Anti-Semitism

How could the Jewish religion be redefined so that it became a possible and even quickly accessible faith for all of humankind? The answer was devised by the first two or three generations of those who had adhered to the person and teaching of an itinerant Jewish preacher, Jesus of Nazareth. Despite centuries of thought and scholarly research, what Jesus himself believed is still not clear. The weight of the evidence is that Jesus regarded himself as a Jew who had come to wrest the leadership of his people from the priests who dominated in the affairs of the Temple and the Pharisees who had seized the initiative in defining the laws by which Jews were urged to live. In a few decades after his crucifixion, the religious leadership passed to a much more radical Jewish thinker, Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul; d. between 62 and 68 C.E.), who opened Judaism to all the non-Jews of the world without requiring that they accept the rituals and all the many restrictions that the rabbis had defined.

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 accept the truth of their religion as it was now being expounded by those of them who had become Christian believers.

Even more fundamentally, Christianity could not present itself as a universal religion that was setting out to convert the whole world. It demanded only that those who joined it should include themselves in the transforming faith in Jesus, who had died for sins of humankind. How could anyone be excluded from this transforming faith and the salvation that it offered each individual? And yet, as the church fathers saw with bitter dismay, the Jews did not behave according to the Christian theological plan. Jesus had been born among them, but the Jews were obdurate. Their majority refused to accept the truth that appeared among them. To the church fathers, it was unthinkable that the divine message was unclear or, worse still, that the Jews understood the message but rejected it.

By the middle of the second century, church fathers such as Saint Justin (Justin Martyr, c. 100–c. 165), writing in Greek, and half a century later, Tertullian (c. 155 or 160–after 220 C.E.), writing in Latin, were critical of the Jews for not having accepted Christ. Within a hundred years, especially after Emperor Constantine (ruled 306–337) proclaimed Christianity the state religion of Rome, later church fathers were offering an explanation for the obduracy of the Jews: they were too strongly in the grip of Satan, who had commandeered the synagogues and instructed the rabbis; the Jews could not see the truth of Christianity because they were now led by the enemy of God, the supreme anti-Christ. They were referred to as the "Synagogue of Satan" in Revelations 2:9 and 3:9. Two things could be done: Jews could be persecuted as the enemies of truth or the effort to convert them could be redoubled, over and over again, to persuade them to abandon their wrong-headedness. In this very early Christian explanation that the Jews were now "the synagogue of Satan" their otherness was explained, and the path was prepared that could lead to pronouncing the Jews to be totally dangerous to the rest of humankind—and all of this on the basis of Christian theology. Manetho had decided that the Jews were dangerous to the health of humankind because they were lepers; the earliest church fathers defined a different metaphor—the Jews were a threat to the souls of men and women because they were Satan's disciples in leading them away from divine truth. Thus, the Christian relationship to Jews was defined as a paradox: the culmination of the triumph of the new faith would be in its conversion of the Jews, but the tasks of achieving this glorious time would be enormously difficult, because it involved direct war with Satan himself.

Early Christianity found a compromise between the two alternatives—that the Jews had to survive until they accepted Jesus and that they were by their very nature the hopelessly wicked "synagogue of Satan"—by asserting both alternatives: the Jews could not be totally obliterated, for there would be no one left to represent them at the end of days when they would finally accept the Christian truth, but society had to be defended against the Jews or it would be hopelessly corrupted. Further elucidations of this basic paradox included the permission to keep Jews alive by allowing them to perform pariah tasks that were forbidden to Christians, such as lending money at interest, but the notion that those who had condemned Christ deserved the most severe punishment was never abandoned.

Since living Jews were the enemies of truth, they could be blamed for everything that went wrong in society. So, early in the fifteenth century, when Europe was swept by the Black Plague, which killed perhaps a quarter of the population, it seemed self-evident that this scourge was brought on the Christian majority by the small Jewish minority, which was full of hate and anger. It also seemed self-evident that the possessions of the Jews had been acquired by deception and by stealing from the Christians. It was, therefore, logical and even lawful to treat them like a kind of sponge; whatever possessions they had could be confiscated by the ruling power. In the course of the Middle Ages, there was hardly a place in Europe that had not expelled the Jews and forced them to leave without any resources with which to live. Nonetheless, the myth remained that in the divine plan Jews or at least some of them needed to be kept alive so their acceptance of the true Christianity would be the dramatic act that would point to the end of days. Some historians call this medieval version of hatred of Jews "anti-Judaism" rather than "anti-Semitism." It was only late in the Middle Ages that Christian anti-Semitism came close to completing its ideological journey by asserting that the Jews were hopelessly dangerous always, even after they might convert to Christianity.