This effort arises from a concern for the rise of hatred towards Jews. The question begs to learn from where it arose and how. Maybe by knowing the roots we learn to resolve its ending. Literature expressed sentiments held from long ago in the past. The earliest expressions of hostility toward Jews in Western literature emerged not from Roman or Christian pens, but from the Hellenistic Greek world of the third and second centuries BCE. As Jews came into sustained contact with the Greek-speaking world after the conquests of Alexander the Great, they entered an intellectual environment shaped by civic religion, anthropocentric ethics, and the expectation of religious pluralism within the polis. Jewish monotheism, with its exclusive worship of one God, rejection of idols, dietary restrictions, and strict legal separation from Gentiles, challenged these sentiments and assumptions. The result was a corpus of ethnic critique (enthnographic) and philosophical commentary that oscillated between curiosity,  contempt and outright violence against Jewish people —what modern scholars recognize as the earliest literary expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment. It also reveals the roots of current rise in this type of disdain for Jewishness and faith.

Hellenistic Ethnography and the Jewish “Other”

          Among the earliest Greek authors to discuss Jews was Hecataeus of Abdera (late 4th century BCE), whose work On the Jews survives only in fragments preserved by Josephus (Against Apion 1.183–205). Hecataeus, writing in the courtly milieu of the Ptolemies, offers an unusually positive portrayal of the Jewish people. He depicts Moses as a wise lawgiver who established a rational polity guided by divine law, and the Jews as a people dedicated to virtue and piety. Yet even in this sympathetic ethnography, one senses the strangeness with which Greek observers viewed Jewish customs—especially their rejection of images and participation in foreign cults. Later pseudo-Hecataean writings, composed in the second century BCE, turn sharply polemical, depicting Jews as xenophobic and hostile to outsiders. This shift marks the beginning of a literary pattern in which Jewish separateness was reinterpreted not as moral integrity, but as misanthropy, a dislike for humankind.

          The next major source of Greek hostility appears in Agatharchides of Cnidus (second century BCE), whose account of the Jewish refusal to fight on the Sabbath survives through Photius (Bibliotheca 250). Writing as a moralist and historian, Agatharchides derides Jewish observance of the Sabbath as “a folly of no benefit,” mocking their refusal to defend themselves as evidence of superstition and irrationality. The tone reflects an emerging ethnographic topos: the idea that Jewish piety was absurd, socially dangerous, and contrary to reason. Greek ethnographers who prided themselves on cosmopolitanism could not comprehend a people whose laws forbade them from sharing meals, marriage, or worship with non-Jews. In this intellectual framework, Jewish distinctiveness was reinterpreted through the moral vocabulary of Greek civic life—as anti-social, unworthy, and impious behavior, rather than as the expression of a distinctive monotheism.

          By the first century BCE, this ethnographic unease hardened into open hostility in the writings of Apollonius Molon, a rhetorician and teacher of Cicero and Caesar. Known through Josephus (Against Apion 2.145–296), Apollonius accused Jews of atheism, misanthropy, and hatred of all other nations. For him, Jewish customs—especially the rejection of the gods—amounted to a denial of human fellowship. These accusations introduced what would become enduring features of anti-Jewish polemic: that Jews were both godless and anti-human. Apollonius’s influence extended into the Roman period, where his motifs were echoed by authors such as Posidonius, Damocritus, and later Tacitus.

Roman Inheritance: Anti-Jewish Topoi and the Politics of Empire

          When Roman writers encountered Jews, they did so within the intellectual framework inherited from these Greek predecessors. The empire’s absorption of the Hellenistic East ensured that Roman ethnography adopted Greek categories of cultural difference, reinterpreted in an imperial register. In Tacitus’s Histories (5.2–5), written in the early second century CE, Jews are portrayed as a “people prone to superstition and hostile to all others,” who “regard as profane all that we hold sacred.” Tacitus repeats verbatim the charges of misanthropy, superstition, and separatism that had originated in Hellenistic ethnography. For him, Jewish monotheism is not merely peculiar but subversive—an affront to Roman pietas and social harmony. The charge of odium generis humani (“hatred of the human race”) – a hateful people, encapsulates the transformation of Greek cultural critique into Roman moral indictment.

          Roman satire also absorbed these stereotypes. Juvenal mocked Jewish proselytes for abandoning Roman traditions, and Seneca lamented that “the customs of the accursed race have prevailed” (Epistles 95.47), implying that Jewish influence corrupted Roman morals. While some Roman authors—such as Strabo or Pliny the Elder—were more ethnographically neutral, the dominant tone of Roman commentary was suspicion and serious disdain. The political revolts in Judea (66–135 CE) only reinforced the image of Jews as rebellious and unassimilable. By the late first century CE, the intellectual pattern was set: Jewish faith and customs were seen as hostility a Greek religious faith and world view, whether Hellenic, Roman, or cosmic.

Transition to the Christian Era: From Cultural to Theological Hostility

          Early Christianity emerged within this Hellenistic-Roman cultural matrix and inherited its sentiments, language, and the tension. Yet the Christian appropriation of anti-Jewish motifs transformed them from ethnic critique to theological critique. The Jewish refusal to accept Jesus as Messiah was reinterpreted not as cultural obstinacy but as hate and spiritual blindness. In the New Testament, particularly in John’s Gospel and Pauline letters, one sees the beginning of this theological turn. Jewish opponents are depicted as rejecting divine revelation, with polemical overtones that later Christian writers would amplify. The “Jews” who oppose Jesus in John 8:44—“You are of your father the devil”—reflect not the language of Greek ethnography but a soteriological reconfiguration of older stereotypes: rejection of truth, stubbornness, and moral blindness.

          The early Church Fathers, writing in a world still shaped by Greek and Roman thought, inherited, and recast this vocabulary. Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Origen reinterpreted Jewish law as obsolete and Jewish resistance to Christianity as hateful and willful disobedience. By the fourth century, in John Chrysostom’s Adversus Judaeos, the ancient charges of misanthropy and impiety reappear in explicitly theological form: the Jews are accused of rejecting God Himself and of being enemies of humanity through their opposition to Christ. The continuity is striking. The Greek critique of Jewish separateness evolved into a Christian critique of Jewish unbelief, but the underlying logic—of a people set apart, hostile to divine truth and civic virtue—remained intact.

Conclusion

          The genealogy of anti-Jewish sentiment thus begins not in the New Testament, though is displays the sentiments quite alarmingly, but in the intellectual laboratories of the Hellenistic world BCE. Greek ethnographers and moralists established the interpretive categories—misanthropy, superstition, scorn, and impiety—that would shape Roman and later Christian thought and polemic against all things Jewish, including belief in one god. Under Roman rule, these ideas were amplified through imperial ideology and moral rhetoric. Christianity, emerging from within this cultural continuum, inherited the same stereotypes and infused them with theological meaning to elevate its view of God to be superior to that of the Jews, enhancing its chances for world dominion. By tracing the trajectory from Hecataeus to Apollonius, from Tacitus to Chrysostom, one sees that Christian anti-Judaism was not an isolated phenomenon but the culmination of a long tradition of Greco-Roman sentiments towards the Jewish faith and practice—a tradition that profoundly influenced the shaping of Western attitudes towards the Jewish people and their faith and life with God from BCE to CE and the shaping the semantics of the writing of the New Testament.

 

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