How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500

by Ivan G. Marcus

An examination of how the Jews—real and imagined—so challenged the Christian majority in medieval Europe that it became a society that was religiously and culturally antisemitic in new ways

In medieval Europe, Jews were not passive victims of the Christian community, as is often assumed, but rather were startlingly assertive, forming a Jewish civilization within Latin Christian society. Both Jews and Christians considered themselves to be God’s chosen people. These dueling claims fueled the rise of both cultures as they became rivals for supremacy. In How the West Became Antisemitic, Ivan Marcus shows how Christian and Jewish competition in medieval Europe laid the foundation for modern antisemitism.

Marcus explains that Jews accepted Christians as misguided practitioners of their ancestral customs, but regarded Christianity as idolatry. Christians, on the other hand, looked at Jews themselves—not Judaism—as despised. They directed their hatred at a real and imagined theoretically subordinate, but sometimes assertive, an implacable “enemy within.” In their view, Jews were permanently and physically Jewish—impossible to convert to Christianity. Thus Christians came to hate Jews first for religious reasons, and eventually for racial ones. Even when Jews no longer lived among them, medieval Christians could not forget their former neighbors. Modern antisemitism, based on the imagined Jew as powerful and world dominating, is a transformation of this medieval hatred.

A sweeping and well-documented history of the rivalry between Jewish and Christian civilizations during the making of Europe, How the West Became Antisemitic is an ambitious new interpretation of the medieval world and its impact on modernity.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Jewish, Antisemitism, Judaism, European History, Religion

371 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 11, 2024

Reviews

[Ilya · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very good. Sharp medievalist scholarship, untainted by any particular agenda, except for perhaps the usual scholarly give-and-take with rival accounts or theories. As a relative newcomer to the subject, there was lots that I found fascinating here, not least the many accounts of how medieval Jews—often stereotyped as passive victims of persecution and expulsions—could be quite deft at striking back, if only (often) polemically or symbolically. But to reiterate—this is not some kind of of-the-moment popular history, and it has only a relatively short chapter about the connection between medieval and contemporary antisemitism. For what it is, though, it is very much worth the time.

[T S · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bloated and redundant article. Half the page count is notes, indices, bibliography etc. One-third of the actual text is a regrettable fixation on feces, urine, semen, and blood. Another third of the book unfortunately takes up the cause that Jewish behavior itself could've warranted antisemitism. The last third of the book reiterates the initial undeveloped assertion that western antisemitism rests upon the inverted hierarchy of the mutually exclusive Jewish and Christian claims to righteousness, the role of the internal/near enemy contrasted by the distant enemy of the crusaders, and the perceived inalterable nature of the Jewish condition. An interesting discussion of the relative academic merits of terms for historic antisemitism practices or outbursts obscures that hardly twelve pages are dedicated to the relation of this historical western antisemitism to anything that grew out of it.

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review.