The days leading up to Easter were a difficult time to be a Jew in medieval Europe. For centuries labelled as Christ-killers, the increased emphasis on the events surrounding Jesus’s death, both in ritual and popular preaching, often resulted in anti-Jewish sentiment reaching fever pitch.
Baseless accusations of Jews kidnapping Christian children and re-enacting crucifixions, such as in the infamous case of the disappearance of two-year-old Simon of Trent on Holy Thursday 1475, whipped up emotion and led to the torture, killing and expulsion of Jews from the region. The irony, of course, is that Christians themselves were accused of similar ritual killings in the second century when they were still a misunderstood minority; but this did not stop some Christians revisiting such calumnies on their neighbours centuries later.
With anti-Semitism on the rise once again in Europe, it’s worth recalling how Christian theology and historic attitudes to the Jewish people have contributed to anti-Jewish sentiment and that, despite significant progress in Jewish-Christian relations in the 20th century, some blind spots remain to this day.
While Christianity began as a tiny Jewish sect, by the second century it had become a predominantly gentile religion, which faced the difficulty of how to negotiate its Jewish heritage. This also involved reinterpreting passages in the Jewish scriptures which were now regarded as referring to Christ. This is already evident in the writings of the New Testament.
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The theological idea emerged that Christianity had now replaced Israel (supersessionism), and that the old covenant God made with his people was now null and void, replaced by the new covenant in Christ’s blood. Christians began to see the Jews as rejected by God and cursed on account of their killing Christ.
A whole body of early Christian literature called Adversus Iudaeos (Against the Jews) argued that Jews had a history of murdering their prophets and had now killed their Messiah. God had, therefore, rejected them in favour of a new people, the New Israel, allowing Jerusalem and its temple to be destroyed in 70AD. The fourth-century preacher John Chrysostom claimed that after the Jews crucified Christ, “it was then that he scattered your nation over the face of the earth”.
Christians believed this had all been foretold in the Old Testament but that Jews were blind to its true meaning. In medieval depictions of the female figures of Ecclesia (church) and Synagoga (synagogue), the defeated Synagoga is shown blindfolded and turning away from the cross. In one version, called the Living Cross, hands emerge from the cross to bless and crown Ecclesia on the right and to inflict a deadly wound on Synagoga with a sword.
While in the fourth century we find Christian bishops sympathetic to the burning of synagogues, Augustine of Hippo advocated a different approach. He argued that the Jews should remain unmolested as a “witness to the truth”. Cut off from their homeland, and subservient to Christianity, Jews functioned as a living embodiment of the consequences of denying Christ. Augustine’s argument was later invoked in the Middle Ages to justify a dubious degree of protection for Jewish minorities.
The Shoah in the 20th century would be instrumental in changing the landscape of Jewish-Christian relations. Anti-Jewish rhetoric was increasingly seen for what it had always been: reprehensible and illegitimate. Furthermore, the foundation of the State of Israel made it increasingly difficult to support the idea of the exiled “wandering Jew” as perpetually punished by God.
In 1965 the Second Vatican Council’s document Nostra Aetate (In our Time) unequivocally put to rest the idea of supersessionism, the idea that Christianity has replaced Judaism. Furthermore, it deplored “all hatreds, persecutions, and displays of anti-Semitism levelled at any time or from any source against the Jews”. It insisted that the Jewish people as a whole, through all time, cannot be held responsible for the death of Christ. Neither should the Jews be held to be rejected or cursed by God. Subsequent declarations would maintain that the Jewish covenant with God should be held to be permanently valid, and unbroken for “the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable”.
Despite such progress, some blind spots persevere. In popular preaching, the term Pharisee continues to be used as shorthand for a legalistic, hypocritical Jewish opponent of Jesus. Recent research has sought to provide a reappraisal of Pharisees, rescuing them from caricatures created later in the first century, when the gospels were being written, which tell us little about Pharisees in Jesus’s own day.
Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish historian and New Testament scholar, suggests there are two compelling reasons for Christians to rethink their biases toward this ancient Jewish group. “First, Jesus looks perfectly good on his own,” she remarks. “He doesn’t need the negative foil.”
Second, she states, “I shouldn’t bear false witness against my neighbour.”
Salvador Ryan is professor of ecclesiastical history at St Patrick’s Pontifical University Maynooth