The Evolution of Anti-Semitism: Historical and Psychological Roots

Virtually every ideology and nationality in Europe had been saturated with anti-Semitism by the time the Nazis developed the “Final Solution.” Over the preceding centuries and decades, essential elements of Christianity, Marxism, socialism, nationalism, Enlightenment, and modern thought had found the existence of Jews to be intolerable. Currently, Islamic extremism has joined this historical pattern. This

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paper will briefly attempt to look at the evolution of anti-Semitism and its pervasiveness throughout the Western world, particularly since 324 AD.

Messiah and Apostle

In the first two decades after the death of Jesus, from 30 to 50 AD, all Christians were Jews, and Christianity as a Jewish sect differed little from its many other sects. New converts came mostly from the ranks of other Jews, and those pagans who joined the new religion had to first become Jews before they could be accepted into the Christian faith. The Great Schism between Christians and Jews did not occur until after 50 AD, when the Christian sect was taken to the pagans, who no longer had to follow Jewish dietary laws, and made a world religion. This was both the decision and the accomplishment of one Jewish man, Saul of Tarsus, the real builder of the Christian church, who is generally known by his Christian name of Paul. He became to Jesus what the Talmud became to the Torah—a commentary and a way of life.

The Evolution of Anti-Judaism

Although Jesus, Paul, and Jesus’ other early disciples identified themselves as Jews, the basic themes of anti-Judaism were established at the very beginning of the Christian era. The first and by far gravest charge in the indictment was deicide: Jews had rejected Christ. They had not only rejected him, but they had killed him, and since Christ was God, they had killed God. Modern scholarship and morality have both shed doubt on the ancient and cherished theory of Jewish guilt for the death of Christ. The Romans were, after all, the unchallenged rulers of Judea, and crucifixion was a Roman, never a Jewish, form of capital punishment.

Unfortunately, such considerations and questioning were far from the minds of the early converts to Christianity and most of their successors. For almost 2,000 years, or al-

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most from the time Constantine made Christianity the only legal religion in the Roman Empire in 324 AD, Christians had to believe in the Nicene Creed that was adopted in 325 AD. The principles of the Nicene Creed stated that all other opinions outside of Christianity were banned and declared heretical. The monopolistic character of the early Church was set, and the Gospel according to Matthew unequivocally placed the blood of Christ on the Jews.

During the so-called Dark Ages, Jews in Europe enjoyed relative tranquility. But the Crusades brought a new Christian militancy, and while this was directed primarily against the Muslims, the crusaders found their first victims in their Jewish neighbors. From time of the Crusades onward, the satanic element began to dominate anti-Jewish polemic. Jews were then seen as children of the devil whose assigned task was to combat Christianity and injure Christians. By the 12^th century, they were accused of poisoning wells, ill-treating holy symbols, and murdering Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes.

Paranoid Fantasies after Emancipation

With the growing intellectual sophistication of Christian Europe, such fantasies began to lose their hold, though they—and the attitudes resulting from them—have shown extraordinary persistence in some areas, and from time to time make a disconcerting reappearance. The myth of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, directed by a secret Jewish government of which all Jews are agents, reappeared toward the end of the 18^th century and has continued to survive. For example, a French Jesuit, Abbé Augustin Barruel, published a lengthy book “proving” that the Revolution was the work of a secret conspiracy of Free Masons, Bavarian Illuminati, and other secret societies, all founded by Jews. Some Jews tried to pass as Christians in order to better achieve their deceitful purposes, and they had even penetrated the Catholic Church. According to Abbé Barruel’s

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fantasies, Jews sought to be masters of the entire world, converting churches into synagogues and enslaving the remaining Christians.

When in Western countries Jews were finally permitted to emerge from the ghetto and enter into the life of European society, they displayed that additional energy and determination often found in penalized minorities that have to struggle to survive. As a consequence, they have done rather well. Jewish students thronged to the universities from which they had been barred since the Middle Ages and strove to excel. The idea that Jews wielded some secret and diabolical power that enabled them to triumph over good, honest Christians now found new audiences, even in the more advanced countries of Northern and Western Europe. Only in this way could they explain how a few thousand allegedly inferior Jews excel among many millions of superior Christians. The word “anti-Semitism,” in fact, did not exist until 1879 AD, when it was coined by Wilhelm Marr, a German with a Jewish grandfather and perhaps other Jewish relatives, to fit the emergence of an entirely new historic pattern of Jewish-Christian relationship.

Hitler’s Anti-Semitism

There were avowedly anti-Semitic movements in Western Europe before Hitler’s: the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Black Death epidemics. Jews were frequently burned at the stake and expelled from various cities and countries, such as Spain and Portugal, simply because they were Jews. Then in Germany in 1933, Adolf Hitler’s government, with anti-Semitism as a major plank in its ideology, came to power. In Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he writes that he became an anti-Semite when he first saw Hassidic Jews from Eastern Europe in Vienna, and through observation of their black hats, side curls, beards, and long black coats, he believed that they were an alien race who deliberately kept themselves apart from Aryan Europe. At the same time, he

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felt an even more passionate hatred against those Jews who cast off their strange garb, unlearned their grotesque accents, and passed themselves off as part of Aryan society.

Comments and Conclusion

There are various stages in the evolution of anti-Semitism, which reached its zenith of horror in the Holocaust. First, the three components of Judaism (God, Torah [laws and teachings], and Israel [Jewish nationhood]) often threaten the gods, laws, and nationalism of the non-Jews among whom the Jews live. Second, the Jews’ denial of Christ as the living God in the Christian world of Western civilization is another factor. Third, the belief in the Jew as the “other” was replaced by the myth of the Jew as the enemy who must be eliminated. Fourth, an anti-Semitic church had enormous influence over its members. Finally, according to Lloyd deMause, who wrote the pioneering “Evolution of Childhood,” there is the reality of pervasive child abuse during the Middle Ages and into the Modern Era, which placed the Jew as a receptacle for poisonous feeling for those individuals who grew up in Christian homes in which they were physically and/or sexually abused. The Jews became the abusive parents to those Christian children who suffered early abuse.

People throughout history defend their despair and shame by finding and restaging their early traumas in the ultimately vain hope of removing the cause of their inner agonies; Jews have historically filled this position.

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