Anti-Semitism - Overview - Origins, The Roman Empire, Christianity And Anti-semitism, Conversos, Modern Anti-semitism
contrary hatred
Anti-Semitism is that hatred of the Jews that defines them as a threat to humankind. The most important contemporary quarrel about anti-Semitism is the issue of its very nature. While some scholars have been insisting for decades that there is no continuing phenomenon of anti-Semitism, arguing on the contrary that "Jew hatred" has reinvented itself many times, others adhere to the contrary opinion, seeing a direct line connecting pre-Christian to modern forms of anti-Semitism.
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Manetho's main contention, an obvious rebuttal to the biblical account of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, is that the Jews did not leave Egypt as the victors in a revolt against the pharaoh who oppressed them. On the contrary, the Jews were expelled from Egypt because they were lepers and, on the side, engaged in nefarious and destructive acts. The Egyptians threw them out into the deser…
The basic "Jew hatred" as defined by Manetho was expanded by a number of Greek or Roman writers, historians, and statesmen. To be sure, not all Hellenistic literature in its two languages, Greek and Latin, was dominated by anti-Semitism. Some writers admired the steadfastness of the Jews and their continuing search for righteousness and social justice—but the majority of the H…
In its very beginnings Christianity could not choose the path that had been suggested by Manetho and elaborated by the pagan Hellenists, that Jews were by their very nature beyond redemption. On the contrary, Saul of Tarsus asserted in Romans 9 that Christianity was a shoot grafted on to the tree of Jesse, that is, that Christianity was the true offshoot of Judaism—if only the Jews would ac…
The largest Jewish community in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries existed on the Iberian Peninsula, the southern half of which was then controlled and ruled by Muslim states and the central and northern half by Christians. Jews were a significant minority in both these regions of Spain. They were especially important to the Christians who wanted to force them to convert and thus str…
The major shift in the definition of anti-Semitism occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Christianity was largely pushed aside among educated Europeans by the doctrines of the Enlightenment. The dominant cliché since the eighteenth century has been that the Enlightenment ushered in the age of equality of all religions and ethnic identities. This is largely true, but the mo…
The heyday of anti-Semitism, its ultimate climax, came with the rise of Nazism. Adolf Hitler and those who followed him were certain that they were engaged in a great and unavoidable task, the defense of European civilization against all forms of subversion by the Jews. Hitler's ultimate vision of the world was that it was poised on the verge of an ultimate war in which the Jews had to be d…
Baron, Salo W. The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets. 2nd edition, rev. and enl. New York: Schocken, 1987. ——. A Social and Religious History of the Jews. 8 vols. 2nd edition, rev. and enl. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Gager, John G.. The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Hertz…
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