About the roots of Anti-Semitism and the Church

Anti-Semitism has deep and old roots starting with the 2nd century and the church fathers. All church fathers (Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Augustine, etc.) were anti-Semitic and their writings paved the way for the Holocaust. The church fathers rejected the Jewish believers in Jesus not long after the destruction of Jerusalem and the death of the first Apostles.

Jeremy Cohen, who coins the term "hermeneutical Jew," writes the following about Christian conceptions of the Jewish people:

"The Christian idea of Jewish identity crystallized around the theological purpose the Jew served in Christendom; Christians perceived the Jews to be who they were supposed to be, not who they actually were, and related to them accordingly." (Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 2)

I think Cohen claims that the church fathers viewed the Jewish people as just the people (Jewish witness) through whom Jesus and salvation came into the world. In the Church father’s eyes God rejected the Jewish people as a nation because they rejected Jesus as their Redeemer. So over the centuries Christians in general related to the Jewish people as the rejected or the cursed people.

For Augustine the Jews were ’a people unchanged since the first coming of Christ’ and a people fixed in ’useless antiquity’. There is little evidence to prove that Augustine (or other church fathers) had real conversations with Jews—it was more in his imagination. The anti-Jewish myths spread in the society of his time influenced Augustine’s understanding of the Jewish people.

He also projected his altered understanding of the Jewish people in his approach to the New Testament texts.
Later, this way of interpretation of the Jewish people was adopted also by the christian theologian Martin Luther. As Kaufmann says ’in Luther’s mental world the Jews represented the fundamental opposition to Christians’.

For Luther the Jewish people belonged to the same group with the devil, the muslim, and the other pagans. Instead of speaking more with the Jews or to them, Luther spoke more about them and he probably never initiated a genuine connection with learned real Jews to learn from them.

Christian theologians, over time, perpetuated in their writings the interpretive model that began with Augustine.

The Jewish people were portrayed by the church fathers and by many others as the ’Christ killers’ and the scapegoats for all the problems of the world. I’ve heard people blaiming Israel and the Jewish people even for the COVID-19 pandemic and for the war in Ukraine. As well as for the rising of the electricity and gas prices.

Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism

Zionism refers to support for the existence of a Jewish state—specifically, the state of Israel. To be a zionist is to believe the Jewish people have the right to live in the land given to them by God. Anti-Zionism is in fact ’a new version of anti-Semitism that poses itself as ’political opposition to Israel.

However, looking at what most people say against Israel one can see very few who can make objective statements that differentiate between the Jewish people and certain actions of Israel’s government. Not everything Israel does is righteous (no human government is perfect), but to project the old and evil anti-Semitic stereotypes over the entire Israel and call it political opposition to Israel is actually wrong because that’s anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish propaganda.

Anti-Zionism is quite strong in Europe and one can see it even within the Christian circles. I believe many don’t realize their anti-Zionism is actually anti-Semitism.