Modern European history is rife with antisemitism, and Catholic Christianity created many of the mechanisms by which antisemitism became part of European culture. With the widespread belief that Jews were collectively guilty of deicide, the blood curse of Pontius Pilate justified persecution and execution across Europe.[1] While the initial marginalization relegated Jews to professions considered ‘sinful’ by Catholics, such as moneylending and taxation, the increasingly violent antisemitism led directly to the Shoah – the Holocaust – which was nothing less that the culmination of two thousand years of segregation, persecution, expulsion, and genocide of the Jewish communities in Europe through the tactic and direct support of the Catholic Church.
The first recorded mention of Jews in Europe was in Flavius Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, dating from 200-300 BCE. Josephus wrote that most Mediterranean cities had Jewish populations, and they generally appeared in clusters, rather than dispersing throughout the city.[2] By roughly 150 BCE there was a Jewish population in Rome, and there was a slow but steady spread throughout the Roman Empire over the next 500-700 years - evidence shows Jewish communities spreading from Croatia to Germania and then to Gaul between the mid- 2nd to late 5th century CE.
During this time, persecution followed the Jews wherever they migrated, and historical records substantiate claims of persecution as related in the New Testament. The most common punishment for being Jewish was forced conversion, confiscation of property, and forced resettlement. On the extreme end of the spectrum was enslavement or murder.[3] Jewish mistreatment expanded and increased as Catholicism spread through Europe. After the Visigoth conversion from Arianism to Nicene Christianity, all Jews were expelled from Visigoth lands. The French Merovingian Dynasty required conversion from Judaism to Catholicism under penalty of expulsion or death, and the Catholic Archdiocese of Toledo ordered forced conversions and burnings at the stake on several separate occasions.[4]
Persecution increased during the Crusades - communities near the Rhine and Danube were exterminated by Crusaders during the First Crusade, and French Jews were massacred during the Second Crusade. English Jews were expelled from that country in 1290, from France in 1396, and from Austria in 1420.[5] At this point the Catholic Church was largely responsible for the prejudice against the Jews, as Christian populations were taught by the Church that as the Jews had murdered Jesus, murdering Jews in His name was an appropriate response.[6]
The Black Death’s devastation of Europe led to widespread Jewish persecution. As the cities fell into chaos, those fleeing death found Jewish communities generally free of the infection. The unknown nature of the disease led many to speculate that the Jews had to be responsible for the illness, as they did not get sick on nearly the same scale as their non-Jewish neighbors.[7] By 1348, Jewish communities in Barcelona, France, and across the Holy Roman Empire were openly targeted, and one of the worst atrocities, the Valentine’s Day massacre of 1349 saw over two thousand Jews murdered – burned to death in the Strasbourg cemetery – with only children and ‘attractive women’ saved – though local priest Jakob Twinger von Konigshofen recorded that “the money [debt owed to the Jews] was the thing that killed the Jews. If they had been poor and if the feudal lords had not been in debt, they would not have been burned.”[8] After the execution, residents of Strasbourg sifted through the ashes and recovered any valuables they found, hoping to restore their financial fortunes, and the tradesmen claimed their former masters’ possessions as their own.
By the late 14th to early 15th centuries, most of those expelled Jews had fled to Poland, which had become recognized as a nation friendly and safe for exiled Jews. The Statute of Kalisz of 1264 paved the way for mass Jewish migration, as this legislation granted Jews unprecedented legal rights, including the right to Jewish jurisdiction over Jewish legal matters. Essentially, this was the original Civil Rights Act; it legislated that Jews were to be treated no differently than Christian, in any aspect of life. Thus, no less than three-quarters of all European Jews lived in Poland at this time.[9]
The tradition of tolerance declined along with the rest of the kingdom, and after the destruction of Poland as a nation in 1795 the Jews suddenly found themselves subjected to the laws of the partitioning powers (the anti-Semitic Russian Empire, Austro-Hungary, and the Kingdom of Prussia), which needless to say were extremely more restrictive the Polish ones had been. Of these, the Russian policies were the harshest. The Pale of Settlement decree restricted Jews to the western parts of the empire and excluded certain areas of prior settlement. The 1804 Statute Concerning Jews accelerated Jewish assimilation by allowing Jews to establish schools with Russian, German, or Polish curricula and legalized Jewish land ownership, however, it prohibited the Jews from leasing property, using Yiddish in classrooms, from working in the brewing industry, and from entering Russia. Further, the Jews were prohibited from small towns, thus forcing them into larger cities with the intent of compelling Jewish integration into the dominant society.[10]
A combination of the Enlightenment and protests to the Russian treatment of the Jews led to France becoming the first nation other than Poland to emancipate the Jews, in 1791. This emancipation extended to all lands controlled by Napoleonic France, and despite a measure of reversal after his death, the movement to preserve emancipation was not uncommon. The Frankfurt Parliament granted emancipation through their Basic Rights, which dictated that civil rights are not conditional on religious faith. Hamburg followed suit and legalized emancipation, as did Prussia, Wurttemberg, the Electorate of Hesse, and Hanover. The German states that chose not to extend emancipation laws did so upon the unification of Germany. Frits Stern, a German historian, found that the emancipation and integration of the Jews into German society had produced a unique cultural symbiosis. German Jews had blended their culture with that of gentile Germans, rather than repeating the historical trend of remaining somewhat segregated from the larger non-Jewish society. For instance, incidents of interfaith marriages were somewhat common - a reversal in the Jewish trend of generally refraining from marrying gentiles as a method of preserving their heritage, which historically had been less than secure. The Jewish population in Germany grew from just over 500,000 at the time of unification to over 600,000 by 1910, with less than 20,000 converting to Christianity due to marital pressure during the same period.[11]
At this point, irony began to rear its ugly head. During World War I, Jews viewed service to their nation as a way to combat the lingering, though illegal, anti-Semitism. As such, the Jews displayed effervescent patriotism in a desire to prove they truly were a German people. The result was the Jews, as an ethnic group, suffered the most. Over 100,000 Jews served in the German military, 12,000 died for their nation, and 3,500 were decorated for valor and bravery in combat. Despite all of this, the pervasive anti-Semitism led the German High Command to conduct a census to discredit pervasive concerns of a Jewish lack of patriotism, but in actuality the Judenzalung was designed to confirm these accusations. The official finding of the report confirmed that Jews generally did not serve in combat, which was in contradiction to the evidence, which had proven that of the Jews in service, 80% served in a front line capacity. This point marks the end of the German-Jewish symbiosis and began the feeling among many Jews that there would never be a complete integration regardless of what they did to attempt to do so.[12] The 'stab-in-the-back' premise, and the fact the Hugo Preuss, a Jew, wrote the first draft of the liberal Weimar constitution enabled radical Germans to latch onto irrational anti-Semitism. One of the more radical anti-Semitic groups was the National Socialist German Workers Party, or NSDAP. This group and its leader, Adolf Hitler, gained control of the government through a combination of democratic means and behind the scenes shenanigans. It was only a matter of time before the cycle of extreme persecution was renewed.
During the early twentieth century, German Protestant leaders used Martin Luther’s writing as a basis for German nationalism, and though Nazi ideology would never support a church establishment that did not directly link Christianity as a subservient puppet to Nazism, leaders such as Goebbels and Himmler embraced antisemitism as a facet of the church they could support. They pointed to Luther’s antisemitic works, published and reprinted many times in his own lifetime, as justification for the Protestant fight against Judaism, crediting Luther’s 1543 work “On the Jews and their Lies” as the blueprint for Kristallnacht.[13] Moreover, once the crimes were perpetrated and the synagogues were burning, the Bishop of the Lutheran Church in Thuringia, Martin Sasse, wrote, “on November 10, Luther’s birthday,” people ought to heed Luther’s words as “the greatest anti-Semite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews.”[14] Groups such as the German Christians sought to create a unified Protestant faith in Germany, much as Emperor Ferdinand II had sought to Catholicize the entirety on the Holy Roman Empire in 1618, and the Nazis were able to subordinate this another other ideas, such as the traditions of Christian culture in Germany and the desire to eradicate any trace of Judaism from Christianity to gain wider support from the Protestant denominations across the Reich to the extent that the Protestant Christian Movement embraced Nazism as a way to show Christ embodied as an Aryan warrior who encapsulated the ideals of the new Germany.[15]
The Christian attitudes toward European Judaism began as exclusionary and slowly became increasingly violent. The antisemitism in Europe has its foundations in Catholic doctrine, and the violence culminated in the Shoah, the single worst atrocity in Jewish history. The common misconception across this all is that the Church itself created doctrines, but rarely actively participated in anti-Jewish pogroms, though historical record proves that wars incited by the Church against infidels and heretics generally included Jews in the number to be converted or put to the sword, despite later statements that the Church was responsible for the protection of the Jews in Catholic Europe. The apology made in 1998 by Pope John Paul II for the inactivity and silence on the part of the Catholic Church fails to fully embrace the guilt the Catholic Church has for inciting Europeans to perpetrate violence against Jews, and failed to recognize many Church leaders were complicit in the Jewish persecution from 1939-1945.
[1] The blood curse is based on Matthew 27: 24-25, in which Pilate symbolically washed his hands of Christ’s blood, and the crowd – of which many were Jewish – accepted the guilt of the crucifixion onto themselves and their descendants. Though modern Anglican, Catholic, and Reformed scholars acknowledge the verse was likely in reference to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70C.E., the Catholic Church failed to modify its official position until the 1545-1562 Council of Trent, which was also tasked with halting the expansion of the Reformation through clarifications of canon, tradition, scripture, and salvation. See: Norman Tobias, Jewish Conscience of the Church: Jules Isaac and the Second Vatican Council (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 115.
[2] Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XI v.2.
[3] Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 46-48.
[4] Paul Grosser and Edwin Halperin, Anti-Semitism: The Causes and Effects of a Prejudice (Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1979), 20-35.
[5] The irony is that the Jews had been forced to abandon moneylending because of Catholic statutes opposing usury, under Edward I in 1274, but the amount of taxes Jews had been forced to pay had not declined despite the loss of income. The Catholic Church was instrumental in ensuring that Jews didn’t engage in usury and argued that any contract one may enter into with a Jew was likely to be based in usury, with very little actual evidence proving such. When Edward ordered the Jewish expulsion, Parliament granted him £116,000, with the Catholic Church footing 10% of that bill, apparently in gratitude. See: Richard Huscroft, Expulsion: England’s Jewish Solution (Stroud, UK: Tempus Publishing, 2006), 151-153.
[6] Norman Cantor, The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 94-128.
[7] Despite little substantive evidence outside of confessions extracted through torture, European had no real reason to suspect the Jews other than blanket antisemitism. They simply did not understand that the Jewish hygiene practices prevented the creation of the conditions which encouraged the real culprit – rats and fleas. See: Diane Zahler, The Black Death (Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books, 2009), 64.
[8] Yvette Alt Miller, “Horrific Valentine’s Day Massacre of Jews,” AISH, retrieved October 23, 2024, https://aish.com/horrific-valentines-day-massacre-of-jews/
[9] Salo Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, Volume 16 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1976), 210-233.
[10] Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (Charleston: Nabu Press, 2010 reprint), Vol. 2, 282.
[11] Volker Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 1871-1914: Economy, Society, Culture, Politics (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1994), 102-111.
[12] Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler's Jewish Soldier's (Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 2002) 160.
[13] Diarmid McCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (New York: Penguin, 2004), 666-667.
[14] Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Vintage, 1997), 265.
[15] Victoria Barnett, “The Role of the Churches in Nazi Germany,” Anti-Defamation League, January 1, 1998, retrieved October 23, 2024, https://www.adl.org/resources/news/role-churches-nazi-germany.
