LACKING a formal religious upbringing,I have always found faith at once fascinating and faintly repellent.Christianity has dominated Western civilisation for 2000 years, for good and ill, but there is still extraordinary vagueness about what the Bible means, and who is acceptable to the faithful.
Take the Jews. They practically invented Christianity, yet for most of its history they havebeenpersecutedinonewayor another by Christians.To an outsider this is simply stupefying. How could co-religionists be so hostile to people who worship the same God simply because they have an aversion to pork?
Of course, I know there's a lot more to anti-Semitism than eating habits. Marxists always argued that Jews represented a proto-capitalist merchant class under feudalism, which made them the object of resentment when times got hard. Just read The Merchant Of Venice for confirmation of that. Hitler revived this prejudice during the economic crisis of the 1930s.
But you can't reduce anti-Semitism purely to economic class or fascist expediency. There has been an ideological aversion to Jewishness in Christendom which has echoed down the generations, and still finds expression today in the drunken ravings of Hollywood actor-producers.
The idea that, as Mel Gibson put it, "Jews are behind all the wars in the world" is deep-rooted. It derives from the claim - hinted at in his film The Passion Of The Christ - that the Jews were responsible for the murder of Jesus.
In the first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul says of the Jews: "They both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets and have persecuted us: and they please not God, and are contrary to all men." Sounds like the Bible has the Jew bang to rights. Except that Paul, as Martin Goodman points out, was himself a Jew, and a Roman citizen. So if there was any collective guilt to be handed out, Paul would presumably be the first in line. It was the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who actually authorised the nails and hammers, after washing his hands.
Moreover, since Christ was himself a Jew,albeitaprophetofanunderclass version of Judaism, you could argue that he was collectively responsible for his own crucifixion. All of which merely confirms that the Bible is a work of sublime madness, gloriously vague and self-contradictory.
Sohowdidpracticalanti-Semitism actually begin?Was it the pagan Romans whostarteditallwhentheyattacked Jerusalem in 70CE?The Emperor Titus certainly behaved badly: his legions sacked the city, razed the Temple of Herod and murdered every Jew they could lay their handson.ButGoodman,professorof Jewish studies at Oxford, rather exonerates the Romans from the charge of being the archetypical anti-Semites.
Indeed, in this magisterial exercise in comparative religious socio-history, Goodman reveals that the Romans and the Jews co-existed for hundreds of years. The Jews were not confined to what we now call Palestine, but were spread across the entire Roman empire, and were an integral part of it.
The pagan Romans regarded the Jewish religion, with its austere monotheism and obscure rituals, as eccentric but harmless. There were many Jews in ancient Rome and they were allowed complete religious freedom.Theywereusefuloutsiders wholivedbyarbitrage;financialintermediaries who kept the wheels of empire turning in an aristocratic civilisation whichfound commerce distasteful and tedious.
ThedestructionofJerusalem,aftera successionofJewish"terrorist"revolts against the local Roman governor, was not borne of Roman fear or hatred of the Jewish religion,accordingtoGoodman,but because the emperor needed to demonstrate military supremacy. The sack of Jerusalem was an early exercise in shock and awe. Nothing personal.
It did get personal a couple of centuries later, when Christian theologians began to define the limits of their faith. Goodman argues that: "It would have been quite possibleforearlyChristianstohave maintained a view of Judaism as another, older, relationship with God but it was easier to join in the attack and agree with the pagans that the defeat of the Jews and the destruction of the Temple were to be celebrated as the will of God."
In the fourth century CE, the Romans, under Emperor Constantine, converted to Christianity, which became the state religion of a crumbling empire. Constantine, with all the zealotry of the newly converted, was obsessed with doctrinal purity. He used the Jews to define the boundaries of the new Roman faith by placing them firmly outside it.
But what none of this really explains is why anti-Semitism continued after the fall oftheRomanempire.Whydidn'tthe emerging Roman Catholic Church simply reabsorb Jews as part of the brotherhood? TheChurchdidnotdisowntheOld Testament, Moses, Zion and all that, despite the urgings of some early theologians such as Mercian who wanted a clean break.
Scriptural Judaism was retained as part of the Christian faith, but the Jews were still stigmatised. Five hundred years later, the ninth-century Christian scholar, Jerome, was still attacking Jews as "the treacherous inhabitants, who having killed the servants and then the Son of God, are prohibited to enter Jerusalem except to lament".
Itishardnottoconcludethatthis commercially astute outsider caste simply became a universal scapegoat. It seems that whenever there is a society in crisis - whether it is the collapse of Roman civilisation, the disintegration of the feudal order, or even the great depression - it's the Jews who get the blame. Simply because they are there. It just beggars belief.
