Why Always the Jews?

The accusation that survived two thousand years

For almost two thousand years, Jews have been accused in the Christian Worlds of an extraordinary variety of evils. They have been persecuted when they were rich and when they were poor, when they practiced their religion and when they abandoned it. They have been persecuted for remaining separate from the societies around them and accused of corrupting those societies when they interacted with them. Persecution continued both when they had no state of their own and after establishing one. They were accused of controlling capitalism and of promoting communism.

The accusations changed. The collective guilt remained.

Why?

I want to propose a hypothesis: the exceptional persistence of Western antisemitism originates in the Christian accusation of deicide — the claim that the Jewish people killed God. Over the centuries, that accusation changed its language, eventually surviving even among people who no longer believed in Christianity.

This hypothesis deserves consideration because it may explain two historical patterns that the usual explanations leave unresolved: the persistence of antisemitism across radically different circumstances, and the exceptional intensity and recurrence of anti-Jewish persecution in Christian Europe compared with other civilizations.

Why the usual explanations are insufficient

Consider the most common explanations.

• Jews are hated because they are wealthy and powerful. Yet millions of Jews in Eastern Europe lived in poverty and political vulnerability through many centuries. Their poverty did not protect them from persecution or extermination.
• Jews become scapegoats during crises. Certainly, crises have intensified antisemitism. But Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the very year it conquered Granada, consolidated royal power, and embarked on its overseas expansion. Portugal imposed forced conversions in 1497 during a period of maritime expansion. These were not simply desperate societies looking for someone to blame for their collapse.
• Jews are rejected because they remain different. Yet even abandoning Judaism did not necessarily end the discrimination. In Spain, limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”) statutes excluded people of Jewish ancestry, including practicing Christians, regardless of their personal beliefs. Centuries later, Nazi Germany similarly made Jewish ancestry grounds for persecution, irrespective of religious conversion.
• Jews are hated because of their economic activities. In medieval Europe, particularly from the twelfth century onward, some Jewish communities became associated with commerce and moneylending, partly because restrictions limited other occupations. In modern times, Jews entered virtually every field of economic and professional life. Yet stereotypes rooted in particular historical circumstances persisted long after those circumstances had changed.
• Nationalism treats Jews as foreigners. Even fully assimilated Jews could be treated as permanent outsiders, facing forms of suspicion and exclusion that did not apply equally to other citizens of European descent. In the United States, for example, universities and social institutions imposed restrictions specifically on Jews, including those born and raised as Americans.
• Jews are blamed because political leaders need an enemy. Political authorities have exploited antisemitism to redirect popular anger and consolidate support. In the Russian Empire, officials sometimes tolerated or encouraged pogroms, while the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion helped spread the myth of a Jewish conspiracy. The Nazis later made antisemitism central to their political ideology. Such manipulation depended on an existing social receptivity to accusations against Jews, which political opportunism alone cannot explain.

These explanations are not mutually exclusive. Different circumstances may have made Jews targets of hostility at different times, while their distinct religious identity made them a recognizable minority. Taken together, these factors help explain why Jews could be singled out for persecution.

But they leave a deeper question unanswered: why did accusations of collective Jewish guilt acquire such extraordinary intensity and persistence in Christian Europe, rather than following a comparable pattern in other civilizations where Jews also lived centuries as a distinct minority?

The answer may lie less in the circumstances or behavior of Jews than in the societies that repeatedly attributed collective guilt to them.

The decisive comparison: other civilizations

The comparison with other civilizations brings the question into sharper focus.

If Jewish wealth, poverty, occupations, separateness, or political circumstances explain antisemitism, why did persecution not follow the same pattern wherever Jews lived?

For more than a millennium, large Jewish communities existed under Muslim rule. They experienced legal inferiority, discrimination, and sometimes severe persecution. But their history there did not generally reproduce the extraordinary combination of recurring and sometimes contradictory accusations, collective demonization, mass violence, and ideological transformations that characterized Christian Europe.

The historian Mark R. Cohen, in Under Crescent and Cross, documented how anti-Jewish persecution in medieval Christian Europe, particularly from the Crusades onward, became far more severe and recurrent than in much of the Muslim world.

The same people, practicing the same religion, could encounter profoundly different patterns of hostility in different civilizations.

What distinguished the Christian world’s relationship with the Jews?

One fact stands out: for centuries, across Christian Europe and later in its overseas colonies, from great cathedrals to small village churches, generations were taught that the Jewish people were collectively responsible for killing Christ.

And Christ was not simply a prophet or religious leader. In Christian belief, he was God incarnate, whose death and resurrection constituted the unique event through which humanity was offered salvation.

The Jews were therefore accused of responsibility for the death of the very being who had come to save the world.

The comparison raises a question that explanations based on economics, nationalism, or political crises cannot answer on their own:

Why did the most persistent and extreme tradition of collective Jewish guilt develop precisely in the civilization that, for centuries, accused the Jews of killing God?

An accusation beyond any possible defense

The accusation that the Jews had killed God was not an obscure theological argument confined to scholars. For nearly two millennia, it was transmitted through sermons, religious instruction, church art, and popular culture, reaching successive generations throughout Christian Europe.

Its extraordinary power lay in the absolute nature of the crime attributed to the Jews. The accusation of having killed God placed their supposed guilt beyond any ordinary human measure.

The guilt was also collective and hereditary. It extended beyond those allegedly involved in Christ’s death to the Jewish people across generations. An individual Jew could be born centuries later and still inherit the stigma.

And it could not be refuted through behavior. No amount of poverty, generosity, loyalty, success, assimilation, or peaceful coexistence could invalidate a collective accusation grounded in religious doctrine rather than observable conduct.

A commercial dispute can end. A political conflict can be settled. Economic circumstances can change. But how does a minority defend itself against an inherited accusation of killing God?

My hypothesis is that the accusation of an absolute crime established a presumption of absolute Jewish guilt that later generations could inherit without retaining its original theological justification.

The accusation survives by changing its content

Over the centuries, new accusations accumulated around the inherited presumption of Jewish guilt: they drew strength from that presumption while reinforcing it, making further accusations easier to believe.

In medieval Europe, Jews could be accused of poisoning wells or murdering Christian children in supposed rituals.

In the modern world, they could be accused of controlling finance, undermining national unity, secretly directing political revolutions, or conspiring to seize territory.

By the late nineteenth century, racial antisemitism had emerged in European societies shaped by centuries of Christianity, recasting older accusations against Jews in the language of race and heredity. Nazism inherited and radicalized this worldview, ultimately turning it into a program of systematic extermination.

The Nazis portrayed Jews as an existential threat to the German nation and ultimately to humanity itself—    as an absolute evil—regardless of what individual Jews believed or did. They devoted immense resources to exterminating Jews, even when those resources were needed for the war. Extermination had become an objective in itself.

My hypothesis is that Nazi antisemitism represented an extreme secular transformation of the structure of collective guilt established by the accusation of deicide. The Jews, once accused of committing that absolute evil, came to be portrayed as embodying a new form of absolute evil     .

The Holocaust reverses two thousand years of guilt

The extermination of European Jews profoundly shook Western civilization’s moral conscience, challenging not only its inherited image of the Jews but also its understanding of itself.

Those whom Christian Europe had portrayed for centuries as perpetrators of the ultimate crime—    killing God—had become victims of one of the most unfathomable crimes in human history, committed at the heart of that same civilization.

This reversal may have confronted Western civilization with a devastating question, even if it was rarely consciously acknowledged: had centuries of accusations and persecution rested on a profound injustice? For a civilization whose religious tradition preached love of one’s neighbor and forgiveness even of one’s enemies, the question challenged some of its deepest beliefs about itself.

The moral recognition of the Holocaust and the broader rejection of antisemitism transformed Western public consciousness. In 1965, the Catholic Church, through the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate, rejected the attribution of Christ’s death to Jews collectively, including Jews living in later generations.

But a prejudice transmitted through centuries of religious teaching and cultural inheritance does not necessarily disappear when the institution that helped perpetuate it repudiates its original justification.

The unconscious relief of finding Jews guilty again

An inherited prejudice that persists beneath consciously held beliefs may create a tension that is difficult to confront. Finding Jews guilty again could offer an unconscious way of relieving that tension.

More than eighty years after the Holocaust, the generations that experienced it firsthand are disappearing, and the passage of time may have softened some of its emotional impact. Israel, as the modern expression of Jewish nationhood, is now widely perceived as a strong and prosperous state. These changes may make it easier for the inherited presumption of Jewish guilt to reemerge in new forms.

What happens when the State of Israel is accused of committing grave injustices?

For some people, those accusations may provide more than an occasion for political indignation. They may offer relief from a profound moral dissonance: the difficulty of recognizing as victims those whom their inherited culture had long portrayed as guilty.

The Jews are guilty again.

In this changed context, a person may feel an almost spontaneous inclination to dislike or blame Jews, without ever wondering where that inclination comes from. The accusation may feel entirely justified, even obvious. When confronted with facts that challenge it, that same person may find reasons to dismiss them rather than reconsider the accusation. Both reactions may reflect an inherited presumption of Jewish guilt. Being unaware of that presumption does not relieve anyone of the responsibility to question their own judgments.

The inherited presumption of Jewish guilt, together with the possibility of finding relief from this profound moral dissonance, could also help explain the particular emotional force of comparing Israelis, or Jews generally, to Nazis. The victims of the Holocaust are thus symbolically turned into perpetrators of supposedly equivalent crimes.

In the context of the war in Gaza, accusations that Jews collectively and deliberately kill children may carry an even older resonance. In Christian belief, Jesus was the Lamb of God, the embodiment of perfect innocence. The accusation of deicide thus portrayed Jews not only as killers of God, but as killers of innocence itself. Medieval accusations that Jews ritually murdered Christian children echoed this image. That ancient image may reemerge.

The inherited presumption of Jewish guilt becomes especially visible when responsibility for Israel’s actions is attributed to individuals solely because of their identity.

Jews in New York, Paris, or Haifa bear no personal responsibility for decisions made by the Israeli government simply because they are Jewish or Israeli. Yet they are sometimes treated as collectively guilty, wherever they live. The old structure of collective guilt reappears in a new political setting.

A Paradox on the Western Left

The hypothesis may also help explain a paradox in parts of the Western left.

Some of those who express intense hostility toward Israel, sometimes extending to Jews more broadly, are sincerely committed to fighting prejudice and discrimination.

Their anti-imperialist convictions provide a political framework for solidarity with Palestinians. Many view Israel through the lens of Western colonialism and imperialism, pointing to the large-scale immigration of European Jews, Western support for the creation of a Jewish state, the liberal and social-democratic ideas and institutions that shaped it, and Israel’s subsequent alliance with the United States.

Why, then, do these circles sometimes express such intense hostility toward Israel, compared with their reactions to other countries whose military actions have caused immense suffering?

Consider the United States, long a principal target of anti-imperialist criticism on the Western left.

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the conflicts that followed resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Iraq Body Count, has documented more than 200,000 civilian deaths since the invasion.

The United States faced massive antiwar protests. Yet why, in these same sectors of the Western left, does criticism of Israel sometimes turn into collective blame directed at Jews wherever they live, while criticism of the United States does not generally produce comparable blame directed at Americans wherever they live?

The inherited cultural image of Jewish guilt may supply part of the explanation. Anti-imperialism provides a contemporary moral language through which that hostility can be expressed.

The paradox is that some on the Western left, despite their commitment to fighting prejudice and discrimination, may have rejected the old religious accusation while unknowingly preserving the disposition to find Jews collectively guilty. That same disposition may also contribute to the exceptional intensity of their hostility toward Israel, compared with their reactions to other countries.

What survives

This hypothesis offers a way to connect events separated by centuries. It suggests that the changing accusations against Jews may matter less than the remarkable persistence of the presumption that they are guilty.

The Christian accusation of deicide established a form of absolute, collective, and hereditary guilt that no individual conduct could erase. Its religious justification has largely lost its authority, but the image of Jewish guilt it created may have survived in parts of Western culture, adapting to ideologies that no longer share its religious foundations.

The Holocaust profoundly challenged that inherited image. Yet among those in whom it persists, finding Jews guilty again may offer unconscious relief from the resulting moral contradiction. This possibility suggests how deeply an ancient accusation may continue to influence judgments without being consciously recognized. .

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the accusation that Jews killed God is not the belief itself, but the persistence, in some quarters, of a disposition to find Jews guilty, whatever the accusation happens to be.