Links
*ITS Home *Jewish Learning Channel
*Santa Fe Distinguished Lecture Series *Publications *About Us

A Concise History of Antisemitism

Ron Duncan Hart, Ph.D.
Executive Director

Institute for Tolerance Studies
P.O. Box 23924
Santa Fe, NM 87502
www.tolerancestudies.org
All rights reserved.
Comparative Religion Monograph Series

A Concise History of Antisemitism is in copyright. © 2021 Author Ron Duncan Hart.  
Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may be done without the written permission of Institute for Tolerance Studies (admin@tolerancestudies.org).

Introduction

Versions of antisemitism, anti-Judaism, or anti-Jewish movements are found in both Christianity and Islam in varying degrees, according to historical period, geographical region, and cultural tradition. Our focus in this text is on Christian antisemitism as we have experienced it in Europe and the Americas over the last thousand years. Historically, Jews have fared better in pluralistic societies composed of multiple ethnic groups, such as the Muslim Empires from the Ummayads to the Ottomans. Jews have suffered persecution more in unified societies, such as Medieval Europe under the Church or later in the new Muslim nation states of the twentieth century. As societies define themselves in more unitary terms, the minority groups, such as Jews, can be defined as corrupting elements to be marginalized or eliminated.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims are the only three major religions that are bound together simultaneously by shared elements of history and practice (the Abrahamic tradition of monotheism) and hostility. It is a bounding of attraction and repulsion. The conflict between the three religions is not so much about theological conflict, rather it is more about historical alienation and competition for space and followers.
Terms. First, lets clarify terms. These terms are related and sometimes intertwined as threads that may be difficult to disentangle, but they can occur independently of each other or with varying degrees of importance. These are various dimensions of Judeophobia as it is expressed in Euro-American Christendom, especially Catholicism. In contrast, Judeophilia also exists, most notably in some contemporary evangelical Protestant churches and in the Confucian world of China.
Judeophilia. This is the love or admiration of Jews. In the relevant Protestant churches, the view of Jews is primarily religious. One element is that Jews may be seen as the “chosen” ones of God and therefore have a special status, and the second element is that the in-gathering of Jews to Israel is a marker of the coming of the Messiah and the beginning of the Golden Age of Messiahnic rule. In the Confucian/Communist world of China, the view of Jews is primarily ethnic and historical. Jews are admired for the special status that they have achieved in the world, including the reputation for economic success, scholarship and learning, and remarkable millennial survival as a small minority people. Jews are admired for discipline and achievement.
Judeophobia. This is the hatred of Jews, and the first term commonly used is the subject of these lectures.
Antisemitism. This is the common term used in English to refer to the range of phenomena from having negative attitudes toward Jews to persecuting or being actively hostile to Jews. Consistent with the Euro-American experience, this term has racial implications, and it tends to be against Jews as a race, as in the attitude of the Nazis during the Holocaust or the KKK in the U.S. Not all of the anti-Jewish movements in Christendom over the last 2,000 years have been racial, and the ones in Islam have tended to not be racial in character. The anti-Jewish movements of the last century in Europe and the United States have been frequently racial.
Anti-Judaism. The movements against Judaism have been focused more on the religion and religious practice. The movement against Judaism started in first century C.E. and continued into the Middle Ages, and it was driven primarily by Church identified people. As they claimed religious exclusivity, they had to eliminate the practice of non-Christian religions, and Judaism was the most important one.
Anti-Jewishness. This term refers specifically to bias or persecution of Jews as a social and cultural group. Usually behavioral characteristics are assigned to Jews and denigrated. These characteristics range from medieval references to smells, dark coloration, blood libel, having horns, avarice or greed, being the wondering Jew, and other such traits. The expression “to Jew down” a person on the price of something is an example.

Stages of Discrimination and Persecution

Human groups do discriminate against others who are not in their group or whom they perceive to be different. This can range from negative attitudes (discrimination) to actions to eliminate the group that is different (expulsion or genocide).
Stereotypes. The above terms refer to stylized perceptions about Jews that put together a selected set of characteristics into an arbitrarily defined definition of who Jews are without the constraints of the realities of individuals who are members of the group. Not all Jews play the violin and not all Jews are millionaires. Not all Jews are dark, and not all Jews have hooked noses. Stereotypes create these incorrect perceptions of people.
Intolerance and Discrimination. This refers to the non-acceptance of the group discriminated against and can lead to the rejection of the presence of the Other, even ghettoization, living in separate areas of town, separate public facilities from schools to drinking fountains, and prohibitions against participating in public life. The non-accepted group becomes a pariah group outside the mainstream or dominant society.
Persecution and Violence. This stage occurs when people begin to punish people for their difference, and the punishment can be through legal constraints and can include socially permitted physical violence against those who are different. This can range from physical attacks on the pariah communities to destroy businesses and infrastructure to the killing of people in that group. Lynchings, etc.
Expulsion and Genocide. The ultimate action against a non-tolerated pariah group is the elimination of the group from the dominant society through expulsion or genocide. Expulsions may be state-enforced, such as the expulsion of Jews from England, France, Spain, and other kingdoms in the medieval period, or it can be achieved by economic discrimination and violence, such as occurred against Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1800s. Among these extreme measures, the ultimate anti-Semitic action is genocide. The only time that has occurred was during the state-sponsored genocide against Jews engineered by the German government during the Holocaust of 1942 to 1945.
There is a 2,000-year history within Christendom from the early expressions of discrimination against Jews to the period of expulsions to the attempted “Ultimate Solution” in the Holocaust. How did this happen in the Christian world?

1. First Century: The Origins of Anti-Judaism
The roots of Christian antisemitism can be traced back to the first century C.E. in the conflict between Peter and Paul. The original vision of the movement among the followers of Jesus was a Jewish movement, and there were other movements during the first century, which was a time of unrest in Israel after the Roman occupation of that land. The original group of Jesus followers, led by Peter, was focused in Jerusalem, and they saw themselves as Jews, continuing Jewish practices from observing Shabbat to circumcision. They were a sect of Jews living in a Jewish environment. Jesus was not necessarily seen as a divine figure among this group.
The separate Jesus movement that Paul started was focused on the Jewish diaspora to the West, starting in present day Turkey and moving into Greece. These Jews in the Diaspora were more assimilated into Greco-Roman society and culture with knowledge of the Greco-Roman pantheon of gods, but their knowledge of Hebrew traditions was waning.
Gospels. Written toward the end of the first century C.E. under the influence of Pauline Christianity, they emphasize the centrality of Jews and the marginality of Romans in the crucifixion of Jesus. This theme of the Jews being responsible for the death of Jesus is a recurring theme in the Roman Catholic Church until Vatican II in 1963, and is one of the primary sources of antisemitism for two millennia.
Justin Martyr. (135-150) He is seen by many as the origin of antisemitism. He said that Christians should not practice Judaism. For example, circumcision should spiritual and not be physical. By this he meant that a Christian should cut off practices that interfered with his or her spiritual attainment and that physical circumcision was not relevant. According to his writings there was continuing Judaizing among early Christians, observing the laws of Moses, rather than the Pauline doctrines. He seems to have been the first to make a clear distinction between Christians and Jews. By his time in the second century, there were still Christians who continued with Jewish practices. Were these early crypto-Jews?

2. Eusebius. (260-329)
He wrote History of the Church, which was the first book on Christianity written after the writings of the New Testament. He portrayed the heroes as preachers and martyrs, and the problems were the Jews, heretics and Roman oppressors. He differentiates between the Hebrews, who are the historical people, and the Jews, who are the people contemporary with him. Christians had replaced Hebrews, and Jews were non-believers. He refers to the Jews as a punished people.

3. Augustine of Hippo. (354-430)
He was the leading thinker in Christianity for the first millennium C.E. His works, The City of God, and others defined Christian thinking during this period. He argued that Jews should be allowed to live in Christendom as a pariah minority because they would be a testimony of what happens to people who do not follow Christianity. He saw Jews as the “chosen ones” of God who reject the true Messiah, the son and messenger of God, when he lived and taught among them. As foretold in the writings of Justin Martyr, the break between Christianity and Judaism was complete at this point. Augustine says that Jews should be allowed to live their lives in exile from their homeland as punishment for their rejection of Jesus. He essentially puts Jews into a pariah category as rejects within the Christian world.
In his book the City of God Augustine says that Abraham was the physical progenitor of the Jewish people, but he was also the spiritual progenitor of religious correctness. He goes on to say that the exile of the Jews from the land of Israel after the death of Jesus is proof of their punishment, and their presence gives proof of what happens to those who do not accept Jesus. In Adversus Judeos Augustine said that Jews had the Covenant with God, and they lost it.

4. Pope Gregory (r.590-604) and the Council of Elvira
He emphasized separation from Jews, including no marriage or adultery with Jews, no eating with Jews, no accepting of Jewish blessings, and no Jews owning Christian slaves. The conversion of Jews was a top priority, but he emphasized that they should not be forcibly converted. So, it was a time of separating the communities and focusing on Jews for conversion. He did believe that Jews had the right to their own place of worship. His doctrine seems to have continued more or less intact until 1200.
5. Visigoths (470-711)
The Visigoths conquered Spain in the 470s, as a part of the larger Goth conquest of the Roman Empire. They had been recently Christianized, and there were a series of Church Councils in Spain to clarify the correct teachings of Christianity, and two of them addressed the role of Jews in society. Various Visigoth kings conducted campaigns against the Jews that marked the true beginning of anti-Semitic persecution. Although the Church emphasized the conversion of Jews, the Visigoths were willing to use force, going beyond the official teachings of the Church.
Toledo III (589). This Council essentially confirmed the principles that Pope Gregory was supporting. Jews should not be in a position of power, or marry Christians, or have intimate relations with Christians, or hold public office with authority over Christians, or own Christian slaves. These principles were oriented toward social control and limiting the role and influence of Jews.
Toledo IV (633). This Council re-affirmed the same principles of Toledo III about the separation of Jews and Christians, no intermarriage, etc., but there was more emphasis on the conversion of Jews. They were becoming less acceptable, and the push to convert Jews was becoming stronger.

6. Muslims (632-1095)
The sudden, lightening eruption of Arabs from the East overwhelmed Christendom from the Middle East to Egypt and across North Africa to Spain. In less than a century that part of the world was transformed into the first Arab Empire. As much as 80 percent of the world population of Jews lived in the areas conquered by the Arab Muslims. The Jews in Spain had been persecuted by the Visigoths, and they welcomed the Arabs when they invaded Spain in 711. Later, Jews were named to government positions in the new Muslim realm. In the eighth and ninth centuries the people of Christendom were more concerned about the invading Arab forces and gave little attention to the Jewish issue.
From 800 to 1088 the Muslim rulers of Spain were the most prosperous Muslim kingdom outside of the Middle East, and they welcomed Jews. By 1100 the Jewish population of Spain was the largest in the world and 80 percent of all European Jews. It is estimated that fewer than 5 percent of world Jews lived in eastern Europe at this point, the people who would become Ashkenazi. The terms Sephardi and Ashkenazi were not significant at that time historically. Jews were Jews and religious observance was traditional. There was no Yiddish, no Ladino, no reform, no Orthodox. The distinction between Sephardi and Ashkenazi would develop over the next centuries with the separation of language and cultural differences between the Jews of Germanic and Eastern European descend and those from Mediterranean cultural experience.
In Muslim Spain many Jews achieved prominent roles, even Vizier or Prime Minister and commander of the armed forces. Jewish scholarship was important during this time with important writers, such as Judah HaLevi. But, the turning point came in 1088 when the Christian forces from the north took Toledo and important sections of central Spain from the Muslims. As the reconquest continued, Jews increasingly came under Christian rule, and their status declined under Christian antisemitism.

7. Antisemitism in Medieval Christian Europe. (1088 – 1500)
Most Jews had lived under Muslim rule from 650 to 1100, but after that date the balance between Christian Europe and the Muslim world began to shift. The successes in the Reconquest of Spain and in the First Crusade energized Christian kingdoms. A century later, the Mongols invaded the Muslim Middle East conquering Baghdad in 1258 and overthrowing the last Arab Dynasty and destroying its economic infrastructure. So, as the European Christian kingdoms were emerging from the Dark Ages, the Muslim Middle East was thrown into a dark age of its own. Jews were moving into the emerging Christian kingdoms in Spain and western Europe in a demographic shift that would change the nature of Jewish life.
As Jews migrated in larger numbers into Europe, the opposition to them increased. Only the Spanish Jews were to migrate back to Muslim lands after their expulsion from Spain. Other Jews stayed in Europe, as they were expelled first from England in 1290, later from France in 1309, and later from various Germanic principalities, and finally Spain in 1492. The differences between European Jews and Arab Jews grew over the succeeding centuries and eventually created a notable cultural divide between the two.

7.1. Pope Urban II and the Call for the First Crusade in 1095
Pope Urban II starts the militant Church with the sacralization of violence. For the first thousand years of Christianity, there was no doctrine of violence, but it does start here at the beginning of the second millennium. The Church moved from being a missionizing organization to one using violence to achieve its ends. This militant, crusading approach started against Muslims but subsequently led to crusades against dissident Christian groups and campaigns against Jews. The Vatican established its own army and waged war against kingdoms that were not following its guidelines.
Medieval European life took shape under the influence of the Church, and antisemitism was an integral part of that life. Combining the reconquest of Toledo and central Spain by Christian forces in 1088 and the declaration of the First Crusade by Pope Urban II in 1095, the Church and Christian Europe began to change in it attitudes toward Jews. While Urban’s declaration of the Crusade was focused on freeing Jerusalem from the control of Muslims, it had the affect of stirring hatred against non-Christian groups, which included Jews.
The call for a crusade was aimed at the nobility who could raise armies and pay for them, but it also spun off fringe groups that had weak leadership and few resources. As these fringe groups began their march eastward toward Jerusalem, their first attacks were against the infidel in their midst, the Jews. Three important Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley were attacked and largely destroyed. Thousands were killed in this birth of violent antisemitism in Europe.
Although this was important because it marked a shift in anti-Jewish attitudes and actions against them, the Jews in the other regions of Europe were still safe. Historically, the use of violence against Jewish communities had been by governments (i.e. Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans), but this is the first incident of large-scale organized violence by a disorganized popular group. Christians blamed the Jews for the violence, saying that it was proof that God had abandoned them and that they should convert to Christianity.
When Pope Urban II called for a crusade to drive the Muslims out of the Holy Land in 1095, (Bentley and Ziegler 2006:532) it morphed into a campaign for the eradication of Jews and Muslims. As Crusaders from Europe began marching to the Holy Land, they attacked Jewish communities in the Rhineland, killing thousands, (McKay, et.al. 1996:369) and in Spain the call for the Crusades strengthened the fervor of the Christian drive to re-conquer the Peninsula from the Muslims. As Christian forces invaded Muslim lands in the south of Spain, they killed unknown numbers of Jews because the Christians did not distinguish between Jews and Muslims since they dressed alike and both spoke Arabic.
A century later, Pope Innocent III endorsed the last crusades, which became a campaign to forcefully convert Jews and to eradicate Judaism. He was pope from 1198 to 1216 and is considered one of the most powerful popes of the Medieval period. He was a strong influence over the Christian kings of Europe, and his reign marks the beginning of the social and political decline of Jews on the continent. His campaign against the Jews specifically led to their expulsions from France (1182 and again in 1306), from England in 1290, and from Spain in 1492. (Marcus 2012:137) Pope Innocent also enforced the edicts of the Fourth Council of Toledo, which approved punishment for crypto-Judaism.
What would be inconceivable in 1492, the Spanish nobility protected Jews in 1200 and encouraged them to remain in Spain and continue working in their service. The idea was that Jews would guarantee a good level of trade and enhance Spain’s culture. As would happen later in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, converted Jews were frequently promoted to important roles in the administration of local and national government and even in the Church.
During this period, Jews were punished in various ways, and during the Third Crusade, 1189-1192, Pope Clement III canceled the debts of Crusaders to Jews, who had financed the equipment and costs of many of the nobles who went on the Crusade. Going further he prohibited Jews from holding any political office that could be oppressive to Christians.
In Muslim lands Jews seemed to live fuller lives. The Third Crusade was against Saladin and his forces that had recently retaken Jerusalem after eighty-eight years of Christian rule. In contrast to the restrictions placed on Jews in Christian kingdoms, they had important positions under Saladin, including Maimonides, who was his court physician.
Violence against Jews in Spain grew during this time period. Easter was particularly threatening to Jewish communities because Christians would frequently attack them at that time because of the belief that Jews had killed Christ. In Girona catapults were placed at the top of the hill near the Cathedral and used to lob giant stones into the Jewish quarter, which was located lower down the hill.
The fourteenth century was difficult for Jewish communities in Europe, starting with the expulsion from France in 1306, then the Black Death, which arrived from Asia in 1348. At its peak the Black Death killed one-third of Europe’s population. Although many Jews also died, those who survived were accused of causing the Black Death and poisoning the drinking water of Christians. In revenge, Christians attacked Jewish communities, and reportedly tens of thousands of Jews were killed. (McKay, et.al. 1996:421)

7.2. Building the Case against Jews: Rationality and Argument (1150-1300)
Beginning in the 1100s Christian scholars were building rational arguments against Judaism, including Oto of Tournai, Peter Abelard and Peter Alfonsi. They created the argument that there were levels of intelligence, noting that animals have a kind of intelligence. They argued that like animals, Jews have a kind of intelligence, but rationality was not complete until one became a Christian. These Christian arguments were the early stages of building the case that Jews were less than Christians, ultimately leading to the later persecutions, executions and expulsions. Jews also actively build rational arguments against Christianity during this period. It became a time of the great disputations.
Oto wrote a work on Jews entitled, Disputation with Lev, the Jew, arguing that Lev, like other Jews, was a-rational, building an argument that Jews were less than Christians. He went further to say that Jews observed tradition for the sake of tradition, a blind, non-thinking observance.
Peter Abelard wrote Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian in which he was the philosopher questioning both Christian and Jewish traditions. He sets up polar comparisons between faith and reason, theology and philosophy, Judaism and Christianity. Jews are on the irrational end of this spectrum and Christians on the rational end. He seems to have had an ambivalence toward Jews, and in that sense reflects the strand of Christian thought that does not approve of Jews and finds them irrational and different.
Pedro Alfonsi was a Jewish convert to Christianity who knew the Talmud and halachic practices of Judaism. He wrote Dialogue with Moses the Jew, one of the most popular works of religious polemic against the Jews in the Medieval period. In that work he argues that Jews have a misguided reading of the Bible, and that coincides with the error of their reliance on the halachic rules of religious observance.
The writings of Bernard of Clairvaux define Jews as being greedy and Muslims as being violent. Just as the crusading knights fight and defeat the violence of the Muslims, Christians were to fight and defeat the greed and materialism of the Jews. Greed and materialism were seen as evil inclinations from within the soul of a person that needed to be controlled and turned to a more spiritual direction.

7.3. Pope Innocent III (r. 1198 – 1216)
Innocent III was one of the most powerful and influential popes. He claimed Church supremacy over secular rulers in Europe, and he called the Fourth Lateran Council to refine canonical law. His focus on Jews was to separate them from Christians, so that they could not lead them into non-Christian beliefs or practices. Although he was not concerned with what Jews believed or practiced within their own communities, later popes would claim theological authority over Jews and invalid their interpretations of sacred literature, the Torah and Talmud.

7.4. Jewish Renaissance and Anti-Christian Polemics
In the eleventh century was a renaissance century for Jewish scholarship in the West, and rabbinical studies, Kabbalah, and Talmud were important. There was an active climate of cultural interactions especially on the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rulers. Translations between Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and vulgate languages were common, and Jews were important sources because of their knowledge of multiple languages. Under the safety of the pluralistic Muslim rulers, there was also a flourishing of anti-Christian polemics by Jewish writers, more than in all previous centuries combined. Judah HaLevi wrote Kuzari, a book about a far-away kingdom in which the king invited Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious scholars to explain their religions. The book was primarily a defense of Judaism that invalidated both Christianity and Islam. Jews were pushing back.

7.5. Attacks on the Talmud
In the 1230s and 1240s there were a series of attacks on the Talmud, instigated by Pope Gregory IX and continued by Pope Innocent IV. This was an attack on Judaism by ordering the kings of Europe to confiscate and burn all copies of the Talmud. Because of these orders, only one complete version of the Talmud has survived from the Medieval period. The argument was that the Talmud superseded the Bible, and that it was full of errors, obscuring the correct understanding of the Bible and leading to heresy.

7.6. Disputations
From the attacks on the Talmud, the next step was to challenge Jewish scholars directly through direct debates or disputations. The initial Disputation was in Paris in 1240, but two later disputations in Spain were the largest and most spectacular.
Disputation of Barcelona (1263). Nahmanides (1194-1270) is the most widely known of figure in the Girona group of kabbalists. His full name was Rabbi Moses ben Naḥman Girondi, and he is also known by his acronym Ramban. He was born in Girona, where he lived most of his life, and died in Israel. He was a leading medieval Jewish scholar and rabbi, as well as kabbalist and biblical commentator. Although he practiced medicine for a livelihood, he was considered the most important religious scholar of his day.
He was known for his adherence to traditional religious teachings, as well as his scholarship. When he was sixteen-years-old, he wrote his first treatise on Jewish law, Milhamot Hashem (Wars of the Lord), and it reveals the conservative respect of rabbinical law that distinguished his work throughout his life. He did not question the writings in the Mishnah or Talmud, even when he could not understand the meaning. Nahmanides saw religious life as mystical, the opposite to Maimonides, who understood the Divine and spirituality in rational terms. (Gerber 1992:109-110)
In 1263 Church officials in Catalunya challenged the Jewish community to a debate whether Jesus was the Messiah in what became the Disputation of Barcelona. Nahmanides was selected to speak for the Jews, and King James I supervised the event. Pablo Cristiani, a Jewish convert, was chosen to lead the debate for the Christian side because of his knowledge of Hebrew, the Torah, and the Talmud. The Christian intention was to prove that they had the correct faith. Nahmanides challenged Christian beliefs and openly stated that he did not accept them, arguing that Jesus was not divine. His arguments generated such hostility that the King ended the debate after four days and urged Nahmanides to leave the kingdom because he could no longer guarantee his safety. (Ibid.,101ff)
The Disputation of Barcelona marks a turning point in Sephardic thought, reflecting the increased role of Talmudic reasoning and the influence of Rashi, Rabbi Shomo Yitzchaki. Jews had moved from the intellectual influences of the Muslim south to those of the Christian north. The unique mixture of poetry, science, philosophy, and rabbinical thought that had characterized Sephardic thought in the Golden Age during the Muslim period was losing its dominance, and the up and coming Ashkenazi practice of Talmudic logic and debate was taking its place. (Gerber 1992:108-109)
Nahmanides moved to Israel and lived the remainder of his life there, marking the end of the era of great Jewish scholars in Spain. Works of theology, poetry, philosophy, and science came out of the rich environment of Spanish Jewish scholarship before the intolerance, attacks, forced conversions and expulsions eliminated the possibility of productive Jewish life.
Disputation of Tortosa (1413). One hundred and fifty years after the Disputation of Barcelona between Nahmanides and Church officials about the divinity of Jesus, the Disputation of Tortosa was called, and it was to become a flamboyant show trial of Judaism. Although the Disputation of Barcelona was supervised by a king, the one in Tortosa was chaired by the schismatic Pope Benedict XIII. While the Disputation of Barcelona had lasted a matter of days, the one in Tortosa dragged on for almost two years. In Barcelona, one rabbi, Nahmanides, represented the Jewish community, but in Tortosa they sequestered twenty-two rabbis and Jewish scholars to confront the court of cardinals loyal to the Pope. (Gerber 1992:125-126)
Rather than a debate, it was more of a series of proselytizing sessions against Jewish leaders. The Pope called the Disputation of Tortosa with the hope of putting so much pressure on Jewish leaders that they would convert, which was seen as a way of affirming the validity of his claim to be pope. The Pope would preside, surrounded by dozens and dozens of cardinals, archbishops, and bishops loyalty to him, dressed in gold vestments, and the larger sessions could include over a thousand invited observers.
The Disputation in Tortosa focused on the doctrine of the Messiah, as did the one in Barcelona. Geronimo de Santa Fé, the new convert, led the Christian argument using his detailed knowledge of the Talmud and Midrash against Jewish beliefs. Once the rabbis were in Tortosa, they were not allowed to leave, and the sessions continued for months. As pressure was brought on the rabbis and followers to convert, a few did. Eventually the debate ended, and the Christian forces claimed they had won and that Judaism had been discredited. Taking advantage of that moment Pope Benedict XIII decided to push for the conversion of all of the Jews of Aragón.
King Fernando I chose to avoid confrontation with the Pope and took a neutral stance on the issue. Although the kings had historically defended the rights of Jews, now they were largely co-opted by the Church. The Jewish communities of Castile, Aragón, and Cataluña were powerless at this point without the protection of the monarchs and marginalized by the new anti-Semitic laws. The Disputation of Tortosa sealed their fate as an outcast community.
While the rabbis were sequestered in Tortosa, Ferrer continued traveling from town to town preaching against the Jews. In 1415 Pope Benedict XIII issued a papal bull prohibiting the reading and teaching of the Talmud. All copies of the Talmud were to be confiscated and taken to the diocese of each town, and all other Jewish books were prohibited. Only one synagogue was permitted per town, and they could not be expanded or repaired. Vicente Ferrer and Pope Benedict XIII were on the verge of achieving their goal of eradicating Judaism in Aragón and Castile.
At that moment when all seemed to be lost, there was a reprieve for the Jewish communities. In 1416 the authority of Pope Benedict XIII was revoked, and in the same year King Fernando I died. Without those two powerful supporters, Ferrer lost his political influence and his projection as a preacher and religious activist declined. Three years later in 1419 Ferrer died. The anti-Semitic forces had lost their most powerful protagonists.

8. Spain and Antisemitism in Europe.
In the mid-1300s, there had been several hundred thousand Jews in Spain, but the history of persecution and massacres decimated the Jewish community. In the late 1340s, the Jews were blamed for being the source of the Black Death, leading to communities being attacked and many people killed. The Black Death impacted Jews in all regions of Europe. Jonathan Israel points out that the catastrophic loss of population and contraction of economic activity in Europe in the century 1350-1450, led to the persecution of the Jews in virtually every European country except in Italy. (Israel 1998a:4)

8.1. The Riots of 1391
In the 1300s Jews were persecuted and exiled across Europe, but it would be worse in Spain. The smoldering antisemitism burst into full view again in 1391. In Seville, both King John, who had protected the Jews, and the Archbishop died, leaving a power vacuum in the city. Ferrán Martínez, Vicar General to the Archbishop of the city and long time anti-Semitic advocate, took advance of this situation to order the destruction of all synagogues in Seville, which was the richest and most important Jewish community in Spain. (Gerber 1992:113-114)
Over the next few months, thousands of Jews in the city were killed as mobs pillaged Jewish neighborhoods. That launched a series of attacks against Jews in other cities from Toledo to Burgos, Valencia, and Barcelona. Tens of thousands of Jews were forced into baptism while thousands more were killed. This cultural and religious genocide in Spain was supported by the Spanish Crown and the Church, to erase vestiges of Judaism and Jewish life in the Iberian Peninsula. Jane Gerber says that after the year of rioting in 1391, 100,000 Jews converted, 100,000 had been murdered, and another 100,000 survived primarily by going into hiding. (Ibid.,113)
Jewish communities were devastated, never to recover. The great age of Jewish Spain had been destroyed, and the 100,000 converts were unprepared for life as Christians. After the threat of the riots subsided, many of the converts seem to have regretted their conversion under threat and wanted to return to Judaism, but once they were baptized they were considered Christians by the Crown and religious authorities. The converts who wanted to return to Judaism were perceived as turncoats by Christians, they were derided with the offensive term, marranos (i.e. pigs).
In the two hundred years from 1350 to 1570 Jewish populations were persecuted and exiled across Western Europe from England and France to Spain, and many migrated to Poland and Eastern European countries from Hungary to Romania, Bulgaria, and the Balkans. The number of Jews in Western Europe dramatically declined, and Eastern Europe was emerging as the new center of Jewish life.

8.2. Vicente Ferrer: Dominican Preacher against Jews.
From 1390 to 1419 the Dominican preacher Vicente Ferrer emerged as the central figure in the suppression of Jewish life in Spain. Ferrar, who had wide popular appeal, was overtly anti-Jewish, reflecting a position that had been growing in Christian thought. (Hart 2002)
In the fifth century Augustine of Hippo had advocated that Jews should be allowed to live in Christian lands because of his “doctrine of Jewish witness”, which supported the existence of Jews, as a minority within Christian countries, which he thought would confirm the validity and superiority of Christianity. (Cohen 1999:35ff) In the eleventh century Church scholars were abandoning Augustine’s position and moving toward antisemitism and beginning to call for actions against Jews.
Anti-Semitic thought and actions grew from crusaders attacking Jewish communities in Europe to the expulsions from England, France, and other smaller kingdoms. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Ferrer and others were openly anti-Semitic and actively preaching against Jews.
When Ferrer launched his campaign against Judaism, his the purpose was to eliminate it from Spain, and over the next three decades he came close to achieving it. After he died, Ferrer was canonized not only because he was an eloquent preacher who stirred Christians to their faith, but also because he was credited as the most successful evangelist of the age against the Jews.
Ferrer’s preaching engendered violent emotions that turned his followers into mobs that invaded Jewish neighborhoods assaulting Jews, destroying property, and killing people. An element to his success as an evangelist was the atmosphere created by the intimidating behavior of those who followed him. (Gerber 1992:120)
Over the years he was known for his endurance in long evangelical campaigns visiting hundreds of towns. When Ferrer would arrive to a town, the local Jews were rounded up and forced to go to the Church to hear his fiery sermons, denouncing Judaism as an infidel religion and appealing directly to them to convert to Christianity. Although he did not overtly advocate the physical assaults on Jewish communities, his calls against the Jews led to Christian throngs in town after town attacking Jewish neighborhoods and businesses with chains, clubs, and other weapons. Ultimately, thousands converted under the threat of being attacked and beaten or even killed after his visits. (Hart 2002).
Ferrer’s first campaign against Jews came in 1390 when he encouraged the wave of antisemitism that was sweeping Spain at the time. He went on an evangelizing mission to Castile accompanied by Cardinal Pedro de Luna, who was later elected Pope Benedict XIII. The two of them were to lead the anti-Semitic forces in Spain over the next three decades, each re-enforcing the other.
Ferrer’s preaching against the Jews in this crusade through Castile was a part of the environment of antisemitism that led to the 1391 assaults on Jewish communities in which tens of thousands of Jews were killed, the worst attacks ever in Christian Spain. In some cities the entire Jewish population was either killed, forced to convert, or fled the city, making it free of Jews. This experience seems to have honed Ferrer’s vision that it was in fact possible to eradicate Judaism in Spain.

8.3. The Spanish Inquisition.
Ferdinand and Isabella had a history of restrictions on Jewish life. In 1480 they had re-instituted the order that all Jews be separated into juderias or ghettos and not have contact with Christians. They accused the Jews of teaching about Judaism to those who had converted, making it difficult for them to be good Catholics.
Tomás Torquemada, a Dominican priest, was the personal confessor to Queen Isabella and an important presence at court, and he was one of the primary advocates for the expulsion of Jews. His argument was that as long as practicing Jews lived in Spain, it was impossible for the new conversos to be good Christians. He had appealed to the Pope, who refused to consider the case, then Torquemada appealed to the King and Queen.
The Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834) was authorized by the Vatican and established by the Spanish Crown to combat heresy in Spain. There were many Inquisitions in Europe, but they were normally authorized and run by Church officials. The Spanish Inquisition was unique because it was a political institution, as well as religious, under the Spanish Crown. (Graizbord 2006:334) Although the Inquisitors were Church officials, when they condemned a person to death, they turned him or her over to Crown officials, who were responsible for carrying out the sentence.
The Purpose of the Spanish Inquisition. It was to stamp out heretical movements, among both Old and New Christians. Queen Isabella, who was deeply religious, seems to have believed that political institutions must have a religious foundation. The Inquisition was the religious police service to identify, arrest, torture, and punish people who did not accept the official Christian creed and the Christian state.
The Grand Inquisitor. This person directed the Inquisition, and the first was Tomás Torquemada, who was the Grand Inquisitor from 1483 to his death in 1498, and he drew up the guidelines defining the crimes to be punished as being heresy and apostasy (including Judaizing), sorcery, sodomy, polygamy, blasphemy, and usury. In addition to Jews, Muslims and other groups were persecuted. After the rise of Martin Luther in 1517, Protestants were added to the list. During Torquemada’s fifteen years as Grand Inquisitor, he set the standard for early inquisitorial practice, arresting tens of thousands and burning thousands at the stake.
Although Torquemada came from an observant Christian family, one of his grandmothers was a converso. As happened with many converso families, they were assimilated New Christians and had a history of dedicated service to the Church, and his becoming a priest, personal confessor to the Queen, and Chief Inquisitor was a continuation of that service. Not only was Torquemada in the service of the Church, but one of his uncles was the Dominican cardinal, Juan de Torquemada.
Punishment and the Auto-de-Fe. Although the Office of the Inquisition persecuted other heretics, a major focus of its efforts in the late 1400s and early 1500s was against converted Jews, who were suspected of continuing Jewish practices. Convicted judaizers were publicly sentenced in the auto-de-fé (act of faith). Those who confessed their judaizing and repented were reconciled with the Church and allowed to live. Punishment of crimes against the Church included a public ceremony of those convicted by the Inquisition. They had to wear a San Benito penitential garment and a conical hat as a display of their wrong-doing. Since this was a Church event, a Mass was said with prayer and a procession of those convicted.
Then, their sentences were read, and they were turned over to Crown authorities to carry out the sentences. For those condemned to death, they were burned at the stake in a separate event. (Kamen 1997:192ff) In the Americas, burning people at the stake was less frequent, and people convicted of Judaizing were more commonly expelled from all Spanish territories without the right of return.
According to Kamen, the period of most intense activity by the Inquisition was 1480 to 1530, and his review of Inquisition records indicates that more than 10,000 conversos were arrested during those fifty years, and 2,000 were burned at the stake. (Ibid.,60) Most people (8,000) were reconciled with the Church and given lesser punishments. Higher numbers for arrests and deaths under the Inquisition in these early years have been estimated, but Kamen’s figures are based on Inquisition records and seem to be reliable. The extreme measures taken by the Inquisition during those first fifty years drove tens of thousands of conversos out of the country. Many of those who remained in Spain seem to have dropped crypto-Jewish practices because the arrest rate for Judaizing by the Inquisition declined significantly over the next century. The Inquisition had seemingly won.

8.4. The Alhambra Decree: the Edict of Expulsion.
In a further move to eliminate the non-Christian presence, Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree, the Edict of Expulsion of Jews, on March 31, 1492. (Beinart 2001) The Jews were ordered to leave by July 31, 1492, and they were not allowed to take gold or currency with them. Those who were leaving had to sell properties and businesses or abandon them. The Crown confiscated public buildings, such as hospitals and schools, and it gave the synagogues to the Church, which converted most into churches. Synagogue buildings were given Christian names, such as Sangre de Cristo or “Blood of Christ”, in keeping with the old accusation that Jews had been responsible for the death of Jesus.
According to the Decree,
This proved by many statements and confessions, both from these same Jews and from those who have been perverted and enticed by them, which has redounded to the great injury, detriment, and opprobrium of our holy Catholic faith.
Because the Jews were believed to be a danger to the faith of New Christians, they were expelled from all the territories of Spain. In the Decree Ferdinand and Isabella specifically stated,
Therefore, we, with the counsel and advice of prelates, great noblemen of our kingdoms, and other persons of learning and wisdom of our Council, having taken deliberation about this matter, resolve to order the said Jews and Jewesses of our kingdoms to depart and never to return or come back to them or to any of them.

8.5. Post-Expulsion Antisemitism: Limpieza de sangre
Since being accepted into good society in Spain meant not having any Jewish or Muslim heritage, the purity of the lineage, limpieza de sangre (cleanliness of blood) became a cult-like obsession in the 1500s and 1600s. (Pike 2000:12) Certificates and booklets were prepared demonstrating that the family was free of non-Christian heritage for at least four generations.
Since New Christians were not allowed to go to the Americas, the scrutiny was most intense in Seville, which was the port for leaving. After the religious and ethnic cleansing in Spain was more or less complete by the 1600s, it was assumed that only Christians lived in the motherland, but the Americas were less secure for Christianity because of the Indians, Africans, crypto-Jews, and non-Catholics from other countries. The Inquisitions in the Americas were weak compared to the one in Spain, so there was fear that New Christians going to the Americas might relapse and return to the practice of Judaism. Since the American territories were in the process of being Christianized, only Old Christians were legally allowed to travel there, but the system of controls was porous.
The linajudo was a person who scrutinized the family lineages of people who were suspected of being New Christians. Since everyone in Spain was a Christian after 1492, the only way to block a person of Jewish ancestry from a position, an award, or travel to the Americas was to accuse them of that ancestry. The Spanish have always focused on lineage and family heritage, and genealogists have had a key role in society, but the linajudo was a new phenomenon. It ran parallel to the Inquisition.
Explaining this, Ruth Pike points out that the insistence on limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) as a qualification for offices and honors gave rise to the linajudo, essentially a genealogist that examined lineages to identify traces of converso ancestry. Candidates for positions in the Church, Colegios Mayores and Military Orders had to provide certification that none of their ancestors were of Jewish or Muslim descent, and that no one had been convicted by the Inquisition. A linajudo did the necessary genealogical research, but the system was noted for corruption, and with the right payment the necessary certification could be arranged. (Ibid.,xi)
Many of the wealthy Jews who had converted at the time of the Expulsion had then intermarried with wealthy Old Christian families. In Seville these families dominated the transatlantic trade and governed the city in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The descendants of conversos in these families were the principal victims of the accusations of having Jewish blood, and they became the primary source of income for the linajudos.
Although a New Christian or descendant of conversos was not Judaizing and would not be arrested by the Inquisition, the person still could be defamed by being publicly denounced as having Jewish blood. That could end a marriage proposal or deny an honor being given. Books were maintained to record the marriages of conversos with Old Christian families, to help identify people in the future who might try to deny their converso heritage.
By 1500 conversos were well established in the new emerging power structure of Spain, and the Comunero Revolt of 1520-21 quickly turned into an anti-Semitic movement. Although it was suppressed, the anti-converso movements of the fifteenth century became progressively racial in nature.
The fact of having a lineage free of Jewish blood as a requirement for advancement meant that antisemitism continued even after people converted to Christianity, and that became another incentive for conversos to leave Spain.

8.6. Rise of Protestantism & the Decline of Antisemitism (1500-1850) in Western Europe
The rise of Protestantism in the early 1500s turned the attention away from the Jews to the looming threat from these dissident Christians. After Martin Luther started this protest in 1517, his movement spread quickly through northern Europe until it included Germany, Scandinavia, England, Scotland, and parts of France and Switzerland. During the first three decades the Roman Church reacted slowly with little interested in the far off northern provinces, which were considered the less civilized areas of Christendom.
The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries changed Europe so completely that the Church would never regain the power that it once had. As Christian fought against Christian, Europe would never be unified again, and the hostilities generated by the Catholic-Protestant wars could still be felt three and four hundred years later.
The Inquisition was refocused during this period against Protestants, and Jews soon became a secondary and almost irrelevant concern. By the mid-1550s the protest moved to conflict, and a century of religious wars began between Catholics and Protestants. Given the fact that Jews had recently been expelled from Spanish Catholic territories, a major demographic shift occurred as Jews left Western Europe for more welcoming kingdoms in Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Over the next three centuries under the relatively benign rulers of the Eastern Europe and the continuing antisemitism in Western Europe, Eastern European Jewry grew to be the dominant Jewish population in the world. By the late 1800s, 60 percent of Jews in the world lived from Germany and Poland to Russia. Then, the violent antisemitism erupted in that part of the world.

9. Antisemitism in Nineteenth Century Europe
At the beginning of the 1800s, the growing secularism in Europe after the Enlightenment led to the acceptance and assimilation of Jews into the larger society. In secularism many Jews saw a way out of the historic limitations imposed by antisemitism, and in increasing numbers Jewish young people turned to philosophy, literature, and science as avenues out of the ghetto or shtetl. It looked like Europe was going through a fundamental transition away from traditional antisemitism.

9.1. France and Western Europe. With the French Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 freedom of religion and the free exercise of worship were recognized. That freedom for Jews gradually spread across other European countries. By the early 1800’s the position of Jews in France, Italy, Prussia, and England had improved. Then, in 1807 Napoleon recognized Judaism as an official religion of France, and he gave Jews equal citizenship rights in France and the Italian territories under French rule. As the liberator of the Jews, “Napoleon” became a popular name for Jewish boys after that.
Throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century Western European Jews experienced success in many areas of life from business to academia and sports, but these achievements were muted by the continuing presence of antisemitism, as seen in the Dreyfus Affair in 1894 in France. False information was used to convict Dreyfus, a military officer, of treason and strip him of his rank. He was sentenced to life in prison, and for the next ten years he was imprisoned on Devil’s Island in French Guiana before his conviction was overturned in 1906. This incident revealed the antisemitism that was just under the surface of Western European society and that would erupt onto the world stage with the Nazis in the 1930s.

9.2. Eastern Europe. The largest Jewish populations in the world during this period were in small towns and shtetls of Poland and Russia. In contrast to the wealth of Jewish communities in the West, the Eastern European Jews experienced grinding poverty. In most areas they were not allowed to own land, which forced them into the trades in small towns. They worked as tailors, carpenters, shoemakers and other manual tradesmen.
Antisemitism was a constant problem. Until the early 1800’s Russia had few Jews, but then Russia took over territories to the west along the borders with Poland and Eastern Europe. This area had large Jewish populations, and it became known as the “Pale of Settlement”. Antisemitism in Russia was strong, and Jews were forbidden from moving out of the Pale of Settlement into Russia itself.
Both the Russian Orthodox Church and the Tsarist government were actively anti-Jewish, which lead to pogroms against Jewish communities. In 1881-84 over 200 anti-Jewish riots occurred in the areas of present day Ukraine and Poland and the homes and means of livelihood of thousands of Jewish families were destroyed. Men, women and children were killed and hundreds were raped and injured. Thousands of families were left destitute. The Tsar blamed the Jews for the riots and imposed harsh restrictions on them in retaliation.
In the next wave of pogroms from 1903 to 1906 thousands of Jews were killed and many more injured. It is estimated that 2,500 people were killed in one pogrom alone in Odessa in 1905. As in the 1880s, massacres were planned for Easter, and some were led by priests. In many places the army did not intervene to control the riots.
During the revolutionary period from 1917 to 1922 tens of thousands of Jews were killed in the chaos and fighting. As the Bolsheviks gradually gained control of Russia, the killing of Jews diminished. Although the international and atheist ideology of the Bolsheviks was more accepting of Jews, who tended to be poor workers, Judaism itself was denounced as were all religions.
The harsh conditions under which Russian Jewry lived led to people trying to escape those conditions through migration, assimilation, secularism, or withdrawing into self-contained religious communities. Between 1880 and 1920 two million Jews left Russia, mostly migrating to the United States. The pogroms and poverty of shtetl life combined with the repressive antisemitism of the Church and the Tsarist governments led to the largest Jewish migration in history. As much as 80 percent of the Jewish population in the United States today can trace its family origins to these Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian lands.
Assimilation. Still others changed their names and converted to Christianity in their attempt to assimilate to Russian life. Some chose the path of secularism, and many of those joined the revolutionary movements to change Russian life. Jews had an important role in the revolts of 1917, and some, such as Trotsky, became leaders of the Bolshevik movement.
Mysticism. When antisemitism and persecutions have reached their highest levels historically, Jews have turned to mysticism, such as the Kabbalistic movement in Spain and later the massive movement following Shabbatai Zvi, the false messiah. This happened in Russia and Eastern Europe as persecutions became more severe in the 1700s and 1800s. As Jews turned inward, focusing on religious tradition and practice, a new form of Judaism emerged called Hasidism, which was rooted in the kabbalistic mysticism of the past and led by a non-rabbi, Israel Baal Shem Tov. Hasidism focuses on the continual presence of God and emphasizes the emotive experience of that presence. The Hasidic movement was also reacting to the rational modernism of the Enlightenment, which was making itself felt from Western Europe.
Starting in the late 1700’s and throughout the 1800s the hasidic movement was growing, as tens of thousands of people found the security of Jewish identity and life in self-contained religious communities. Most Hasidim lived largely ghettoized lives within the confines of closed religious communities.
10. Nazi Germany: From Antisemitism to State Sponsored Genocide
When the Nazis came to power in 1933 with Adolf Hitler, the anti-Jewish rhetoric increased sharply. Gradually over the next few years the German government tightened the controls on Jews. In as series of repressive measures that could have been taken from fifteenth century Spain, the Nazis restricted the Jews from participating in professions; their businesses were attacked; and they were forced to move into ghettos and to wear identifying clothing.
Jews were prohibited from working in the government and from working in many professions. Then, Jewish children were expelled from public schools, and Jews were prohibited from owning certain kinds of wealth. A shift in the level of overt violence came on “Kristallnacht”, November 9, 1938 when Nazi sympathizers rampaged through Jewish communities burning synagogues and vandalizing Jewish businesses, homes and schools. They broke windows of Jewish stores and looted them. One hundred Jews were killed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps that had already been built.
What started as anti-Jewishness morphed into antisemitism and became racial. Germans were declared as the Master Race, and Jews and Gypsies were declared as races that contaminated the purity of the Aryan race by their presence. At first Germans pressured the Jews to leave, and tens of thousands did, but their options were limited. The United States, the traditional migratory destination, had essentially closed its borders with the immigration act of 1924, and most other European nations were not accepting Jews. The British, as rulers of Palestine, restricted Jewish migration to that land. Jews had few places to go. At the Wanasee Conference in 1942 the decision was made for the Final Solution, and Jews were forcibly shipped to death camps and killed.
Jewish properties were confiscated from cash to gold and silver, businesses, houses, and personal items such as art and other valuables, a process that intensified in 1942 with the “final solution” as Jews were arrested and shipped to concentration camps. It is estimated that confiscated Jewish wealth, perhaps twenty billion dollars in today’s value, paid for 30 percent of the Nazi war costs.
The systematic killing of Jews from 1942-45 was the most dramatic example of state sponsored genocide in history. By the time of the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, Germans and their accomplices in other European countries had killed six million Jews, half of the world’s Jewish population, a monument to human savagery and they did it in the short time of three years. Germans under the Nazis carried anti-Jewish violence to the highest level in history.
The atrocity of a state systematically killing its citizens introduced a new horror into human life. Earlier in the century the Turks and the Russians had killed millions of their own citizens, but it was the horror of the German atrocities that defined the meaning of Holocaust.

The post-Holocaust guilt among people across Germany, Europe, and the Americas is expressed in the poem “I Remained Silent” by Martin Niemoller.

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

At the end of the War, the millions of Jews displaced by the German terror were scattered around Europe, and over the next few years, they were slowly relocated in Israel and in various countries in the Americas. Acting out the centuries old intolerance of European Christendom toward Judaism, the culturally sophisticated Germans had launched their never to be forgotten Holocaust.

11. United States and Antisemitism
Although the United States is a pluralistic society with freedom of religion, antisemitism has been a recurring problem since the arrival of Jews in1654. Peter Stuyvesant, who was the Director General of New Netherland (now New York) when the first Jews arrived, tried to expel them. He was forced to admit them as residents by his superiors in Amsterdam. Stuyvesant referred to Jews as, “a deceitful race, hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ.”
Over the next 200 years, the Jewish population of the United States consisted predominantly of educated and well-to-do Sephardic business families, and there were few problems of antisemitism. There were contradictions in that the Puritan Massachusetts colony did not allow Jews to live there initially, while Hebrew was one of the classical languages taught along with Greek and Latin. Student papers and valedictorian addresses were given in Hebrew in the early Ivy League universities, including Harvard and Yale. In fact, Jews seem not to have lived in Boston until the mid-1800s, as indicated by the establishing of the first synagogue there in 1850. From 1654 to the 1850’s most Jewish families lived in the five primary port cities of New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans.
Antisemitism in the United States grew dramatically with the immigration of more than two million Russian and Eastern European Jews from 1880 to 1920, escaping pogroms and persecution. They were largely small town and rural people, who came from the ghetto-like shtetls of Eastern Europe and the Russian Pale of Settlement, lacking in the skills of urban life. Their poverty and non-WASP social and cultural patterns marginalized them within the larger American society. The Irish and Italians were migrating into the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, and all were lumped into the same category of poor, non-WASP people. Given the American preoccupation with race, Jews were seen as a race with specific racial characteristics: the nose, swarthy skin color, dark eyes and hair, short.
Grant’s Expulsion of Jews. One of the early indications of antisemitism was the expulsion order issued against Jews by General Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War. In the Fall and Winter of 1862 Grant was the commander of the area that included Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, and he issued an order expelling all Jews from those states because of a controversy over the buying and selling of cotton from the South for northern factories. That trade was legal, but it required a special license. Merchants, both Jewish and non-Jewish, were engaged in that trade without legal licenses. In an attempt to control it, Grant issued the expulsion order against Jews. A few of the illegal traders were Jews although the majority were WASPs, but Jews were called profiteers, speculators, and even traitors at the time. Grant even referred to “the Israelites…an intolerable nuisance.”
Grant was convinced that the unlicensed trade in cotton was being organized by Jews, and at first he ordered that Jews were not to be granted trade licenses, nor be allowed to travel into the three states in question. That did not stop the unlicensed trade, so Grant issued Order No. 11 on December 17, 1862 to expel the Jews within 24 hours.
The officers under him began enforcing the order, making Jewish families pack up and leave their businesses and homes with only hours notice. In Paducah, Kentucky, the thirty Jewish families were long-term residents, and none of them were involved in the cotton trade, but they were ordered to leave. Cesar Kaskel, along with several of his fellow Jewish merchants, sent a telegram immediately to President Lincoln, condemning Grant’s order as a violation of their Constitutional rights as citizens of the United States. Jewish communities from St. Louis to Louisville and Cincinnati and from Chicago to New York and Philadelphia quickly joined the protest.
Kaskel then traveled to Washington arriving in early January, 1963, just as Emancipation Proclamation was going into effect. He consulted with Jewish Republican leaders and went to the White House where Lincoln received him. After reviewing the General Order No. 11, Lincoln ordered the commanding general of the U.S. Army to revoke General Order No. 11.
Lincoln condemned the order and asserted that no American could be singled out for discrimination based on their religious affiliation. That short-lived expulsion order against Jews reflects the antisemitism that existed at the time. In spite of the General Order No. 11, Grant won the majority of the Jewish vote when he ran for president in 1868, and he did appoint a number of Jews to positions in his administration.

12. Arab Anti-Zionism Becomes Antisemitism
At the end of World War I the British supported the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of ethnic based nation states in its place, namely Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel. Although Arab nationalists supported the establishment of their own individual countries, most were opposed to a separate country for Israel saying that Jews had always lived with Arabs in a pluralistic society, and there was no need for a separate Jewish homeland. Israel was the last of the new nation-states to be created in the region.
In April, 1920 the World War I winning Allies (Britain, France, Italy, Greece, Japan, and Belgium) met in San Remo, Italy to discuss a peace treaty with Turkey. The Allies agreed to grant Great Britain the mandate over what is today Israel and Jordan and authorized them to implement the Balfour Declaration. The League of Nations confirmed the British Mandate for Palestine.

Balfour Declaration. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour stated:

His Majesty’s Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish People, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status by Jews in any other country.

During the debate in the United Nations on the formation of the state of Israel after World War II, the British were ruling the territories of present day Israel, Palestinian territories, and Jordan, and they supported dividing the land between Jews and Arabs. In 1946 there were 543,000 Jews in the three administrative districts that were carved out of the Ottoman Empire to create Palestine. As large numbers of Jews, who were Displaced Persons after World War II, began arriving, the Jewish population grew.
Jews bought agricultural land and established a new collective farm organization known as the kibbutz in which men and women shared tasks equally. Urban Jews established Tel Aviv as a focus of commerce and cultural activities. Hebrew was revived as the language of the Zionists. The traumatic experience of the Holocaust sealed the commitment of the international community to create the independent state of Israel, which was approved in 1948 by the United Nations. After centuries of living in peace, the struggle over land in the newly re-established Israel led to a decades long conflict.
Life in Israel between Arabs and Israelis has been one of intermittent collaboration and conflict. Perhaps in no other place is the sharp divide between Western-style technology and capitalism and Muslim-style family economy more apparent, and that clash contributes to conflict.
With the establishment of the state of Israel, a number of Arab countries, including Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and others, expelled their Jewish populations or created such hostile environments that Jews were forced to leave. These expulsions on short notice meant that Jewish families lost businesses, homes, and other properties. Many were jailed before being expelled. This began an emigration from Arab lands that led people to re-settle in Israel and a number of European and American countries. One million Jews were displaced in this process, most of them Sephardic.
The Muslim countries that did not expel Jews and have maintained a degree of plurality have been Morocco, Turkey, Iran, and Yemen. Those countries still have Jewish populations today, even though they are a fraction of what they once were.

Arab Resistance to Israel
Within days of the San Remo conference Arab protests began in Jerusalem. Throughout the next two decades Palestinians, led by Haj Amin el-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and others, fought against Jews. In 1921, 1924, and 1926-28 a series of violent confrontations left hundreds dead. In the Hebron Massacre of 1929 Jewish/Palestinian tensions reached a boiling point as Arabs attacked Jewish homes, synagogues, and businesses, killing sixty-seven and driving the rest of the Jews out of Hebron, leaving the city without Jews for the first time in centuries. In 1936-38 a major Palestinian revolt left thousands of Arabs and Jews dead in three years of intense fighting.
After the Nazis came into power in Germany, some Arab leaders wanted the anti-Jewish programs of the Nazis to be extended to the Middle East. Haj Amin el-Husseini traveled to Germany and met with Adolf Hitler in a bid for Nazi assistance against the Jews in Palestine. Hitler refused.
In the current situation, the sense of conflict with Israel varies from one Muslim country to another with non-Arab Muslims generally being less identified with it. However, the younger generation in some parts of the Middle East today is being taught that Israel is an illegitimate nation-state occupying Arab lands in an affront to Arab sovereignty. Throughout the Middle East and North Africa Muslims and Jews had co-existed for centuries, doing business and living as neighbors, and older Muslims today remember growing up with Jewish friends and families. That is no longer true. In the diminished Jewish populations of Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Morocco, there are pockets of Jewish-Muslim interaction today, but even in those countries the vast majority of Muslim young people have no contact with Jews, who have become foreign and the unknown “Other” that is easy to stereotype.

The New Antisemitism

Recently, the French president Emmanuel Macron said, “Our country, like Europe as a whole and almost all Western democracies, is facing a resurgence of antisemitism not seen since the Second World War.” Aspersions are now being cast against Jews in Europe and the United States, as opponents denounce the policies of an Israeli government. This movement in progressive circles is reviving anti-Semitic tropes that expand the opposition to Israeli politics to blaming Jews for being a “hidden state” that controls international politics and commerce and even the old accusation of “blood libel”.
Attacks on Jews are coming from two directions in this new wave of antisemitism: the white nationalist movement on the right and the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Israelism on the left. In the European and American societies, antisemitism and Islamophobia are prejudices that have historically re-enforced each other. Jew hatred and Muslim hatred are the ignoble twins of Western prejudice, and where one starts the other will follow. The massacres at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and the New Zealand Mosque in Christchurch are the dreaded bookends of a common hatred that all too often affects both Jews and Muslims.
I fear that the anti-Israeli sentiment in our city and in our country, not sufficiently questioned, is turning into antisemitism and anti-Jewishness, re-enforced by stereotype and prejudice, rather than questioning the underlying political causes of the stalemate between Israeli and Palestinian authorities. Lets not make this into a conflict between peoples. Jews and Arabs have lived together for almost 1,400 years with only local and sporadic conflicts.
What is the structure and character of antisemitism in the western world? We all know that antisemitism has been rising at a rapid rate in our days from Charlottesville to Pittsburgh, from Jewish kids being bullied in schools and colleges, to the advocates who accuse an Israeli government for its policies in the West Bank and Gaza and subtly extending those accusations to Jews as a people. Antisemitism in the West has not been a constant given, but it has ebbed and flowed over the last 1,000 years. Antisemitism first peaked during the Medieval period and then again in the nationalist/racist/Nazi period. As we are confronting a new emergence of antisemitism now, what does it look like this time, and what does that mean to us today?
Antisemitism is not one seamless phenomenon, but a spectrum of expressions of stereotyping Jews. Judeophobia is the hatred of Jews; anti-Judaism is being against Judaism as a religion. Anti-Jewishness is the bias or persecution of Jews as a social and cultural group, and antisemitism, the general term, has acquired racial implications, as in the attitude of the Nazis during the Holocaust or the KKK in the U.S. Anti-Zionism is the opposition to Jews living in their traditional homeland, and anti-Israelism is the opposition to policies of the Israeli government. And, yes, there is Judeophilia, the admiration of Jews as the “chosen” ones. The fact that so many words are required to define the various nuances of antisemitism gives an indication of the complex, extensive nature of it.
Some people suggest that the roots of Christian antisemitism can be traced to the first century, most importantly the emphasis in the Gospels on the centrality of Jews and the marginality of Romans in the crucifixion of Jesus. That set a theme that still exists in Christendom. The accusation that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus was a recurring theme in Catholicism until Vatican II in 1963, and it was a major source of antisemitism, especially at Easter. In Latin America today the Judas figure is still burned in some rural towns at the end of Easter Week, and the chants of “Muerte al Judas” (Death to Judas) easily slip into “Muerte al Judio” (Death to the Jew) with the emotion of the moment.
In this context, the Third Wave, the new antisemitism of the left has emerged, which has begun with the criticism of Israel and its policies of control over the West Bank and Gaza. The terminology that is being used is of the North/South divide of dominance vs suppression. Accusations of colonialism, apartheid, and racism are being applied to Israel as a country, rather than toward the policies of its governments, which half of Israelis also oppose. It would be the same as if all Americans would be blamed for the policies of the government currently in power. Since Jews are identified with the Jewish state of Israel, anti-Israelism has begun to be conflated with antisemitism.
In 2001 international politics intervened to change the course of the international dialogue about Israel and the conflict. First was the United Nations sponsored Durban Conference against Racism, a turning point that led to the definition of Israel as a racist, apartheid state by Latin American, African, and Muslim states. Although those claims were not approved in the Conference itself, dissidents from the Conference began using those terms, and they have spread as a denunciation of the global divide between the rich, powerful countries of the Northern hemisphere and the poor, exploited countries of the southern hemisphere. The United States, Western Europe, and Israel have been lumped into the North, whereas most Muslim and African nations have been lumped into the “South” and labeled as exploited nations. This has become the dominant paradigm of the last two decades. In this view of the conflict, Palestinians are the suffering minority under a more powerful, imposed government.
The other event in 2001 that changed the possibility of dialogue between Jews and Arabs was 9/11. The attacks on the Twin Towers were seen by many in the West as an attack of the Muslim world on the power structure of the West, along the lines defined by the Durban Conference. In Israel, politics began changing to hardline “security” politics that no longer permitted negotiations. The Palestinians were perceived as the threatening masses, the spearpoint of the South ready to overwhelm Israel, as the outpost of the wealthy North in the Middle East.
Yet, in the last decade another new dimension has entered this conflict. With the wars in Iraq and Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah, both declared enemies of Israel, have aligned themselves with Syria, Iran, and the Shi’ite axis. In contrast, the United States, most of Western Europe, and Israel have aligned themselves with the Sunni nations from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, Jordan, and others. The local conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has now shifted to the ages old, conflict between Shi’ites and Sunnis, which loosely coincides with the North/South lines defined at Durban.
The stalemate between Israelis and the Palestinians has grown beyond a local dispute. The advocates for the poor South are against Israel, which they perceive as a wealthy subjugating power, much like the Western European powers and the United States. In the Muslim world, Israel has become the enemy of the Shi’ite coalition (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas) because of its alignment with the Sunni power structure.
In the spectrum of antisemitism over the last 1,000 years, it has evolved in Europe from anti-Judaism to racism and now to the accusations of exploitation, colonialism, and apartheid, the new discourse of North/South. In this third wave of Western antisemitism, it behooves those who think critically to look beyond the terms of this discourse to establish the full spectrum of facts behind the conflated assumption that if an Israeli government has a flawed policy, then Israelis are must be flawed, and Jews are flawed.
Once again in the Western world, Jews are the center of recriminations. Not all Jews agree with all of the governmental policies of Israel, yet Jews are blamed for the suffering of Palestinians. Why didn’t the British give Palestinian independence when they could have? Why didn’t Abdul Nasser and King Hussein give independence to the Palestinians when they could have? The Sunni nations would not agree to a Palestinian state affiliated with Iran and the Shi’ite axis. Why have not decades of American administrations enabled a peaceful solution? Blaming only the Israelis for the wrongs in the complex Arab-Israeli conflict is facile, and it turns into antisemitism when only Jews are blamed for wrongs in the situation. Although it seems unthinkable that it could be happening, antisemitism looms once again, and I ask myself, “How much damage will it do this time?”