Antisemitism in Christianity
Christians imposed ever-increasing anti-Jewish measures over the ensuing centuries, including acts of ostracism, humiliation, expropriation, violence, and murder—measures which culminated in the Holocaust.
[4] For two millennia, these attitudes were reinforced in Christian preaching, art, and popular teachings, as well as statutes designed to humiliate and stigmatise Jews.
Robin Lane Fox traces the origin of much of the later hostility to this early period of persecution, when the Roman authorities commonly tested the faith of suspected Christians by forcing them to pay homage to the deified emperor.
A justification of this charge is derived from the Gospel of Matthew (27:24–25), alleging a crowd of Jews told Pilate that they and their children would be responsible for Jesus' death.
However, Chrysostom went so far as to say that because Jews rejected the Christian God in human flesh, Christ, they therefore deserved to be killed:[disputed – discuss] "grew fit for slaughter."
In the later medieval period, the number of Jews who were permitted to reside in certain places was limited; they were concentrated in ghettos, and they were also not allowed to own land; they were forced to pay discriminatory taxes whenever they entered cities or districts other than their own.
[43] The first papal bull was issued in about 1120 by Calixtus II, intended to protect Jews who suffered during the First Crusade, and was reaffirmed by many popes, even until the 15th century although they were not always strictly upheld.
Without the judgment of the political authority of the land, no Christian shall presume to wound them or kill them or rob them of their money or change the good customs that they have thus far enjoyed in the place where they live.
[47] In Iceland, one of the hymns repeated in the days leading up to Easter includes the lines:[48] The righteous Law of Moses The Jews here misapplied, Which their deceit exposes, Their hatred and their pride.
During the Middle Ages in Europe persecutions and formal expulsions of Jews were liable to occur at intervals, although this was also the case for other minority communities, regardless of whether they were religious or ethnic.
In the Edict of Expulsion, King Edward I expelled all the Jews from England in 1290 (only after ransoming some 3,000 among the most wealthy of them), on the accusation of usury and undermining loyalty to the dynasty.
On 31 March 1492 Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, the rulers of Spain who financed Christopher Columbus' voyage to the New World just a few months later in 1492, declared that all Jews in their territories should either convert to Christianity or leave the country.
[53][54][55] In his book On the Jews and Their Lies, Luther excoriates them as "venomous beasts, vipers, disgusting scum, canders,[clarification needed] devils incarnate."
He provided detailed recommendations for a pogrom against them, calling for their permanent oppression and expulsion, writing "Their private houses must be destroyed and devastated, they could be lodged in stables.
Let them be forced to work, and if this avails nothing, we will be compelled to expel them like dogs in order not to expose ourselves to incurring divine wrath and eternal damnation from the Jews and their lies."
[58]: 28 In 1772 Catherine II, the empress of Russia, forced the Jews living in the Pale of Settlement to stay in their shtetls and forbade them from returning to the towns that they occupied before the partition of Poland.
[citation needed] The counter-revolutionary Catholic royalist Louis de Bonald stands out among the earliest figures to explicitly call for the reversal of Jewish emancipation in the wake of the French Revolution.
[62][63][64][65] Bonald's article Sur les juifs (1806) was one of the most venomous screeds of its era and furnished a paradigm which combined anti-liberalism, a defense of a rural society, traditional Christian anti-Semitism, and the identification of Jews with bankers and finance capital, which would in turn influence many subsequent right-wing reactionaries such as Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux, Charles Maurras, and Édouard Drumont, nationalists such as Maurice Barrès and Paolo Orano, and anti-Semitic socialists such as Alphonse Toussenel.
[60][68] In the 1840s, the popular counter-revolutionary Catholic journalist Louis Veuillot propagated Bonald's arguments against the Jewish "financial aristocracy" along with vicious attacks against the Talmud and the Jews as a "deicidal people" driven by hatred to "enslave" Christians.
[68] Between 1882 and 1886 alone, French priests published twenty anti-Semitic books blaming France's ills on the Jews and urging the government to consign them back to the ghettos, expel them, or hang them from the gallows.
Catholic writers such as Ernest Jouin, who published the Protocols in French, seamlessly blended racial and religious anti-Semitism, as in his statement that "from the triple viewpoint of race, of nationality, and of religion, the Jew has become the enemy of humanity.
"[74] Pope Pius XI praised Jouin for "combating our mortal [Jewish] enemy" and appointed him to high papal office as a protonotary apostolic.
During a meeting with Roman Catholic Bishop Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrück On April 26, 1933, Hitler declared: I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question.
Before he became Pope, Cardinal Pacelli addressed the International Eucharistic Congress in Budapest on 25–30 May 1938 during which he referred to the Jews "whose lips curse [Christ] and whose hearts reject him even today"; at this time anti-Semitic laws were in the process of being formulated in Hungary.
[79] The 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge was issued by Pope Pius XI,[80] but drafted by the future Pope Pius XII[81] and read from the pulpits of all German Catholic churches, it condemned Nazi ideology and has been characterized by scholars as the "first great official public document to dare to confront and criticize Nazism" and "one of the greatest such condemnations ever issued by the Vatican.
"[82] In the summer of 1942, Pius explained to his college of Cardinals the reasons for the great gulf that existed between Jews and Christians at the theological level: "Jerusalem has responded to His call and to His grace with the same rigid blindness and stubborn ingratitude that has led it along the path of guilt to the murder of God."
[85] The Israeli historian Pinchas Lapide interviewed war survivors and concluded that Pius XII "was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands".
For example, the influential Evangelical preacher Billy Graham and the then-president Richard Nixon were caught on tape in the early 1970s while they were discussing matters like how to address the Jews' control of the American media.
(But see supersessionism) Several scholars, including Susannah Heschel,[7] Gavin I Langmuir[98] and Uriel Tal[7] hold the position that anti-Judaism directly led to modern anti-Semitism.
[108]: 154 According to research which was conducted by Armand Mauss, most LDS members believe that the Jewish people will need to be converted to Christianity to be forgiven for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
