It is remarkable how ideas flourish, not only within a group, a society, a nation, as well across eras in time. The idea of concern is anti-Jewish sentiments. In a previous post,[1] I noted that the lingering effect of anti-Jewish sentiments of the apostolic and Patristic Era laid a fertile ground for the future. That future continued into the Middle Ages and beyond. Such sentiment echoed as underscored by among many writers, monks, theologians, priests, historians, and philosophers who learned from their predecessors, the honored Church Fathers.[2] They learned the previously established stereotypes and interpretive categories. The characterizations and interpretations imbued with anti-Jewish sentiments formed the thinking of the created Christian theology and its spiritualization with a motif of an appeal of knowing God better than the Jews. This was an exegetical supplanting pursuit, for the long haul.
For nearly two millennia, Christian Europe constructed a systematic “teaching of contempt” toward Jews that blended theological accusation, social segregation, and periodic violence.[3] This was not a marginal phenomenon but a core element of Latin Christendom’s self-definition: the Jew was cast simultaneously as deicide,[4] obstinate rejecter of truth, usurer, ritual murderer, and agent of cosmic evil.[5] The following figures—Church Fathers, medieval schoolmen, Reformers, Counter-Reformation polemicists, and Enlightenment philosophers—did not merely reflect popular prejudice; they provided the intellectual scaffolding that justified brutal expulsions, forced conversions, ghettos, and pogroms under the explicit banner of Christian theology and, later, secularized “reason.”[6]
The passages quoted herein are offensive, however they represent what was actually said by the noted figures in history within the Chrisitan milieus. To understand why such vile ill sentiment towards Jews were held by Christians and why Christians believe their view is superior to that of Jewish faith, it is crucial to be aware of what was said and taught consistently through the ages.
Early Church and Patristic Era (2nd–5th centuries)
The era’s prevailing thoughts about Jews believed and relied on notions from Greco-Roman and Apostolic Eras.[7] Accompanying the voices of Tertullian, Origen, and Justin Martyr, two alarming voices resounded in the 4th century. In his eight homilies Adversus Judaeos (374–387 CE), John Chrysostom (347-407 CE), the “Golden Mouthed” preacher of Antioch and later Constantinople declared synagogues “brothels and dens of demons,” accused Jews of drunkenness and ritual murder of Christ every Passover, and urged Christians to prevent intermarriage “even if it costs their lives.”[8] These sermons became canonical in Eastern Orthodox liturgy and were reprinted repeatedly in the West.[9]
A second loudest voice of the Patristic Era was St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Augustine softened pursuits of overt violence but had a hardened theology. In Tractatus adversus Judaeos and City of God (XVIII.46), he formulated the “witness-people” doctrine: Jews must survive in perpetual servitude and degradation as living proof of Christian truth.[10] This doctrine paradoxically protected Jewish existence while guaranteeing them to live in lower-class status and being subject to periodic mob violence.7 Both, Chrysostom and Augustine had a bookend effect on the durability of ill sentiments towards Jews through time.
Middle Ages and Scholastic Consolidation (6th–14th centuries)
As time progressed into the early and high Middle Ages – 6th – 14th centuries, noted voices harboring ill sentiments towards Jews as their predecessors, were St. Isidore of Seville (560–636), Agobard of Lyon (779-840), Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), Peter the Venerable (1092-1156) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). In De fide Catholica Contra Judaeos I.1, Isidorestated “The Jews… with blinded heart and perfidious mind always oppose Christ.”[11] Agobard in De Insolentia Judaeorum, viewed the Jews as “. . . cursed offspring of the devil… children of Satan.”[12] Following Agobard, Bernard shared and continued Augustine’s ‘witness people’ doctrine regarding Jews. Bernard opposed physical slaughter during the Second Crusade but only because Jews must be preserved as witnesses.[13] Peterthe Venerable, in Adversus Judaeorum inveteratam duritiem[14] he stated “You [Jews] are truly the most brutal of all beasts… You are not men but beasts…” Peter the Venerable demanded they pay for crusades because “they killed Christ.”[15] This was a continuous thought and shared sentiment that flowed from those of Chrysostom and Tertullian before him. As did their predecessors from the Patristic Era, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter the Venerable along with Agobard and Isidore, carried the narratives and ill sentiments towards Jews proudly.[16]
A century later, St. Thomas Aquinas’ in Summa Theologica, states, “Since the Jews are the slaves of the Church, she can dispose of their possessions… It would be licit to hold the Jews, because of their crime [deicide], in perpetual servitude.”[17] Despite his reputation for moderation, Aquinas reaffirmed Jews as perpetual slaves (servitus perpetua) because of the crucifixion[18] as did predecessors Augustine, Chrysostom, and Tertullian. Aquinas endorsed forced attendance at conversionary sermons, approved the baptism of Jewish children against parental will under certain conditions, and defended the Church’s right to persecute Jewish “perfidy.”[19] Aquinas’ opinions were cited in papal bulls justifying the Inquisition’s extension to Jews and the 1290 expulsion from England.[20]
Reformation and Counter-Reformation (16th–17th centuries)
Early in his career Martin Luther (1483-1546) wrote That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (1523) in attempts to convert Jews to Christianity. By the 1540s after being unsuccessful in converting Jews, Luther produced the most virulent anti-Jewish writings of the Reformation, On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) and Vom Schem Hamphoras (1543), calling for synagogues and schools to be burned, Jewish homes destroyed, and Jews forced into labor or expelled, rabbis forbidden to teach on pain of death, safe-conduct revoked, and Jews forced into agricultural labor or expulsion.12 Nazi propagandists reprinted these tracts in massive editions; Julius Streicher cited Luther at Nuremberg trials, saying “I only did what the Reformer taught.”[21]
Luther’s echo resounded with John Calvin (1509-1564) who held colder ill sentiments towards Jews but no less consequential. In Ad Quaestiones et Objecta Judaei cuiusdam Responsio,[22] echoing Luther, Chrysostom, and Aquinas, Calvin accused Jews of “obstinate malice” and “Satanic perfidy.” While he opposed physical violence, his doctrine of double predestination implied Jewish rejection was divinely ordained, reinforcing the idea of Jews as eternally damned. Calvinist cities (Geneva, Dutch Republic) still enforced ghetto-like restrictions. His doctrine of double predestination reinforced the idea of Jews as eternally damned,[23] an ongoing Christian sentiment towards Jews, motivating missionary efforts.
Counter-Reformation Polemicists
The Council of Trent reaffirmed medieval anti-Jewish canons. The Roman ghetto (1555) and yellow badge (1593) were direct Counter-Reformation policies citing Aquinas and other predecessors of anti-Jewish sentiment.[24] The currents of time may have involved differing terms just to say the same. The hatred was and is toward Jewishness of being Jewish, stated succinctly by John Milton, “That which was to the Jew but Jewish, is to the Christian no better than Canaanite customs.”[25]
Enlightenment and Philosophical Antisemitism (18th–19th centuries)
The Enlightenment’s darling of reason and enlightenment was the most celebrated champion of tolerance all the while he was its most obsessive hater of Jewish life and belief. Voltaire (1694-1778) published hundreds of pages over the course of thirty years calling Jews “the most abominable people in the world,” “calculating animals,” and accused them of ritual murder (Dictionnaire philosophique, “Juifs”; Lettres de Memmius -1771). Voltaire secularized medieval tropes; instead of deicide, he stated the Jews were now a “barbarous” race incapable of culture.[26] and declared that “one must enter their synagogues only with a torch.”
Voltaire influenced thought beyond the era. For instance, 19th-century French thinker Édouard Drumont, Toussenel quoted Voltaire incessantly as proof that hatred of Jews was compatible with Enlightenment rationalism. Drumont’s La France juive (1886) opens with a long epigraph from Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary with pejoratives. Nazi propagandists in the 1930s–40s reprinted selections of Voltaire’s anti-Jewish writings in German translation (especially the “Juifs” article) to demonstrate that the ill sentiment towards Jews was a European tradition shared by the greatest minds. Rationality embraced hating Jews.[27] Voltaire’s hatred of Jews was demonstrated in one of the most voluminous and vicious bodies of writing on the subject produced by any major Enlightenment figure.[28]
Voltaire had a follower in Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant advocated the “euthanasia of Judaism” (The Conflict of the Faculties, 1798) through forced civic assimilation and declared Judaism morally worthless a “non religion.” His lectures on anthropology repeatedly characterized Jews as mercenary and deceitful by “national character.”[29]
Voltairian and Kantian hatred towards Jewishness was shared and followed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). In Contribution to the Correction of the Public’s Judgment concerning the French Revolution (1793), Fichte wrote: “To give them [Jews] civil rights, I see no other means than to cut off all their heads in one night and replace them with heads containing no Jewish ideas.”[30]
The characterizations of Jews as vile continued in fashion beyond Voltaire and Kant by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Hegel portrayed Judaism as the religion of “servile obedience” and “unhappy consciousness,” eternally inferior to Christianity (The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate).[31] In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Jews are depicted as fossilized relics whose world-historical role ended with the crucifixion of Jesus.
The eighteenth century did not escape the hatred thought towards Jews. Jonathon Edwards (1703-1758), an out spoken preacher, referred to the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, “as ending . . . all the Jewish world. And from this time began the Gentile church to be the only people of God”[32] Edwards was influential with the preceding history of a vile narrative about Jews that echoed through with John Wesley (1703–1791). Charles Finney (1792–1875), who was involved in the Christian claimed second awakening, preached that Jews have been replaced by Christians as the recipients of God’s promises. Finney preached that “The promises made to Israel and Judah, in the Old Testament, are promises made to the whole Christian Church.…Church of Christ is the ‘Israel of God’… to whom, collectively and individually, all the promises of the Bible belong.”[33] A contemporary of Finney, Charles Spurgeon (1834 – 1892) with his preaching rooted in his eschatological beliefs in the role of Jewish people in salvation by accepting Jesus as the messiah, fueled the conception that Jews are wrong in their beliefs. Such commentary crystallized the evangelical mantra of saving the Jewish people by having them accept Jesus as a messiah. The justification for continued Jewish existence was for their acceptance of Jesus as a messiah was a shared sentiment.
Consequences of Anti-Jewish Sentiment
As time passed the effects of these ideas have allowed a catastrophic short list of events:
1096 Rhineland massacres (justified by Peter the Venerable’s successors);
1290 expulsion from England (Edward I cited Aquinas);
1492 expulsion from Spain (Torquemada invoked centuries of precedent);
1648 – 49 Chmielnicki massacres in Ukraine (Cossacks quoted Luther);
19th-century Russian pogroms (Orthodox clergy reprinted Chrysostom and Luther);[34]
20th-century Nazi propaganda (direct citations of Luther, Voltaire, Fichte, Kant).
The Enlightenment did not dismantle Christian ill sentiments towards Jewish people; it universalized it by replacing theological with racial-biological arguments while retaining the same inventory of ethnic and religious hatred towards Jews.[35] The fashionable Jewish pejoratives girded prevailing cultural thought of excoriating the Hebrew scriptural texts[36] into the 19th and 20th century as a seemingly banal discredited rendering of Jewish religious scriptures.
Final Thoughts
The history of Christian traditional beliefs contains a long legacy of anti-Jewish rhetoric from some of its most influential figures. While not all Church Fathers were equally hostile, many of the greatest names in Western theology — including several revered as saints, apostles, church fathers, and founders of Protestantism — wrote harshly against Jews and Judaism. These texts were later cited justifying discrimination, forced baptisms, expulsions, ghettoization, and, in the 20th century, by Nazi propagandists. It depicted a dark taint in humanity from Patristic Era through the Enlightenment culmination.
History speaks for itself without needing scholarly narrative. Actions do speak louder than words, especially when actions follow beliefs passed on and acted upon with indignation. The consistency through ages has been to effectively supplant Jewish understanding of God and human life. The actions in history speak louder than words.
I rest that the era-transcending Christian pursuit has been to garner an appeal, a recognition of knowing God and the Hebrew scriptures better than the Jews – a recurring modus among Christian apologists. Despite accommodations provided by inter-faith dialogue, knowing the root cause of their beliefs could be productive. Historic pursuit of converting Jews evinces their theological superior belief,[37] a product of continued era-transcending teaching. The lack of earlier dated evidence of first temple and second temple period scriptures, as asserted by apologists and critics of the Hebrew scriptures, can be attributed to the malefactors besieging the Jewish people in Judea through the ages.[38] Christians do not have a monopoly on the modus operandi conduct against Jewish faith, as Muslims can claim a stake too. Only a closer look at the origin of the purpose for these faiths can tell more than what has been spiritualized. Only then, hopefully, will these ill sentiments harbored towards the Jewish faith be the ones to be eviscerated in humanity’s future.
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[1] J.B. Lorenzo, Origins of Anti-Jewish Sentiment from Greek Ethnic and Theological Condemnation – Word From Vine.
[2] J.B. Lorenzo, Apostolic and Patristic Era Anti-Jewish Sentiments: Early Writings and Christianity – Word From Vine
[3] Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964).
[4] The phrase “Jew was cast as deicide” means that the Jewish people have historically been falsely accused by some Christians of being collectively and eternally responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, who in Christian theology is considered God incarnate. This concept of “deicide” (literally “the killing of a god”) has been a cornerstone of Christian antisemitism for centuries, leading to immense suffering and persecution.
[5] David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), chs. 1–4.
[6] William Nicholls, Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1993).
[7] Origins of Anti-Jewish Sentiment from Greek Ethnic and Theological Condemnation – Word From Vine; See also, Apostolic and Patristic Era Anti-Jewish Sentiments: Early Writings and Christianity – Word From Vine.
[8] Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
[9] Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), ch. 2.
[10] Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
[11] Isidore, PL 83:449
[xii] Agobard of Lyon (779–840), Agobard, (PL 104:71–74)
[13] Synan, The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages.
[14] Peter the Venerable, (CCCM 58:124–125); Edward A. Synan, The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1965). Adversus Judaeorum inveteratam duritiem (Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews)
[15] Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity, ch. 5.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Aquinas, Summa Theologica II–II q. 10 a. 12; Letter to Margaret of Flanders (ed. Mandonnet)
[18] Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, q. 10, a. 12; q. 12, a. 2.
[19] John Y. B. Hood, Aquinas and the Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
[20] Walter Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews (Ebelsbach: Rolf Gremer, 1988).
[21] Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
[22] Calvin, Ad Quaestiones et Objecta Judaei cuiusdam Responsio, translated “Response to the Questions and Objections of a Certain Jew.”
[23]Calvin, Opera Omnia (CO) 9.
[24] Kenneth Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy 1555–1593 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1977).
[25] Milton, John. “The reason of Church government urged against prelacy of true religion, heresy, schism, toleration.” The Prose Works of John Milton. Vol. 2. United Kingdom, G. Bell & sons, 1848: 497.
Google Books, The Prose Works of John Milton.
[26] Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
[27] Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews (1968) famously called Voltaire “the major link between traditional Christian antisemitism and modern racial antisemitism.
[28] Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews.
[29] Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), ch. 3.
[30] Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (1990).
[31] Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).
[32] Edwards, Jonathan. Notes on Scripture. Editor Stephen Stein. Works of Jonathan Edwards. Vol. 15. Yale Univ. Press, 1998: 49–50.
[33] Finney, Charles. “The Promises.—No. 1.” The Oberlin Evangelist. Vol. 1, no. 12 (1839): 89.
Google Books, The Oberlin Evangelist
[34] Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943); Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
[35] Robert Michael, Holy Hatred: Christianity, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
[36] Friedrich Delitzsch, Bibel und Babel (1902-1905), an indictment of the Hebrew Bible as being entirely unoriginal compared to other ancient Near Eastern texts; Germany’s 1879 new antisemitism won significant academic approval in the Berlin antisemitism conflict of 1879–1881(Antisemitismusstreit); Michael Meyer, Great Debate on Antisemitism: Jewish Reaction to New Hostility in Germany, 1879-1881, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 11:1 (1966): 137-170; see Aly Elrefaei, Wellhausen and Kaufmann: Ancient Israel and Its Religious History in the Works of Julius Wellhausen and Yehezkel Kaufmann, BZAW 490 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016).
[37] As an experienced former Christian apologist, I can comment that the held covert conception is to conceive the Hebrew Bible as younger than the claimed Septuagint (LXX) (a 250-100 BCE ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), while the Masoretic Text (MT) is a medieval Hebrew text standardized by Jewish scribes between the 7th and 10th centuries. This engendered a confidence, unbeknownst shallow. But for the centuries of efforts to eviscerate the Jewish writings, evidence of Jewish scriptures from the first and second temple periods would be extant for consideration.
[38] An example of malefactors in Judean Hebrew history: Hebrew scriptures (Torah scrolls) were sought out and destroyed as part of a broader aggressive policy of Hellenization and the forceful suppression of Jewish religious practices, which ultimately triggered the Maccabean Revolt under Seleucid Empire’s severe Hellenization and persecution of Judaism by monarch Antiochus IV Epiphanes (reigned 175–164 BCE). (1 and 2 Maccabees). Antiochus IV intervened in Judean civil division between Hellenizers (those embracing Hellenistic culture) and Traditionalists (loyal to Jewish law (Torah)). Antiochus IV imposed measures to Hellenize Judea and unify his empire under a single culture, transforming Jerusalem into a Greek-style polis (city-state). Judaism was outlawed by criminalizing the Sabbath, circumcision, observance of traditional feasts, offering of traditional Jewish sacrifices, and the possession of Jewish scriptures as punishable by death. Greek cultic practices were installed in the Second Temple in Jerusalem, as an altar to Zeus was erected in the sanctuary, and animals considered impure (like pigs) were sacrificed there, an extreme act of sacrilege to the Jewish people.