Antisemitism

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an-ti-sem-i-tism: 1. Hostility toward or prejudice against Jews or Judaism; 2. Discrimination against Jews. Alternate spelling: anti-Semitism.

Antisemitism is not a new phenomenon, nor is it likely to disappear in the foreseeable future. It has existed for over two thousand years, and has come in many forms - Holocaust denial is just but one of the more recent forms.

One of the oldest forms of hatred of Jews is religious antisemitism. Despite the fact that Christ was a Jew, the organised Church quickly began to view Jews as being hated by God and being responsible for the murder of Christ himself. However, this was not always the case. The Bible reveals that Paul saw Jews as being mistaken, and through jealousy, would turn to accept Christ as the Messiah.

“So, I ask, have they stumbled so as to fall? By no means! But through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles so as to make Israel jealous. Now if their trespass means riches for the world, and if their failure means riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean. Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry in order to make my fellow Jews jealous and save some of them” (Romans 11:11-14).

Indeed, the history of Judaism and Christianity are inseparable, as Christianity shares the Scriptures and Old Testament saints with Judaism.

By the fourth century C.E., Christian polemic against Jews even reached the point of suggesting that it was no sin to set fire to synagogues, as what would normally be considered a crime is not when perpetrated against Jews, as they did not accept Christ as the Messiah. (Daniel Juster, Jewish Roots: A Foundation of Biblical Theology for Messianic Judaism (Rockville, Maryland: Davar Publishing Co., 1986, p. 143) When the Roman Emporer Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century, discrimination against Jews became institutionalised, and so remained until the twentieth century in Christian countries.

Throughout the last two thousands years, into the twentieth century, Jews have been the victims of random pogroms. For instance, the Crusaders, who sought to rid the Holy Land of infidels in the Middle Ages, murdered Jews and pillaged Jewish property whilst travelling to the Middle East.

In 1876, the German Wilhelm Marr, who himself hated Jews, coined the term 'antisemitism'. The late nineteenth century marked a significant change in the nature of antisemitism. No longer was religion the primary basis for the hatred of Jews - scientific antisemitism became more important.

Whilst the Church may not have itself been involved in the murder of Jews during the Second World War, it nonetheless did little to prevent the Nazis from so doing. Furthermore, the centuries-old tradition of religious antisemitism provided a firm basis on which National Socialist propaganda was built, and as a consequence of the ingrained nature of it, allowed the propaganda to seep further into collective consciousness than it perhaps otherwise would have been able to.