Antisemitism Yesterday and Today: Two Required Readings

The J7 Communities Task Force report on antisemitism is out. It’s grim reading. Global attacks on Jews are at a 30-year high. From dozens of recently published books to shorter insights, authors are observing and analyzing the current wave of often-violent Jew-hatred sweeping Europe, America and even faraway Australia. Today, it is almost normative to open a news site and find reports about antisemitism.

From Ann Arbor to Brooklyn and Belfast, Jews and their Israeli homeland are a topic seemingly on everyone’s mind. All the world’s other atrocities get short notice. Politicians from constituencies as small and remote as Maine to those of Great Britain and Spain must pass a litmus test on where they stand on Gaza and Palestine.

I will not attempt to summarize the written material offering explanations for the resurgence of antisemitism. Barton Swain in The Wall Street Journal has already pointed this out. However, in brief, they range from latent antisemitism now given permission to manifest itself to the impermissibility of Jews to be aggressive and powerful when their historic role is one of subservience, violent oppression or outright elimination.

For every reader of this article, your required reading is Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, a History, a book that twenty years ago changed my life, and in a very sad way has given me an insight into today’s reality.

The author is James Carroll, a former Catholic priest who became a university professor. Published 25 years ago, in 756 pages, it documents 17 centuries of Catholic, and later Protestant, doctrine that, at its core, promoted antisemitism.

As Carroll explains, it was the third century Roman leader Constantine who, for political and family reasons, decided to recognize Catholicism as the Roman state religion. As a consequence, Judaism became stigmatized as an enemy of this new mandate.

Carroll gives the reader a pope-by-pope, theologian-by-theologian breakdown of this antisemitic doctrine. Yes, he also mentions the few vicars and Christian kings who tried to steer the church into a more rational stance, but they were outliers, either ignored or marginalized.

Carroll posits that the recently arrived antisemitism is a continuum of millennia of hate that becomes quiescent for a few decades (as in America for the last 60 years or so…not long by historical measure), but he explains that since Christianity is the dominant religion in the western world, antisemitism will always come to the forefront. It is baked into the Christian mind.

Spain and Ireland, two of the most historically Christian countries, are in the forefront of Jew hate which has reached such a fevered pitch that it has become a political plank of both governments. Their citizens are literally stomping in the streets.

Seeing history in this perspective simultaneously makes one less alarmed that this round of Jew hate is some new virus and more alarmed that, in a world that has basically turned its demographic back on organized religion, especially amongst the young, the antisemitic virus is so bone-deep that it doesn’t matter if one goes to church on Sunday. TikTok is the new homily.

The other required reading is Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War by Howard M. Sachar. Published only two years after Constantine’s Sword, Sachar dissects the period between the two world wars when the Jews of Europe, with a focus on Vienna, enjoyed an interval of prosperity perhaps unmatched since the golden age of Spanish Jewry.

In between the wars, Austria saw its Jews reach the heights of security in society. They were leading businessmen, jurists, lawyers, scientists, artists and academics. This was the culture that produced scientists and writers like Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Stafan Zweig, and Franz Kafka, as well as industrialists and banking families like the Bloch-Bauers. Viennese Jews enjoyed access to every imaginable luxury from jewels to furniture to theater and opera.

Political leaders ranged from Rosa Luxemburg to Leon Blum.

As we all know, it came crashing down. Who has not seen the photographs of women wearing fur coats herded into trains headed to concentration camp ovens?
The two books prove that the Christian world has always been antagonistic to Judaism. Even more frightening, an excuse to degrade and persecute Jews is only temporarily in abeyance by a thin veneer of cultural and political restraint.

Observers of the current antisemitism accurately point out that no other group is subject to this mass hysteria and hate. Russians are not stabbed on the street or shot on Australian beaches for their role in the atrocities in Ukraine. No Chinese as they shop on the Champs Elysee are molested for their torture of the Tibetans or Uigurs.
It is not reassuring to read these two volumes, but then historical reality is not always about assurance. Sometimes it is a mirror. Sometimes a warning.