Anti-Judaism

The term "anti-Jewish" is often colloquially used interchangeably with terms such as "antisemitic", "anti-Hebrew", or "anti-Judaism". Although these designations share a commonality—hatred towards a group of people—each term encompasses unique ideologies and prejudices. Jeanne Favret-Saada, author of the 2014 HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory article "A Fuzzy Distinction: Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism," explains the ways in which historians often conflate anti-Judaism and antisemitism, failing to distinguish between Christian anti-Judaism and Nazi antisemitism. Favret-Saada argues that the combination of these distinct ideologies diminishes the Christian role in the evolution from anti-Judaism to antisemitism. Anti-Judaism encapsulates those who oppose the Jewish religion and religious system. The term refers to Christian animosity towards Judaism as a religion. Anti-Judaism historically included attempts to convert Jews to Christianity. In contrast, the term "antisemitic" is more modern and secular term, categorizing Jews as a racial or ethnic group. Antisemites hate and target Jews for their ethnic Jewish identity rather than religious beliefs. ==Pre-Christian Roman Empire==

In Ancient Rome, religion was an integral part of the civil government. Beginning with the Roman Senate's declaration of the divinity of Julius Caesar on 1 January 42 BCE, some emperors were proclaimed gods on Earth and demanded to be worshiped accordingly throughout the Roman Empire. This created religious difficulties for those Jews, who were monotheists and adhered strictly to Jewish law, and worshipers of Mithras, Sabazius and early Christians. At the time of Jesus's ministry, the Jews of the Roman Empire were a respected and privileged minority whose influence was enhanced by a relatively high level of literacy. The Jews were granted a number of concessions by the Romans, including the right to observe Shabbat and to substitute prayers for the emperor in place of participation in the imperial cult. They had been exempted from military service on the Sabbath, for example. Julius Caesar, who never forgot the debt he owed to Antipater the Idumaean for playing a decisive role in the Siege of Alexandria (thereby saving his life and career), was supportive of Jews, allowing them uniquely a right to assembly and to collect funds for Jerusalem. His enmity toward Pompey, who had conquered Jerusalem and defiled the Holy of Holies, enhanced his status among Roman Jewish leadership, as he ordered the reconstruction of the walls of Jerusalem after the destruction wrought by Pompey. He may also have cultivated Jews as clients to buttress his position in the East against the latter. At times, he treated High Priest of Israel Hyrcanus II on equal terms by writing to him as Rome's pontifex maximus. Jews reacted to Julius Caesar's assassination by mourning him publicly in Rome. These confrontations did cause temporary erosions in the status of the Jews in the empire. Reversals in the relationship were temporary and did not have a lasting impact. Consul Titus Flavius Clemens was put to death in 95 CE for "living a Jewish life" or "drifting into Jewish ways", an accusation also frequently made against Early Christians, and which may well have been related to the administration of the Jewish tax under Domitian. The Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its state religion with the Edict of Thessalonica on 27 February 380. ==Christian anti-Judaism==

Early Christianity and the Judaizers Christianity originated as a sect of Judaism. It was seen as such by the Jewish early Christians, as well as Jews in general. The wider Roman administration most likely would not have understood any distinction. Historians debate whether or not the Roman government distinguished between adherents of Christianity and Judaism before 96 CE, when Christians successfully petitioned Nerva to exempt them from the tax levied specifically on Roman Jews (the ) on the basis that they (i.e., Christians) were not Jews. From then on, practising Jews paid the tax while Christians did not. Christianity is based on Jewish monotheism and includes the Hebrew Bible in its canon as the Old Testament (the development of which generally relied on the Septuagint and Jewish Aramaic ), as well as Jewish liturgy and the Seven Laws of Noah. The main distinction of the early Christian community from its Jewish roots was the belief that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, as in the Confession of Peter, but that in itself would not have severed the Jewish connection. Another point of divergence was the questioning by Christians of the continuing applicability of the Law of Moses (i.e., the Mosaic Law of the Torah), though the Apostolic Decree of the Apostolic Age of Christianity appears to parallel the Noahide Law of Judaism. The two issues came to be linked in a theological discussion within the Christian community as to whether the coming of the Messiah—in either first or future second coming—annulled some or all of the law given in the Hebrew Bible in what came to be called the New Covenant. The circumcision controversy in early Christianity was probably the second issue—after that of Jesus being or not being the Jewish messiah—for which Christian theological argumentation grew into anti-Judaism, with those who argued that Jewish law continued to be applicable being labelled Judaizers (Galatians 2:14)—a pejorative—and Pharisees (e.g., Acts 15:5 and Matthew 3:7). In the NRSVUE translation of the New Testament, among others, these individuals are sometimes termed "scribes." The teachings of Paul (), whose letters comprise much of the New Testament demonstrate a "long battle against Judaizing." The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE would lead Christians to "doubt the efficacy of the ancient law", though Ebionism would linger on until the 5th century. However, Marcion of Sinope, who advocated rejecting the entirety of Judaic influence on the Christian faith, would be excommunicated by the Church in Rome in 144 CE. Anti-Judaic polemic Anti-Judaic works of this period include De Adversus Iudeaos by Tertullian, Octavius by Minucius Felix, De Catholicae Ecclesiae Unitate by Cyprian of Carthage, and Instructiones Adversus Gentium Deos by Lactantius. The traditional hypothesis holds that the anti-Judaism of these early Fathers of the Church "were inherited from the Christian tradition of biblical exegesis" though a second hypothesis holds that early Christian anti-Judaism was inherited from the pagan world. Miriam S. Taylor argues that theological Christian anti-Judaism "emerge[d] from the Church's efforts to resolve the contradictions inherent in its simultaneous appropriation and rejection of different elements of the Jewish tradition." Modern scholars believe that Judaism may have been a missionary religion in the early centuries of the Common Era, converting so-called proselytes, and thus competition for the religious loyalties of gentiles drove anti-Judaism. The debate and dialogue moved from polemic to bitter verbal and written attacks one against the other. However, since the last decades of the 20th century, the view that a proselytizing struggle between turn-of-the-era Judaism and early Christianity may have been the main generator of anti-Jewish attitudes among early gentile believers in Jesus is eroding. Christian scholar and Anglican Church in North America deacon Scot McKnight revisited the traditional claims about Jewish proselytizing in a 1991 book and concluded that active Jewish proselytizing was a later apologetic construct that does not reflect the reality of first-century Judaism. A statement about whether early Christian written texts, referred to as () in tractate Shabbat 116a of the Talmud, could be left to burn in a fire on Shabbat is attributed to Rabbi Tarfon (). Although a disputed interpretation, scholars Daniel Boyarin, Kuhn, Maier, and Paget, and Friedlander and Pearson identify said scrolls with the Christian Gospels: "The Gospels must be burned for paganism is not as dangerous to the Jewish faith as Jewish Christian sects." The anonymous Letter to Diognetus was the earliest apologetic work in the early Church to address Judaism. Justin Martyr () wrote the apologetic Dialogue with Trypho, a polemical pseudo-debate that outlines the justifications Christianity offers for the messiahship of Jesus by using the Hebrew Bible, contrasted with counter-arguments from a fictionalized version of Rabbi Tarfon. "For centuries defenders of Christ and the enemies of the Jews employed no other method" than these apologetics, argued Bernard Lazare. Although Roman emperor Hadrian was an "enemy of the synagogue", the reign of Antoninus Pius began a period of Roman benevolence toward the Judaism and Jews within the empire. Meanwhile, imperial hostility toward Christianity continued to crystallize; after Decius, the empire was at war with it. An unequal power relationship between Jews and Christians in the context of the Greco-Roman world generated anti-Jewish feelings among the early Christians. Feelings of mutual hatred arose, driven in part by Judaism's legality in the Roman Empire. From Constantine to the 8th century When Constantine and Licinius were issuing the Edict of Milan, the influence of Judaism was fading in the Land of Israel (in favor of Christianity) and seeing a rebirth outside the Roman Empire in Babylonia. Jews were barred from Jerusalem except on the anniversary of the Second Temple's destruction (Tisha B'Av) and then only after paying a special tax (probably the Fiscus Judaicus) in silver. Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire (see Christendom), and in 351 the Jews of Palestine revolted against Constantine's son in the Jewish revolt against Constantius Gallus. From the middle of the 5th century, apologetics ceased with Cyril of Alexandria. This form of anti-Judaism had proven futile and often served to strengthen Jewish faith. While Gregory of Nyssa merely reproaches Jews as infidels, other teachers are more vehement. While Justin's Dialogue is a philosophical treatise, John's homilies Against the Jews are a more informal and rhetorically forceful set of sermons preached in church. Delivered while Chrysostom was still a priest in Antioch, his homilies deliver a scathing critique of Jewish religious and civil life, warning Christians not to have any contact with Judaism or the synagogue and to keep away from their festivals. "There are legions of theologians, historians and writers who write about the Jews the same as Chrysostom: Epiphanius, Diodorus of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyprus, Cosmas Indicopleustes, Athanasius the Sinaite among the Greeks; Hilarius of Poitiers, Prudentius, Paulus Orosius, Sulpicius Severus, Gennadius, Venantius Fortunatus, Isidore of Seville, among the Latins." From the 4th to 7th centuries, while the bishops opposed Judaism in writing, the Empire enacted a variety of civil laws against Jews, such as forbidding them from holding public office, and an oppressive curial tax. Soon thereafter, 634, the Muslim conquests began, during which many Jews initially rose up again against their Byzantine rulers. The pattern in which Jews were relatively free under pagan rulers until the Christian conversion of the leadership, as seen with Constantine, would be repeated in the lands beyond the now-collapsed Roman Empire. Sigismund of Burgundy enacted laws against Jews after coming to the throne after his conversion in 514; likewise after the conversion of Reccared, king of the Visigoths in 589, which would have lasting effect when codified by Reccesuinth in the Visigothic Code of Law. This code inspired Jews to aid Tariq ibn-Ziyad (a Muslim) in his overthrow of Roderick, and under the Moors (also Muslims), Jews regained their usurped religious freedoms. which culminated in the 13th century establishment of the Inquisition by Pope Innocent III. In Italy and later Poland and Germany, John of Capistrano stirred up the poor against the usury of the Jews; Bernardinus of Feltre, aided by the practical notion of establishing mont-de-piétés, called for the expulsion of Jews all over Italy and Tyrol and caused the massacre of the Jews at Trent. Kings, nobles, and bishops discouraged this behavior, protecting Jews from the monk Radulphe in Germany and countering the preachings of Bernardinus in Italy. The Church kept to its theological anti-Judaism and, favoring the mighty and rich, was careful not to encourage the passions of the people. In contrast, Roland Bainton, noted church historian and Luther biographer, wrote "One could wish that Luther had died before ever this tract was written. His position was entirely religious and in no respect racial". Peter Martyr Vermigli, a shaper of Reformed Protestantism, took pains to maintain the contradiction, going back to Paul of Tarsus, of Jews being both enemy and friend, writing: "The Jews are not odious to God for the very reason they are Jews; for how could this have happened since they were embellished with so many great gifts...."{{cite book ==Scholarly analyses and contrasts==

"The terms 'anti-Judaism' (the Christian aversion toward the Jewish religion) and 'antisemitism' (aversion toward the Jews as a racial or ethnic group) are omnipresent in the controversies over the churches' responsibility with regard to the extermination of the Jews" and "since 1945, most of the works on 'anti-Semitism' have contrasted this term with 'anti-Judaism'". Thus Langmuir considers the labelling of Jews as 'Christ-killers' as anti-Judaic; accusations of well-poisoning, on the other hand, he regards as antisemitic. The blood libel is another example of antisemitism, though it is based in distorted notions of Judaism. • David Nirenberg, in his 2013 book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition "has produced a sweeping and exhilarating new intellectual history of Western thought, including Islam, that argues that hostility to Judaism is at the heart of Western culture, not incidental to it and not the product of economic crisis, historical tension, or political tendencies. Rather it is a formative element of our culture, the marrow of its bones, and one of the critical tools of self-definition. From Ptolemaic Egypt to Early Christianity, from the Spanish Inquisition and Catholic Middle Ages to the Protestant Reformation, from the Enlightenment to modernity, from revolutionary politics to fascism, whenever the West has wanted to define what it is not, whenever it has tried to define and name its deepest fears and aversions — Judaism is the name and concept that came most easily to mind", e.g., tracking the allegation of Jewish impiety toward the gods and misanthropy, a core element of anti-Judaism in the version formulated by Manetho throughout history to the current day, • Similarly, in Anna Bikont's investigation of "the massacre of Jews in wartime Jedwabne, Poland" in The Crime and the Silence, she recognizes the presence of antisemitism as a result of religious influence that is blurred with anti-Judaism characteristics. Bikont's explanation of life in Poland as a Jew post World War I reveals how it is often difficult to distinguish between anti-Judaism and antisemitism during this time of growing anti-Judaic ideology. Poles and Jews "lived separate lives and spoke different languages" which prevented Jews from fully assimilating into Poland culture. Jewish religious culture remained present and Jew's "social and cultural life ran on a separate track" compared to Poles. These events are classified as antisemitic because of the change from increase of hostility and exclusion. The delusional perception of Jews escalated in 1933 when there was a "[revolution that] swept up the whole town... 'Shooting, windows broken, shutters closed, women shrieking, running home." Bikont believes that these violent aggressions towards Jews are considered acts of antisemitism because they are performed as revolutionary acts that were a part of the National Party's agenda. Much of the difference between defining anti-Judaism from antisemitism relies on the source of influence for beliefs and actions against Jews. Once Jews were viewed as the other from Poles, the discrimination transformed from ideology of religion to race which are shown through acts of violence. ==Islamic anti-Judaism==

Early Islam Since antiquity, Jews, known to the Arabs as Yahud, had lived in various parts of the Arabian peninsula and were by the time of Muhammad highly assimilated into Arab society. Though still viewed as a separate groups, Arabs would have been familiar with Jews and their religious practices, ideas and some Arabs accepted Judaism. According to Muhammad, the Jewish (and Christian) prophets taught all the same religion from Abraham onwards, but there is a gradual evolution towards the final and perfect dogmas of Islam which supposedly clarify all previous doubts. Muhammad seems to have initially not have seen any distinction between his notions and those of the Jews and was offended by the opposition of the Jews to his claims of Prophetic finality and perfection. The Quran reflects this ambivalence towards Judaism and while it recognises a certain ethnic kinship and cultural affinity, the Quran contains many anti-Jewish pronouncements. A prominent place in the Quranic polemic against the Jews is therefore given to the conception of the religion of Abraham. Whereas Judaism derives from the Mosaic law and Christianity from the teachings of Jesus, Islam goes allegedly back to Abraham who was the progenitor or pristine, undistorted monotheism. The Quran presents Muslims as neither Jews nor Christians but as followers of Abraham who was in a physical sense the father of both the Jews and the Arabs and lived before the revelation of the Torah. In order to show that the religion which is practised by the Jews is not the pure religion that was practised by Abraham, the Quran mentions the incident in which the Israelites worshipped the Golden calf, in order to argue that Jews do not believe in the part of the revelation that was given to them. The term Yahud is mostly negatively connotated and associated with interconfessional strive and rivalry. Islamic texts also accused the Jews of hostility, though it is portrayed as ineffectual: the Jews disobey Moses, and are quelled; they try to crucify Jesus, and fail; the Jews oppose Mohammed, but they are overcome and punished by expulsion, enslavement or death. The settlement made with the Jews after the battle of Khaybar gave the precedent for the further treatment of non-Muslim minorities under Muslim rule. According to sura 9:29 (), Muslims are to fight against people of the Book (i.e. Christians and Jews) until they are subjugated, pay the jizya and are fully humbled. From the Islamic Conquests to the Late Middle Ages During the first centuries after the early Muslim conquests these principles were incorporated into the dhimma system whose main feature were outlined latest by the reign of the eightcentury Caliph Umar II (717–720). Under that system, Jews were not to proselytise, not pray to loud, not build new houses of worship or repair hold ones and not hold public processions, including for funerals. Similar to life under Christian rule, Jews were not allowed to bear arms or ride horses under Muslim rules, which is why popular anecdotes among Muslims derided the Jews as cowards. Forced conversions were in general rare as the greater majority of Muslims adhered to the Quran that there is no compulsion in religious, but did occur on rare occasion such as during the Almohad Caliphate. As Jews shared their dhimmi status with other more numerous and conscipuous Christians and Zoroastrians, the suspicion against those often mitigated and diffused specific anti-Jewish sentiment. Nevertheless, in general medieval Muslim theologians devoted only a small part of their polemics against Judaism. This was in place at least since the 17th century, as Shalom Shabazi wrote in one of his poems about "stealing orphans". Other anti-Jewish acts in Yemen include the Mawza Exile (1679–1680). Testimonies claim up to 80% of the Jewish population in Yemen died during that year. "Those who were banished then came up from the Tihama [coastal plain], returning from Mawzaʻ; one man from a city and two from a family, for most of them had been consumed by the land of Tihama which dispenses of life." Another instance of forced conversion took place in 1839 in Meshed, Iran. Many religious texts and establishments were destroyed or stolen during that time period. In the aftermath, anti-Jewish laws were established. ==Modernist and Enlightenment anti-Judaism==

Karl Marx in On the Jewish Question, 1843, argued that Judaism is not only a religion, because it is an attitude of alienation from the world resulting from the ownership of money and private property, and this feeling of alienation is not exclusive to the Jews. Rather than forcibly converting Jews to Christianity, he proposed the implementation of a program of anti-capitalism, in order to liberate the world from Judaism, thus defined. By framing his revolutionary economic and political project as the liberation of the world from Judaism, Marx expressed a "messianic desire" that was itself "quite Christian", according to David Nirenberg. In 2022, he specified in a K. interview that, in doing so, Marx perpetuated a more radicalized externally conceived Judaism than that of "slavery to the law, to forms, to rites", when "he affirm[ed] that the West, insofar as it utilized money and private property, produces Judaism 'from its own entrails'". However, David McLellan argued that "On the Jewish Question" must be understood in terms of Marx's debates with Bruno Bauer over the nature of political emancipation in Germany. According to McLellan, Marx used the word "Judentum" in its colloquial sense of "commerce" to argue that Germans suffer, and must be emancipated from, capitalism. The second half of Marx's essay, McLellan concludes, should be read as "an extended pun at Bauer's expense". Yoav Peled (1992) sees Marx "shifting the debate over Jewish emancipation from the plane of theology ... to the plane of sociology", thereby circumventing one of Bauer's main arguments. In Peled's view, "this was less than a satisfactory response to Bauer, but it enabled Marx to present a powerful case for emancipation while, at the same time, launching his critique of economic alienation". He concludes that "the philosophical advances made by Marx in 'On the Jewish Question' were necessitated by, and integrally related to, his commitment to Jewish emancipation". ==See also==