The term antisemitism is thrown about regularly in public discourse these days. Perhaps, now would be a good time to review some historical perspective on the term.
Early Christians were Jewish followers of Jesus, while the majority of Jewish people were not. The Christians wished to claim the legacy from the Biblical prophecies and welcome Gentiles into their religion. The existence of the Jewish nonbelievers was at best an embarrassment. Christians had to convince others that they were the true beneficiaries of God’s covenant with Abraham not the nonbelieving Jews. Magda Teter writes about how this dogmatic conflict drifted into social conflict and led to the recognition of Jews as a unique class of humans in her book Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism. The nature of anti-Jewish sentiment would evolve over the centuries and develop into an extremely threatening form often referred to as modern antisemitism. David I. Kertzer, in the book The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, provides perspective on the role of the Vatican and the Catholic Church in encouraging antisemitism in the years leading up to the Holocaust.
From Teter’s book we learn the earliest attempt to resolve the issue of how to deal with the non-Christian Jews is attributed to Paul.
“In Galatians, seeking to dissuade Judaizing Christians from following Jewish rituals and ceremonies, he wrote: ‘For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman. One, the child of the slave, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise. Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One woman, in fact is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery…But the other woman…she is free and she is our mother.’ Christians were now, Paul continued, the children of promise, like Isaac. Jews, who continued to follow God’s commandments, were in turn, Hagar’s children, ‘born into slavery’.”
The free woman was Abraham’s wife, and the son was promised by God. The son by the slave woman was a mere act of fornication. Paul’s interpretation would always place Christians in a position superior to the “born into slavery Jews, and thus be popular with Christians, both Jews and Gentiles. God’s covenant with Abraham was thus transferred to the Christians, and practicing Jews were deemed inferior to Christians before God. This self-serving interpretation would consign practicing Jews to servitude and ultimately to slavery to their Christian masters.
Through the early centuries as Christians aspired to an influential role in the Roman Empire. How to live with the Jews was often discussed, but only from the perspective of superior Christians. This viewpoint probably had little effect on the Jews until Constantine the Great allowed a greater degree of freedom for Christians. Ultimately, in 380 AD, Emperor Theodosius I would make Christianity the state religion and provide Christian leaders the power to insert their feelings towards Jews into public practice. The subservience of Jews must be maintained. An initial horror over the possibility that a Jew might have control over a Christian slave evolved over time to spread to restricting Jews from any occupation that would suggest even the slightest ability to control a Christian.
“In pre-Christian Roman Empire, Jews were able to hold public office and were granted accommodations for their religious observance. There was no concern about Jewish power over non-Jews, and the only concern about Jews’ holding slaves was over the slaves’ conversion to Judaism. But in Christian Roman imperial law, the anxiety over proselytism was increasingly mixed with anxiety over Jewish authority and power. The first explicit prohibition against Jews holding public office came in 418, declaring that ‘the entrance to the civil service [militiae] shall be closed from now to those living in Jewish superstition’.”
These sentiments would then be officially entered into canon law where they could be implemented in any nation with Christian leanings.
“A similarly explicit language was used by the VI Council of Toledo in 638, which ruled that ‘Jews should not be allowed to have Christian slaves, or buy them, or acquire them through gift of any man whatever; for it is monstrous that members of Christ should serve the ministers of Antichrist.’…Such anxieties about Jewish authority and power, in relation to public offices, especially judges and tax collectors, entered canon law through compilations by Burchardt of Worms or Gratian’s Decretales, thus becoming part of the long legal tradition that would have an impact for centuries to come. In these legal texts and legal corpus, Jews were marked as inferior members of society, whose presence was not questioned but whose status was to be controlled.”
“There were no comparable laws for any other specific group in antiquity, Greek or Roman, pagan or Christian.”
Declaring a whole people to be inferior and in need of control places that whole people at risk of all sorts of abuse. If they need to be controlled, one will question what they might do if they were not controlled. The more different and the more unliked they are the more bizarre the speculation is likely to be. A constant source of irritancy to the Christian leaders was a lack of gratitude on the part of the Jews for the Christian permission for them to coexist.
The religious did not always follow the commands of their religious leaders. There were always places where Jews and Christians learned to get along. This infuriated Pope Innocent III who in 1205 issued Etsi Judaeos reminding people that it was ungodly to treat Jews as equals.
“’While Christian piety accepts the Jews, who, by their own guilt, are consigned to perpetual servitude because they crucified the Lord…and while [Christian piety] permits them to dwell in the Christian midst…the Jews ought not to be ungrateful to us and not requite Christian favor with contumely and intimacy with contempt.’ The pope then recounted ‘how Jews have become insolent’ and ‘hurled unbridled insults at the Christian faith,’ relating alleged reports that Jews made Christian nurses who had taken communion ‘pour their milk into the latrine.’ To stem this ‘insolence’ and violation of canon law that prohibited Jews from having Christian servants, he urged the king of France ‘to restrain the excesses of the Jews that they shall not dare to raise their neck, bowed under the yolk of perpetual slavery,’ and ‘to forbid them to have any nurses nor other kinds of Christian servants in the future, lest the children of a free woman should be servants to the children of a slave; but rather as slaves rejected by God, in whose death they wickedly conspired, they shall by the effect of this very action, recognize themselves as the slaves of those whom Christ’s death set free at the same time that it enslaved them’.”
The pope was reminding Christians of other nations that they must treat Jews as slaves just as their church does. This was an attempt to propagate the church’s anti-Jewish practices into national legal systems. This would certainly qualify as propagating what we would now call antisemitism.
Another pope, Paul IV, would provide the ultimate example of how to treat Jews in 1555 by enclosing them in a ghetto in Rome.
“In Cum nimis absurdum, Paul IV did not just reiterate the concept of Christian freedom and Jewish servitude; he wanted to embody it in real life—to reify it. One of the most dramatic and tangible of outcomes was the creation of a restricted Jewish quarter ‘with one entry alone, and so to one exit,’ controlled by Christian authorities. The premise of the bull was then implemented across Papal States and then in other principalities in Italy, where Jews were forced to live in ghettoes.”
From Wikipedia:
“The bull restricted Jews in other ways as well. They were forbidden to have more than one synagogue per city—leading, in Rome alone, to the destruction of seven "excess" places of worship. All Jews were forced to wear distinctive yellow hats especially outside the ghetto, and they were forbidden to trade in everything but food and secondhand clothes. Christians of all ages were encouraged to treat the Jews as second-class citizens; for a Jew to defy a Christian in any way was to invite severe punishment, often at the hands of a mob.”
This may be suggesting that anti-Jewish sentiment was restricted to the Catholic version of Christianity. However, Teter tells us that no one was more virulently anti-Jewish than Martin Luther. He expressed his feelings in On the Jews and Their Lies.
“’They live among us, enjoy our security and shield, they use our land and our highways, our markets and streets.’ But the princes and lords do nothing, and ‘permit the Jews to take, steal, and rob from their open money bags and treasures whatever they want. That is, they let the Jews, by means of their usury, skin and fleece them and their subjects and make them beggars with their own money. For the Jews, who are exiles, should really have nothing, and whatever they have must surely be our property. They do not work and they do not earn anything…and yet they are in possession of our money and goods and are our masters in our own land and in their exile.’ The social hierarchy, thus, was turned upside down, the Christian social order disrupted. More ominously, any material possessions and wealth Jews had was considered ill-gotten and illegitimate.”
But Luther had recommendations to make that would influence generations of antisemites in the future.
“Luther ended his long venomous work on Jews with recommendations of expulsion to ‘their land’ and their elimination from Christendom. But his ideas would not gain ground until the late nineteenth and twentieth century, when modern antisemites rediscovered this particular work and began to use it as a font of new antisemitic ideas or to justify them by grounding them in historical sources.”
David I Kertzer is interested in whether the Vatican was guilty of contributing to the events that led to the Holocaust. The Catholic leadership was forced to ask itself the same question. It is not surprising that a commission that was founded managed to find the Church innocent. The argument was that although the Church was guilty of generating anti-Judaic feelings over religious stances, these had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Rather, the forms of nationalism developing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries changed the focus on Jews from their religion to their social and economic activities. It would be from that perspective that the Holocaust would develop. The church claimed it had nothing to do with that evolution.
Kertzer will have none of this.
“This argument, sadly, is not the product of a Church that wants to confront its history. If Jews acquired equal rights in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was only over the angry, loud, and indeed indignant protests of the Vatican and the Church. And if Jews in the nineteenth century began to be accused of exerting a disproportionate and dangerous influence, and if a form of anti-Judaism ‘that was essentially more sociological and political than religious’ was taking shape, this was in no small part due to the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church itself.”
“What, after all, were the major tenants of this modern anti-Semitic movement if not such warnings as these: Jews are trying to take over the world; Jews have already spread their voracious tentacles around the nerve centers of Austria. Germany, France, Austria, Poland, and Italy; Jews are rapacious and merciless, seeking at all costs to get their hands on all the world’s gold, having no concern for the number of Christians they ruin in the process; Jews are unpatriotic, a foreign body ever threatening the well-being of the people with whom they live; special laws are needed to protect society, restricting the Jews rights and isolating them. Every single one of these elements of modern anti-Semitism was not only embraced by the Church but actively promulgated by official and unofficial Church organs.”
Kertzer provides the following selection of quotes to prove his point. They were taken from articles written for Civiltà cattolica, the unofficial medium by which the Vatican disseminated its views, and for L’Osservatore romano, the Vatican’s own publication. They were published in the late nineteenth century.
“The Jews—eternal insolent children, obstinate, dirty, thieves, liars, ignoramuses, pests and the scourge of those near and far….They managed to lay their hands on …all public wealth…and virtually alone they took control not only of all the money…but of the law itself in those countries where they have been allowed to hold public offices.”
“The whole sinew of modern Judaism—that is of the antisocial, antihumanitarian, and above all anti-Christian law that the Jews now observe believing that they are obeying mosaic law—consists essentially in that fundamental dogma according to which the Jew cannot and should not ever recognize as his fellow human being anyone other than a Jew. All others, whether Christian or non-Christian, must be considered, by every good Jew observing his law,…as hateful enemies, to be persecuted and, if possible, exterminated…from the face of the earth.”
“…brotherhood and peace were and are merely pretexts to enable them to prepare—with the destruction of Christianity, if possible, and with the undermining of the Christian nations—the messianic reign that they believe the Talmud promises them.”
“…if this foreign Jewish race is left too free, it immediately becomes the persecutor, oppressor, tyrant, thief, and devastator of the countries where it lives.”
“The whole Jewish race…is conspiring to achieve this reign over all the world’s peoples.”
“…the Jews truly do murder Christians to use their blood in their detestable Talmudic and rabbinical rites…”
“Content yourselves…with the
Christians’ money, but stop shedding and sucking their blood.”
Even when war struck and the Holocaust was already underway, the Church was in no position to complain about the poor treatment of Jews because the ready rejoinder from the Nazis and Italians was always “we are merely treating the Jews the same way you treated them.”
Even more ominously, the Vatican made it clear to civil governments that they had the right to address the problem of Jews in any way they saw fit. Kertzer provides an apt quote from a sermon given by the Bishop of Cremona in 1939 as Mussolini was implementing his racial laws against the Jews.
“Only a few weeks after the
second wave of Italian racial laws was announced, the bishop told his
congregation: ‘The Church has never denied the state’s right to limit or to
impede the economic, social, and moral influence of the Jews, when this has
been harmful to the nation’s tranquility and welfare. The Church has never said or done anything to
defend the Jews, the Judaics, or Judaism.’
The sermon received broad attention, and was quoted in the Vatican’s own
Osservatore romano.”
This is a history that too few are familiar with, a history that needs to be told and understood for what it reveals. We must realize that religion can be a powerful yet dangerous thing. Perhaps the most frightening words ever spoken are “God is on our side.”
A new definition of antisemitism is being promoted: any
criticism of Israel is antisemitic.
There are reasons why Israel should be criticized. There are reasons why Israel should be
detested. Punishing anyone who possesses
these views does nothing to protect Jews from actual antisemitism. Most Jews live in the diaspora. Do any of them feel safer because of what
Netanyahu and Trump are doing?
