apostles; originally he wanted to change Judaism, albeit in a radical way, not to create a new religion. He was the head of one of many small apocalyptic Jewish sects that existed at the time. There was no break with Jewish religious rituals, such as the observation of the Sabbath; this came only with the appearance of Paulus, who had not known Jesus. From this point on, Christianity was the new Israel. There was systematic vilification of the Jews beginning about a hundred years after the death of Christ, as in the work of Justin Martyr, who claimed that the destruction of the temple (by the Romans) was just punishment for the sins of the Jews and their perfidy. But the question that has preoccupied historians and theologians was and is to what extent the New Testament was anti-Jewish from the beginning or whether it was only interpreted as such by the church fathers several centuries later.
A few examples will have to suffice. Matthew relates how Pontius Pilate was quite literally washing his hands when confronted by the multitude demanding that Jesus be condemned to death: “And washed his hands before the multitude saying I am innocent of the blood of this innocent person, see ye. Then answered all the people and said: his blood be on us and our children” (Matt. 27:24-25). This seems to be a wholly conclusive self-condemnation, if the account was correct. But it is not wholly convincing. Pilate was known as a severe, harsh ruler and it is unlikely that he would have a Jew crucified just because some others wanted it, especially if he thought him innocent. In addition, the text is not entirely clear—a few words are missing and the expression “his blood be on us” was not meant to be an eternal curse. It appears more than once in the Bible and not necessarily in consequence of a murder. Nor does it concern all Jews but merely those assembled that day in Jerusalem.
Another example is Luke 13:34-35, which has been interpreted as a condemnation of all of Israel: “Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem which killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen her brood under her wings and ye would not. Behold your house is left unto you desolate. . . .” This, too, has been interpreted as an eternal curse by later commentators, but such threats (or predictions) can be found by earlier prophets such as Jeremiah. Prophets in Israel were seldom received with open arms and Stephanus, a follower of Jesus, was not quite wrong when he said “which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? Ye stiff necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears. Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost . . .” (Acts 7:52).
These inner Jewish disputes were exceedingly bitter and the language (“murderers,” “betrayers,” “followers of Satan”) very abusive. Of all the sections of the New Testament, Revelation is the most outspoken, with frequent references to the “synagogue of Satan.” In the gospel of John, Pilate is exculpated as far as the crucifixion is concerned, and the guilt is put on the Jews. The idea of a Jewish Antichrist, which played such an crucial role in the Middle Ages, goes back to John and his later interpreters. According to them, the Jews were a useless people, odious to God; furthermore, the Antichrist which would compel the whole world to obey the Jewish law would arise from among them (the tribe of Dan, to be precise). Other interpreters have argued that the original reference was not really to Jews but to those who claim to be Jews but really were Satan’s followers, and that the church fathers hated heretics even more than Jews. But this is not quite convincing since there were too many references to the Jew as the enemy, the synagogue a congregation of animals. The church fathers certainly did make an enormous contribution to the development of Judeophobia.
Hostility became sharper with every generation of early Christian interpreters: God had rejected the people he had originally selected; the Torah was no longer legitimate; the Jews had sinned and fallen; in brief, God hated them. This appears most strikingly in the writings of the church fathers from the third to the fifth century after Christ. Many of them are forgotten today; others, like St. Augustine, are considered central figures in Christian theology.
Mention has been made of Justin Martyr, the first in a long row of such churchmen; he was followed by Origen, bishop of Alexandria, who preached that the Jews had committed the most abominable crimes and that as a punishment the city where Jesus had suffered was destroyed and the Jews dispersed. The most violent language was used by John Chrysostom in the fourth century. The synagogue, he said, was worse than a brothel and a drinking shop; it was a den of scoundrels, the repair of wild beasts, a temple of demons, the refuge of brigands and debauchees, and the cavern of devils, a criminal assembly of the assassins of Christ. It was an abyss of perdition. Following these and similar pronouncements, it came as no surprise when he finally declared that he hated the synagogue and the Jews. The Jews alone, not the Romans, were responsible for the murder of Christ; they were killing children (Socrates of Constantinople); they were pigs, stinking of garlic (Efraim the Syrian). Absolving Pilate from guilt may have been connected with the missionary activities of early Christianity in Rome and the desire not to antagonize those they wanted to convert.
But even more moderate churchmen, such as St. Augustine of Hippo (North Africa), showed little of Christian love and charity; he wrote, “How I wish that you would slay them (the Jews) with your two-edged sword, so that there should be none to oppose your word . . . Gladly would I have them die to themselves. . . .” St. Augustine also wrote that Judas Iscariot, the traitor, was the true image of the Hebrews and that the Jews would forever bear the guilt for the death of Jesus.
These pronouncements became in later centuries a source of inspiration to antisemites and also to the Nazis who otherwise had not much patience with Christianity. St. John Chrysostom was frequently quoted and reprinted in the Third Reich as a witness for the prosecution; after the Holocaust, this became an embarrassment for the church and attempts were made to explain their words in the historical context. It was said that the general discourse at the time was aggressive, brutal, and extreme. At a time of struggle for survival and recognition, Christian forgiveness and salvation were not in demand. These anti-Jewish attacks continued and grew even sharper after Christianity had become a state religion in the Roman empire.
It was also argued that these attacks were frequently directed not against Jews but Judaizers, that is, Christian sectarians who had not completely broken with the Jewish religion and continued to pray in synagogues. But more often the Jews were directly attacked. And it was said that the Talmud, which was composed between 400 and 600 CE, contained outspoken anti-Christian statements. This issue will occupy us later in this study because the Talmud was to play a crucial role in subsequent ages in antisemitic propaganda. That such statements can be easily found in the Talmud is perfectly true but they were mainly defensive, prescribing that no help should be extended to their persecutors and tormentors.
Could the attacks of the church fathers against Judaism and the Jews be explained as a result of political rivalry? Both groups were engaged in missionary activities among the pagans and the Christians, and the early Christians felt the necessity to distance themselves as much as possible from the religion from which they had originated. This could well have been an important motive albeit not the only one. For Jewish missionary activity ended with Constantine’s edicts and the laws of 315 to 339 which made Christianity the state religion, and as a result, Jewish missionary activity became a criminal offense.
John Chrysostom, the most aggressive of the anti-Jewish spokesmen with his eight sermons against the Jews, belongs to a later period in which there was no competition to fear. Some authors believe that the anti-Jewish propaganda was somehow connected with the fact that, in a few instances, Jews may have made common cause with the pagans (the Romans) in the persecution of the early Christians. But it is doubtful that such cooperation took place on a significant scale; on the contrary, there are more references to common Jewish-Christian interests during the age of Roman persecution.
Yet other theologians stress that among the church fathers not a few obscurantist statements can be found, for instance with regard to women, but that this should be interpreted not by modern standards but against the general cultural level of a dark age. Even if most of the church fathers became saints, they were not infallible; it would have been easiest to dissociate Christianity from the Old Testament—as the “Deutsche Christen” did in the Nazi era. But this for a great variety of theological reasons was quite impossible, not only because the Messiah had arisen from the house of David but because Christianity was so deeply rooted in the Old Testament. And so a consensus was reached that, with all their shortcomings and sins, the Jews had been the chosen people up to the time of Christ but that they forfeited the role by rejecting Jesus and his message.
Lastly, it was argued that even if Christian writers denied that Jews were human beings but were, instead, wild beasts, as did Peter the Venerable, (who nonetheless was called by his contemporaries the meekest of men), they should not be killed but only consigned to a life worse than death—greater torment and ignominy. This leads to a central question, namely whether and to what extent did the anti-Jewish preaching lead to violence and ultimately to murder.
There had been physical persecution of the Jews under the Roman emperors; reading the Torah, practicing circumcision, etc. were banned in the year 135 CE, and Judaism ceased to be a legal religion. But these strictures were limited and temporary, and were restricted to the land of Palestine. This changed in the fourth century; under Constantine—Jews were forbidden to live in Jerusalem (315 CE). Even earlier, mixed marriages and sexual intercourse had been forbidden, and in 337 these became punishable by death. The first case of burning a synagogue following a local anti-Jewish campaign occurred in 388 in Kallinikon in Mesopotamia. Emperor Theodosius wanted the culprits punished and to pay for the restoration. But Ambrosius, bishop of Milan, persuaded the emperor that this had been an action pleasing to god, something akin to divine punishment.
St. Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, had the Jews expelled from this city, and the Byzantine emperor Justinian I prohibited reading the Bible in Hebrew, building synagogues, and Jews’ assembling in public. The Synod of Claremont in 535 decreed that Jews could not hold public office; in the fifth century Jews were expelled from parts of France, and in 613 Jews in Spain had to either embrace Christianity or leave the country. Pope Leo III outlawed Judaism and in 855 the Jews were exiled from Italy.
The list could easily be prolonged. But it is also true that, in part, these decrees remained a dead letter, because some Jews did stay on and the old orders had to be restated from time to time. If the church council of Toledo in 697 decreed that Jews were to be held in perpetual slavery, this was not general practice in reality. In any case, following the spread of Islam, most Jews lived under Islamic rather than Christian rule.
Furthermore, while the rulers had become Christian, Christianity had not yet become the religion of the masses and there were few instances of popular anti-Judaism. Seen in historical perspective, the situation of the Jews in Europe was not too bad up to the First Crusade. From the seventh to the eleventh century, there were attacks against Jews on the part of popes and bishops, some Visigoth kings were inclined to be friendlier than others, and there were various forms of pressure such as compulsory conversion. But by and large, the position of Jews in Western and Central Europe under the Carolingian dynasty improved as manifested in the spread of Jewish communities in various countries. Jews fulfilled an important function as international traders and bankers. In many places, they had special rights and enjoyed the protection of ecclesiastic and secular authorities. There was a fair amount of intermarriage, and they could own land and carry arms. Their numbers were not large but they were needed in society as merchants and bankers, and while the road to leading positions in public life was barred, there were not a few wealthy Jews who caused, as far as can be established, resentment on part of the bishops rather than the common people. Generally speaking, there is little evidence of popular antisemitism during this period.
What concerns us in the present context, however, is not the efficiency of the persecutors but their intentions, and in this respect there can be little doubt. Anti-Jewish preaching continued. Some of the bishops, such as Agobard of Lyons, complained that the Jews were living too well, that they had domestics and other servants who were observing the Sabbath with the Jews and violating Sunday. There was even a danger of conversion because Judaism still had a certain attraction. There were physical attacks against Jewish communities in France and Germany when news spread that Jews collaborating with Muslims were responsible for the persecution of Christians in the Holy Land, the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher, and the beheading of the patriarch of Jerusalem.
But these were short-lived, sporadic interludes. Only with the First Crusade in 1096 did a rapid and dramatic deterioration set in. Pope Urban II called in November 1095 for a religious military crusade to liberate the holiest places in Christendom that had been conquered and desecrated by the Muslims. This appeal had an enormous echo; masses of people were shouting “dieu le veut” (It is God’s will). But the crusade proceeded not quite in the way the pope had envisaged. Instead of an orderly army under papal command, all kinds of private militias gathered. Obscure rabble-rousers like Peter the Hermit were preaching to the masses in Germany and enlisted people quite unsuitable for any military expedition. Once they confronted Islamic regular forces, they were defeated in no time. Subsequently there was an even more ill-starred children’s crusade and a French shepherds’ crusade.
As the crusaders made their way from France to the Holy Land by way of Germany, Austria, and Byzantium, they killed thousands of Jews. Some of the motivation was theological, for they had been told that anyone who killed a single Jew would have all his sins absolved. But there was also the element of blackmail and plundering. French Jewish communities paid the priest Peter the Hermit protection money and were left in peace. In the Rhineland the Jews were less lucky; whole Jewish communities such as those in Cologne, Mainz, and Worms were destroyed, and three thousand people were killed. Many Jews committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of the murderous bands. Some of the authorities—the local bishops and citizens (burghers)—tried to give some protection but often half-heartedly and not effectively. For the Jews of Central and Western Europe, these attacks became a great trauma, perhaps because they had been so sudden and unexpected, or perhaps because earlier persecution had been mainly in the form of bans and restrictions imposed from above. The massacres of 1096 were seemingly spontaneous, not instigated by the authorities but carried out by the mob.
What was the place of these attacks in the history of anti-Jewish persecutions? Only a tiny part of the Jewish people lived in Northern Europe at the time and the communities that had been destroyed were reestablished in the years thereafter. The pope had certainly not intended to initiate mass pogroms at the time, and the key figure in the Second Crusade, Bernard of Clairvaux, denounced anti-Jewish violence. If so, what caused these anti-Jewish attacks?
Some Christian historians have stressed that the Middle Ages were a violent age and that mass murder (for instance, of Christian heretics such as the Waldensians) was not infrequent. In the course of the crusades, not only Jews but a great many others, including Christians, were killed. All this is true and it stands to reason that the Jews, being marginal people in society, were an obvious target. It is also true that the later Middle Ages were a time of great political and social tensions, of a struggle for power between the papacy and the secular rulers, between the central power and the towns. It was an age of natural calamities, such as the Black Death, of mass migration, of religious fanaticism and superstition, and of all kinds of strange quasi-religious beliefs.
But the general climate created by the church also played an important role. According to church dogma, with its concept of Jewish servitude caused by their sins, the Jews were slaves of the Christians. The emperors usually interpreted this injunction by regarding Jews as “serfs of our Chamber” (or as in Spain, the property of the royal treasury), which meant they had to pay protection money and special taxes. Still, this attitude could be regarded as too liberal by the church. The popes were not in favor of the murder of Jews and on occasion spoke out against it. From a theological point of view, the survival of Jews was necessary—as a proof of the essential rightness of Christianity; their misery was to help to let the glory of Christ shine all the more. Yet among the clergy, there were not a few who thought that the Jewish remnant was too large.
From time to time, the popes would declare that some of the grosser libels against the Jews—such as the ritual murder of Christian children and the poisoning of wells—were false. But the church also believed that love for the church had to manifest itself in hatred of the Jews. For a variety of reasons the church pressed for stricter and stricter discrimination against Jews, which was evident in the imposition of laws aimed at their further isolation. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 decided that Jews and Muslims should wear special dress—yellow badges in some places, horned hats in others. Pope Innocent III in 1205 wrote that the Jews through their own guilt were consigned to perpetual servitude, and Pope Gregory IX in 1236 ordered the confiscation of Hebrew books.
On the other hand, various popes insisted that Jews were not lawless but should be treated according to Roman law. The Jews were subservient and should not be attacked, unlike the Saracens, according to Alexander II early in the eleventh century. Nicholas IV, late in the thirteenth century, demanded strict punishment for Jews who aided conversion to Judaism, but at the same time denounced Christian attacks against Jews as long as Jews stuck to the rules, meaning as long as they accepted living in a state of servitude, wore the distinguishing marks imposed on them, and did not eat at a common table. Pope Clement VI even published a papal bull in 1348 against the persecution of the Jews that said the Black Death was not the fault of the Jews but divine punishment of sinning mankind.
There was a certain inconsistency on questions of detail: some Catholic theologians were in favor of forced conversion of Jewish children; others were against it. Some churchmen favored the expulsion of Jews from Belgium (1261), England (1290), France (1306 and 1394), Spain and Portugal (1492 and 1507); others did not make a stand on this issue. Some radicals (Capistrano for one) demanded the abolition of all rights to the Jews or fomented and carried out pogroms (the Flagellants); others distanced themselves from the violent persecution of the Jews.
Some Christian scholastics engaged in interesting hairsplitting—whether God, being all powerful, was responsible for the actions of the devil, whether Lucifer was a fallen angel or whether he had been evil from the creation, whether the Passion of Christ broke Satan’s power. But these debates were far too abstract for the common people who knew from the New Testament that the Jews were children of Satan (whether the Antichrist himself was a Jew was a question left open).
The Jews were not the only ones to be demonized by the church: witches, sorcerers, and various heretics were also included but the Jews usually took the place at the top. The devil had a far more central position in Christian religion than in most others, and his story appeared in countless sermons, books, plays, and medieval works of art on every level of sophistication. It was only natural that those receiving this message would reach the conclusion that if the devil was the creator and incarnation of evil, he had to be permanently fought. If Satan had to be expelled, so had his children—the Jews.
The church, in brief, created a certain image of the Jews that dominated the Middle Ages and that led to persecution, murder, and expulsion. The devil was taken by some as a metaphor, by others—including Luther—as a personal devil, just as there was a personal God. Other features of this image of the Jew in popular religion to which we next turn included the blood libel and the poisoning of wells.
The blood libel was the accusation that according to the Jewish religion, Christian infants or young children had to be abducted, abused, tortured, slaughtered, and their blood consumed (especially on the occasion of Passover) for religious purposes. One of the first recorded cases of this libel was that of St. William of Norwich (England) in 1144. According to Theobald, a former Jew who had become a monk, leading Jews (the forerunners of the Elders of Zion perhaps?) assembled each year in Narbonne, France, to decide what child should be killed. In the Norwich case, several local Jewish leaders were arrested and executed. Even more famous was the case of Hugh of Lincoln (England) in 1255. The body of a little boy had been found in a cesspool near the house of a Jew, who was arrested, tortured, and confessed. As a result, about a hundred Jews in the town were arrested; some were killed outright, some were tried and killed, others paid a ransom and were freed.
Altogether, there have been about 150 recorded cases of blood libel (not to mention thousands of rumors) that resulted in the arrest and killing of Jews throughout history, most of them in the Middle Ages. Initially, most cases occurred in England (Bury, Bristol, Winchester); they were subsequently also reported in France, Spain, Germany, and other countries. In almost every case, Jews were murdered, sometimes by a mob, sometimes following torture and a trial. The story of the murder of Christian children entered folklore (it appears in Grimm’s Fairy Tales) and was exported to countries outside Europe; in the famous Damascus trial of 1840, the alleged victim was, however, not a child but an elderly Italian monk. We shall later return to the cases of blood libel that took place in the nineteenth century.
Pope Innocent IV appointed a committee to study the issue in 1247, and it was established that there was no truth to these allegations—and not only because Jewish law strictly forbid the consumption of blood. Gregory X in 1275 published a letter ordering that no Jew should be arrested under such silly pretexts. He further demanded that no Christian should “stir up anything against the Jews.” He noted that blackmail had been involved in many cases—that the parents of these children or some other Christian enemies of these Jews had secretly hidden the children in order to injure the Jews so that they might extort money from them.
Pope Nicholas IV in 1291 issued a bull entitled “Orat mater ecclesia,” announcing that the church would not tolerate Christian injury to Jews. Four other popes denounced the blood libel, but others took a more lenient view of overzealous preachers such as Capistrano, who continued to spread the malicious tale. In this age, the church was very powerful and if the popes would have threatened the Christian evildoers with Draconian punishment, they could have stopped the blood libel. But they did not want to go that far. During the centuries that followed, some of the alleged child victims of the Jews were beatified and canonized.
As late as 1881 Civilta Cattolica, the Rome-based Jesuit organ, tried to demonstrate that ritual murder was, after all, an integral part of the Jewish religion; the main innovation on this occasion was that the murder took place on Purim rather than on Passover. Some of the blood libel charges continued to the twentieth century. Such was the case with the martyrdom of Anderl von Rin, allegedly killed in 1462 near Innsbruck. In the seventeenth century this legend became the subject of a cult; pictures in the local church showed how the little child’s throat was slit and the blood collected in a bowl. The pictures were finally removed five centuries later, in the 1990s, on the instructions of the local bishop. A similar, even better known, case was the one of St. Simon of Trent, Italy, where a Jewish doctor was said to have killed a two-and-a-half-year-old boy. The cult that grew around this tale was at last suppressed by the clerical authorities in 1965.
Another frequent reason for attacks against Jews was the alleged desecration of the Host, the bread or wafer used in the mass. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 adopted the doctrine of transubstantiation, i.e., the bread and wine used in the mass actually become converted into the body and blood of Christ. Groups of Jews in various European countries such as Germany, Poland, France, and Belgium were accused of stabbing the Host, forcing a nail through it, or misusing it in other ways. Arrested and tortured, they confessed and sometimes were burned. Persecutions on this charge, however, were less frequent than the blood libel cases and they occurred only infrequently after the Middle Ages.
Far more important for the history of antisemitism is the gradual development of the concept of the “Talmud Jew,” which dates back, broadly speaking, to the thirteenth century. Following the denunciation of a converted Jew named Nikolas Donin of La Rochelle, Pope Gregory IX was informed in 1239 that the Jews were guided in their practices not by the biblical injunctions and taboos as transmitted by Moses in Sinai but by a monstrous collection of books entitled Talmud. Various committees were appointed, mainly in France; various rabbis were invited to explain the charges against them. Eventually the Paris theologians and jurists decided that the accusations were true and the Talmud was ceremoniously burned in 1242. Parts of the Talmud were translated into Latin and reissued, reprinted, and translated many times; all these publications were approximate and incomplete simply because there were few experts at the time capable of dealing with texts in Hebrew, let alone Aramaic—the language in which the Babylonian Talmud had been written.
Over four centuries later, in the year 1700, a professor named Eisenmenger at the University of Bonn published a massive work (2,120 pages) in which he claimed to have unmasked the monstrosities of the Talmud Jews. Eisenmenger knew the languages concerned and his book became the bible of religious and post–religious antisemitism for two centuries and more.
What were the specific accusations? Mainly, it was alleged that the Talmud was full of blasphemous statements about God, Jesus, the holy Virgin, and Christianity in general. It superseded the Bible and it claimed that the rabbi-interpreters were wiser and cleverer than God. Furthermore, it was alleged that the Talmud justified any crime committed by Jews against non-Jews. Jews were not only permitted to defraud, betray, and even kill the gentiles, it was their sacred duty. Nor was it sufficient to refrain from helping non-Jews in an emergency; one should actively work toward their perdition. Everything should be done to deceive the dumb gentiles who were outside the protection of the Talmudic law. It was allegedly written in the Talmud that Adam had sexual intercourse with every animal in the garden of Eden and that the Jews should eat excrement as a medicine against pleurisy. Even the best of the gentiles should be killed—one who was observing the Sabbath deserved death, as did one who was studying the Bible (this, despite the fact that Eisenmenger had been greatly helped in his work studying the Bible by a variety of rabbis, who were not aware of his intentions). All strangers were Amalekites, the most bitter enemies of the Jews. In brief, the Jews were permitted to lie, to perjure themselves, to be disloyal to every non-Jew, to cheat authority, to steal, to rob, to commit every possible crime, to defraud others, to cause the greatest possible harm to non-Jews, according to Eisenmenger.
It was obvious that a book containing such monstrous teachings should be destroyed and that the persecution of the people who had accepted these criminal guidelines should be intensified. The Jews were the enemies of God and of mankind. The church had not initiated the “Talmud Jew” concept, but it accepted it since it confirmed all their suspicions about the Jews. The lower clergy was particularly active in spreading the message about the enemies of Christ and the Christians that had allegedly been uncovered.
In the present context all that need be said about the Talmud, written between the fourth and sixth centuries, is that it contains many statements that seem outrageous or ridiculous from today’s perspective but not more than other theological works of that period. Equally outrageous statements can also be found in the works of the church fathers and in the hadith, the interpretations of the Koran. In any case, the Talmud was never a secret document; although it was banned and burned on various occasions by the church, it was published in 1520 by Daniel Bomberg in Venice under the protection of papal privilege. The Talmud was also published in Switzerland in 1578–81, as well as in Wilna, Lublin, and in other European cities. Some of these editions from the late Middle Ages were expurgated, omitting, for instance, attacks against Christianity—but they were expurgated also because of the very length of the Talmud; modern editions such as the Soncino run to more than 12,000 pages, and fill many CD-Roms. Whatever the sins of commission or omission of the Talmud, secrecy was not among them.
This image of the Jew created (or rather refurbished) in the late Middle Ages provides the general background of the particularly violent persecution that took place during the period of the Black Death (1347–61) which felled about one-third of the population of Europe and virtually destroyed German Jewry. The plague was endemic in various parts of the world such as the Far East, and it was believed to have been brought to Europe by Genoese ships sailing from the Far East to Messina. In 1348 it reached France by way of Marseilles, and in the summer months of that year it spread to London, Germany, Hungary, and other countries. It had a disastrous effect, killing some twenty-five million people in Europe. In the larger cities the death rate is estimated to have been between 30 and 60 percent; elsewhere the death rate estimates range between 20 and 100 percent.
No one had the faintest idea what caused the epidemic and how it spread, and there were of course no drugs to prevent or stem it (the plague bacillus would not be discovered until the middle of the nineteenth century). It was an unprecedented trauma—physicians refused to attend to the sick, priests refused to give the last rites to the dying. There were mass flights from areas that had been infected, often to no avail. Jews were suspected of having caused the disease even though Jews suffered as much from it as the rest of the population—and the pandemic continued even after Jewish communities had been destroyed. Jews were arrested and tortured, and admitted everything the authorities wanted to hear.
One well-known incident was the evidence of Agimet, a Jew from Geneva, who confessed that he had been sent to Venice by Rabbi Peyret of Chambray, who had given him a parcel of poison to spread in the wells, cisterns, and springs in and around Venice. From Venice he went to Calabria and Apulia to cause further damage. He also said that he had spread poison in the wells of Toulouse and other places in the South of France.
There had been earlier accusations of “poisoning the wells” during the age of the crusades, but since there were no epidemics at the time, these had been isolated cases. Nor had Jews been tortured and forced to confess that they had committed these acts out of hatred against Christianity and the Christians. There had been no confessions that all Jews knew about the plot and that it was planned and administered by a committee of twelve. In parts of the world where no Jews lived, other minorities were accused of spreading the disease, including Muslims and Christians, and in some cases priests and monks. But the Jews were by far the most numerous and most often accused. According to a more sophisticated version of the accusations, the Jews had perhaps not caused the outbreak of the disease, but they were certainly involved spreading it. This period became known in Jewish history as emek ha’bacha (the valley of tears).
The number of Jewish deaths is unknown but probably the majority of Jews of Central Europe, including whole communities, perished. They succumbed not only to the disease but as victims of persecutions that ensued. A few thousand Jews were killed in Mainz, two thousand in Strasbourg. Sixty large Jewish communities were destroyed; altogether 350 massacres were counted. This wave of mass murder caused the migrations from Western and Central Europe to the east, where earlier there had been few Jewish communities.
The church as such had no hand in these persecutions. In the regions where papal authority was strong (Avignon and Italy), Jews were not attacked, and in many cities the local authorities also tried to defend them albeit often ineffectually. Pope Clement VI spoke out several times against the popular belief that the Jews were to blame for the pestilence and he called it a divine punishment.
The attackers were what contemporary chroniclers called the “common people,” that is, the poor and the riffraff. They were incited by the itinerant Flagellants, whipping themselves and torturing the flesh in a frenzy of fanaticism and hysteria. The Flagellants were not merely radical religious fanatics; they despised the priests who, they thought, lived a life of sin. The pope had initially taken a benevolent view of this movement, but he later declared them heretics because they placed themselves beyond the control of the church and rejected parts of the church ritual, such as the Eucharist.
There is much evidence that those attacking the Jews were motivated, as in the First Crusade, not only by fear and religious fervor but by greed and envy; there were countless cases of robbery and spoiling. As a contemporary chronicler wrote, the money in the hand of the Jews was also the poison that killed them. Had they been poor, they would not have been burned.
There were no mass attacks against “Jewish poisoners” after the period of the Black Death, but the accusation became part and parcel of antisemitic dogma and language. It appeared again in early 1953 in the form of the “doctor’s plot” in Stalin’s last days, when hundreds of Jewish physicians in the Soviet Union were arrested and some of them killed on the charge of having caused the death of prominent Communist leaders. Only the death of Stalin put an end to this campaign. Similar charges were made in the 1980s and 1990s in radical Arab nationalist and Muslim fundamentalist propaganda that accused the Jews of spreading AIDS and other infectious diseases.
AFTER THE TRIBULATIONS of the Middle Ages had passed, there was little change in the status of the Jews, certainly none for the better. There were fewer sporadic attacks from the general populace than in earlier centuries but more repression from the powerful authorities. In 1394 Jews were exiled for the second time from France. And 100,000 Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 following the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula, and later also from Portugal.
This period marked the establishment of ghettos, closed districts to which the Jews were confined, beginning in Venice in 1516. The Catholic Church took a leading part in the establishment of these ghettos. It was the age of the Inquisition which was set up to determine, among other things, whether conversions to Christianity were genuine. Jews were further restricted in their work and the professions they were permitted to exercise—trade with agricultural products and peddling in the countryside were not permitted—and it was perhaps no accident that Rome’s ghetto was the last in Europe to be abolished in 1870.
Early in the sixteenth century, a baptised Jew named Johannes Pfefferkorn appealed to the clerical and secular authorities to ban and destroy the Talmud which, he argued, was the source of all evil motivating Jewish behavior. He denied, however, that Jews had engaged in ritual murder, and he protested against other forms of persecution of the Jews. Pfefferkorn’s publication “The Mirror of the Jews” (1516) and his activities encountered the opposition of some Renaissance humanists such as Johann Reuchlin and Erasmus, who advocated greater religious tolerance. But the debate that raged for more than a decade made no difference as far as the legal and social status of the Jews was concerned. Nor did the advent of Protestantism have a positive impact.
Martin Luther at the beginning of his career had entertained hopes that the Jews would be converted to his new creed and stressed in particular that Jesus had been born a Jew—a fact frequently ignored in church discourse. But he did not win converts among the Jews and in later years turned sharply against them. His views are of considerable importance because they helped to shape the outlook of the Protestant churches up to the twentieth century, and his pamphlet entitled “The Jews and Their Lies” (1543) was frequently reprinted during the Nazi era.
Luther was a high-strung man who felt persecuted all his life by various kinds of demons; he believed in the power of prayer to make Satan disappear. But to be quite safe, he also threw inkpots at the satanic apparitions that came to visit him. No wonder therefore that Luther turned against the children of the devil, the Jews.
What shall we do, he asked, with this damned, rejected, blasphemous, accursed, evil, poisonous race. He observed that the Jews had been punished “a thousand times more than we might wish them,” but all this seemed insufficient, and he made a number of practical suggestions about how to deal with them in his 1543 pamphlet. Their synagogues should be burned and whatever did not burn should be covered with dirt. Their homes should also be destroyed and they should all be put under one roof or stable so “that they realize that they are not masters in our land as they boast but miserable captives.” They should be deprived of their prayer books and the Talmud, and their rabbis should be forbidden under threat of death to teach any more. They should not be given travel permits for they had no business to take them into the countryside. All roads should be closed to them and they should be forced to stay at home. Jews should not be protected by the authorities and everything should be done to free the world of this insufferable, devilish burden—“our plague, pestilence and misfortune.”
Luther mentioned that he had heard about the poisoning of wells and the kidnapping and murder of children, and he tended to believe the allegations even if he was well aware that the Jews denied it. Hence, in conclusion, he proposed that the Jews be sent to parts of the world where there were no Christians for “the Turks and other pagans do not tolerate what we Christians endure from these venomous serpents.”
The attitude of other Protestant reformers toward the Jews was more positive. For the Calvinists, the seed of Abraham was part of the body of Christ. The Jews were God’s first-born, and the grace of divine calling could not be made void. On occasion, Calvin even expressed “great affection for the Jews” and said that “our differences with them were purely theological” (Calvin, Commentaries, vol. 19).
It was no accident that under Oliver Cromwell Jews were again permitted to settle in Britain—albeit against the resistance of the clergy and the merchants—and they found a shelter in the Netherlands after their expulsion from Spain.
No major changes occurred in the life of Central European Jewry between the sixteenth century and the emancipation in the nineteenth century. Although Jews had been originally merchants and bankers, they were squeezed out of these fields and engaged in marginal trades such as peddling their wares in villages and small-scale money lending and currency changing. A few Jews rose to wealth and prominence as court Jews (Hofjuden), helping kings and dukes to increase their revenues—which did not endear them to the population in general. They could not own land and most of the professions were closed to them by the town guilds.
Expulsions continued from time to time—for instance, the Bohemian Jews were expelled in the eighteenth century by Empress Maria Theresa, who suspected them to be enemy agents of Prussia. Even though the number of Jews in Germany was small, and even smaller in France and Britain, attitudes toward Jews did not change and antisemitic literature continued to appear. Whereas in the early Middle Ages there had been social intercourse between Jews and non-Jews in Europe (hence the papal injunctions against it), there was little if any after the fourteenth century.
The situation was different in Poland, where many Jews from Central Europe had found refuge following the persecutions. Until about the eighteenth century the situation of Jews in Poland was considerably better than in other European countries, despite attempts by religious radicals (such as Capistrano) to persuade the kings of Poland to abolish the rights and privileges of the Jews. To a large extent, the Jews in Poland constituted the urban middle class and were engaged in all kind of professions other than trading, including craftsmanship and even agriculture. According to a popular saying, Poland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a heaven for the Jews, a paradise for the nobles, and hell for the serfs. In the mid-seventeenth century about half a million Jews lived in Poland, more perhaps than in the rest of Europe taken together.
Jews served the Polish nobility, acting as their business agents and advisers. This made them vulnerable; in the Ukrainian Cossack uprising against the Polish overlords (1648) headed by Bohdan Chmielnicki, tens of thousands of Jews were killed because as close collaborators with the Poles, they had also become an object of hatred.
The situation of the Jews in Poland began to deteriorate in the second half of the eighteenth century, resulting in their gradual impoverishment. They were gradually squeezed out of banking and also from major trade activities by the rising Polish urban middle class. The frequent wars taking place in Poland in the eighteenth century also played a negative role, compelling them to live in smaller communities and engage in more marginal professions. Eventually this led to mass emigration to Western Europe, and then mainly overseas in the nineteenth century. Accusations of blood libel and profanation, which had been rare earlier, began to appear.
By and large, it seems to be true that—as Leon Poliakov, the historian of antisemitism, put it—there was a considerable difference between antisemitism in Western and Eastern Europe. Whereas antisemitism in countries such as Germany was primarily theological in character, its roots in Poland were to a larger extent social. This has to do with sheer numbers—even before the persecutions and expulsions, the number of Jews in Germany (and a fortiori in France, Britain, and Italy) had been quite small; the Jews had been scapegoats rather than competitors. In Poland, the Ukraine, and Western Russia, on the other hand, the number of Jews was considerable. To put it in another way, while antisemitism in Western Europe was an ideological issue, in Eastern Europe it was, or became, an objective problem in view of sheer numbers. That the church—Catholic in Poland, Uniate in the Ukraine, Russian Orthodox in Russia—was not enamored with the Jews goes without saying, but the decisive factor was their sheer number—Jews in Western and Central Europe were counted in the thousands, whereas in Eastern Europe they numbered in the hundreds of thousands and later millions.
THIS SURVEY OF THE SOURCES of antisemitism has taken us to early modern history. Until fairly recently many historians tended to disregard the fact that during much of the Middle Ages, the majority of Jews lived not in European Christian societies but under the rule of Islam. With the spread of this new religion in the seventh and eighth centuries, Muslim rule extended from Spain to India and Central Asia, and eventually included the Balkans. To the extent that Jewish historians dealt with the fate of Oriental Jewry—the sources are not abundant—they did so to juxtapose the persecutions of Europe with the more fortunate experience of the Jews in the Orient. It is true that, for the most part, Jews under Muslim rule fared better than in Europe; there was a cultural flowering in Spain and Baghdad, the social and economic situation was better, and there were no massacres on the scale of the Black Death pogroms.
But this is not to say that Jews could feel free as citizens with equal rights, that Jews were not persecuted, and that there was no anti-Jewish feeling. This leads back to the basic Islamic writings, the Koran and the hadith. The Jews had committed no basic sin as in Christianity—the founder of the religion had not been killed by the Jews (even though, according to some later-day Islamic interpreters, Muhammad thought that he might have been poisoned by a Jewish woman). There was also the story of the Banu Qurayza, a Jewish tribe in Medina, who had refused to accept Muhammad’s message and turned against him—he had them all killed. But mostly the Jews played a far smaller role in Islamic thought than in Christianity; they had been hostile to the prophet according to the Koran, but they had not killed him.
It is impossible to summarize the attitude of the Koran toward the Jews simply because the evidence is contradictory. It states repeatedly that Allah has cursed them on account of their unbelief, and that Allah is the enemy of the unbelievers. It says that the Jews of Medina, where Muhammad had taken refuge, had not only been defeated but humiliated, and that they were afflicted with humiliation and poverty and felt the wrath of God. The Jews were weak and were bound to remain weak: there was no particular reason to worry about them. (The main enemy of Islam over the centuries was Christianity.) The Koran says that the Jews (and the Christians) falsified the message God had given them. It warns that most of them are evildoers and “you shall always discover treachery in them except a few of them.” It says “do not take Jews and Christians for friends” and mentions in passing that Allah has transformed some of them into monkeys and pigs. It calls for the killing (beheading) of Jews and Christians (Sura 47:4–5). There is in the hadith the famous, often quoted story about the final struggle between Muslims and unbelievers, when a Jew will be hiding behind a rock and a tree and the rock will say “O Muslim there is a Jew behind me—come and kill him.”
But it is also true that Islam accepted much of the Old Testament (as they interpreted it) and that there was less bitterness in Muslim polemics against Jews than against Christians, perhaps because, as Bernard Lewis has pointed out, the Jews were less significant and less of a competitor than the Christians. They were powerless and no danger. Jews and Christians much of the time enjoyed a protected status as People of the Book (the Bible); as dhimmis they had something like second-class citizenship. They had to pay a poll tax, something akin to protection money. But the hadith also said that according to the prophet, “He who robs a dhimmi or imposes on him more than he can bear—will have me as his opponent.”
Jews could not as a rule attain public office (as usual there were a few notable exceptions), and there were occasional pogroms, such as in Granada in 1066. They had to dress in a certain way to make a clear difference between them and the Muslims. They were (in theory, if not always in practice) forbidden to ride horses and to bear arms—but this also applied to Christians. They were, however, permitted to ride on donkeys provided they did so side-saddled. They were persecuted under the Fatimids in Egypt and Palestine, under the Almohads in North Africa, and temporarily in Spain. There were expulsions from the Arab peninsula but fewer than in Christian lands.
There was nothing in Christian Europe comparable to the Golden Age in Spain, with its flowering of the arts and sciences in which the Jews played a prominent part. Or, to be precise, some Jews played a prominent part; the goldenness of the Golden Age and the extent of the Arab-Jewish symbiosis were often exaggerated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. General attitudes toward Jews changed little over the centuries, at least on the level of doctrine. The Jews had their legally defined, rightful place in the society; there was a degree of tolerance as long as the Jews did not try to rise above their inferior status.
In reality, there were considerable differences as far as their treatment was concerned. Harsher attitudes prevailed in times of crisis and Jews fared on the whole less well among the Shi’a than among the Sunni. Their lot was better in Spain and the Near East than in North Africa and Central Asia. But one would look in vain for the sources of modern antisemitism in the medieval Islamic world. Persecution of Jews and massacres became more frequent in modern times—beginning in the late eighteenth century from Morocco to Persia. This had to do with the decline of the Muslim world (the decline also in self-confidence and tolerance), which strengthened xenophobia in general. It had to do with sudden outbursts of fanaticism (of which there had always been a strand in the Islamic tradition), but it had also to do with the importation of European antisemitic propaganda into Muslim lands.
IN SUMMARY, the persecution of the Jews in Europe continued throughout the late Middle Ages and beyond, while the situation of the Jews in Eastern Europe was better at the time than in Western, Central, and Southern Europe. The Chmielnicki massacre in which tens of thousands perished was not an exception; there simply was no systematic, state-supervised antisemitism in Eastern Europe as in Spain and Portugal. The Spanish persecutions culminated in the expulsion of 1492, when about 300,000 Jews were forced to leave the country unless they were willing to be baptized; Portugal followed suit a few years later. The Jews in these countries emigrated to Turkey, the Near East, and also to the Low Countries.
Conversion alone, however, did not necessarily solve the problem in Southern Europe. The Inquisition spent much time and energy—it continued to be active into the early nineteenth century—investigating whether conversions had been sincere and punishing the insincere. But even if the conversions had been sincere, Jews and their descendants were still barred from many professions, including public office, and from attending universities. This was based on the principle of purity of blood, a forerunner of the racialist antisemitism of the late nineteenth century. True, political and social practice at the time was not always in conformity with the doctrine. Ignacio de Loyola appointed a converso as his successor, and it was not too difficult to forge genealogies. In any case, only those of high birth had been registered in church and even among the nobility there had been a great deal of intermarriage over the ages. What matters in the final analysis is the fact that hatred of Jews came from both above and below and continued for a long time, even after no Jews were left on the Iberian peninsula.