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The Devil and the Jews: the medieval conception of the Jew and its relation to modern anti-semitism
A JPS bestseller, this is the definitive work of scholarship on the medieval conception of the Jew as devil—literally and figuratively. Through documents, analysis, and illustrations, the book exposes the full spectrum of the Jew’s demonization as devil, sorcerer, and ritual murderer. The author reveals how these myths, many with origins traced to Christian Europe in the late Middle Ages, still exist in transmuted form in the modern era.
278 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1943
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514 people want to read
About the author
Joshua Trachtenberg
24 books4 followersJoshua Trachtenberg was a reform Rabbi based in the United States of America. He had a notable career as a congregational Rabbi and scholarly writer.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
January 11, 2024
Written in the shadow of World War II, this book is sadly still relevant. The thesis is that a hallmark of the medieval era (as opposed to, say, the classical era) is the absolute dominance of the Church. Christianity wasn't merely a religion or faith in this period, but the bedrock of culture and legitimacy. It's truth claims were so predominant that they seemed eminently reasonable to all classes of society. Even Jews, it was asserted, must know they're valid. So why do Jews nonetheless obstinately reject them? The only answer is that Jews must be in league with the cosmological enemy of Christianity, the Devil.
From this flows everything else. The conflation of Jews with the Devil means that Jews are committed to hurting Christians, such as by poisoning wells and ritual murder. Syllogisms are based on this fundamental belief: e.g., since the Devil is the origin of sorcery and since Jews are followers of the Devil, then Jews must be sorcerers. Things are more complex in the post-modern era, but the assumption of gratuitous Jewish culpability is still with us.
From this flows everything else. The conflation of Jews with the Devil means that Jews are committed to hurting Christians, such as by poisoning wells and ritual murder. Syllogisms are based on this fundamental belief: e.g., since the Devil is the origin of sorcery and since Jews are followers of the Devil, then Jews must be sorcerers. Things are more complex in the post-modern era, but the assumption of gratuitous Jewish culpability is still with us.
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December 19, 2022
Brilliant. Despite having been published in 1943, this is something I could happily assign to my students today. One of the earliest and most exhaustive explorations of European persecutions and conceptions of Jewishness, from the fall of Rome to the rise of the Nazis. The specific focus is on the European understandings of Jews as sorcerers and Satanists and how that influenced the ways in which they were legislated against and misrepresented by their non-Jewish neighbors. I especially appreciated his wry asides, dripping with a sense of the black humor inherent in his people's tragic history. EG: In describing Dio Cassius' sensationalistic and largely fabricated account of the Jewish revolt in North Africa (the ancient consul-cum-historian claimed that the Jewish rebels engaged in cannibalism, washed themselves with gentile blood & dressed in the entrails of slaughtered goyim), Trachtenberg wryly notes: "The ferocity of the American Indian of dime novel fame pales ingloriously before Dio Cassius’ blood-curdling description…" Comparing Dio Cassius to pulp authors like Zane Grey? YES.
January 31, 2025
Again, the Tribe seems, by its own account, to have a long and puzzling tradition of migrating to anti-Semitic countries. Or rather, "anti-Semitism" is the explanation it gives for its own perpetual unpopularity, and at the root of anti-Semitism, it insists, is Christianity (though a new explanation has to be found for its unpopularity in the Muslim world).
~ Joseph Sobran, "The Jewish Faction" (May 2004)
~ Joseph Sobran, "The Jewish Faction" (May 2004)
February 15, 2023
a light romance next would be good
January 11, 2022
Written in the midst of the Holocaust, "The Devil and the Jews" reads like an act of despair. In his retracing of the histories of various anti-Semitic myths, Trachtenberg is searching for answers. Why has Christian anti-Semitism proved so durable? And what is it about these myths that can provoke (and supply popular consent for) horrific acts of violence?
The author finds his answers in medieval European history. The book is history both from the top-down and the bottom-up, as Trachtenberg surveys legislation and Church dictates on one hand and folktales and popular plays on the other. And there's no shortage of horror to be found. Jews are poisoners, kidnappers, Christ-killers, devil-worshippers. They are on a Satanic mission to destroy Christianity. They literally give birth to pigs. Through the sheer volume of sincerely-held bigotry, Trachtenberg argues that anti-Semitism as an ideology was almost universally adhered to in medieval Europe, and that Jews historically haven't been so much scapegoated as completely dehumanized. "The only Jew whom the medieval Christian recognized was a figment of the imagination," he concludes.
For Trachtenberg, dehumanization is the essential truth of Christian-Jewish relations. And despite the Reformation, the Enlightenment, etc., he believed that truth held to his present day. His arguments certainly rely on generalizations, it'd be difficult to prove that anti-Semitic mythology was universally held in the way he suggests. But it isn't hard to see how the old fantastical anti-Semitism still resonates in our era. To irrational minds, Jews are still the double agents, the ones set on subjugating the Christian West to their vicious, greedy agenda. And this stuff is woven into Western culture. Pick an insane quote at random, look up the author on Wikipedia and you won't even see an anti-Semitism section. Trachtenberg is right - anti-Semitism is fundamental.
According to Trachtenberg, the early Middle Ages were a time of extreme superstition. It seems obvious in retrospect, but it had never occurred to me that Satanism, witchcraft and the occult are all drawn directly from Christianity. Satanism is merely the flip side, the temptation, and at least in the medieval mind not only did Christianity and Satanism share a set of stories and cultural reference points, but the two quite literally could not exist without their inverse. Jewishness, as a repository for hidden desires and hysterical fears, served the same function. Jews weren't just a scapegoat, they were mankind's inhuman opposite. That is a cultural legacy that's pretty hard to shake.
The author finds his answers in medieval European history. The book is history both from the top-down and the bottom-up, as Trachtenberg surveys legislation and Church dictates on one hand and folktales and popular plays on the other. And there's no shortage of horror to be found. Jews are poisoners, kidnappers, Christ-killers, devil-worshippers. They are on a Satanic mission to destroy Christianity. They literally give birth to pigs. Through the sheer volume of sincerely-held bigotry, Trachtenberg argues that anti-Semitism as an ideology was almost universally adhered to in medieval Europe, and that Jews historically haven't been so much scapegoated as completely dehumanized. "The only Jew whom the medieval Christian recognized was a figment of the imagination," he concludes.
For Trachtenberg, dehumanization is the essential truth of Christian-Jewish relations. And despite the Reformation, the Enlightenment, etc., he believed that truth held to his present day. His arguments certainly rely on generalizations, it'd be difficult to prove that anti-Semitic mythology was universally held in the way he suggests. But it isn't hard to see how the old fantastical anti-Semitism still resonates in our era. To irrational minds, Jews are still the double agents, the ones set on subjugating the Christian West to their vicious, greedy agenda. And this stuff is woven into Western culture. Pick an insane quote at random, look up the author on Wikipedia and you won't even see an anti-Semitism section. Trachtenberg is right - anti-Semitism is fundamental.
According to Trachtenberg, the early Middle Ages were a time of extreme superstition. It seems obvious in retrospect, but it had never occurred to me that Satanism, witchcraft and the occult are all drawn directly from Christianity. Satanism is merely the flip side, the temptation, and at least in the medieval mind not only did Christianity and Satanism share a set of stories and cultural reference points, but the two quite literally could not exist without their inverse. Jewishness, as a repository for hidden desires and hysterical fears, served the same function. Jews weren't just a scapegoat, they were mankind's inhuman opposite. That is a cultural legacy that's pretty hard to shake.
February 11, 2025
Pretty good book and very insightful but the writing had interesting sentence structure that made it hard to read.
April 26, 2021
Trachtenberg patiently demonstrates that the Middle Ages never ended and that the contemporary conception of the Jew is the medieval Christian idea of the Jew––which he notes “permeated every layer of Christian society and which grew layer by layer century by century–– repackaged: In the middle ages, Jews are "creatures of the devil with whom they conclude secret pacts and whom they worship with obscene rites; they offer sacrifices to demons; they conduct secret meetings where they plot foul deeds against Christian society and practice blasphemous ceremonial; they mock and despise the Christian faith and profane its sacred objects; they stink; their eyes are permanently fixed earthward; they often wear a goat's beard, and at their conventicles disguise themselves with goats' head masks; their heads are adorned with horns, and their wives trail tails behind them; they suffer from secret ailments and deformities; they are cruel and rapacious; they buy or kidnap children and slaughter them in homage to Satan; they consume human flesh and blood; they believe that the sacrifice of an innocent life will prolong their own lives..."
The blood libel––the notion that Jews murder, often torture, children for their blood, which they use in religious rites, to make matzah at Passover, and to treat the ailments that plague them and are tokens of their spiritual rot flowered the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries via the Inquisition, flourished through a reformation notable Luther's genocidal hatred of Jews and call for their elimination, an idea that flowered in Nazism and still flowers today in QAnon conspiracies, Pizzagate and anti-Israel Zionist rhetoric and imagery and casual references, political cartoons, statements like “Israel hypnotized the world,” and in tropes of malignant Jewish/Israeli/Zionist power, cruelty and murder.
As Trachtenberg notes, "The mythical Jew, outlined by early Christian theology and ultimately puffed out to impossible proportions supplanted the real Jew in the medieval mind, until that real Jew to all intents and purposes ceased to exist. The only Jew whom the medieval Christian recognized was a figment of the imagination." I'd add that this figment is more powerful than reality and animates not only Judensau—the vulgar Jew-pig sculptures depicting horned rabbis eating the shit of pigs that adorn some German churches and even Notre Dame in Paris, but is foundational to the way the non-Jewish world views the Jew––as incapable of loyalty, over-powerful, greedy, spiritually deformed, corrupting and controlling, sexually deviant, always working behind the scenes to enrich Jews, delighting in the deaths of children, carriers of disease (Covid). This is the Jew of F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Chaucer, Louis Farrakhan, Henry Ford, and the publications of the Nation of Islam, in the pamphlets of white supremacists, the Jew described by celebrities, in the political discourse of some members of congress on the right and the left, in political cartoons, i.e. the blood libelous assertions that Netanyahu would happily wear a necklace made of the teeth of dead Palestinian children, that Jews provoked the Holocaust, "danced" on 9/11 or that Jews are Nazis.
When an elderly French woman is awakened by and beaten to death by a neighbor enraged at her mezuzah and who prior to tossing her off her balcony calls her "Shaytan,"[Satan], we are living in the fourteenth century.
Because this conception of the Jew is foundational to Christianity and to European culture and is plastic and resilient, it has been exported to non-Christians and flourishes beyond Christianity. And because this conception informs and is built-in to the Western European literary canon, arts and Christian religious tradition, I have come to believe that it is probably ineradicable.
It’s illuminating and necessary, though, for members of a continuously-targeted and tiny minority whose existence itself is “a problem” to majority, Christian-supremacist culture to understand the source and mutations of the dehumanizing and demonizing ideas circulating around them and employed to define them. This book painful but absolutely necessary reading for anyone interested in antisemitsm.
The blood libel––the notion that Jews murder, often torture, children for their blood, which they use in religious rites, to make matzah at Passover, and to treat the ailments that plague them and are tokens of their spiritual rot flowered the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries via the Inquisition, flourished through a reformation notable Luther's genocidal hatred of Jews and call for their elimination, an idea that flowered in Nazism and still flowers today in QAnon conspiracies, Pizzagate and anti-Israel Zionist rhetoric and imagery and casual references, political cartoons, statements like “Israel hypnotized the world,” and in tropes of malignant Jewish/Israeli/Zionist power, cruelty and murder.
As Trachtenberg notes, "The mythical Jew, outlined by early Christian theology and ultimately puffed out to impossible proportions supplanted the real Jew in the medieval mind, until that real Jew to all intents and purposes ceased to exist. The only Jew whom the medieval Christian recognized was a figment of the imagination." I'd add that this figment is more powerful than reality and animates not only Judensau—the vulgar Jew-pig sculptures depicting horned rabbis eating the shit of pigs that adorn some German churches and even Notre Dame in Paris, but is foundational to the way the non-Jewish world views the Jew––as incapable of loyalty, over-powerful, greedy, spiritually deformed, corrupting and controlling, sexually deviant, always working behind the scenes to enrich Jews, delighting in the deaths of children, carriers of disease (Covid). This is the Jew of F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Chaucer, Louis Farrakhan, Henry Ford, and the publications of the Nation of Islam, in the pamphlets of white supremacists, the Jew described by celebrities, in the political discourse of some members of congress on the right and the left, in political cartoons, i.e. the blood libelous assertions that Netanyahu would happily wear a necklace made of the teeth of dead Palestinian children, that Jews provoked the Holocaust, "danced" on 9/11 or that Jews are Nazis.
When an elderly French woman is awakened by and beaten to death by a neighbor enraged at her mezuzah and who prior to tossing her off her balcony calls her "Shaytan,"[Satan], we are living in the fourteenth century.
Because this conception of the Jew is foundational to Christianity and to European culture and is plastic and resilient, it has been exported to non-Christians and flourishes beyond Christianity. And because this conception informs and is built-in to the Western European literary canon, arts and Christian religious tradition, I have come to believe that it is probably ineradicable.
It’s illuminating and necessary, though, for members of a continuously-targeted and tiny minority whose existence itself is “a problem” to majority, Christian-supremacist culture to understand the source and mutations of the dehumanizing and demonizing ideas circulating around them and employed to define them. This book painful but absolutely necessary reading for anyone interested in antisemitsm.
July 29, 2020
This book really shows how the dichotomy between scholarly and popular is a false one, or at least that it can be when the scholar has a very clear mind and significant compositional powers. "The Devil and the Jews" is a book brimming with information on the religious mind of the Medieval world, its customs, forebears, and offshoots, but it is also in no small part humorous, mordant, suffused with a poignant and sad irony. Yes, it's a great piece of scholarship, but it's also a lament, a jeremiad, incidentally, first published in 1943. For those of you who are not history buffs, 1943 was not a very good year to be Jewish in Europe.
The book focuses its study on the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance, but reaches at least as far back as the reigns of Justinian and Nero. It gives this thoroughgoing treatment in order to argue its central thesis, which is that antisemitism started as an offshoot or perhaps adjunct to one of many interfaith squabbles in the Middle Ages (between Catholics and Protestants, various charismatic sects, gypsies, Saracens, Gnostics). This theological squabbling led to sectarian bloodletting when cultural and economic tension between Jews and Gentiles reached a boiling point.
Dr. Joshua Trachtenberg shows that many of the charges lobbed at Jews, ritual murder, the gathering of blood and other bodily fluids for unholy sacrament, had previously been levelled by pagans against the early Christians, and that many times religious and secular authorities were not in agreement with each other, or with their citizens, about how to resolve the "Jewish Question."
We know the unfortunate answer to the question that got proffered around the midpoint of the 20th century by a man my professor used to refer to as Evil Charlie Chaplin. One has to wonder if Herr Trachtenberg knew the extent of the nightmare himself when he created this book that does what all great scholarly works do, inasmuch as it increases the stock of human knowledge? Unfortunately, he's no longer with us and we can't ask him. Highest recommendation, with some photos included.
The book focuses its study on the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance, but reaches at least as far back as the reigns of Justinian and Nero. It gives this thoroughgoing treatment in order to argue its central thesis, which is that antisemitism started as an offshoot or perhaps adjunct to one of many interfaith squabbles in the Middle Ages (between Catholics and Protestants, various charismatic sects, gypsies, Saracens, Gnostics). This theological squabbling led to sectarian bloodletting when cultural and economic tension between Jews and Gentiles reached a boiling point.
Dr. Joshua Trachtenberg shows that many of the charges lobbed at Jews, ritual murder, the gathering of blood and other bodily fluids for unholy sacrament, had previously been levelled by pagans against the early Christians, and that many times religious and secular authorities were not in agreement with each other, or with their citizens, about how to resolve the "Jewish Question."
We know the unfortunate answer to the question that got proffered around the midpoint of the 20th century by a man my professor used to refer to as Evil Charlie Chaplin. One has to wonder if Herr Trachtenberg knew the extent of the nightmare himself when he created this book that does what all great scholarly works do, inasmuch as it increases the stock of human knowledge? Unfortunately, he's no longer with us and we can't ask him. Highest recommendation, with some photos included.
June 2, 2019
Les comparto que en mi calidad de judía practicante y tras venir leyendo desde la semana pasada las atrocidades acerca de la expulsión de los judíos de España y la Inquisición, pensé que este texto me deprimiría y su lectura se me haría cuesta arriba. Sin embargo, muy por el contrario y para mi asombro, el texto me resultó irónica y ridículamente divertido. Pienso que tal vez este sentido del humor tan propio de los judíos ashkenazíes es una de las cosas que nos permite sostenernos cuando el entorno (en este caso el texto) refleja una realidad tan espantosa. Tal vez sea parte del relato histórico inconsciente que nos permite reinos de nosotros mismos y de nuestras desgracias, quién sabe.
El texto relata acerca del origen católico de la asociación de los judíos como aliados con el demonio y cómo se ve reflejado este discurso tanto en las élites como en el pueblo, en diferentes expresiones artísticas y literarias.
El texto relata acerca del origen católico de la asociación de los judíos como aliados con el demonio y cómo se ve reflejado este discurso tanto en las élites como en el pueblo, en diferentes expresiones artísticas y literarias.
December 14, 2019
Infinitely disturbing.
November 7, 2025
One of the most important books on my shelves. Instantly it's become something I recommend to everyone I talk to, especially within sci fi / fantasy spaces.
December 18, 2025
Since I generally only read obscure books and do so exclusively on my YouTube channel, as I did with this one, I can clearly state that the so-called ignorance of the medieval mind on the matter of Jewish world standing is a great misnomer. Not that our forebears were correct in their nefarious assumptions about the people but that the prejudice, superstition and animus persists to this day.
Based upon the derogatory comments its rendering received I would say that it's still a majority opinion across many demographics around the world. Some of the recent revival is due to the constant Middle East conflicts between Israel and its enemies but there seems to have been a simmering undercurrent of antisemitism even after Hitler's reign of terror.
All that aside, the book does what it purports to do but with a slightly more pointed objective than I assumed before starting the book: that the prejudice and mistrust is basically the result of an ongoing feud between the Christian church and the Jewish synagogue over the latter's involvement in the crucifixion of Christ. Not THE reason but an integral crux of the matter.
This was a quick read and a perfect primer for another of Trachtenberg's books - "Jewish Magic and Superstition" - that I intend to read in the near future.
Based upon the derogatory comments its rendering received I would say that it's still a majority opinion across many demographics around the world. Some of the recent revival is due to the constant Middle East conflicts between Israel and its enemies but there seems to have been a simmering undercurrent of antisemitism even after Hitler's reign of terror.
All that aside, the book does what it purports to do but with a slightly more pointed objective than I assumed before starting the book: that the prejudice and mistrust is basically the result of an ongoing feud between the Christian church and the Jewish synagogue over the latter's involvement in the crucifixion of Christ. Not THE reason but an integral crux of the matter.
This was a quick read and a perfect primer for another of Trachtenberg's books - "Jewish Magic and Superstition" - that I intend to read in the near future.
January 23, 2019
Horrifying catalogue of reasons, some real (they wash their hands a lot!) but overwhelmingly imagined (they piss on the Eucharist!), that contributed to centuries of anti-Semitic oppression, violence and murder. Required reading for those hack ass occultists dallying in Kabbalah and "solomonic" magic.
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July 11, 2013pdf bookfinder
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August 3, 2013[Joshua_Trachtenberg]_The_Devil_and_the_Jews_The_(BookFi.org)pdf
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