There is a fact about religious history that most believers prefer not to look at directly: the faiths that proclaim love most loudly have, more often than not, produced the most organized and sustained hatreds.

Christianity, whose founding text commands its adherents to love their enemies, generated two millennia of contempt for the Jewish people, culminating in the cultural soil from which the Holocaust grew. Islam, which presents itself as a religion of peace, has within it strands that have produced organized violence against Jews from the seventh century to October 7, 2023. Judaism, which sets the bar lower — asking only that one not do to others what is hateful to oneself — produced no comparable tradition of hatred toward outsiders.

This is not a comfortable observation. It is also not an accident. The asymmetry has a structure, and the structure deserves to be named.

The architecture of the rules

Consider the two great ethical formulations side by side. Hillel, asked on one foot to summarize the entire Torah, said: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. The rest is commentary. This rule places the diagnostic on the emotion of hatred itself. To live by it, one must continually ask whether what one is about to do would feel hateful if done to oneself. Hate is the boundary that cannot be crossed. Leviticus had already prohibited it as an inner state — you shall not hate your brother in your heart — and the rabbis extended this further: one may hate evil deeds, but not the evildoer.

The Christian command to love your enemies sets, on its face, a higher bar. And in the lives of saints, it has produced extraordinary moral beauty. But positive aspirations carry a peculiar structural weakness that negative prohibitions do not. There is a vast middle territory between loving one’s enemy and hating him, and that territory can be occupied indefinitely without anyone — including oneself — being able to point to a clear breach of the commandment. Worse, the command to love can be deployed to authorize cruelty. Augustine’s compelle intrare — compel them to come in — became a license for forced conversion. The Inquisition’s autos-da-fé were framed as acts of love for the heretic’s soul. A medieval Christian could persecute a Jew while sincerely believing he was loving him toward salvation. The modern formula hate the sin, love the sinner is the same maneuver in softer dress.

A negative formulation does not permit this rationalization as easily. If burning someone alive would be hateful to me, I cannot do it — no matter what story I tell myself about its eventual benefit to the burnt.

Why the Jews

There is a second factor specific to Christianity. From its earliest centuries, the Church defined itself through supersessionism — the claim that it had replaced Israel as the bearer of God’s covenant. This made the continued, unconverted existence of the Jew a theological problem. The Jew was both witness (their persistence proved scripture’s truth) and obstacle (their refusal denied Christ’s claim). Augustine’s solution was to assign the Jews the role of permanent humiliated witness: preserved alive, but degraded. This is the seedbed of what the historian Jules Isaac called l’enseignement du mépris — the teaching of contempt — that ran through the catechisms, sermons, and passion plays of Europe for nearly two thousand years.

Islam inherited a comparable structural problem. The Quran portrays the Jews of Medina as having rejected Muhammad’s prophethood, and the dhimmi system that followed institutionalized Jewish subordination across the Islamic world. The treatment was often more humane than what Jews experienced under Christendom — until it wasn’t. The Farhud in Baghdad in 1941, the expulsions from Arab lands after 1948, the charters of Hamas and Hezbollah, the celebration of October 7 in mosques and madrassas — these are not deviations from a peaceful tradition. They are the activation of a strand that was always present, and that the tradition’s self-image as peaceful makes it harder, not easier, for adherents to confront.

Judaism has no corresponding structural need. The Jewish covenant does not require any other people to be wrong. A righteous gentile inherits the world to come; the Noahide laws suffice. There is no missionary imperative that requires the negation of the other. The religious architecture itself does not generate a permanent target.

The complications

Three honest complications must be named, lest the contrast become a self-congratulation.

First, love your neighbor as yourself is itself from Leviticus. Jesus was quoting Torah, not innovating. Judaism contains both the positive and the negative formulation. It simply foregrounds the negative as operational. That may be the actual wisdom: aspire to love, but make no hate the floor on which you walk.

Second, Christianity contains powerful self-critical resources. The Sermon on the Mount cuts against everything the institutional Church later did in its name. The abolitionists were Christians. The civil rights movement was led from Black churches. Nostra Aetate in 1965 repudiated the deicide charge that had fueled centuries of pogroms. The repudiation came late and remains incomplete, but it is real, and it was generated from within.

Third, the deepest variable may not be theology at all but power. Christianity became imperial in the fourth century; Islam became imperial in the seventh; Judaism remained a minority almost everywhere until 1948. Imperial religions develop apologetics for cruelty that minority religions do not need. Some of what looks like a flaw in the love-ethic may be a flaw introduced by Constantinianism — the moment the religion of the persecuted became the religion of the persecutors.

What this means now

But even granting all of that, the original observation stands. An ethic anchored on do not do what is hateful is harder to bend into a license for hatred than an ethic anchored on love, because the diagnostic is built into the rule itself. The believer who is about to commit cruelty against a Jew, an apostate, a heretic, or a stranger cannot easily ask is this hateful to me and arrive at yes, but I am doing it in love. The question stops the hand in a way that the higher aspiration does not.

This matters now, as Israel faces the recrudescence of organized antisemitism in forms both ancient and novel — from European cathedrals where the deicide story is still taught in stained glass, to American campuses where the new blood libel travels under the language of liberation, to Tehran where eliminationist theology is state policy. In each case, the perpetrators believe themselves to be acting from love: love of Christ, love of the ummah, love of the oppressed, love of justice. The love is sincere. The hatred is also sincere. The two coexist because the ethical architecture permits it.

Judaism’s more modest formulation has, in practice, the more reliable record. It does not promise to make us holy. It promises only to keep us from becoming monsters. After the century we have just survived, and watching the one we are now entering, that may be the more important promise.