Theology Today - Vol 30, No. 4 - January 1974 - ARTICLE - Anti-semitism In Christian Theology

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Anti-Semitism In Christian Theology
By Rosemary R. Ruether

"The rejection of the Jews is based on their rejection of the Messiah . . . [but] the Jews have always been apostate from God, and so the rejection and murder of Jesus is the foreordained culmination of this evil history of an evil people . . . . The Jews, in Christian theory, thus become the eternally damned ones, outside the pale of humanity and on-going history, preserved until the end of time in a negative space of divine wrath and human misery."

ANTI-SEMITISM in Christianity cannot be dealt with either as an accidental and non-intrinsic accretion or as the product of purely sociological conflicts between the church and the synagogue. At its root, anti-semitism develops in Christianity from theological anti-Judaism. Anti-Judaism in Christian theology stands as the left hand of Christology. The church wished to prove that Jesus was the Christ of the Jewish messianic promise as found in the Jewish Scriptures. This demanded a polemic against the ongoing Jewish hermeneutical tradition which denied this interpretation. This denial evoked a response from Christianity designed to show that Judaism, which rejects Jesus' messianic status, itself stands in a rejected status, and so its teaching authority on this subject can be totally discredited. It is from this nexus between Christological and anti-Judaic midrash that we find that intimate union in Christianity between "faith and fratricide."1

Rosemary Ruether is a graduate of Scripps College and the Claremont Graduate School. She is Professor of Historical Theology at Howard University, Washington, D. C., and a guest professor during 1973 at the Divinity School at Harvard University. As an eloquent voice of the new -theological liberation within Catholicism, Dr. Ruether has written many articles, essays, and reviews, and such significant books as The Church Against Itself (Herder & Herder, 1967). This essay is an extension of research pursued in the writing of a new book on Christian anti-Semitism.
1 This is the title of a forthcoming book on this subject, to be published by Harvard University Press in 1974.

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The form of this anti-Judaic argument is that of a midrash on the Hebrew Scriptures. Anti-Judaic literature retains this original form down through the Church Fathers and even into the Middle Ages.2 In other words, the anti-Judaic argument arises as a "testimonies tradition."3 By "testimonies tradition" one means a concatenation of proof texts from the "Old Testament." This was the oldest form of Christian teaching and preaching; a form which arose before the written New Testament when the Old Testament, christologically interpreted, was the Bible of the Christian church. Again this shows that the anti-Judaic argument arises as the left hand of Christology. A tradition of proof texts from the Jewish Bible, proving that Jesus was the expected Messiah of these Scriptures, had, as its left hand, a parallel collection of texts proving that the discredited status of the rabbinic interpretation which rejected this Christological midrash, going on to prove, furthermore, the rejected status of the religious community that rejected this Christian interpretation of its own Scriptures. This did not stop merely with proving some special guilt of the religious leaders of this community for the death of Jesus. It immediately ramified out into arguments intended to prove the inability of the teachers of this community to read Scripture rightly; the discredited status of their religious law, worship, and even their past history back to Moses. Jewish history was split down the middle, proving that there had always existed, in the divine intentionality, a true people of faith who were the true people of the promise, over against a fallen, disobedient people who never obeyed God or heard the prophets; who, from the beginning, rejected and even killed the prophets and who could, therefore, be expected to reject and even kill the Messiah, the promised redeemer of the prophetic tradition, when he appeared. This was the logical climax of an evil history. The church was the heir of the true people of the promise, the spiritual community of faith, while "the Jews," that is to say, the religious community gathered around the temple and the rabbinic teachers rejecting the churchs Christological midrash, were the heirs of this evil history of perfidy, apostasy, and murder. Not only rejection but active divine wrath poured out upon the cultic and national center of this community in Jerusalem, pursuing them into exile and finally even to the Last judgment as the appropriate retribution for this evil climax of this evil history.

2 A handy summary of these works is found in A. L. Williams, Adversos Judaeos (Cambridge, 1935).
3 See D. Plooij, Studies in the Testimonies Book (Amsterdam, 1932). For a critique of the thesis of Rendal Harris that the Testimonies tradition constituted an actual "book," see Barnabas Lindars, New Testament Apologetic; The Doctrinal Significance of Old Testament Quotations (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961), pp. 13ff.

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This theme appears in its nascent form already in the parable of the vineyard in the synoptic Gospels, most fully developed in Matthew. According to this parable, the King (God) leaves his vineyard (Israel) in the hands of tenants (the Jews), occasionally sending messengers (the prophets) to check up on how things are going. But the unfaithful tenants constantly beat, stone, and even kill the messengers. Finally the King sends his own son, assuming that the tenants will respect the actual son of the King. But they straightway kill the son, believing thereby to occupy the vineyard permanently. In other words, they don't have any real right to the vineyard. They are only tenants, not sons. What will the King do to those unfaithful tenants? He will come and destroy those tenants and "give the vineyard to others who will produce the fruits of it." In Matthew there follows immediately the great "stone" text so central to the earliest Christological midrash: "the stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the comer" (Matt. 21:42; Ps. 118:22-23).

This tradition must have been formed quite early. Paul, writing in the 50's, already takes for granted the fusion of this stone text with the stone "which God is laying in Zion" (Rom. 9:30-33; Isa. 28:16), as the stone "of stumbling for Israel" (Isa. 8:14-15).4 This idea is incorporated into the idea that Israel has "always" killed the prophets. This pattern of hostility is extended to include the Christian missionaries, as the continuation of the prophetic line, who are the current recipients of this heritage of "Jewish" hostility to the prophets. Finally these ideas, adding up to the justification of the "rejection" of Israel, are read in tandem with the idea that God is electing a second people from among the gentiles.

For you brethren became imitators of the churches of God which are in Judea, for you suffered the same thing from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, who both killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, displease God and oppose all men by hindering us from speaking to the gentiles that they may be saved-so always to fill up the measure of their sins. But God's wrath has come upon them at last (I Thess. 2:14-16).

This theme that Israel has always killed the prophets is echoed again and again in the Synoptics. Stephen, in Acts, culminates his account of the apostasy of Israel with the judgment:

You stiff necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered (Acts 7:51-52).

For good measure Stephen also throws in the assertion that the Jews have never kept the Law either, although previously he had

4 Ibid., Lindars, pp. 169ff.

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taken the position that the Jewish Law was not the real Law of God, since the commandments which God intended to give on Sinai were withheld because of the worship of the Golden Calf. Therefore the Jews have a spurious Mosaic Law and have never been the people of God's covenant. This was withheld from them on Sinai and reserved for the Christian people of the Last Days.

The climactic text on apostate Israel, as the lineage of those who murder the prophets and never hear the word of God, comes from the "Q" tradition. In Matthew this is used to climax the great chapter of "woes" against the Pharisees:

Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, saying, "if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets." Thus you witness against yourself, that you are the sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up then the measure of the sins of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how can you escape being sentenced to Hell? Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify and some of whom you well scourge in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of the innocent Abel to the blood of Zechariah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar (Matt. 23:29-36).

This text is followed immediately by that of Jesus mourning over Jerusalem: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you," and the judgment that "your house is forsaken and desolate," followed by the prediction that the temple will be destroyed so that 'not a stone is left upon a stone." But the real culmination of this section is found in Matthew 27:25 when the people of Jerusalem demand Jesus' death, crying out that "his blood be upon us and upon our children." This is, dramatically, the final "doing" of what has been "foreshadowed" by the evil history of apostate Israel, namely, the killing of the King's son, thereby "filling up the measure of their sins" and bringing down on their heads God's vengeance for the blood of all the righteous ones from the beginning of history, not to mention all the Christian martryrs to come.

This anti-Judaic argument begins, of course, as a sectarian conflict within Judaism itself, an argument between, on the one hand, the Jewish messianic sect which saw the crucified Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah; who awaited his return as Son of Man and who interpreted the Hebrew Scriptures to prove that it bad been foretold and taught continuously by the prophets that the coming Savior was to suffer, to be crucified by the official religious leaders, and was to rise on the third day; and, on the other hand, the mainstream

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religious community of Judaism, gathered around the temple and the rabbinic teachers, who neither saw any such prophetic pattern in the Scriptures nor did they find in Jesus the characteristics of the Messiah. The roots of this argument lie clearly in the disciples' fundamental experience of Jesus' messianic preaching and his death in a manner that convinced them that, in these events, the climactic " turn of the ages" bad already taken place. But this experience of the resurrection remained unconvincing to their co-religionists.

It is often said that the Jews expected a merely carnal, material, or nationalistic messianic advent. But this split between the material and the spiritual itself belongs to the history of Christian polemic against Judaism. Prophetic Judaism makes no such split between the outward and the inward. It expected spiritual transformation to take the form of a radical and visible transformation of history, abolishing evil and creating a new situation of the Kingdom of God. No split exists between the coming of the Messiah and the coming of the messianic Kingdom. The "two advents" are one and the same thing. For the average Jew, who bad not been caught up in the messianic expectations surrounding the preaching of Jesus, reaffirmed as the resurrection experience, there was no evidence that any such "turn of the ages" had, in fact, taken place. Jesus was simply one more messianic preacher, done in by some obscure combination of local and Roman political forces. The evil world continued its accustomed course visibly unchanged. One had only to look out one's window and see the Roman soldiers bearing down on the people to know that no deliverance had taken place.

For the Christians, however, the great breakthrough had already taken place in a hidden and mysterious way, invisible to the eye, although very soon the heavens would open and Jesus would appear with a host of angels to reveal visibly that victory over the powers of cosmic evil that bad already been won in his death and resurrection. They must, therefore, search the Scriptures to certify that this very pattern of messianic fulfillment had been the one that had always been taught and foretold by the prophets. Further, they must show that the negative response was also a part of this same prophetic teaching, as found in the Scriptures.

Originally this two-sided argument functioned within a mission to Israel itself. Convinced that they alone understood the meaning of the Scriptures and its final fulfillment in these the last days of world history, the Christians, not unlike other messianic sectarian and baptist preachers of the period, set out to preach this as the true meaning of biblical faith and to convince their "non-believing" brethren that they had erred in not accepting Jesus; that they must repent and accept Jesus as the true cornerstone of the covenant of salvation. Just as the Essenes believed that anyone who did not

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come into that community and their interpretation of law and history was outside the true Israel and its promise of salvation, so Christians operated as a messianic Jewish sect, announcing that only in this faith in Jesus as the cornerstone could one participate in the true covenant and its promise.

It was this interpretation of Jesus as the "cornerstone" of the covenant of salvation, which the builders (leaders of normative Judaism) rejected, "which has become the bead of the corner" (the cornerstone of the true covenant of salvation) which made Christian preaching non-negotiable from the beginning, as far as traditional Judaism was concerned. In other words, this interpretation of Jesus as the cornerstone was the fundamental "stumbling block that was to rupture the Christian from the Jewish religious community because it implied the substitution of a new foundation of the covenant for those of the tradition. The implications of this idea took generations to work themselves out in total social separation, but one must see the root of this separation present from the beginning in this concept of the "new cornerstone." Consequently this preaching of the meaning of the Scriptures found firm rebuff from mainstream Jewish religious institutions, especially from the Pharisees, who were the élite among the rabbinic interpreters of the Jewish teaching tradition.

In the New Testament it is the Pharisees who replace the temple priesthood and "scribes" as the "bad guys" of the Christian polemic against the leadership of normative Judaism. As the early church went out to preach its message, first in Palestine and then in the Diaspora, it was these teachers who saw to it that the Christian tradition was refuted and the Christian preachers excluded from teaching this interpretation in the synagogues. This exclusion not infrequently was accompanied by hard blows on the backside, which was the standard punishment of the synagogue for dissident preaching, particularly a dissident preaching which disrupted the order of worship in the synagogue.5 The actual order from the rabbinic assembly forbidding Christians to lead synagogue worship was not handed down until about 90 A.D. But it is probable that local discipline began to be enforced immediately in various places where Christians attempted to preach their message in the synagogues. Contrary to what is often thought, this order never seems to have definitively excluded Christians from quietly attending the synagogue worship, something which they clearly were still doing in the fourth century in Antioch and even later.6 What it did was to exclude the Christian teacher from leading the synagogue service

5 See Douglas Hare, The Theme of Jewish Persecution of Christians in the Gospel According to Matthew (Cambridge, 1967).
6 For example, the eight sermons of John Chrysostom, preached in A.D. 386-7, were occasioned by the fact that many Christians continued to worship with the synagogue, especially on High Holy Days.

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and thereby imposing on it what the rabbis regarded as a false interpretation of the tradition.

Finding themselves being forced outside the ordinary institutions of the Jewish community, the negative side of the christological hermeneutic began to harden in Christian preaching, changing from a prophetic appeal to the Jewish community to be converted to a fixed and final judgment upon the Jews as a rejected community- the terms "Jews" here meaning, not a racial, but a religious community; i.e., the Jewish religious community gathered around its priestly and rabbinic leadership and the midrash of the rabbinic schools and rejecting the midrash of the church.

But this hardening negativity was transformed by a new and somewhat unexpected occurrence. The Christian preaching rejected by the Jewish community began to attract large numbers of gentiles, particularly those "God-fearers" attracted to Jewish ethics and monotheism that had gathered around the synagogues but who found the Jewish Law a barrier to full identification. Familiar with the mystery religions centered in a dying and rising savior-god, the very characteristics of Christianity most unacceptable to the Jews caused no difficulty for these gentiles. Adapting itself to this gentile mission, Christianity began to cross the divide that separated them from the Jewish community ethnically and to become more and more a gentile faith.

Texts about the blindness and perfidy of the leaders of the normative Jewish religious community were read not only in a harsher light as a result of non-response of the synagogue to Christian preaching, but they also took on a compensatory extension. The exposition of the "unbelief of the Jews" now was placed in tandem with a teaching about the responsiveness of the gentiles. This too was incorporated into the midrash on Old Testament Scriptures and presented as a teaching that had always been contained in and foretold by the prophets. As a result of these series of interactions between interpretation of historical event and sociological response to interpretation, one comes finally to that pattern of exegesis of the Old Testament that is characteristic of the Synoptics and the book of Acts, where the "rejection of the Jews" is proclaimed in tandem with the idea of the "election of the gentiles." All the old prophetic texts about Israel as a "light to the nations" and the expectation of an "ingathering of the nations to Zion" expected as a part of the messianic fulfillment, ideas which, in the prophets, exist in a positive and outgoing relation to the salvation of Israel, are now taken up by the church, but in a negative relation to what is now seen as the "old Israel." The "Old" elect people have proven unfaithful and have been rejected. But God is carving out for himself a new people from among the gentiles who will produce the real fruits of the vineyard. The election has been taken away from the Jews

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because of their sins, climaxed in their rejection of the Messiah, and has been transferred to this new people who are being carved out from the "nations" and who will be the true sons of God and heirs of the promise.

This hermeneutical pattern probably took nascent form within the sphere of the gentile mission within one to two decades as oral teaching, although its written crystallization in the Synoptics and the book of Acts took place decades later. But this pattern is already known to Paul, and probably be was not the innovator of it but himself built upon precursors among the "hellenists" who began the gentile mission .7

This hermeneutical tradition that expressed the estrangement of Christianity as a new people outside the "old Israel" and on the way to increasing gentilization was incorporated by Paul and the author of the Letter to the Hebrews and later by the Johannine school into a philosophical framework in the form of anthropological and cosmological dualisms. This framework was constructed by fusing the dualism between the "carnal" and the "spiritual" of Philonic: exegesis with the messianic sectarian dualism between the "historical" and the "eschatological." Out of this fusion one gets a way of interpreting the split between the "true" and the "apostate" Israel which regards the former as transcending and superseding the latter both historically and on the moral and ontological plane. As this original concept of Christianity as the eschatological supersession of the "old Israel" is increasingly read back into history, one develops from this exegesis a doctrine of the "two eras," the "old" carnal era of the Mosaic covenant and the "new" spiritual era of the church. The line between the "carnal" and the "spiritual," the historical and the eschatological, is read as a line between two historical eras and two historical communities but embued with all the absolutism of these theological underpinnings. What in Judaism had been dialectical relationships become antitheses in Christianity. This "historicizing of the eschatological" is intrinsic to the kind of distortion of the Christian message represented by anti-Judaism. By implication, the anti-Judaic left hand of Christianity can only be resolved by a radical rethinking of this idea of the "coming of the Messiah" as a line which separates Judaism as the "old era and old Adam" from the church, dividing man and history at the historical moment of Jesus' life and death.

III

In Paul one finds the roots of this incorporation of the alienation into cosmological and anthropological dualism. The Old era, the era of Mosaic law, is seen as the era of blindness and hardness of heart. The Law itself is seen as an expression of this era of fallen,

7 See Marcel Simon, St. Stephen and the Hellenists (1958).

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Adamic man, corresponding to the reign of the powers and principalities, or, as Paul calls them, "the elemental spirits of the universe" (Col. 2:8, 20; Gal. 4:3). Now, in Christ, this reign of demonic powers over human history, exemplified both by the elemental spirits and by the law, has been broken and mankind delivered from their sway. But the Jews, who refuse to accept this Christological hermeneutic, still stand under the power of fallen man, and they become, in Christian theology, its typological expression. The "Jews" become the graceless, carnal man. A veil lies over their hearts, and all their religion is ritual and rote, "hypocrisy" without inner virtue or redemptive power. The Christian, by contrast, is the "spiritual man," the man of faith and grace, read as if he is already embued with the characteristics of "eschatological man," transcendent to finite historical powers and tasting the "first fruits" of the Kingdom of God.

In the theology of John, this contrast between the "two eras" is absorbed into the dualism between the carnal and the spiritual. This is understood as vertical rather than historical transcendence. The clash between the true and the apostate Israel thus becomes a clash between the carnal man and the carnal "world below" and the spiritual man united in faith with the spiritual world "above." The followers of Christ are the spiritual men, in communion with the spiritual world "above," who understand the world of God spiritually. The "Jews" are the carnal men who read everything from the outside, who have never known God because they have not known Christ and who, therefore, have never read Scripture aright, that is, Christologically. They belong to the fallen lower cosmos of the "prince of this world." They are the children of the Devil, and their will is to do the will of their father, the Devil, who was a murderer from the beginning (Jn. 8:43-47). Both the "blindness" and the hostility of the Jews to Christ, the spiritual man, therefore, only expresses their "nature." They are the sons of the Devil, the father of lies. They are the typological representatives of the alienated principle of the fallen man and cosmos who not only reject the truth but whose instinctive reaction to the truth is one of murderous hostility. It is, therefore, only according to their nature that, when the spiritual man, the son of God, appears, these children of the demonic principle will react to him with unalloyed hostility and bend all their energies to destroy and murder him. Having established this antithesis between the spiritual man and "the Jews," John then reads this same relationship as one which will extend to the on-going relations between the sons of Christ, the Christians, and the on-going synagogue. Thus the conflict between the Jews and Jesus in the gospel presentation is not allowed to stand as a past episode, but becomes the paradigm for understanding the on-going relationship between church and synagogue.

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The basic themes of the Adversos Judaeos tradition were set within the New Testament. The anti-Judaic writings of the church fathers consolidate, extend, and harden this tradition. The fact that the Adversos Judaeos writings of the Patristic period are built upon collections of Old Testament Christological and anti-Judaic midrashim and, in several cases, consist of nothing else except concatenations of such texts arranged in thematic order,8 shows to what extent this tradition is built on and continues this earliest form of Christian theologizing.9

The basic themes of the Patristic anti-Judaic literature will be summarized here in very brief form. The arguments center around two main themes, the rejection of the Jews with the election of the gentiles, and the abrogation of the law. The rejection of the Jews is based on their rejection of the Messiah, but, as in the New Testament, this is read back into a heritage of evil-doing which is culminated in this final act of apostasy. It must be shown that the Jews have always been apostate from God, and so the rejection and murder of Jesus is the foreordained culmination of this evil history of an evil people. This list of crimes expanded in the church fathers. The Jews not only always rejected the prophets and killed them. Beginning with the golden calf, it is shown that the Jews from the beginning always turned from God and worshipped idols. This proclivity for idolatry did not stop at Sinai. Throughout their subsequent history the Jews frequently deserted God and ran after the baals. All the prophetic texts against baalism are ransacked to prove that the Jews were ever apostate from God and incorrigible idolaters. Even worse crimes are brought forward, again using the prophetic texts. The Jews are said to have been cannibals and to have sacrificed their children to idols. John Chrysostom, whose sermons against the Jews represent the rhetorical extreme of this tradition, regards Jewish history as one long trail not only of idolatry but also of debauchery. The Jews in Chrysostom take on the appearance of preternatural demonic figures with superhuman appetites for vice, addicted to every depravity of flesh and spirit. The law itself is declared to have been given to the Jews, not as a mark

8 For example, Cyprian's Three books of Testimonies (Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5, pp. 507ff.) and Pseudo-Nyssa, Testimonies Against the Jews (Migne, F.G., Vol. 46).
9 Among the major anti-Judaic writings are: The Epistle of Barnabas; Justin's Dialogue with Trypho; Tertullian, In Answer to the Jews; Hippolytus, Demonstration Against the Jews; Cyprian, Testimonies; Aphrahat, Three Homilies Against the Jews; Ephraim the Syrian, Rhythm Against the Jews; Jacob of Serug, Homilies Against the Jews; Dialogue of Timothy and Aquila, and Dialogue of Athanasius and Zacchaeus; Pseudo-Nyssa, Testimonies; Chrysostom, Eight Homilies Against the Jews, and Demonstration Against Jews and Greeks; Isidore of Seville, Against the Jews; Augustine, In answer to the Jews; and John of Damascus, Against the Jews, concerning the Sabbath. Also Novatian, On Jewish Meats, and Eusebius, Demonstration of the Gospel and Preparation for the Gospel.

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of special virtue, but simply to curb this incorrigible proclivity for idolatry and vice.

Many of the church fathers adopt the scheme of history that posits, before the Mosaic law, an earlier period of universal spiritual religion corresponding to the inward reign of the natural law in men's hearts. This is believed to have existed in the time of the Patriarchs and antideluvians. This was the true universal spiritual religion of God, but it was eclipsed temporarily by the lower stage of religion represented by the Mosaic law. The law comes then to represent a Fall, and its giving was occasioned by the peculiar viciousness of the Jews, who are said to need such extra restraints because of the idolatry and unnatural vice which they picked up in Egypt. But now, with Christianity, a new race of moral heroes has arisen and the law is no longer necessary. The original universal spiritual religion of natural law has been restored in a new and perfected form. This theory is especially dear to Eusebius, but it is mentioned or alluded to by various other patristic writers.10

The hermeneutical method for proving this tale of evil Jewish history consists of splitting the right from the left hand of the prophetic message. All the negative descriptions, judgments, and threats are taken out of context and read monolithically as descriptive of the Jews. The positive side of the prophetic message, the traits of repentence, faith, and future promise, are said to apply, not to the Jews, but to the church. The heroes of the Old Testament become the lineage of the church, whereas the Jews are understood as a people addicted to incorrigible apostasy throughout the Old Testament period. Since the church operates with a biblical literalism which regards the books of the Bible as having been written by God or expressing the heroism of the prophets and heroes of the Old Testament, it is not necessary to explain sociologically how this document was written and preserved as the community Scriptures of a people who never "heard the prophets." By splitting prophetic judgment from prophetic promise, one gains an unrelieved tale of evil as characteristic of the Old Testament people, while painting a picture of the church that has lost the left band of prophetic self-criticism. Anti-Judaism and ecclesiastical triumphalism thus arise as two sides of the same bifurcation.

The final crime in this evil history of the Jews is the killing of the Messiah. Indeed, it is in order to give this crime a heritage and explanation that this evil history has been created by Christian apologetics. As Christology heightens to the full doctrine of the Nicene faith, this comes to be seen, not simply as the killing of the

10 Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica. Tertullian, among others, echoes this idea in his treatise against the Jews.

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final prophet, but as the killing of God himself, the crime of deicide, of treason and lése majesté against the sovereign of the universe. For criminals of such a stamp no vituperation is too extreme, as can be seen in the sermons of John Chrysostom who speaks constantly of the Jews as devils, their synagogues as brothels of the Devil, and the souls of Jews as dwelling places of demons.

For this final crime the Jews have been exiled irretrievably beyond the pale of divine mercy. Their city has been destroyed, their cultic places ravished never to be rebuilt, all their former favor and tokens of election taken from them. They have been driven into captivity and exile among their enemies never to know any cessation of misery until the end of time. Endlessly, the patristic fathers prove from Scripture that, whereas the former captivities in Egypt and Babylonia were predicted to have fixed temporal limits, the third captivity is predicted to have no limits lasting until the end of history. Foolishly, the Jews still scan the horizon for the coming of Messiah. But the Messiah has already come, and they have rejected him. If they are still looking for some other Messiah than Jesus, this can only mean that they are hoping for the coming of the Anti-Christ. In fact, their very pretense of not knowing that the true Messiah has come is pure hypocrisy. The prophets told them every detail of his coming, and so they had every means of being able to recognize him without fail. Thus their pretended inability to recognize Jesus as the predicted Messiah is simply the final perfidy, no doubt reflecting their unwillingness to turn from their vicious ways. They are to remain in a status of reprobation and misery until the end of time when Jesus returns in glory so they can finally acknowledge their mistake. Indeed, circumcision was given to them for no other purpose than this. Far from being a mark of election and divine favor, as they foolishly believe, "puffed up in their sensuous minds," circumcision was actually given by God in foreknowledge of this future accursed status in history. It was to serve as a mark of Cain whereby any Jews could be recognized by others and so excluded from return to the Promised Land and especially from the Holy City of Jerusalem.

The Jews, in Christian theory, thus become the eternally damned ones, outside the pale of humanity and on-going history, preserved until the end of time in a negative space of divine wrath and human misery. If the Jews repent and accept Jesus as the Messiah, presumably all will be forgiven. But most of the church fathers do not place much stress on Paul's hope for conversion and reconciliation. Yet even for those writers, such as Augustine, who maintain the stress in Romans 9-11 on future conversion, this does not allow any on-going legitimacy for the Jews as Jews. For the Jews as Jews, that religious community which does not accept Jesus as the Christ and believes there is still election, faith, and obedience to be found

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through the dispensation of Moses, for them there is no present happiness or future hope but only endless misery and enslavement within history and final damnation at the end.

This anti-Judaic tradition grew into a fixed standpoint between the apostolic period and the fourth century. It was repeated over and over in every Christian sermon, biblical commentary, or theological treatise which touched on the Jews. And since the church continued to claim Jewish history and the Jewish Scriptures as their own history and Bible, and to understand themselves as the heirs of the election of Israel, it was difficult to preach or teach anything at all without touching on them in some way.

In the first third of the fourth century, Christianity was transformed from a persecuted faith into the established religion of the empire. What had previously been the hostile tradition of an illegal sect toward its parental religion now becomes the official creed of the established civic religion of the Christian Roman empire. In less than fifty years orthodox Christianity has elevated itself into the exclusive religion of the empire. The faith and practice of pagans and even heretics became illegal. Their temples and churches were destroyed or confiscated. Their very existence was proscribed. Toward the Jews the situation was more complicated. The Jews traditionally had a protected status in Roman law. They were regarded as Roman citizens, and their right to worship and to practice their law as the governing regulations of their own communities was guaranteed. Moreover, Christian theology, although it decreed misery for the Jews, did not decree extermination. It provided for the existence of Judaism until the end of time, although in a status of misery, precisely in order to act as the final witness to the vindication of the church. The resulting legislation against the Jews which began to be enacted by the Christian emperors was a social mirror of this theology.

The Jewish community was demoted from all civic dignities by the early fifth century. Jews were forbidden to hold civil or military office, to represent themselves in court, to be judges, or lawyers. The very idea that a Jew might hold authority over a Christian was termed in one law "an insult to our faith."11 Intermarriage was made a capital crime. The church added to these civil laws others against social or religious fraternization. Although Jewish worship was allowed, every effort was made in both civil and canon law to forbid proselytism and to confine Jewish worship to as straitened circumstances as possible. Proselytizing and conversion to Judaism were subject to severe penalties. Jews were forbidden

11 Law of Theodosius II, Jan. 31, 439; Novella III; Concerning Jews, Samaritans, Heretics, and Pagans.

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to circumcize or to own Christian slaves. No new synagogues could be built nor could old ones be repaired. The Hadrianic laws forbidding Jews access to Jerusalem remained in force, and the fiscus Judaicus was renewed to subject every Jew to a special head tax. Forbidden any advantageous office in the empire, they were forced to hold the economically disastrous office of local tax collectors.

In these laws, which enforce a special status of reprobation and dispersion on the Jewish community within Christendom, one notes a language of clerical vituperation. The synagogue is referred to in one early law of the Theodosian canon by a Latin slang word meaning "brothel," a word never before used in Roman law for a place of religious worship.12 The Jews are constantly referred to in the laws as a group hated by God, to be regarded by Christian society as contemptible and even demonic. The laws bristle with negative and theologically loaded epithets. The Christian emperors, in short, do not legislate as secular rulers. They do not act as tools of the church or as cynical exploiters of prejudice for political advantage. There is little rational social advantage to be gained by the empire from such laws. Rather Christian emperors speak as exponents of the Christian theological view of the Jews, acting in their own right as priest-kings of the Christian theocratic empire.

But the popular psychology generated by this view of the Jews as the enemy of God and "His Church ever produced excesses that violated the limits of even this legal discrimination. Mobs led by fanatical monks invaded Jewish sectors to burn or confiscate synagogues. Forced baptism, disruption of Jewish religious observances, outbreaks of street violence, and finally expulsion from urban centers, such as Alexandria and Antioch, took place in the fourth and fifth centuries. The emperors constantly legislated against these excesses, but their efforts to demand redress for the Jewish community often met with the direct opposition of Christian bishops and "saints."13 The imperial laws reiterate the legal standing of Judaism as a religion, but the emperors by the fifth century became increasingly helpless to enforce their own legislation.

In the Byzantine period, the emperors themselves periodically violated their own theory by attempting to legislate forced conversion. This resulted in waves of official persecution of the Jews.

12 Codex Theodosianus, ed. Mormnsen and Meyer (1905); 16,8.1: the word is conciliabulum.
13 For example, Theodosius, in 388 ordered the local bishop to make reparations to the Jewish community for a synagogue burned by a Christian mob on the eastern frontier of the empire. Ambrose, then bishop of Milan, threatened the emperor with excommunication until he rescinded this order. Ambrose, Ep. 40 and 41; see F. H. Dudden, The Life and Times of St. Ambrose (Oxford, 1935), Vol. II, pp. 371-380. In the fifth century in Antioch, Simon Stylites similarly intimidated Theodosius II, when he demanded reparations for the sack of a synagogue there. Codex Theodosianus, 16, 8, 25-6; Symeonis Stylitae Vita, XII.50.

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But these efforts failed, and again and again the emperors rescinded their own legislation.14 As the Byzantine empire consolidated its economic and political order, the status of the Jews settled down to one of legally enforced discrimination against social advancement, but a protected status for their worship within this sphere of negation. Periodic efforts to convert them failed, and periodic waves of violence against the Jews from the populace were contained. Byzantine society thus provides a stabilized social mirror of the Christian theory of Jewish existence as one of reprobation, yet protected within this historical status of misery.

In the west, on the other hand, the social effects of this legacy of theory and legal expression took a far more erratic course and produced a history of far more extreme waves of paranoia, scapegoating, and massacre. The reason for this lies in part in the fact that the economic and political structure of the empire broke down in the west. Yet the legislation of the empire was carried on, incorporated into ecclesiastical law, as well as recensions of the Theodosian canon made for Barbarian states. The Adversos Judaeos tradition also continued as the standard exegetical norm which governed sermon and biblical commentary. The breakdown of the political order meant that the instruments to enforce the legal discrimination against the Jews became only erratically available. Christian bishops, therefore, played a different role in the west. Here they become the spokesmen for the old laws, insisting to the new barbarian princes and kings that they continue to observe these laws against the Jews. The Popes in Rome were the most consistently observant of the legislation of the old empire. Here the Jews were systematically reduced to the lowest social and economic status, yet their misery was protected. No pogroms ever took place in the Pope's territories. But the Jews remained confined to one of the most miserable ghettos in European history until the papal states were dissolved in 1870.15

In Europe the breakdown of the economic order allowed the Jews to escape, temporarily, this status of legal and economic misery, and indeed to play a key role in the revival of economic life because they alone maintained trade contacts with the east. During the eighth to the eleventh centuries the Jews were the catalysts of economic revival and, as such, were valued by kings and princes, despite the protests of Christian bishops. But, on the other hand, the steady indoctrination of a diabolic view of the Jews, which penetrated the popular level especially through outdoor litur-

14 A good recent study of this period is Andrew Sharf, Byzantine Jewry from Justinian to the Fourth Crusade (London: Routledge, and Kegan Paul 1971).
15 See Ferdinand Gregorovius, The Ghetto and The Jews of Rome (Schocken, 1966).

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gical dramas, generated a mood of irrational hatred which exploded into violence, especially in times of adversity. Such explosions of violence could not be controlled by any available force for law and order, whether civil or ecclesiastical. Church leadership played a fundamentally ambivalent role in this history, insisting on all the laws discriminating against Jews, consistently enforcing the diabolic myth of the Jews in its theological teaching, yet also disapproving of the outbreaks of popular violence. These leaders proved incapable of recognizing the manner in which their teachings and actions created the milieu in which these outbreaks of violence occurred. The stance of church leadership toward the results of theological anti-Judaism has been one which might be described as "the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing," and this continues to be the attitude of the Christian church toward the history of anti-semitism in Christian history up to our own times, despite the Holocaust.

In the eleventh century this volatile mixture blew up in a series of terrible massacres that rained down on the Jewish community in the wake of each successive crusade. This experience of gratuitous outbreaks of mass murder against a fundamentally unoffending group generated new anti-Judaic myths in the form of self-justifying fantasies of "ritual murder," "well-poisoning," and social treachery. Under these blows the status of the Jewish community rapidly disintegrated into that condition of extreme diabolization, ghettoization, humilitation through practices such as the forced wearing of the conical cap and "Jew badge" that was their lot in Christian society in the later Middle Ages. Completely dependent on political powers, lacking any intrinsic rights of residence in any area, the Jewish community was made totally vulnerable to popular violence from below and exploitation and/or expulsion from above until the Enlightenment and the secularization of the state gradually dissolved the theoretical and legal forms of Christendom. In lands such as Russia, this medieval pattern continued on into the early twentieth century. Even in western Europe the status of the Jews was not naturalized as one of ordinary citizenship until after the French Revolution.16 The final paroxysm represented by the Nazi Holocaust showed that this poison still ran deep in the veins of western Europe even in the twentieth century. The continuity of this event with this previous history cannot be discounted, despite the adoption of a secular racial myth of anti-semitism for the earlier religious myth.

VII

To a remarkable extent the history of the Jew in Christendom must be seen as having been governed throughout by theological

16 An excellent new study on Jewish emancipation is Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto (Harvard, 1973).

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imagery created in the Patristic Adversos Judaeos literature. This does not mean that the theological image created historical events in a straight line, cause-and-effect relationship. But it does mean that it provided the theoretical structure within which an historical events might be responded to and interpreted so long as this classical theology remained in force. According to this theory, the Jews were regarded as peculiarly demonic in nature and standing under the negative power of God's wrath within the whole of the Christian era. This meant that whenever the Jews escaped from a social status of misery into any affluence or leadership positions in politics or culture, this would very likely be regarded as an affront to Christian identity, an implicit challenge to Christian election that demanded, as its left hand, Jewish reprobation.

On the other hand, the triumphalistic view of the church and Christian society, read out of fulfilled messianism, did not provide an interpretive framework for understanding misfortunes. Corporate misfortunes could not be understood as natural, nor could they be internalized by the church corporately as a result of sin and unfulfillment, as the Jewish community typically took misfortunes upon themselves as calls for communal repentence and rededication. Instead social misfortune must be projected outward upon diabolic forces. The more invisible the cause of the misfortune, the more insidious must be the cause of it. The Jews, as the "types" of diabolic enmity of Christian salvation, were set up to be the scapegoat of Christian misfortune, and the ever-ready explanation of Christian unfulfillment.