Historical Christian doctrine of Jew-hatred and of contempt for Judaism, the religion. In common usage, the term also encompasses the racist anti-Semitism of the German Nazis and of some Islamic extremists, from which phenomena it rightly should be distinguished. In the early centuries C.E., the doctrine developed that “the Jews killed Christ” (that is, “deicide”) and that the guilt for that act is inherited by all Jews from then on. Further, the Church put forth the claim that it represented “the true Israel,” heir to the divine promises, and that the Jews, Christ-killers, were rejected by God and were not really, or no longer, “the true Israel” of whom the Hebrew Scriptures spoke. The Jews, furthermore, no longer had the valid Torah of Sinai since, in light of the doctrine of the oral Torah, they now followed a false revelation, having forged new documents attributed to Moses but never revealed by him.
The promises of the prophets, ISAIAH, JEREMIAH, Ezekiel, all were fully kept in the return to Zion of the sixth century B.C.E., and the Jews no longer had a future; they would never return to Jerusalem and recover their country, the land of Israel. Christian anti-Semitism further maintained that Jews were extravagant gluttons and dissolute, depraved and wanton, and that they were to be kept alive only to bear witness to the truth of Christianity. At the second coming, the Jews too would convert to Christ.
This doctrine of hatred for the Jews and contempt for Judaism formed the foundation for modern racist anti-Semitism, which imputed to Jews on a racial, genetic basis the same evil qualities that Christianity had assigned to them on an inherited basis; the difference was that Christianity held that Jews could atone for their sins and crimes by conversion to Christianity, while modern racist anti-Semitism holds that there is no remedy for the Jews’ condition. Christian anti-Semitism thus held that Jews might live, just not as Jews, while racist anti-Semitism holds that Jews should not live at all.
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