The Stubborn Persistence of 'Jew-Hatred'

THE SHOOTINGS THAT took three lives this spring at a Jewish community center and retirement complex in Kansas are a reminder that deadly strains of what is usually called “anti-Semitism” remain with us. The fact that the shooter was a deranged white supremacist should not prevent us from coming to terms with the roots and survival of Jew-hatred in our culture.

Anti-Semitism is a made-up word that itself gives clues to the history of Jew-hatred in our civilization. The term was coined by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879, one of a number of Jew-haters who were turning longstanding European Christian hatred of Jews into something modern and racial. The “Jewish problem,” therefore, became the “fact” that there was a racial group, the “Semites,” who were a mortal threat to another racial group, the “Aryans,” and therefore needed to be removed from Aryan societies. All right-thinking Germans/Europeans/Aryans, the argument went, needed to unite to combat the Semites through a scientific antisemitismus. The term is usually written “anti-Semitism” in English, but that usage profoundly reinforces the racist myth that there is a race of “Semites” needing to be opposed by “anti-Semites.” The term Jew-hatred is better because it refuses to participate in this mythology.

Modern racialized Jew-hatred flowed into the 20th century and crystallized most disastrously in Nazi Germany. There, over 12 terrible years, the 19th century anti-Jewish program was enacted, and then exceeded. Jews were to be “eliminated” from among the “Aryans,” a program that became annihilation after 1939, with 6 million Jews murdered.

The paradigmatic evil of the Nazis makes it easy for the casual observer to think that Jew-hatred was born and died with Hitler. But not only did Hitler and his party dine on a modern, racial antisemitismus predating them by decades, even that racialized Jew-hatred was parasitic on an earlier 1,800 years of Christian contempt for Jews.

Christianity and rabbinic Judaism were born together in the late first century. Christianity began as a Jewish messianic movement, and with rabbinic Judaism became the two primary forms of Jewish life to survive the catastrophic Jewish-Roman war of 66 to 73 C.E.

New Testament readers can think of it this way: After 73 C.E., the temple officials, Sadducees, Herodians, and Zealots were all destroyed, discredited, or rendered superfluous; only the Pharisees (progenitors of the rabbis) and the Jesus movement survived the failed revolt and the destruction of the temple. Together and apart, rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity competed to claim the mantle as the true successors/interpreters of ancient Judaism and competed for penetration of the spiritually hungry Greco-Roman world.

Christianity eventually won. Moving from the margins to the center of the late Roman imperium, Christianity became the official religion. Fatefully and terribly, church and state leaders attacked the Jewish people and Judaism itself. A virulent “teaching of contempt” coursed through the writings of the Fathers of the church and moved forward generation after generation along well-established tropes: Jews as Christ-killers, children of Satan, hopelessly blind reprobates, and so on. Meanwhile Jews and Judaism constantly faced state persecution, expulsion, and martyrdom at Christian hands.

This centuries-old cesspool of Jew-hatred was the ultimate source of modern racialized Jew-hatred. The horrors of the Holocaust discredited Jew-hatred, but its cultural and religious sources run so deep that it is always available to be drawn upon.

And that’s why deranged shooters outside Kansas community centers are not just deranged shooters. They are the stubborn continuing embodiments of Christianity’s oldest moral failure. Today’s Christians must know this history in order to resist it.

Resistance includes careful handling of the Bible so as not to fall into anti-Jewish reading, preaching, and teaching. It involves getting to know the living history of Judaism and the real Jewish believers we share communities with today. It requires carefully distinguishing between opposition to certain policies of the State of Israel over against rejection of Israel itself. And it demands that we forcefully reject any stereotyping, derogatory speech, or other forms of Jew-hatred when we encounter them.