The Blood Libel against the Church: an Historical Review of Jewish-Christian Relations

INTRODUCTION
Not that long ago, one of our posters wrote and hyperlinked some articles about Jewish influence on the modern world. His comments received significant push-back from many, myself included.

Having said that, offering a critique of Jewish influence is fraught with danger.  The inevitable accusation of anti-Semitism awaits, whether warranted or not. Having said that, no person, no group, no institution is beyond criticism and if one wishes to offer a critique of any historical event or phenomenon, one must be free to do so without fear of recrimination or retribution. Of course, it goes without saying that all such critiques should be done without a spirit of animus and as objectively as possible.

My own bona fides are clear on this matter as I have never been imbued with the spirit of racial hatred toward any group. Period. In fact, I have written positively about “Semitism” as a necessary historical vehicle for monotheism. Furthermore, as a Christian, I believe that the historical legacy of Israel –the people in their collective descent from the Old Testament patriarchs–is providential.1 Indeed, as Christ Himself said, “Salvation comes from the Jews” (John 4:22).

Having said that, what follows is not a brief against Jews or Judaism. Nor is it an exposition on the New Testament attitudes towards the Jewish people, nor the Patristic critique of Judaism. It is not even a condemnation of the Talmud (and there is much to condemn there). It is instead a defense, an apologia if you will, against the stereotype that the Church is the font and origin of all anti-Semitism in all its forms. As I shall attempt to demonstrate this indictment is in no way accurate. It is instead a calumny heaped upon the Church by anti-Christian writers which unfortunately has been accepted by many Christians over the past few centuries.2

GENTILE ANIMOSITY AS A RESULT OF JEWISH IN-GROUP PREFERENCES
I have already alluded to many historical aspects involving Jewry and their relationship with the non-Jewish world. In this regard, I am in good company. Winston Churchill, for example, openly praised the enduring nature of the Jewish nation and culture while recognizing the involvement of “atheistical” Jews in the highest reaches of the Communist Party. An occurrence which he deemed to be nothing less than evil.3

Likewise, the Talmud or body of Jewish lore and law that was compiled between the second and sixth centuries AD contains much anti-gentile commentary that is clearly racist by ancient as well as modern standards.4 Closer to our time, some writers have examined the role of many Jews in the transatlantic African slave-trade.5 This has been particularly vexing to African-Americans groups and has fueled –in part–an intense Islamophilia among them. Pro-Arab sympathies are so pronounced in fact in that community that Minister Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, is readily given a free pass to preach clearly anti-Semitic sermons. This despite the fact that the number of adherents of that sect is minuscule in comparison to the African-American population as a whole.

The actual picture of Jewish-gentile relations, therefore, is complex. While gentile animosity towards the Jews cannot be ignored nor excused, neither can it be used to imply that Jews did not engage in any provocations against their non-Jewish neighbors. Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, stated that “[t]he Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in noticeable numbers. Where it does not exist it is brought in by arriving Jews.”6 Even prominent liberals such as Prime Minister William Gladstone of the United Kingdom, a devout Evangelical with no anti-Semitic inclinations, criticized his arch-rival Benjamin Disraeli (a Jewish convert to Christianity) of “holding British foreign policy hostage to Jewish sympathies”.7 The latter of course, is an example of the popular anti-Semitic trope of “divided loyalties”.

It must be said at the outset that one of the enduring features of Jewish life from the time of Moses, has been a premium on in-group cohesion. During periods of independent nationhood (such as the kingdoms of Israel and Judah), this premium was not as overwhelming. David, for instance, had Moabite blood in his veins and his son Solomon had an international harem and allowed his wives and concubines to bring whatever idols they wished to his palace –much to the chagrin of the Prophets. However, during periods of persecution, such as the Babylonian Exile (ca. 597-538 BC) and to a lesser extent during the subsequent Second Temple period (516 BC-AD 70), there was an increased tendency towards totalitarian control by the religious elites. This only intensified following the Roman exile (AD 74) when the Second Temple and the priestly cult were utterly destroyed and all religious authority devolved onto the Rabbinate.

There can be no doubt that throughout the centuries Christian populations in Europe have been hostile to their Jewish minorities. Pogroms or sudden and violent actions against local Jewish populations are well-attested in the historical record. This bigotry, however, was based largely on racial animus, more so than religious antipathy. Indeed, anti-Jewish attitudes and actions by gentiles reach back into pagan, pre-Christian times (as shall be discussed later). In any event, this bigotry almost always arose from the bottom rungs of society, not from the national government as has long been supposed.8 This was especially true in the Pale of Settlement.

Unfortunately, Jewish aloofness only exacerbated matters. Even when Jews converted to Christianity, oftentimes they were not completely accepted. Jewish endogamy was still practiced, a fact that angered the majority population. The Spanish Inquisition, for example, was created to root out false conversions to Christianity by Jews in the Iberian peninsula, the so-called conversos. These New Christians (Nuevos Cristianos) were believed by many native Christians to be insincere and that they were in fact still secretly practicing Judaism. In any event, the accusation leveled against them was that their conversion to Catholicism was merely as a cover to further their own social advancement at the expense of the native population.9

Besides Jewish exclusivity, much of this anti-Jewish animus was based on negative stereotypes that were especially provocative to the majority: coin-clipping, short-changing and other “sharp” business practices, as well as petty theft and tax-farming. Unfortunately, like all ethnic and racial stereotypes, these prejudices were not completely unfounded. The practice of usury, however, was the chief complaint against them as it hit the poorest of the Christian poor especially hard, permanently indenturing many into endless cycles of perpetual debt.

Even Christian nobles could be trapped in a never-ending cycle of indebtedness to Jewish money-lenders if they could not repay their debts. In England for example, an indebted noble’s property could be forfeited to the Crown; hence it behooved the Norman kings to have a symbiotic relationship with Jewish middlemen. As to how pervasive this was, one only need to look at the Magna Carta in its original form. In two of its clauses, it explicitly protects the children of dead noblemen from losing their father’s lands to Jewish creditors, at least until they achieved their majority (when they could at least make an effort to pay back their creditors).10

As is well-known, this charter was forced upon King John by the nobility in 1215 and he had no choice but to sign it. By 1290 however, inter-ethnic conflict between the Jews of England and the Anglo-Saxon majority had gotten so out of hand that John’s grandson, King Edward I (“Longshanks”) was more than willing to inflict collective punishment upon England’s Jewish minority. Together, with all three estates of his kingdom (Church, nobility and an enraged peasantry) he forcibly expelled all Jews from England. That entire nation remained closed to them until 1656 when Oliver Cromwell allowed them to return.

TALMUDIC SANCTION FOR USURY
On the other hand, to blame the local Jewish populations for engaging in predatory business practices only because of their own racial animus against Europeans is equally unfair. Yes, the Talmud encouraged financial mischief against gentiles but it should also be pointed out that Jews as a group were very often forbidden by gentile rulers and the Church from owning land. Thus it was almost impossible for Jews to be engaged in self-sustaining farming to any appreciable extent. (This disability was one of Zionism’s major complaints about Jewish life under the Rabbinate.) It is easy to see in this context how the racialist invective found in the Talmud became a pretext for economic exploitation against gentiles.

Much of the blame for this goes to the local nobility which preferred to keep local Jews in a state of permanent disability. “Huckstering” (in Karl Marx’s scabrous terminology) may not have been the main outlet for Jewish economic activity but it certainly was the most widely stereotyped one. For the nobility (who were often foreigners themselves), the plan was simple: occupy the top tiers of the social pyramid and use equally foreign (but defenseless) middlemen to extract resources from the majority.

Regardless of this unfortunate handicapping of Jewish economic life, and because Jews generally occupied the middle rungs in the social hierarchy, they were invariably viewed as being economic predators in the eyes of the Christian majority. The social situation, therefore, was always tenuous for all involved but more so for the Jews who had no outlet short of exile (or worse) if and when 

things got intolerable for them.

A little more must be said about this predatory behavior, that is to say, usury. Because the Christian Church forbade the charging of interest (indeed it was often a capital offense), capital formation was next to impossible in Christian lands. Banking as understood in the modern sense was therefore unknown. According to the Mosaic law, Jews were absolutely forbidden from charging interest (Exod 22:25-27, Lev 25:36-37, Deut 23:23-21). In this regard, Moses agreed with Aristotle and Plato. However, there appeared to be no Scriptural prohibition from doing so to non-Jews; thus, rabbis in the Talmudic period (and afterward) believed that Jews were free to charge interest to gentiles.

Later rabbis, writing in the Talmud took these sentiments even further: not only were Jews allowed to charge interest to gentiles but economic exploitation of gentiles was of no moral consequence. In fact, according to some Talmudic exegetes, it was approved by God Himself. Even today, these unfortunate sentiments continue to exist; namely, that goyim (gentiles) exist solely for the benefit of Jews. Indeed, some prominent rabbis take this even further and posit that gentiles have no souls but are merely cattle in human form.11

Because of this unfortunate loophole, Jews were a necessary fixture of society because they were the only source of ready-to-lend capital. It is indeed ironic to note that churches, cathedrals and even crusades were often financed by Jewish money-lenders. And because of canonical (as well as rabbinical) prohibitions against intermarriage, this source of capital would continue throughout the generations. In any event, the majority of Jews were being saddled with the stereotype of money-lending and all its attendant prejudices. As unfortunate as this was, the fact remained that “from the twelfth century onward, [Jews] were in fact disproportionately concentrated in lending money at interest.”12

THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT: PREDATION AND POGROMS
The most infamous example of the use of Jews as hostile middlemen occurred after the conquest of the “Borderlands” of Russia by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In Ukraine and Byelorussia (the “Pale of Settlement”), Jews were either introduced into the newly-conquered lands to assist in the administration of them or if already ensconced there, were elevated to positions of authority over the conquered peoples. Because of a historical accident, Jews and Ukrainian gentiles were thus caught in the inevitable grip of mutual loathing. Perhaps not at first but certainly in due time.

In these lands, the local Jewish populations served additional functions for the Polish-Lithuanian nobility which increased hatred of them even more than what was found in other countries. Specifically they were given exclusive rights to be tax-farmers and arrendentors, that is to say, the collectors of rents. Resentment against the Jews in Ukraine came to a head during the massive uprising led by Bogdan Khmelnytsky, a famous Cossack hetman, whose rebellion lasted from 1648-1657. Reports of atrocities against the local Jews were horrific and the numbers of dead were in the tens of thousands. Poles and Lithuanians as well as Ukrainian collaborators were likewise killed in massive numbers but it was the Jews who were singled out for special punishment.

The Khmelnytsky uprising was viewed by Jews the world over as nothing less than a national trauma of biblical proportions. One of the repercussions of this event was a messianic revival centered around the person of a certain Greek Jew named Sabbatai Z’vi (d 1676), a rabbi from Smyrna, who preached an inversion of traditional Judaism. His movement became so vast that it is estimated that half of all Jews (and significant numbers of Christians and Moslems) recognized him as the messiah. That is until the Turkish sultan Mehmet IV, gave him a choice: either convert to Islam or lose your head. Z’vi chose Islam.

Although Khmelnytsky is credited with creating the first Ukrainian state (and is indeed a national hero in that country today), in order for him to consolidate his victories against the Poles, he had to bring Ukraine into the Muscovite orbit. In any event, the boundaries of the newly-independent Ukrainian state were not settled and the Poles continued to intrude where they could but the overall consensus was that Ukraine was now a vassal-state of Russia. In time, it became formally absorbed into the Russian Empire. In any event, the boundaries of Ukraine were pushed even further westward, an even larger population of Jews were now subjects of the expanding Russian Empire.

Seeking to make a virtue out of necessity, Catherine the Great decided to honor the monopolies which the Jews had enjoyed under the Poles, including the distillation of liquors and the owning of inns and taverns. A common anti-Jewish stereotype that arose in the Pale among the Christian majority was that Jewish taverners would ply Christian peasants with liquor on condition of repayment at a later date. When the time came for the unfortunate peasant to settle his bill and could not, the tavern-keeper often seized his property which he would later sell to a pawnbroker –usually a relative–in one of the larger cities nearby.

These exploitative and unfortunate economic practices were what passed for economic activity in the Pale, entrapping Christian peasants in endless cycles of grinding poverty. Needless to say, as far as the local Jewish population was concerned, their economic lot was only marginally better. This was to be expected since the Christian peasantry (the economic base of the locale) was desperately poor in the first place, having been reduced to servitude by the Polish conquerors.

Regardless, resentment against the Jews by the native Christian populations (whether Orthodox, Catholic or Uniate) was inevitable. That Jews were forbidden from engaging in agriculture and thus not having the resources to engage in any type of economic behavior that was not exploitative offered no balm to the Christian who could not pay his rent or an overdue tavern bill. Pogroms therefore, were invariably “bottom-up” affairs and were driven by local resentments, not as is popularly believed, by czarist edicts.13 In sum, it did not take a lot to light the match on a woodpile that was already primed for combustion. After all, this had happened before (during the Khmelnytsky uprising); it could happen again.

Unfortunately, Jews usually had no choice in the matter as they were almost always restricted to these predatory niches by the nobility (as already mentioned). This enforced ghettoization was necessary in the eyes of the aristocracy, mainly because they could be kept in line more easily but also rescued if need be by the local constabulary. The Jew as agent of the Polish boyar, the Norman peer or the Moorish emir was a necessary part of the administration of these polities. He was therefore the most conspicuous object of resentment by the lower classes. To say that this was a tenuous state of affairs as far as the Jews were concerned is a massive understatement.

Be that as it may, we should not assume that Jews were under constant attack. For one thing, they were incredibly insular, keeping pretty much to themselves. For another, because of their utility to the aristocracy, Jews were a protected class. In feudal societies, they had a range of movement and enjoyed privileges that were denied to the Christian serfs. More often than not, they lived in autonomous towns and ghettos under the authority of the local rabbi and were answerable only to themselves. Local rabbinic courts (known as a Bet’ Din) were established and they literally had the power of life and death over local Jewry. Like their noble overlords, the rabbinate became hereditary and often received coats-of-arms. If the local rabbi did not have the adequate resources to enforce his edicts he could always rely on the gentile aristocracy to provide him with the necessary muscle.

Despite their relative autonomy, Jews did live in a state of consternation. In Europe alone, Jews were evicted en masse some one hundred ninety times over the course of several centuries. As already noted, England evicted its Jews in 1290 and upon completion of the Reconquista in 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain evicted all Jews who did not convert to Christianity. Prague, Warsaw, Mainz and even Rome itself were some of the other great European cities from which entire Jewish populations were evicted during the Medieval period.

In each of these cases, the impetus for evicting the local Jewish population was almost always economic with religion perhaps providing a moral veneer to salve the conscience of the mob. Sometimes these expulsions happened because the local aristocracy was too indebted and could find no way out of honoring their debts. Other times it was because the local population was too angered by crimes committed by Jews, real or perceived (such as the infamous Blood Libel, of which more below). This cannot be stressed enough: the anger was almost always predicated on economic competition. Jews, because of easier access to capital as well as a much greater sense of ethnic cohesion, invariably occupied higher economic niches. Because of this, they bore a disproportionate share of resentment.

ZIONISM: A WAY OUT OF THE GHETTO?
Relations between the Jewish minority and the Christian majority were thus always in a state of tension. Periods of quiescence oftentimes resulted in outbursts of creativity. In the Renaissance, for example, Christian thinkers such as Pico della Mirandolo, Athanasius Kircher and Johann Reuchlin were clearly fascinated by the Jewish mysticism found in the Kabbalah. Much of what we label today to be “hermetic” thought has clear Kabbalistic antecedents. This continued even into the early nineteenth century wherein we find the tantalizing possibility of Mormon cosmology being influenced by the Kabbalah.14

In any event, the doors of inter-ethnic and inter-religious cooperation invariably –and often violently–snapped shut, usually do some provocation. Even in the best of times, racial animus was always beneath the surface. Still, Jewish life was enduring, if not stable. One reason was because of the iron-fisted rule of the rabbis. Life in the ghetto or the local Jewish quarter was vibrant to be sure but it could also be stultifying. What passed for piety was often little more than superstition; in reality, a barely disguised polytheism.15 When the rabbis could not rely on Talmudic exegeses, they were not averse to turning to obscurantism and if need be, the recrudescence of occultic beliefs. At any rate, such was the price of reliance upon the totalitarian rule over communal life.

Surprisingly, intra-ethnic violence could be explosive; riots between Jewish factions were not uncommon. In the Pale, for example, czarist officials were always told to be on the lookout for any possible disturbances that could break out whenever Jews would meet in large numbers.16

And rabbis could (and sometimes did) impose the death penalty on men they perceived to be trouble-makers. One method of capital punishment was beating a miscreant to death and then piling his corpse onto a dung-cart and thereupon continuing to beat it with shovels. Such authoritarian rule was the lot of almost all Eastern European Jewish communities throughout the Middle Ages and even through the early modern period (ca. 1500-1800). Short of conversion to Christianity (which could be punished by death should the rabbis find out ahead of time), there was no way out for those Jews who chafed under this type of regime.

A little more must be said about the Kabbalah and its place in Jewish history. The Kabbalah, a mystical philosophy based on Neoplatonism, first arose in Spain in the eleventh century, when a book called the Zohar was first published (probably by Moses de Leon).  The Zohar’s claim to fame was that it was the secret, oral teachings of Moses who supposedly dictated it to Joshua at the foot of Mount Sinai. (The other Israelites were given the written Torah instead.) Joshua then transmitted it to a secret cabal of disciples in due time who then transmitted this occult knowledge to other disciples and so on. This pattern was repeated for two thousand years until this body of knowledge was reduced to writing. Clearly this was a fanciful tale but it filled a spiritual void in Jewish life, not unlike what motivated many early Christians to adopt Gnosticism.

Whether or not the Kabbalah was intended to be a competitor to the rabbis, it became a reaction to their increasing reliance on Talmudism and its incessant argumentation. Like earlier Christian Gnosticism, Kabbalism relied on a Neoplatonic worldview, which found its expression in an intense, personal embrace of divinity. While it could in theory bypass the need for an educated rabbinate which was well-versed in Talmudic law, it still relied on ethnic cohesion in order to be practiced. Indeed, according to some devotees, all Jews as a whole were viewed as physical manifestations of the Godhead. Ironically, the spiritual power of the Rabbinate within these peculiar sects became even more pronounced. Among these votaries, the “Rebbe” (who was the head of the sect) was viewed as a “ray of God” and his power was so absolute that it extended even after death: upon his judgment, a Jew who committed adultery (for instance) would have his soul returned to earth as an animal if the Rebbe so wished.

Needless to say, neither Kabbalism nor Talmudism comported with the winds of the Enlightenment that were sweeping across Europe around that time. When viewed in this light –that no social mobility was possible (short of conversion to Christianity)–recently emancipated Jews of the nineteenth century looked to other venues as a way out. At this point in time, two novel philosophies presented themselves as a possibilities: Zionism and Haskala (or the Jewish version of the Enlightenment). That is to say Jewish nationalism or assimilation.

While Kabbalism fueled Jewish cohesion, assimilation worked in the opposite direction (at least in theory). Assimilation was the philosophical project of the Haskala. Among the luminaries of the Jewish Enlightenment were men such as Moses Mendelsohn, Heinrich Heine, and Baruch Spinoza. Though popular among many progressive Jews, it never caught on with the main body of Jewry even during periods of emancipation. One possible reason was that in-group cohesion among Jews had become a very successful evolutionary mechanism.17

Still, assimilation was not without its successes in that it arrived with the heels of Jewish emancipation by Enlightenment rulers such as Frederick the Great, Napoleon and –to a lesser extent–Catherine the Great. This emancipation, the freeing of Jews to leave the ghetto or shtetl and to go to the city for the first time, resulted in a cultural ferment that enlivened European literature, art and music thanks to the involvement of emancipated Jews (many of whom enthusiastically viewed European society as the ideal). The nineteenth century especially saw the flowering of European culture thanks to this melding of Jewish talent with Christian society.

It also resulted in an increased intermarriage rate between Jews and gentiles. In point of fact, Herzl, the founder of Zionism believed that emancipation brought Jews into direct economic competition with gentile burghers. Anti-Semitism he wrote, was “an understandable reaction to Jewish defects”, and went further on to say that “I find the anti-Semites are fully within their rights”. In a letter he wrote to the Tsar of Russia, Herzl wrote that Zionism is “the final solution [!] to the Jewish question.”18 Nor should we presume that Herzl was alone in his assessment of the so-called Jewish Question: Moses Hess, Martin Buber, Vladimir Jabotinsky, among others, heartily concurred.

To modern ears, such talk is shocking to say the very least. Of course Herzl had a nationalist agenda and this no doubt played some part in his use of anti-Semitic tropes as rhetorical devices. Be that as it may, Herzl’s ideology did not arise in a historical vacuum; an assimilated Jew, he was personally revolted by the backwards attitudes and folkways of Jews who had left the ghetto and had refused to abandon them.

Herzl however was caught on the horns of a dilemma: while he despised the lower-class ethos of unassimilated Jews, the court-martial of Capt Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 was a turning point for the founder of modern Zionism. Dreyfus was the only Jewish officer in the French Army and there had never been any reason to suspect his patriotism. Unfortunately, he was accused of treason, specifically of giving information to the Germans. That the charges against the only Jewish officer in the French Army were trumped-up was proof in Herzl’s mind that no Jew would never be allowed to assimilate into gentile society, no matter how patriotic and acculturated he perceived himself to be.

In any event, he was not wrong about the often stark differences between the Jew and Christian which became readily apparent upon their emancipation. In his opinion, the peculiar qualities which allowed Jews to survive in the ghettos could not be viewed in anything but a negative light. Herzl’s Zionist polemic was not based on racist myths: for whatever reason, Jews were different and their assimilation was exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. L’affair Dreyfus only solidified in Herzl’s mind this impossibility.

Moreover, the Zionists believed that the Jews were not a religion (as the assimilationists believed) but an ethnicity, a race even, and a foreign one at that. A people that would “always dwell alone”. This view was expounded by no less a personage than Rabbi Steven Wise, who in the run-up to the Second World War, boldly stated: “I am not an American which is of the Jewish faith. I am a Jew…Hitler was right in one thing. He calls the Jewish people a race and we are a race.”19 Wise was no minor rabbi presiding over some middling synagogue, he was in fact the President of the American Jewish Congress and his words carried especial weight among American Jews.

For all their disdain of the Rabbinate and Kabbalism, the Zionists were in agreement with the sentiment that the Jews were most definitely a race and intermarriage was undesirable if not unworkable. As such, political nationhood was the only viable answer for all concerned. The urgency as far as the Zionists were concerned was to preserve Jewish life, which they saw as incompatible with assimilation. If nothing else, a Jewish state offered Jews a way to break free from the stultifying life of the ghetto and the stereotypical occupations which were foisted upon the Jews as a whole.

ETHNIC COHESION AND DARWINISM
Nor should we forget that this was also the age of Darwin; his materialistic and deterministic understanding of species formation had taken hold of social scientists everywhere. Evolution, as it came to be understood, stated that speciation proceeded from genetic drift and divergent geological and climatological conditions. Furthermore, Darwin believed that races of man are in fact separate species (today this view has been modified to the view that they are instead sub-species). Thus, the concept of humans socially segregating themselves was not only desirable but unavoidable.

Curiously, such thoughts had already been anticipated by certain Jewish writers in the early modern period. The Sephardic Jewish writer Isaac la Peyrere for example (ca 1655) claimed that only Jews were descended from Adam, while all other races of man predated Adam’s creation and were devoid of souls.20 Thus the racially exclusivist Talmudic view, which strictly forbade intermarriage and thoroughly disdained conversion to Judaism was reinforced by Darwinism and its deterministic reliance on population genetics. In this regard, both the theocratic rabbis of the Middle Ages and the secular Zionists of the modern period agreed.

It should be pointed out here that the reality of social as well as economic segregation had an unwitting effect on Jewish genetics, at least from the time of the Middle Ages onward. Since Jews were forbidden from owning land, they were encouraged to concentrate on financial and mercantile trades. Those who were more successful in these trades lived to produce offspring. Those who excelled in higher mathematical skills, such as calculating interest rates and keeping track of debits and credits, were thereby favored as potential mates. When one considers the smaller numbers of Jews in any given area and their preference for endogamy, it became obvious over time that this inbreeding caused a higher mean I.Q. in comparison to the local gentile population. The chromosomes upon which the genes for a higher mean Ashkenazi (i.e. Central and Eastern European) Jewish intelligence have been isolated in fact.21

Unfortunately, these same chromosomes are the loci for certain autosomal diseases which appear with distressing frequency. Because of the inbreeding found in the typical Jewish ghetto or shtetl, these diseases are in fact, intractable. Even today the premium on Jewish endogamy has not resulted in any dilution of these traits to any appreciable extent. All told, Ashkenazi Jews have a higher propensity for many autosomal diseases, among them Tay-Sachs, Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.22

In the final analysis, although there were evolutionary mechanisms which fueled ethnic cohesion, the picture is actually more complicated. Other mechanisms were social, others preferential, still others legally obligatory. All told however, they provided a net benefit to the community as a whole. Whether this was because of a theological warrant or was the result of generations of evolutionary adaptations is probably beside the point. In any event, the phenomenon of Jewish cohesiveness does seem to comport to the historical reality, of this there can be no doubt.

While such a racialist understanding of Jewish population genetics violates the modern sensibilities of the greater part of polite society today (Jews included), it definitely played a role in ensuring in-group preferences. In the naturalistic sphere, however, for this system to survive, the out-group had to be exploited. Economic predation therefore was inevitable. As such, it is impossible to lay all blame for internecine strife between the two groups solely at the feet of the gentile majority, constantly stoked by Passion Week readings of the Gospels.

Quite simply, the view propounded by some Jewish apologists (such as Bruno Bettelheim), that anti-Semitism is an “uncontrollable” and a “constantly mutating virus” which gentiles (particularly European Christians) are permanently susceptible to, is specious.23 To believe this, one would have to strip both Jew and gentile of any moral agency whatsoever. While this would be in conformity with the principles of Darwinism as such, it can only offend religious as well as liberal sensibilities. Darwinism after all, is a purely materialistic hypothesis, one in which there is no room for free will at all.

Be that as it may, the phenomenon of Jewish in-group cohesion has always been readily apparent. Regardless, such alooofness invariably angered the gentile majority. It is in this context that one must understand the writings and opinions of the overwhelming majority of Zionist eminences. The Zionists generally believed that the animus against Jews in any given area was not religious but racial and thus unavoidable. Herzl himself wrote that anti-Semitism was “inevitable” and “understandable” once Jews achieved a certain share of the population in any given area.24

The only option, therefore, was a Jewish national homeland, whether in Palestine, Uganda or South America. A polity where Jews could thrive unmolested, build cities, engage in self-sustaining agriculture and thereby break free from the rigid economic niches which had hitherto been foisted upon them by gentile elites. In short, the Zionists believed that only when Jews had an exclusive homeland of their own could they overcome the negative stereotypes which had served as an indelible mark of Cain, one that permanently forced them into the margins of society and into predatory economic niches.

PAGANISM: THE FIRST ANTI-SEMITISM
More could be said about the fascinating historicity of the Jewish experience in Christian Europe. At this point, however, I wish to rise to the defense of historical Christianity as it has sustained tremendous assault from progressives, “free-thinkers”, skeptics and anti-Christians, of varying stripes and configurations, over the centuries.

Two of the most pernicious allegations from anti-Christians has been that non-orthodox Gnostics and Enlightenment thinkers were free of the taint of anti-Semitism. By these people’s lights, it is instead the Church and especially the Gospel of John which is to blame for historical Jew-hatred. In the eyes of the many Jewish polemicists, it is the Church and the Church alone which is the be-all and end-all of anti-Semitism.25

This assertion is so unabashedly ahistorical that I choose to dismiss this entire view of Jewish-Christian relations as “Dan Brown historiography”. Good enough for the bored housewives who watch Oprah but positively ludicrous to those who actually know even a modicum of history. For one thing, it completely ignores the entire book of Exodus, which details the first time a gentile power became hostile to the Israelites. To be sure, the historical details are no doubt far more complicated than what is commonly believed but the template of Jewish-gentile relations since that time has followed a similar pattern: first Jews are welcomed in to a land as refugees, then they are given rights; these rights later turn into exclusive monopolies and finally, the majority turns against them and either enslaves or expels them.

The events as described in Exodus were no doubt horrific but they were not genocidal. For that, we would need to turn to the book of Esther, wherein we find the first historical record of an attempted genocide against the Jews. This story relates how a beautiful Jewess named Hadassah becomes the favored wife of the Persian king Xerxes the Great (d 465 BC). She takes the Persian name Esther (Ishtar) and uses her feminine wiles on her husband in order to foil the attempted genocide against her people by a fiend named Haman. Soon, the tables are turned and Haman and his sons are hanged and seventy-five thousand Persians are killed instead. (This event is celebrated yearly during the Festival of Purim.)

Regardless as to the actual historical details of these two stories, the narrative they paint is one of collective suffering by the Jews at the hands of ancient, pre-Christian gentile nations. Hatred and/or suspicion of Jews therefore predated the Christian Middle Ages by centuries. As to why Jews were singled out for collective punishment, one can find a reason for it in Edward Gibbon’s epic history The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In Gibbon’s view, the Jews were a vile, foreign people who never hesitated to provoke the host population.26 Tacitus, the Roman historian called them an “odium generis humani“. (And Tacitus was not flattering to the Christians.)

During the Hellenistic period (ca 323-31 BC) relations between Jews and Greeks were rarely quiescent. They came to blows during the Maccabean Revolt (167-161 BC), which resulted in the Second Jewish Commonwealth, a period of Jewish political autonomy. Curiously, it was during this time that the Blood Libel, a particularly sinister anti-Semitic trope broke out throughout the Greek world. According to an ancient Greek writer named Appion, when the Greek king of Syria Antiochus IV Epiphanes, conquered Jerusalem, he liberated a Greek captive from the dungeon of the Second Temple. The tale which the prisoner told was a lurid one of potential cannibalism, specifically that he was being force-fed in order to serve as a human sacrifice in the Holy of Holies.27 Whether true or not, the story gained credence and quickly became a notorious anti-Semitic trope throughout the Hellenistic world.

The First Jewish War (AD 66-74) took place as an act of collective revenge by Rome which they inflicted upon the Jews of Palestine. What is little known about this conflict is that Jews, throughout the Diaspora, had been whipped up into a collective frenzy by certain messianic figures, seemingly all at once. Wholesale slaughters of gentile civilians raged throughout the Mediterranean. Dio Cassius puts the number of dead gentiles at just over a quarter of a million.28

In addition to this conflict, there were two more Jewish wars, the Kiton War, which took place in Cyprus and North Africa (115-117) and the Bar-Kokhba Revolt (132-136), which took place in Palestine. According to most historians, over 400,000 gentile civilians were killed in the Kiton War and over 300,000 gentiles were killed in the Bar-Kokhba Revolt. Jewish fatalities in all three conflicts easily exceeded two million according to the best estimates. All three conflicts were set in motion by messianic figures and were stoked by racial animosity against gentiles.29

Under these circumstances, there was very little sympathy for the Jews among the broader gentile population. Indeed, it should be remembered that these wars did not begin as pogroms against Jews but were hard-fought battles often instigated by the Jews themselves. In the First Jewish War for example, three entire Roman legions were wiped out by Jewish armies. Needless to say, the collective memories of these violent conflicts entered the Church as more and more gentiles became Christian.

THE BLOOD LIBEL IN EUROPE As noted above, the Blood Libel had originated in the Hellenistic period. It laid dormant for centuries however, only to be picked up by Medieval Christians a millennium later, when in twelfth century England, the horribly mutilated body of a Christian boy named William of Norwich was found. Coincidentally, it was during this time that the Jews of Europe were becoming known for financial wizardry (as mentioned earlier). Clearly resentment by the Christian masses was already in evidence. In any event, over the next few centuries, some one hundred fifty such cases of mutilated Christian children were reported. It is difficult to say whether cases such as these were the result of rampant fear-mongering brought upon by outbursts of bigotry or whether there was some truth to at least some of these cases.30

As noted previously, such acts of violence against gentiles were not unknown in Jewish history. During the three Jewish Wars, Jews throughout the Mediterranean littoral rose up and slaughtered tens of thousands of Greek and Roman civilians in several outbursts of messianic frenzy. Sometimes the violence was directed inward. At Masada for example (AD 74), close to one thousand Jewish zealots committed mass suicide rather than be taken by the Romans. To be sure, this was an act of violence that was self-inflicted; yet because it was so unique, it elicited a horror that gave it a special place in history.

Indeed, under Roman occupation, it could be said that the Jews invented terrorism as a political weapon. The Sicarii, for example, were one such terrorist group. Their method of operation was to sneak into large groups of people and then pull out their specially curved knives and surreptitiously stab a random pedestrian in the rib cage, slicing upward to ensure death and then slither off during the resulting melee. Usually, they would be the first to raise the alarm of the murder in order to distract attention from themselves. Their purpose was not terrorism for the sake of terrorism but to provoke other Jews to rise up and riot.31 The hope was that the riots would turn into uprisings and the Romans would tire of it all and leave.

Whether in a Christian context or a pagan one, the belief in the Blood Libel was so preponderant that Flavius Josephus felt compelled to write an entire book (contra Appion) in order to dispute Appion’s earlier claim about the original Greek captive. For our purposes, however, the origin for this lurid allegation predated the start of the Church by almost two centuries. This cannot be stressed enough.

To be sure, the Christian Church did not do much to tamp down anti-Jewish hatreds but the point is that it did not originate them. Anti-Semitism, as we have established, is an ancient hatred and not an exclusively Christian one.

GNOSTICISM: HOW ANTI-SEMITISM INFILTRATED THE CHURCH
So how then, did anti-Semitism enter into the Church, an institution that was not pagan in origin but founded exclusively by Jews? Given what has been discussed already regarding pagan attitudes towards Jews, it should not surprise us that similar attitudes entered the Jewish ekklesia once gentiles started entering into the Jerusalem community. Evidence for this can be found in the Acts of the Apostles where gentile (and even Hellenistic Jewish) resentments became readily apparent. This was a reaction to the anti-gentile animus among the Palestinian Jews who made up the great body of the Church in Jerusalem.

A careful reading of Paul’s letters would indicate that things were never that great between these groups in the first place, even though both were Christian. We see this for example in his repeated exhortations that there should be no racialism within the Church; specifically, “neither Greek nor Jew” (Gal 3:28). Though this was the official policy, it seems obvious that it invariably fell on deaf ears. Simply put, the normal inter-ethnic tensions that exist between people of different races and ethnicities seems to be too intractable at times.

Over time, anti-Jewish animus received another significant boost from the Gnostics who infiltrated the Church. Marcion of Sinope (d. AD 160) was perhaps the first such Christian leader who propounded significant anti-Jewish views. Ironically, it was Marcion in fact who crafted the first Christian canon, albeit one which excised all of the Old Testament and most of the New. (Because of Marcion’s efforts in this regard, later Christian apologists such as St Ireneus of Lyon [d. AD 202] felt compelled to formalize the Christian canon.)32

Like most thinkers who were influenced by Neoplatonism, Marcion could not abide the Semitic God of the Old Testament. In Marcion’s eyes, Yahweh was little more than a belligerent, flesh-and-bone tribal deity, completely at odds with the loving Father that Jesus preached about. At best, the most charitable thing Marcion could say about Yahweh was that he was a self-deluded demiurgos, that is to say, a creator-god who created an equally deluded and sorrowful cosmos.

In Marcion’s cosmology, it stood to reason that if creation was evil, then so too was its creator. It could not be otherwise. It was incumbent upon those who were truly “illumined” to confound the plans of the Demiurge. This could happen in any number of ways; initially, adherents were encouraged to abstain from marriage at all costs. If they were to marry, they were to practice sodomy as a method of birth control. Needless to say, homosexuality was not discouraged. Clearly, Gnostic sexual practices conflicted with Christian orthodoxy.

An independently wealthy man, Marcion thought that his views would find purchase within the Church at Rome, which was heavily indebted at the time. He offered to make a donation of 200,000 sesterces which was gladly received at first. When it became obvious that his doctrine was completely antithetical to the historical record (and common sense), his gift was returned to him and he was promptly excommunicated.

That didn’t stop him from teaching, however. Upon returning to Asia Minor, he founded many congregations. Still, there was a problem: how could he reconcile the man Jesus with creation? He didn’t. For him, Jesus was a spirit-being who appeared (dokein) to have a human body. (This heresy is known as Docetism.) According to this teaching, Jesus was a celestial spirit who imparted secret knowledge (gnosis) but to only those initiates who had the capacity to understand this superior knowledge. Moreover, it was not based on revelation but upon an interior knowledge which all men possess and it was the duty of the illumined Gnostic to teach others how to come to realize their own spiritual illumination. As such, the legalistic and moralistic canon of the Jews was unnecessary, as was their emphasis on revelation and natalism.

Gnosticism appealed to the Western mind in many other respects. For one thing, it was ultimately derived from Neoplatonism, itself a variant of Platonic thought. Secondly, it solidified in the minds of elites (and those who presumed themselves to be elite), that they were in fact “better” than the hoi polloi. According to this worldview, all of humanity is divided into three categories: sarkokoi, psychikoi, and gnostikoi (that is to say, the carnal, the rational, and the illumined.)33 Thirdly, it coincided with the oftentimes severe sexual imbalances that arose during Late Antiquity, often reinforcing the misogynistic impulses of a growing cohort of men who could not find wives.34

Spiritual elitism and misogyny were of course condemned by the Church once it became the religion of the Roman Empire. The veneration of the Theotokos, for example, made misogyny impossible, at least from a purely theological standpoint. However these sentiments never really went away. Suffice it to say that Gnostic impulses have never been extirpated from Western consciousness, arising throughout history in various forms, including Catharism, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry and Illuminism (among others).35

For these anti-orthodox sects, Lucifer was a Prometheus-figure, a demigod who sought to help mankind. In the Gnostic belief-system, Lucifer’s job was to confound the evil, carnal plans of Yahweh. At their base, the fundamental theology of these Neoplatonic philosophical systems was that man could achieve illumination through his own efforts, as opposed to the intercession of the Church. That the Church relied on men such as the Prophets (many of whom were neither heroic nor educated) for revelation, was a rebuke to Classical sensibilities. In the context of the first two Christian centuries, the Church was indistinguishable from the Synagogue in that both viewed themselves as the sole repository of truth. Such absolutist beliefs were incomprehensible to the Classical mind.

The animus towards Jews was, therefore, a logical outgrowth of the Gnostic’s fundamental theology and the Classicist’s view of ordered society, both of which were rigidly hierarchical. The Jews, on the other hand, were enthusiastically natalist because the God of Israel told Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply” and “to subdue the earth”. This exhortation was anathema to Hellenistic civilization in general as it gave all people equal worth, something which no ancient Greek or Roman believed. It goes without saying therefore that every individual Jew was a son of Abraham, hence they all had similar worth. The Church adopted this view as well.

Nor should we forget that Israel was perhaps the first and only civilization to hold homosexuality in complete and utter contempt (Gen 19). Indeed, the Mosaic code demanded the death penalty for all homoerotic relations (Lev 18:22, Lev 20:13). The Church for its part accepted the proscriptions without question (Romans 1, 1 Tim 1:8-10, Jude 7), and amplified them. To be sure, the Church did not prescribe the death penalty but it made clear that the fiery destruction which befell Sodom and Gomorrah would prefigure the eternal punishment that awaited those who practiced these acts. At any rate, this intolerant Judaic attitude must have exacerbated the already latent anger of some gentile converts to the Church.

AN ANCIENT HATRED RATIONALIZED: THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE JEWS
The above is not meant to be an exhaustive survey of anti-Semitism nor to excuse violence against Jewish populations throughout Christian or pre-Christian lands. It is instead a corrective, intending to explain that the relationships between Jews and non-Jews are far more complex than modern anti-Christians would have us believe. This cannot be stressed enough: the roots of anti-Jewish animus predate Christianity by centuries.

And subsequent anti-Jewish attitudes are far from being a European and Christian monopoly. Indeed, Islam has long provided a fertile matrix for anti-Jewish animus. Indeed, as it appears in the Koran itself, it is foundational to Islam (7:145-146, 4:154-155, 17:4-7, 5:85.). If further proof is needed, the overwhelming percentage of attacks on Jews in Europe today is not perpetrated by Europeanist-inspired militias (such as the Sons of Odin or the Golden Dawn) but by ordinary gangs of Moslem immigrants. Recently, the German minister for internal affairs told the Jewish citizens of Germany to not wear their kippahs in public for fear of antagonizing the growing Moslem minority.36

The violence perpetrated upon Jews today in the mind of the ruling elites (and their acolytes in the media) that emanates from the Islamic world is worthy of treatment on its own terms. Yet the irony is that it is Christianity which bears a lion’s share of the blame. Other actors and movements are absolved in the minds of the modern liberal. Fortunately, some Jewish polemicists are waking up to the fact that much blame can be laid at the foot of the Enlightenment for the rise of anti-Semitism as it is found in modern times.37

One such writer, indicts these “avatars of universal reason” who could “not but perceive Judaism as the enemy of their rationalist faith; as the tree trunk from which the branch of Christianity had sprung…”38 This scathing indictment includes Immanuel Kant, who called Jews a “nation of usurers…outwitting people amongst whom they find shelter…”. The great Voltaire himself described Jews thusly: “You will find in Jews an ignorant, lazy, barbarous people who for a long time combined the most undignified stinginess with the most profound hatred for the people which tolerate and enrich them”. Baron d’Holbach called them “the flag-bearers of ‘superstitious blindness’.”39

Along these lines, a curious word must be said here about the Enlightenment luminary Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). I say “curious” because Spinoza was a Dutch Jew who publicly repudiated Judaism in favor of free thought. His apostasy from Judaism was so publicly notorious that he was placed under a death penalty by the local rabbis. It was only because he lived in the Netherlands where the Rabbinate was not as autonomous as it was in other areas of Europe that he was able to escape with his life intact. Spinoza openly detested Judaism and considered the Old Testament to be a complete fabrication, a reworking of Persian and Babylonian tales. At any rate, for Spinoza, one could not accept the ideals of the Enlightenment and still be an observant Jew.40

Then there is Karl Marx a man who was of Jewish birth himself. His assessment of the Jewish people as a whole was of a piece with what Adolf Hitler would say many years later: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstsering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, the face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man –and turns them into commodities…”41 If uttered by a politician today, this formula would destroy his career within five minutes. Yet for some reason, Marx’s historical reputation remains largely unscathed.

The irony of the Enlightenment is that it thought that its logical endpoint would be classical liberalism, free-thought and Deism, with an aversion to Christianity and other such “superstitions”. We are not taught today that the contempt which the Enlightenment thinkers held for Christianity was rooted in an even worse antipathy towards Judaism. In their mind’s eye, the Enlightenment offered all men –Jews as well as Christians–a way out of this superstitious myopia. That the Jews as an ethnicity would not go along with this universalist impulse, only heightened liberal antipathy against them.

In our own day, we are not immune from such Enlightenment wishful-thinking. Sadly, many modern Jewish luminaries have peddled the idea that the end-stage of the post-Christian ideology, especially the separation of Church and state, would result in a democratically liberal utopia. This has most definitely been the case. Today in fact, much blood and treasure has been spilled in the Islamic world to bring this fantasy about. Instead, what has happened is a recrudescence towards tribalism and religious extremism. In fact, it is most ironic that this delusion is simply another version of the proletarian state which Marx predicted once all religious and national hierarchies were removed. In any event, all such utopian fantasies are nothing less than pseudo-messianic heresies, incubated within a Judaic matrix to be sure, but unrealizable nonetheless.

It must be pointed out at this juncture that for any revolutionary socio-political fantasy to take root, the Church in its official capacity as the soul of the nation and the guardian of its ideology must be extinguished. This was clearly foreseen by Dostoyevsky decades before the Bolshevik revolution.42 The Church was not wrong therefore in jealously guarding its cultural prerogatives. This was obvious to even atheists as well: Nietzsche likewise saw that the “liberal” utopia would not happen upon the proclamation of God’s “death”.43 In the final analysis, the end of the Church-state symphony has never resulted in a liberally blissful utopian state; instead it invariably results in either a Red Terror or an irreversible cultural rot.

This was a bitter irony especially for European Jews who at the beginning of the nineteenth century were experiencing for the first time emancipation themselves. Jews like Marx were beguiled by all this heady talk and he and other Jewish thinkers were more than ready to accede to this new internationalist way of thinking. It was probably for this reason that so many Jews were in the vanguard of the Bolshevik Revolution (as Churchill and others had noted). Despite their place at the point of the revolutionary spear, this Red monster eventually turned on them.44 The heroic Jew as “vanguard of the proletariat” could easily turn into the snarling Jew of Nazi cartoons who was now the “avatar of the bourgeoisie” should the need arise.

THE ETERNAL MARK OF CAIN: THE JEWS IN THE ESCHALOGICAL PLAN ACCORDING TO THE CHURCH
The relationship between the Church and the Jews, therefore, is a complicated one. Some liturgical texts, for example, are often startling to modern ears. However, they need to be examined within a theological framework: Jesus Himself uttered many of these words and yet He was clearly a Jew and even a descendant of the royal line that began with Israel’s greatest king. They must also be examined in a historical context as well.

The writings and sermons of Christian preachers such as St John Chrysostom and Martin Luther must likewise be viewed in such a manner. At the risk of repeating myself, the historical context requires us to understand that Judaism almost always displayed an exclusivist tenor, one that did not discourage economic exploitation and sometimes did explode into a violent anti-gentile furor. Chrysostom, for instance, was writing and preaching at a time in which memories of Jewish slave-traders following in the trains of Roman armies were still rather fresh in the collective memory. (Constantine the Great’s proscriptions against the practice of slavery for example, made it illegal for Jews to own Christians.) Of course, slavery has been a constant in human history and the Jews had no monopoly on it.45 Nonetheless, historical scrutiny demands that fiery exhortations against one or another group must be investigated with a dispassionate eye.

The Church recognized this dichotomy. Both Origen and Tertullian were openly hostile to Judaism as a religion and especially to those Christians who clung to Judaic practices.46 A majority of Chrysostom’s preaching while in Antioch was reserved especially for those Christians who partook of Jewish rites and celebrations.47 Yet like St Augustine, none of these Church Fathers advocated violence against the Jews. In the eyes of many Church Fathers, the continuing existence of the Jews –as well as their observable national desolation–served as a permanent example to Christians everywhere as to the falsity of their debased, post-Temple religion.48

Nor should it be forgotten that the hostility of gentile Christians to the Jews was exacerbated by the fact that the Roman government had allowed Jews freedom of worship (something which they refused to accede to the Church). This was because the Jews were an ancient race with their own customs and traditions and the Romans, whatever else their faults, always honored national cults. That the Christians demanded similar treatment –after all, they worshiped the same God as the Jews–fell upon deaf ears. In the eyes of the Romans, this distinction was crucial: Jews were a civilization with a national cult; the Church was a superstitio illicito. Like the Dionysian mysteries, they could be abolished if the state deemed it necessary.

The consensus patrem is perhaps best encapsulated by Augustine who viewed continued Jewish debility as regards to the Church as a collective mark of Cain. In his theological synthesis, Jewish hostility to the Gospel was inevitable because Christian eschatology demanded that they play the role of Cain, the slayer of his righteous younger brother, Abel. According to Augustine therefore, “The Jews’ complicity in the death of Jesus was foreshadowed by Cain’s slaughter of righteous Abel, but Augustine insisted on following the sorry story through to the end. Just as Cain received a mark that protected him from vengeance for his fratricide, so the Jews had been marked for protection and given a promise of perpetuity [as anti-Christians] to the eschaton.”49

Though much of what is written in this paper deals with the socio-historical inter-ethnic competition that existed between Jew and gentile, the mutual loathing that has existed between Church and Synagogue cannot be explained by naturalistic phenomena alone. “Middlemen minorities” (in Thomas Sowell’s memorable phrase) have existed in civilized societies since time immemorial. Yet the histories of such minorities (who likewise exhibit a high degree of in-group preferences) such as Armenians, Levantine Arabs, Greeks, Chaldeans, and others, has never resulted in the immediate and intense animosity that seems to follow Jews in whatever land and time they exist.

In the Church’s eye the reason for the animosity against them was that the Jews had committed deicide. This was obvious from a textual reading of the Gospels. Worse, they invited God’s retribution on themselves when they exhorted Pilate to crucify Jesus (Matt 27:25). Since the Holocaust, much exegetical analysis by Christian writers of all stripes has been done in order to minimize their collective guilt. Nor should it be forgotten that Jesus Himself forgave His tormentors. From a theological point of view, it has been the Jews as a people who have borne the brunt of this great crime. Even from a purely naturalistic view, it is hard to discard Augustine’s eschatological critique out-of-hand. Though it may offend modern historiography, given the tenacity of its historical recurrence, it is curious, to say the least.

CONCLUSION
Some type of tension always exists between ethnic groups whenever they are in proximity to each other. To believe otherwise is nonsensical. Often, this results in intermittent violence, other times in economic exploitation.

In any event, it cannot be disputed that there was a particular hostility directed towards Jews who tended to dominate the financial trades. Curiously, this dominance was out of proportion to their actual numbers in any given area, which of course, only heightened suspicions against them. We see this today in conspiracy theories, many of which invariably place Jews at the center of them.

Ethnic cohesion certainly plays a role in such dominance; so does the emphasis on education. Indeed, among Ashkenazim (who comprise roughly 85 percent of Jews worldwide), the average mean I.Q. is 10 points higher than it is for white Europeans and 4 points lower than East Asians.50 As mentioned earlier, according to some geneticists, the inbreeding that took place in the Middle Ages and their propensity to peddling and money-lending trades (often forced upon them by local elites) caused those Jews who were more verbally and mentally acute to survive and pass on this increase in mean intelligence to their offspring.51 To be sure, the heritability of intelligence may not be discussed in polite circles, but it has nevertheless been scientifically proven.52

While the genetic component of overall intelligence is controversial (and worthy of exploration on its own), ultimately, this is not the point of this essay. It is instead an attempt to correct the historical record, to invalidate as much as possible the comic-book characterization found in modern literature that the only reason for Jewish suffering at the hands of gentiles is because of Christianity and the annual paschal frenzies supposedly unleashed by readings of the Passion Gospels.

Instead, I have attempted to show that anti-Semitism has well-established ancient and pagan roots that pre-date Christianity by centuries. Likewise, it found a fertile seedbed in Hellenistic civilization, Gnosticism, Islam as well as the Enlightenment. All of these either antedate Christianity (e.g. paganism) or are parallel to it (e.g. Islam). Sometimes they are a reaction to Christianity; examples would include the Enlightenment, Gnosticism and its various offshoots.

It is time to consider the historical relationships between Jews and non-Jews in as unbiased (and honestly historical) way possible. When viewed in this light, to lay all anti-Semitism at the feet of the Church is a manifest injustice and one-sided misreading of history. Worse, it absolves all parties involved of any moral agency on their part.

ENDNOTES
1. Michalopulos, George, “The Hidden Anti-Semitism of Christopher Hitchens and the New Atheists” (www.aoiusa.org/blog/2011/02/).
2. Schoenfeld, Gabriel, The Return of Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004), p 4.
3. Churchill, Sir Winston, “Zionism vs Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People” (1920).
4. According to Moed Kattan 17a, Sanhedrin 57a, 58b (among others), gentiles can be extorted, exploited and even killed if it benefits Jews.
5. Friedman, Saul S, Jews and the American Slave Trade (Routledge; 1998, New York). Jewish dominance in the slave trade was well-known. Most slave ships were Jewish owned and in the auction houses in the Caribbean, slave auctions were closed during the Jewish high holy days.
6. Herzl, Theodor, Der Judenstaat (1896).
7. Weintraub, Stanley, Disraeli: A Biography (Hamish Hamilton, 1993), p 579.
8. Klier, John D, Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82, (Cambridge Press: New York City, 2001)
9. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-racism-was-first-officially-codified-in-15thcentury-spain. Because of forced conversions, the Nuevos Cristianos (“new Christians”) could never shake the taint of being insincere converts, that they were in fact, practicioners of “crypto-Judaism”. This, together with the fact that they often rose to the top ranks of society and the Church, often due to the traditional sense of Jewish ethnic networking, fueled resentment against them. The upshot as far as the indigenous Christians was that only “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre) could absolve one from the taint of crypto-Judaism.
10. Magna Carta.10: “If anyone who has borrowed a sum of money from Jews dies before the debt has been repaid, his heir shall pay no interest on the debt for so long as he remains under age, irrespective of whom he holds his lands. If such a debt falls into the hands of the Crown, it will take nothing except the principal sum specified in the bond.” MC.11: “If a man dies owing money to Jews, his wife may have her dower and pay nothing towards the debt from it. If he leaves children under age, their needs may also be provided for on a scale appropriate to the size of his holding of lands. The debt is to be paid out of the residue, reserving the service due to his feudal lords. Debts owed to persons other than Jews are to be dealt with similarly.”
11. “Goyim are born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world –only to serve the people of Israel.” Yosef, Ovadiah; Saturday Night Sermon, Oct 2010. (Quoted in The Times of Israel, Oct 9, 2010; “Five of Ovadiah Yosef’s Most Controversial Quotations”; Lazar Berman.). Among the most scabrous quotations attributed to Ovadiah: “goyim have no souls”. On the other hand, according to the late Rebbe Menachem Schneerson (Chief Rabbi of the Lubavitcher sect), gentiles only possess souls of varying degrees which come from the “satanic realm”.
12. Langmuir, Gavin I, “Continuities, Discontinuities and Contingencies of the Holocaust”, The Fate of European Jews, 1939-1945: Continuity or Contingency? (ed. Jonathan Frankel; New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1977), p 16.
13. Klier, op cit. See also Andrew Joyce, “Revisiting the 19th-century Russian Pogroms, Part I: Russia’s Jewish Question”, (The Occidental Review, May 8, 2012). In point of fact, the severity of the pogroms themselves was likely overstated, at least this was the opinion of official British investigators who had access to contemporaneous data. Nor were the investigators able to place the blame on the Christians as the aggressors in every case. The first major pogrom in the Russian empire took place in the Crimea (1821). It was an all-out fracas between the local, established Greek community and the newly arrived Jewish one. It was instigated by the local Jews who were taunting the Greeks during a funeral procession for the recently-martyred Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople. It was so violent that the Russian constabulary had to to put it down.
Another such incident (this one in Ireland), the so-called Limerick pogrom, was quietly erased from the history books when the facts of the case came out: an Irish youth had thrown a rock at the local rabbi, hitting him in the head. This was the entirety of this supposed pogrom. In the interim, the “Limerick pogrom” served as a useful vehicle for anti-Irish and anti-Catholic propaganda in the British media, confirming Protestant indictments of Irish Catholic cruelty towards Jews.
14. Owens, Lance, “Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection” (Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Fall 1994.)
15. Patai, Raphael, The Hebrew Goddess (New York: Avon, 1978). According to Patai, the Shekkinah (or God’s presence which resided in the Temple) was a feminine aspect of the Godhead. During the Diaspora, She was replaced by the Matronit, a discreet feminine deity which hovered over the Jewish people during the Sabbath.
16. Joyce, op cit. According to Joyce, “[Aronson’s assertion]…’ that the pogroms were planned or encouraged to one degree or another, by elements within the government itself’, has been dealt a death blow in recent years…most notably…[by] John Doyle Klier.”
17. MacDonald, Kevin, Separation and Its Discontents (Praeger, 1998), pp 45, 48.
18. Memo of Nov 22, 1899, Patai, R; The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl (New York: 1960), Vol 3, p 888.
19. “Dr. Wise Urges Jews to Declare Selves as Such”, New York Herald Tribune, June 13, 1938, p 12.
20. La Peyrere, Isaac, Preadamitae (1655). As quoted in Andre Pichot, Aux origines des théories raciales. De la Bible à Darwin (Flammarion, 2008; pp 52-56).
21. Cochran, G; Hardy, J; Harpending, H; “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence” (Oxford Univ Press: June 17. 2005; Journal of Biosocial Science.)
22. See for example “Idiopathic dystonia among Ashkenazi Jews: Evidence for autosomal dominant inheritance”, (Bressman, S B, et al; Annals of Neurology, vol 26, issue 5, Nov 1980.) See also “Mutations in the Connexin 26 Gene (GJB2) among Ashkenazi Jews with Nonsyndronic Recession Deafness” (Morrell, R J, et al; New England Journal of Medicine, Nov 19:1998.)
23. Among those who held to such nonsensical views were Ashley Montague who qipped that “If you are brought up a Jew, you know that all non-Jews are anti-Semitic…I think it is a good working hypothesis” (Macdonald, Culture of Critique; p 26. This is the other side of the coin explicated by Bruno Bettelheim who asserted that anti-Semitism is an “irrational” and “constantly mutating virus” which afflicts gentiles for no reason at all. (Bettelheim’s reputation has suffered immensely following his death and Montague is viewed as a charlatan in anthropological circles.) Gabriel Schoenfeld likewise exhibits muddled thinking as to causation. For him, anti-Semitism is “a complex historical virus…composed of a variety of strains: ancient and modern, racialist and religious, left-wing and right-wing” (op cit, pp 1-6). This view, needless to say, is unscientific because it is unfalsifiable. For both Bettelheim, Schoenfeld and others like them (e.g. Daniel Goldhagen –see endnote #25 below), there was no self-awareness that Jewish financial mischief, together with aloofness, could have explained gentile resentments.
24. Chaim Weizman, (as quoted by Patai, Raphael, ed; The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl; New York: 1960), Vol 3, p 888.
25. Goldhagen, Daniel J, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996). For Goldhagen, the virus of anti-Semitism is a direct result of the Gospel and Medieval Passion plays and it was “unique” only to the German nation. Despite a brief flurry of positivve publicity, his thesis was roundly condemned by more experienced historians. One of them, Raul Hilburg (who was himself Jewish), was particularly scathing: in his opinion, Goldhagen was “totally wrong about everything”.
26. In his magnum opus, Gibbon described the Jews thusly: “A race of fanatics, whose dire and credulous sympathies seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government but also of humankind.” Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, (p 521). It is important to realize that Gibbon’s critique of the Jews predated the Holocaust by at least two centuries. Nor was it based upon his own encounters with Jews as they were a minuscule minority in Great Britain at the time.
27. Flavius Josephus, Against Appion 2.8.
28. Dio Cassius, Annals, 15.47.
29. Flavius Josephus; The Jewish War. Like most ancient historians, Josephus’ numbers are no doubt exaggerated. For a more in-depth analysis of the Jewish Wars, see Thomas F Madden’s Empires of Trust: How Rome Built –and America is Building–a New World, (New York: Penguin, 2008), pp 251-282.
30. Toaff, Ariel, Passovers of Blood: The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murder, (2011). Toaff, the son of a Rabbi met immediate and vocal criticism because he took some of these child-murders seriously. His book was rapidly withdrawn from circulation.
31. Madden, op cit, p 252.
32. St Irenaeus of Lyon, Against the Heresies.23. Irenaeus was particularly vexed by Marcion’s cavalier attitude towards the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John. While Scripture per se had not been officially canonized by the Church, and there was indeed much disagreement, the theological validity of the synoptic Gospels were uncontroversial to almost all Christian congregations.
33. Lee, Philip J, Against the Protestant Gnostics (Oxford: Oxford Univ, 1987), p 33.
34. Ibid. Late Antiquity was a time of severe sexual imbalances and many men, because of constrained economic circumstances could not marry. Some joined mystery cults in which castration was practiced. Others were beguiled by the misogyny preached by Gnosticism. One such teacher, Saturninus, taught that “Christ descended to the earth to destroy the God of the Jews and ‘to destroy the works of the female, to bring marriage and reproduction to an end, to save men from women’.” Such an attitude was uncritically accepted by many, even within the Church. Lee states that “the gnostic diatribes against the female, sexuality, and procreation are answered sharply [by St Paul] in 1 Timothy. [Moreover] the author is aware that some are leaving the Church because of [these] false doctrines…”, pp 18-19.
35. Ibid, pp 101-114.
36. “A German official warned Jews against wearing the kippah. After backlash, he urged all Germans to put them on in support”. Noack, Rick, The Washington Post, May 28, 2019.
37. Schoenfeld, “…today, the most vicious ideas about Jews are primarily voiced not by downtrodden and disenfranchised fringe elements of society but by its most successful, educated and “progressive” members.” op cit, p 3.
38. Ibid, p 4.
39. Ibid, p 4.
40. https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/02/22/baruch-spinoza-was-expelled-from-the-jewish-community-because-he-questioned-the-authenticity-of-the-torah/
41. Marx, Karl, “On the Jewish Question”, (Paris: 1844). Marx’s anti-Semitism was so internalized that in his private letters, he referred to a certain Herr Bamberger as “jew Bamberger” and his son as “little jew Bamberger”. He referred to Ferdinand Lassalle as “a Jewish nigger”. His racism extended to Mexicans whom he considered to be “lazy” and to blacks whom he thought were “closer to the animals” than whites.
42. Dostoyevski, Fyodor, Diary of a Writer (published in installments, 1873-1881). Dostoyevski’s thesis is that the Church must have a monopoly on faith in Russia in order for a properly ordered society to function since, according to him, “Christ lives in the Orthodox Church alone”.
43. Nietzsche, Frederick, The Twilight of the Idols, “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident…Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out if, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.”
44. https://www.britannica.com/event/Doctors-Plot. Eventually, the planned pogrom of Soviet Jewry was derailed because of Stalin’s death.
45. Hezser, Catherine, Jewish Slavery in Antiquity  (Oxford, 2005).
46. Leithart, Peter J, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom, (Downer’s Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2010), p 134.
47. Chrysostom, St John, Against the Jews.5.
48. Lee, Op cit, p 134.
49. Lee, Ibid, p 135.
50. Lynn, Richard, Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis (Washington Summit Publishers: 2006).
51. Cochran, G; Harpending, H; “A History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (Journal of Biological Science: 2006, Sept 38, pp 659-93).
52. Herrenstein, Richard J; Murray, Charles; The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1994). See also Jensen, A R; “The Theory of Intelligence and its measurement” (Berkeley: Univ of Calif: 2011.) See also “Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability” Laster, J, et al (www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/34/htm).