The history of antisemitism, defined as hostile actions or discrimination against Jews as a religious or ethnic group, goes back many centuries, with antisemitism being called “the longest hatred.” Jerome Chanes — senior fellow at The City University of New York’s Center for Jewish Studies — identifies six stages in the historical development of antisemitism:
1. Pre-Christian anti-Judaism in Ancient Greece and Rome which was primarily ethnic in nature
2. Christian antisemitism in antiquity and the Middle Ages which was religious in nature and has extended into modern times
3. Muslim antisemitism which was — at least in its classical form — nuanced, in that Jews were a protected class
4. Political, social and economic antisemitism during the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Europe, which laid the groundwork for racial antisemitism
5. Racial antisemitism that arose in the 19th century and culminated in Nazism
6. Contemporary antisemitism, which has been labeled by some as the new antisemitism
— Wikipedia
Quote: “Augustine is a good place to start in order to understand the roots of European anti-Semitism in early Christianity and medieval Christendom. For it was the writers of the New Testament, buttressed by church fathers like Augustine, who developed a coherent theology based on those writings and laid the seeds for centuries of Judeophobia.”
— My Jewish Learning
Learn more about the history of antisemitism from Wikipedia. ►
Read “The Historical Roots of Anti-Semitism” ►
Read “Antisemitism in Global History” ►
Watch “The Causes of Anti Semitism Throughout History” [11:15]. ►
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