In medieval Europe, a rivalry between two assertive cultures -- Christians and Jews, who both considered themselves "God's Chosen People" -- gave rise to modern antisemitism, argues Yale's Ivan G. Marcus in his latest book.
Christians who lived in medieval Europe considered Jews to be subordinate -- first for religious reasons and then, eventually, for racial ones. The Jews of this period, meanwhile, were not passive subjects of persecution isolated in ghettos, as is commonly thought by general historians of the period, Marcus writes. Rather, they lived alongside and did business with Christians and were emphatic about their beliefs, in both word and deed.
What resulted was a Jewish-Christian confrontation "grounded in a deep structural clash between two related religious cultures," Marcus writes in "How the West Became Anti-Semitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800-1500" (Princeton University Press, 2024).
Marcus, who is the Frederick P. Rose Professor of Jewish History and a professor of history and of religious studies in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, says that this rivalry ultimately set the stage for modern antisemitism. As Christian society began to see Jews as an "enemy within," it not only reacted with violence but also developed damaging narratives that continue to show up in modern ideological battles.
Marcus, who is a core faculty member in Yale's Program in Jewish Studies, talked with Yale News about the fateful year of 1096, when Jewish communities became the target of violent persecution, and the struggle for "chosen-ness." The conversation has been condensed and edited.
Ivan Marcus: The popes of the mid-11th century noticed that the wrong people were ruling Christian society -- namely, the temporal German emperors and other Christian nobility and kings. These popes were learned in the history of the papacy and the way they understood their mandate through the apostolic chain of tradition was that the spiritual head should be the head of the church. The result was a reform movement that tried to create a hierarchical order in the Christian society, make it more Christian.
Ultimately, this movement would lead to the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century, where again order was violated, this time by Muslims who were occupying Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and challenging the Byzantine Christian population, who were under armed attack. The pope appealed to the knights of France to come and save their brethren and to liberate the church. The pope said to the knights: "Go and kill the enemy." And the enemy was defined then as the pagan. When the notion of "the enemy" became the watchword, some Christians got the idea that there were other enemies in Europe, others who were not Christian, and they were the Jews. Suddenly the Jewish communities that had been settling in these market towns, in Germany in particular, became the target of violent persecution for forced conversion or mass murder. That occurred in the spring and early summer of 1096.
Marcus: Judaism from the point of view of the early Christian church was the underlying rationale for the truth of Christianity. The Hebrew Bible was the text which, from the Christian point of view, predicted the truth of and the coming of Jesus. So the church couldn't really attack Judaism per se. But they could attack Jews who refused to accept the truth of Jesus.
From the Jewish side, particularly in the post-biblical period, when the teachers of Judaism known as the rabbis emerged, the enemy was not Christians per se, but Christianity as an ancient pagan cult. And paganism was something that the rabbis, as the biblical prophets, were familiar with, and pagans were the subject of attack. So Christianity was attacked by Jews, and Jews were attacked by Christians. It was not a symmetrical target.
Marcus: Yes, because when you have Jew-hatred as the main expression of the sense of chosen-ness, it can change from a religious context into a more secular context. Whereas if Judaism was the target, theoretically, once religion became less important and the West became more secularized, anti-Semitism might have disappeared. It was able to be refashioned because the target was Jews and not Judaism.
Marcus: Both Jews and Christians considered bodily elimination to be the opposite of the holy. And it gets expressed by Jews particularly in relation to the Christian doctrine of incarnation, which Jews opposed and couldn't understand and ridiculed. The idea of the insides of a human body being somehow identified with God struck Jews as being funny, but also sad because it was the opposite of how they understood spirituality. This ends up being expressed in words and certain gestures. Jews are accused of insulting images of Jesus and Mary by putting them in latrines. Jews did discuss this idea, so it wasn't all made up. While there are many things that Christians accused Jews of doing that they never did, some of the gestures and some of the language written about Jesus and Mary and bodily elimination seem to have been practiced as acts of Jewish assertiveness.
Marcus: The "body of Christ" idea emerges in the 12th century in Christian Europe. In the Crusade chronicles and the Crusade episodes of forced baptism, Jews were being victimized because they were understood to be paying off the original killing of Christ in the Bible in the New Testament. It's avenging the death of Christ in the past.
By the middle of the 12th century, the body of Christ idea develops into a Christ-like, innocent young Christian boy. Jews are then accused in the present of ritually crucifying young Christian boys. The idea was created in Benedictine monks' minds, mostly in connection with forming new Christian martyr saints. The need for sainthood generated this story. It wasn't about Jews at all in the beginning, but in order to have a martyr, you need an infidel who will kill an innocent Christian. And in Europe, the only available infidels were Jews.
And then the whole Christian world was understood at some point as "the body of Christ." And Jews were accused in the 14th century of poisoning wells and bringing about the Black Death. None of these accusations -- and some of them were investigated by popes and kings and emperors -- were actual events. They were part of the imagined Jew of medieval Europe, as opposed to the real Jew.
Marcus: During the medieval centuries in Europe, the idea of forming a perfect Christian society, from the reform movement and beyond, generated its antithesis. The opposition to that perfection took the form of Jews who were sometimes real and sometimes imagined. Imagined in the sense of the Crusade accusation that the Jews were the enemy within Christian Europe. And then the hierarchy idea that Jews should be below Christians. Then the notion that Jews, especially older male Jews, could not really convert to Christianity because something physical in them remained Jewish.
This three-part structure, which began in Christian Europe, was able to be transformed in the modern period, taking it all the way to today, either in American society or in European society or in certain Muslim societies. These ideas were transferred into modern ideological battles. Who's supposed to be on top? Who was the inner enemy? And is there a possibility of cooperation, of coexistence, or are Jews always going to remain Jewish no matter what, which might lead to all kinds of drastic solutions? That could apply in a modern context as well as it had applied in a religious context.