Abstract
In the early 1940s in Kansas, an American historian encountered a farmer who could not believe the historian was Jewish because there were no horns on his head. This farmer was not alone. On another continent, but not another world, the gas chambers of Auschwitz were operating at full capacity; daily the chimneys of its crematoria spewed the ashes of thousands over the soil of Poland. While the Jews of Europe were being murdered, victims of a racist ideology rooted in religion, there were people in America who still believed that Jews bore the physical marks of kinship with the devil.2 It is not likely that ordinary Americans thought about the destruction of European Jewry then under way, but was there any connection between that current genocide and their ancient prejudice?
In our own day, and within our own civilization, more than six million deliberate murders are the consequence of the teachings about Jews for which the Christian Church is ultimately responsible….1
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Notes
James Parkes, Judaism and Christianity (London, 1948), 167
as quoted in Malcolm Hay, Europe and the Jews ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1961 ), 11.
Joel Carmichael, The Satanizing of The Jews (New York: Fromm, 1992), 3, 7.
Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz, eds, Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis (New York and London: New York University Press, 1991 ), 30, 41.
Edward Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews ( New York: Paulist Press, 1985 ), 7–27.
Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York: Random House, 1995), 22.
Claude Lanzmann, Shoah. An Oral History of the Holocaust ( New York: Pantheon Books, 1985 ) 99–100.
Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan ( New York: Random House, 1995 ), 103–5.
W. Friedrich Heer, God’s First Love ( New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970 ), 23
Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 120 f.
Edward A Synan, The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages(Nw York:e Macmillan, 1967) 152 f.
Barnet Litvinoff, The Burning Bush (London: Fontana/Collins, 1989), 17 f.
Franklin H. Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986), 28 ff.
Norman F. Cantor, The Sacred Chain (New York: Harper Collins, 1994 ), 155, 110
Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 21–4, is more balanced.
Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and The Jews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983 ), 116, 124.
Malcolm Hay, Europe and the Jews ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1961 ), 30–2.
Irving Agus, The Heroic Age of Franco-German Jewry (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1969) Cantor, op. cit. 108, emphasizes the disabilities under which Jews lived.
Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1927), Volume I, 176–7; Volume II, 176–9; 250–1, 302–3, 329.
Salo W. Baron,A Social and Religious History of the Jews (Volume IV, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1957 ), 44.
Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, Volume IX (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 60 f., 27.
Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews. Volume XI (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 138; Agus, op. cit. 151–5.
See Allan Harris Cutler, The Jew as Ally of the Muslim. Medieval Roots of Modern Anti-Semitism (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986 ).
Compare Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, Volume I (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974 ) 42
Arno Mayer, Why did the Heavens not Darken? ( New York: Pantheon, 1988 ), 226–33
Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the first Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), passim
Alfred Haverkamp, Medieval Germany 1056–1273 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 124; and Heer, op. cit. 66.
As in Robert Chazan, ed., Church State and Jew in the Middle Ages (New York: Behrman House, 1980), 103; Hay, op. cit. 44 f.
Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism ( cited hereafter as Antisemitism) (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990 ), 113–16
Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism ( cited hereafter as History) (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990 ), 156.
See Alan Dundes, ed., The Blood Libel Legend. A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991 )
Jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World. A Source Book? 315–1791 ( New York: Atheneum, 1969 )
Jacob R. Marcus, Encyclopedia Judaica (New York, 1971 ), 4: 1120–31.
Pinchas E. Lapide, Three Popes and the Jews (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967 ), 67, 69.
H.E. Butler, ed., The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond concerning the acts of Samson, Abbot of the Monastery of St Edmunds ( London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1949 ), 16.
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© 1998 Lionel B. Steiman
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Steiman, L.B. (1998). Christianity and Crusades: The Saviour and the Jews. In: Paths to Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371330_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371330_1
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