Antisemitism

Kenneth W. Phifer


	Several months ago (September 22, 1996) I preached a sermon about the events of 
June 22, 1996, the day the Ku Klux Klan came to Ann Arbor.  In that sermon I pointed 
out that the heart of the Klan’s philosophy is antisemitism.  Racism is the fundamental 
category of the Klan’s thinking, but the grounding of their ideas is found in a wider 
religious notion of the Jews as devils with immense power to control and use various 
people of color and homosexuals for their own purposes.

	Richard Butler of Aryan Nations calls black, brown, and yellow peoples the 
“pawns” of Jews.  Louis Beam of the Texas Knights of the KKK suggests that a Jewish-
led conspiracy, using Blacks, Hispanics, and other ethnic and religious minorities as tools 
for their schemes, actually controls the United States and much of the rest of the world.  
Dave Holland of the Southern White Knights asserts that Blacks and others “would go 
nowhere” without Jewish control and leadership.

	Anitsemitism is the heart of the Klan, the Neo-Nazis, the militias, and other similar 
groups, pumping hatred through the veins of their members, hatred for anyone not a White 
Christian.

	Antisemitism is also found in Pat Robertson’s book The New World Order and in 
many of his speeches since.  It is found in various rituals and sacred texts of the Christian 
faith still used in most churches.  It is found in the attitude of the former Chief Editor of 
the Dead Sea Scrolls who believes that Judaism should disappear and Jews convert to 
Christianity.

	It is found in the graffiti that is painted on synagogues around the country and in 
the bombings of Jewish buildings around the world.  It is found in the jokes that still use 
stereotypical Jewish characters in vicious ways.  It is found in the writings of the left-wing 
radical Noam Chomsky and in the reactionary right-wing writings of Joseph Sobran.  It is 
now found on the world wide web where antisemites have set up web sites to promulgate 
their hatred.

	Antisemitism is the oldest and most deeply embedded form of hatred in western 
culture.

	The ultimate expression of this hatred was the Holocaust, the deliberate murder of 
Jews because they were Jews.  The slaughter of Jewish men, women, girls, boys, and 
infants was the highest priority of the Nazis.

	Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, in his remarkable book of last spring, Hitler’s Willing 
Executioners:  Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, lays out a compelling case supported 
by an enormous body of evidence that Hitler did not have to hide what he was doing, did 
not have to deceive his own people in his aims, did not have to seduce or lure the German 
people into acts of brutality and murder against Jews.  For an overwhelming proportion of 
the German people--and of many peoples in other lands as well--the destruction of Jews 
was viewed as acceptable, or desirable, or as a duty to fulfill.  Many were eager to 
participate in these acts of “cleansing.”  Goldhagen makes the case that German society 
had been riddled with antisemitism for so long that all Hitler really had to do was declare 
the Jews “fair game” for a process to be set in motion that led eventually to massive death.

	The Holocaust shows us in the starkest possible way what the end point of human 
conflict and human aggression is:  the extermination of those we oppose.

	How did this happen?

	How did antisemitism come to be the guiding philosophy of a whole society?

	Why does antisemitism continue today?

	Why do some people hate Jews and Judaism?

	Why is there antisemitism?

	Some suggest that it is the fault of Jews themselves.  This jealous god of theirs 
demands loyalty to the Torah which often necessitates Jewish separation from others, a 
separation, so this argument goes, that inevitably breeds mistrust and hostility.

	Blaming Jews for antisemitism, though, is both an inadequate and an immoral 
explanation.  It fails to account for the peaceful and harmonious existence of Jews in 
places and in times like ancient Babylonia, the China of several thousand years ago, Spain 
in the medieval period, and the Islamic world for much of Muslim history.

	Furthermore, even if antisemitism were found in every age and in every place 
where there are Jews, to say this evil is the fault of the Jews themselves would explain 
only the victims not the perpetrators.  Indeed it would excuse those who commit the 
wickedness, a morally untenable position.

	Others have argued that antisemitism is traceable to pagan elements still part of 
our western culture.  The evidence for this is found largely in the pre-Christian writings 
quoted by Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire.  But Voltaire and many of his 
contemporaries were already anti-Jewish and chose to cite in their work only those ancient 
writers such as Cicero and Tacitus and Seneca who had also been hostile to Judaism and 
its peoples.

	A full review of the attitudes and actions of Greeks and Romans and others in the 
centuries before Christianity gained political power shows clearly that while some 
antagonism against Jews existed it was of a social or political nature.  It was not 
widespread at any time, and it was always mixed with a large measure of appreciation and 
respect for Jewish ideas, customs, and people.  Ernest Abel, in his study of pagan 
influence on modern antisemitism, concluded that it was minimal and of little consequence 
beside other factors.

	Another line of argument suggests that antisemitism is related only to particular 
historical circumstances.  Antisemitism, that is, appears because of certain economic or 
social factors, and then disappears when these factors are no longer of importance.

	Hannah Arendt is most notable for her defense of this notion.  She argued that 
conditions in the nineteenth century were responsible for the antisemitism that erupted into 
Nazism.  The economic role of the Jew in the nation state at that time accounts for the 
hatred that developed against them.  Like Jews in medieval Europe, forced by kings and 
princes into the role of money lender, Jews in the nineteenth century found themselves 
forced into a similar role.  Those whose fortunes sank with the changes in the economy 
blamed Jews for their involvement in money management.

	One problem with this argument is simply that Jews were not involved in financial 
affairs.  A small minority in every European country, in none did Jews control what 
happened economically.  Something else must account for people selecting out Jews as 
being at fault.

	Furthermore, Arendt and others do not seems to take into account the rise in this 
same century of previously stated libels of Jews in a religious sense.  There was the libel 
that Jews used the blood of a Christian child in their Passover rituals and the libel of 
misquoted statements from the Talmud.  Nor do these people account for the publication 
and popularity in Russia in 1905 of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purports to 
tell the tale of a Jewish world-wide conspiracy to suppress Christians and other Gentiles.  
Nor does such a purely contextual explanation make sense of the continuing popularity of 
this tract, not least in Arab countries, in recent decades, often in places where Jewish 
populations have been either tiny or non-existent and no Jew was in a position of financial 
control.

	There are also those who believe that antisemitism is grounded in the 
psychological need of having someone to blame.  The need for an outcast group that can 
be faulted for all troubles personal and communal is so great in some people that some 
minority people has to be picked on.  Jews have been good candidates throughout the past 
two thousand years and, given their small numbers, remain so.

	Judith Taylor Gold has written recently of a variation on this psychological 
explanation.  She suggests that we live with a variety of psychic myths in our heads that 
operate at sub-conscious levels.  In the western world, for a variety of complex historical 
reasons, these myths have come to feature the Jew as the monster figure.

	Gold points out that in Christian terms Jesus is both God and man.  As the heir of 
classical fertility myth deities, Jesus the God is involved in an incestuous relationship with 
Mary his divine mother, thereby making the earth fruitful.  As a man, of course, this incest 
is absolutely forbidden.  Nonetheless psychologically and ritually it occurs and it needs to 
occur.  We must insure that the mysterious process of growth takes place.  Whatever we 
know scientifically, mythically and psychically we still call upon our old deities and their 
ways.

	Christianity, by taking over the fertility myths of the pagan world, brought a 
psychic conflict into the mind of every Christian.  This conflict could be resolved by loving 
the Jesus who was Christ and hating the Jesus who was a Jew, worshipping divine incest 
and loathing its human incarnation.  Antisemitism is the expression of this hatred against 
the monster figure who is Jesus the Jew, who is every Jew from the beginning of time till 
every Jew is destroyed.  Thus do we resolve an inner turmoil by practicing antisemitism.

	Gold’s book, Monsters and Madonnas:  The Roots of Christian Anti-Semitism, is 
fascinating.  Unlike Godhagen’s book, though, it does not because it cannot deal with 
concrete historical facts.  It is intelligent but highly speculative, and thus not for me 
compelling as an explanation of antisemitism.

	Two explanations are compelling.  One is the roots of antisemitism in Christianity.  
The other is the development of racial hatred in the nineteenth century.

	For the better part of Christian history Jews have been portrayed by Christians as 
the devil incarnated on the earth.

	In the Gospel of John it is said that Jews sought to kill the Christ.  In the book of 
Revelation Jews are described as being “the synagogue of Satan.”  St. Gregory of Nyssa 
called Jews “haters of God” and Saint John of Chrysostom said that “the soul of the Jews 
is the domicile of the Devil.”  Chaucer wrote of “cursed Jews” and Martin Luther of the 
“damned, rejected race of Jews.”

	In our own century Karl Barth talked in the 1930’s of the wandering Jew as 
testimony that “God must surely hate evil and punish sin.”  The head of the largest 
Protestant denomination in America said a few years ago that “God does not hear the 
prayer of a Jew.”  The Christian image of the Jew has been a fearsomely pejorative image 
that has wreaked dreadful misery upon the Jewish people.

	Christian antisemitism has its roots in the internal quarrel of a few Jewish people 
about Jesus.  Most Jews in the first century never heard of Jesus.  The few who did meet 
or hear of him divided into a handful of those who came to believe he was a special 
emissary of God, perhaps even the messiah, and the much larger number who regarded 
him as just one more teacher, of which there were many in Jewish history.

	Two things changed the tenor of the quarrel.  One was the work of Paul, a 
Diasporan Jew who started the missionary movement to non-Jews in the Mediterranean 
world and was immensely successful.  This had the effect of further separating the new 
Jesus sect from Judaism.

	The second event made that separation final.  This was the destruction of the 
Temple and the city of Jerusalem in the year 70.  The Jesus followers interpreted this event 
as a sign from God that Torah-faithful Jews were wrong, that the old Judaism of Temple 
worship was now a thing of the past, and that Jesus’ messiahship was confirmed.

	The writing of Gospels about Jesus followed this traumatic event.  These Gospels 
furthered the distinction between Jews and Jewish or Gentile Christians.  Jews became the 
enemy in the sacred writings of the Christian sect.  When Jews are mentioned in the New 
Testament, almost that mention is either negative or descriptively neutral.  Rarely are Jews 
spoken of in a positive way.

	These writings set the tone for what was to follow, namely a struggle over the next 
several hundred years between two religious peoples who laid claim to many of the same 
roots:  a Holy Book called Tanakh by Jews and Old Testament by Christians, a feeling of 
being in a covenant relationship with God, a sense of chosenness by the Almighty, the 
symbol messiah for the saving force in history, and much else.

	Jews saw these elements as the continuation of a history that began with Abraham, 
was made concrete in Moses and the giving of the Law at Sinai, and pointed towards the 
future coming of a messiah who would like the legendary King David.

	Christians read these symbols as pointing to the need for God Himself to intervene 
in history as the only means by which humanity could be rescued from sinfulness.  Jews, 
said Christians, had failed their calling, their covenant, their chosenness, so God became 
human in Jesus to save us all.

	Christians pressed their case by what Jules Isaac would later call the “teaching of 
contempt.”  Christians wrongly claimed that Jews were degenerate, that God dispersed 
them for rejecting Jesus as messiah, and that Jews were deicides, Christ-killers.

	These are false and foolish and highly malevolent charges that have brought untold 
misery to the Jewish people.  In point of fact, the era of Jesus was one of the most creative 
periods in Jewish history, Jews had been dispersed and had dispersed themselves for 700 
years before Jesus, and Romans not Jews killed the Galilean.  This is the one reasonably 
sure historical fact that we know about him.

	These charges were of rhetorical interest until Christianity gained state power 
permanently in the late fourth century.  Then they became and have remained immensely 
dangerous.

	In the course of time Christians, using the justification of these three themes 
imposed upon Jews every single decree of oppression and misery--and more!--that the 
Nazis were later to visit upon them with the sole exception of extermination.  Among 
others, these included forced exile, the wearing of a yellow Star of David, the denial of 
work, ghettoization, casual brutality without recourse to law, the destruction of 
synagogues without allowance for repair or rebuilding, children taken from parents to be 
raised as Christians, required attendance at Christian sermons of conversionary content.

	These tactics of assault upon Jews and Jewish life continued until the nineteenths 
century and the time of so-called emancipation.  They were grounded in one basic fact:  
Jewish rejection of Christianity undermined Christian faith in the rightness of its claim to 
be the inheritor of Judaism.  That is why until just a few decades ago every Christian 
denomination had a mission to the Jews.  A not insignificant number still do.

	Christianity demonized Jews.  They equated Jews with the devil, with absolute 
evil.  They identified Jews as the scapegoat par excellence in western culture.

	When religious influence began to wane during the Enlightenment, when Napoleon 
in the early nineteenth century offered Jews the change to leave the ghetto and become 
citizens of France, when emancipation began to happen slowly in other countries 
throughout the nineteenth century, the image of the Jew as the evil one did not disappear.  
More than 1400 years of teaching contempt for a people, embedding this contempt in 
doctrines, rituals, laws, customs, and languages had made of the Jew something alien to 
European societies.  It was common even among friends of Jews and sometimes among 
Jews themselves to speak of “the Jewish problem.”

	The solution most commonly proposed was the elimination of Jews as Jews, by 
conversion to Christianity--the old solution--but even more in this new time by 
assimilation into the larger society after abandoning the Jewish identity.  Some Jews 
converted--the Mendelsohns, Heinrich Heine, the Marx family--and some assimilated--
Benjamin Disraeli, for example.  But more were what they were, Jews with Jewish beliefs 
and Jewish ways.  This was just not acceptable to many Europeans.  With the 
development of the new theories of race, a way was found to build on Christian hatred of 
Jews.  It proved to be even more dangerous for Jews than Christianity had been.

	The new racialist ideas were developed out of theories of language affinities.  A 
British administrator in colonial India in the late eighteenth century first noticed the 
closeness of the Sanskrit language with Latin and Greek.  Later scholars would see ties to 
Sanskrit in Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic and other languages.

	Early in the nineteenth century a German orientalist named Lassen propounded a 
theory of an original language from which these languages had derived.  He called this 
original language Indo-Germanic.  He argued without evidence to support his thesis that 
all the speakers of this family of languages were of one race.  He compared this race to an 
inferior race called Semites who, in his words, “do not possess the harmonious equilibrium 
between all powers of the intellect which characterize the Indo-Germans.”  Indo-Germans 
were also and often called Aryans.

	Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist, coined the term anti-Semite in 1879 to express 
the opposition of Aryan to Semite, to Jew.

	A few years later the Frenchman Eduouard Drumont made the new racial 
antisemitism popular with his book La France Juive.  It sold 140,000 copies the first year 
and in ten years went through 140 editions.  Drumont espoused the notion of a Jewish 
conspiracy to take over the world.  Jews were an alien race, a foreign body introduced 
into the French bloodstream--biological language that Hitler was later to use so 
effectively.  Drumont believed that all economic woes could be traced to Jewish influence.  
He urged that Jews be gotten rid of as the necessary first step to social health.

	Racial ideas, supported by learned anthropologists and sociologists and 
philosophers and linguists, dovetailed with the needs of the new nation states to find an 
organizing principle around which to build loyalty to the state.  Religion was no longer 
possible as such a tool, as it had been for long centuries of the Christian era.  Race, the 
concept of what in Germany is called the Volk, replaced religion as the bedrock 
identifying factor of group identity, our particular form of humanity.

	To most people in Europe Jews were not and could not be part of the race.  They 
were a race apart, inferior, peculiar, unassimilable as Jews, a problem for every country.  
Openly antisemitic political parties were formed in several countries, notably Germany, 
Austria, and France.  Antisemitic publications grew in popularity in western Europe.  The 
notion of something ineradicable and bad about Jewishness hovered just below the surface 
of the mind in even the most decent and respectable Europeans.

	This was a worse condition for Jews than Christianity had imposed upon them.  
Most of the time Christians had permitted conversion to erase the taint of being Jewish.  In 
other words, it was not so much Jews as Judaism that was bad.  With racial antisemitism, 
though, there was nothing to be done.  Once a Jew, always a Jew.  The taint was in the 
blood.

	That was the Nazi standard.  So secular Jews and Jews who were Christians and 
persons with only one-eighth Jewish heritage had to be eliminated.

	Racial antisemitism took over from Christian antisemitism and made the whole 
phenomenon more pernicious and brutal.  Six million human beings died as a result.

	Those deaths and the way in which they occurred have changed things.

	One change is that in the brief window of compassion for the Jewish people at 
their losses, a new State of Israel was formed.  There is now after 2000 years of longing a 
homeland where Jews can go when others do not want them.  Jews have come literally 
from all over the world to live in the one place where antisemitism is impossible.  Like all 
states, the Jewish state is flawed.  But it is there, That fact is of overriding importance.

	A second change is that many Christian individuals and groups have begun to re-
evaluate their relationship to Jews.  Roman Catholics and Lutherans in particular have 
taken bold steps to re-think traditional dogmas and re-cast certain rituals.  Some, like the 
Anglican William Nicholls, have even proposed re-shaping the New Testament to 
eliminate its antisemitic passages.  Many of the denominations have either re-interpreted or 
abandoned their missions to the Jews.  Numerous scholars have set forth in frank 
description what Christianity has done to Jews and Judaism, and looked for ways of re-
stating theology that will include in positive and equitable ways both the elder and the 
younger sibling.

	Finally, there has been a rejection of the simplistic categories of race that were so 
popular in the nineteenth century.  There is a new awareness of how soft a category race is 
with its slippery, vague boundaries.  All human groups are known to be of mixed genetic 
origin.  We are, as one biologist put it, always “drifting genetically.”  Race classifications 
today are used for geographically clustered groups distinguished by such features as blood 
groups, blood factors like normal or abnormal red pigments, and the excretion of amino 
acids in urine.  No evidence exists to establish a link between any particular race, however 
defined, and behavior or intelligence.

	Those who hold fast to antisemitic ideology--members of the Klan and the militias 
and the Neo-Nazis and individuals here and there innocently or with malice aforethought--
tend to be people who hold deeply reactionary religious views.  Some are Muslim.  Most 
are Christian.  To their Islamic or Christian faith they have added the weight of the now 
discredited racial theories, the historical grab-bag of legend and myth unrelated to real 
Jewish people, and often their own pain at feeling not a part of society and needing 
desperately to blame someone for their misfortune.

	As much sadness as I often feel for those caught up in these foolish theories, I do 
not for one minute forget the tremendous danger they represent.  In my lifetime people 
holding antisemitic views at the core of their being ruled a major European state and for a 
time held many countries under their control.  

	I believe that we must repudiate all antisemitic writings, speech, symbols, and 
actions in whatever guise they may appear.

	I believe that as moral people we have a responsibility to repudiate the false barrier 
of race.

	We have a responsibility to celebrate the unique, beautiful peoples who have 
formed the wildly variant, wondrously interesting, richly challenging cultures of the world.

	We have a responsibility to repudiate the hideous teaching of contempt and the 
texts and doctrines upon which it is based.  

	We have a responsibility to bring out the inspiring moral message of Christianity to 
love one another, love our neighbor as ourself, love even our enemies.

	Antisemitism must be opposed because antisemitism is hatred.  Hatred cannot 
sustain us, only destroy us.

	To oppose antisemitism we must understand its deep roots in our religious and 
secular culture.  We must cut out these roots.

	We need to plant new seeds of love and trust, of respect and appreciation, or 
learning and wisdom.  The flowering of these seeds will serve not only Jews but all of 
humanity well.

	Bibliography

1.  Morris Dees with James Corcoran, Gathering Storm:  America’s Militia Threat, Harper
     Collins, 1996.

2.  Raphael S. Ezekiel, The Racist Mind:  Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansmen,
     Viking, 1995.

3.  Judith Taylor Gold, Monsters and Madonnas:  The Roots of Christian Anti-Semitism, 
    New Amsterdam, 1988.

4.  Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners:  Ordinary Germans and the 
    Holocaust, Alfred A. Kropf, 1996.

5.  William Nicholls, Christian Antisemitism:  A History of Hate, Jason Aronson Inc.,
     1993.

Copyright 1997, Rev. Kenneth W. Phifer