Why is antisemitism wrong?

Question 60109.

Antisemitism is rising again in Britain, and I do not write that as a rhetorical flourish. Synagogue attacks, harassment of Jewish students on campuses, conspiracy theories that would have been recognised in 1930s Germany, and a great deal of it circulating among people who would be appalled to be called racist.

So it is worth setting out, carefully and at some length, why this particular hatred is wrong, and why Christians of all people have a standing duty to say so out loud. The answer is not simply that prejudice is unpleasant. It goes considerably deeper than that.

Naming the Thing Accurately

Antisemitism is hostility towards Jewish people as Jews. It has taken religious forms, racial forms, economic forms and political forms, and it has an unusual capacity to change its clothing while keeping its substance.

In the medieval period it was religious: Jews were accused of deicide and of desecrating the host. In the nineteenth century it became racial and pseudo-scientific. In the twentieth it became genocidal. In our own day it frequently arrives as a theory about hidden influence, banking, media control or global conspiracy, and the people repeating it often have no idea where the ideas came from.

That mutability is precisely why careful definitions matter here. Criticism of a particular policy of the State of Israel is not antisemitism, and saying so is important if the word is to retain its force. Holding Jewish people collectively responsible for such policies, applying standards to them applied to no one else, or recycling old conspiracy tropes with new names, is antisemitism whatever it calls itself.

Why Antisemitism Denies the Image of God

The first argument is the most basic and it applies to every form of racial hatred. Genesis 1:27 says God created man in His own image, male and female He created them. Every human being carries that image, and it is not distributed by ethnicity.

Paul told the Athenians that God made from one man every nation of mankind. There is one human race, descended from one pair, and the biological categories that antisemitism depends upon do not exist in Scripture and, as it turns out, do not exist in genetics either.

So the first thing wrong with antisemitism is what is wrong with every racism: it treats an image bearer as less than human. James says we bless the Lord and Father with the tongue and with it curse people made in the likeness of God, and calls it a thing that ought not to be so. That alone would settle the matter.

It Contradicts God’s Covenant Commitments

But there is a further argument that applies to antisemitism specifically, and it is one Christians ought to know. God made promises to Abraham and his descendants that He has never withdrawn.

Genesis 12:3 records the terms: I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonours you I will curse. That is not a sentimental attachment; it is a covenant commitment, and the history of nations that have persecuted the Jewish people makes for sobering reading.

Paul takes up the question directly in Romans 11 and answers it emphatically. Has God rejected His people? By no means. He speaks of a partial hardening until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in, and then says that as regards election they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers, for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. Antisemitism sets itself against a people God calls beloved.

It Rejects the Jewishness of Jesus

Here is the point at which Christian antisemitism becomes not simply wrong but absurd. Jesus was a Jew. Not incidentally, not in a way that can be quietly dropped, but thoroughly and permanently.

He was born to a Jewish mother, circumcised on the eighth day, raised in a Jewish home, taught in synagogues, kept the feasts, and was executed under a placard naming Him King of the Jews. He said plainly that salvation is from the Jews. Every author of the New Testament except possibly Luke was Jewish. The first church was entirely Jewish, and the debate in Acts 15 was about whether Gentiles could be admitted.

And He is Jewish still. The risen and ascended Jesus is a Jewish man, and Revelation calls Him the Lion of the tribe of Judah and the Root of David. Any Christian antisemitism is therefore hatred directed at the people of the Saviour it claims to worship, which is a contradiction so deep it should stop the sentence before it is finished. See was Jesus a Jew or a Christian.

It Is Built on False Witness

Antisemitism has always required lies, and the lies have been remarkably consistent across a thousand years. The blood libel, the claim that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, first appeared in Norwich in 1144 and has been repeated across Europe ever since despite being denounced by popes and demonstrated false again and again.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, still circulating, is a forgery produced by the Russian secret police around 1903, plagiarised from an earlier French satire that had nothing to do with Jewish people at all. It was exposed as fabricated in The Times in 1921 and has been reprinted continuously since.

The ninth commandment forbids bearing false witness against your neighbour, and antisemitism has generated more sustained false witness than almost any hatred in human history. A Christian who repeats these claims has broken a commandment before any question of racial attitude arises.

The Church’s Shameful History

I would rather not write this section, and it has to be written. The church’s record here is appalling and pretending otherwise makes us liars as well as debtors.

Some of the early fathers wrote things that should never have been said. Chrysostom’s sermons against the Jews of Antioch are vicious. The Crusaders massacred Jewish communities in the Rhineland on their way to the Holy Land. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 required distinguishing dress, which the Nazis would revive seven centuries later. England expelled its Jewish population in 1290 and did not readmit them for over three and a half centuries.

And Luther, at the end of his life, wrote On the Jews and Their Lies, recommending that synagogues be burned and homes destroyed. The Nazis reprinted it with enthusiasm. When the Holocaust came, in the most Christianised continent on earth, the churches were largely silent, and a great many of the murderers had been baptised. Antisemitism did not arrive in Europe from outside the church. A great deal of it was cultivated within.

Where the Bad Theology Came From

The theological root of Christian antisemitism is what is usually called replacement theology or supersessionism: the belief that the church has replaced Israel, that God has finished with the Jewish people, and that the promises made to them have been transferred to us.

Once that framework is in place the rest follows with terrible logic. If God has rejected them, they are under a curse. If they are under a curse, their suffering is deserved. If their suffering is deserved, we need not intervene. You can trace that reasoning through medieval sermons almost without a gap.

My own dispensational convictions are relevant here and I will not pretend otherwise. Israel and the church are distinct, God’s covenants with Israel are unconditional and will be fulfilled literally, and the promises of land, kingdom and restoration have not been spiritualised away. Whatever else is said for and against that framework, it makes Christian antisemitism structurally impossible. See are modern Jews still God’s chosen people.

It Undermines the Gospel Itself

There is a further consequence that concerns me pastorally. Antisemitism destroys Christian witness to Jewish people, and it has done so for centuries.

Paul’s own heart is the model. He writes in Romans 9 that he has great sorrow and unceasing anguish in his heart, and that he could wish himself accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of his kinsmen. In Romans 10 he says his heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved.

Now set that beside two thousand years of Jewish people learning that the cross means a pogrom is coming. The greatest single obstacle to Jewish people considering the claims of Jesus is what has been done to them in His name. Antisemitism does not simply harm its victims; it slanders the Saviour and closes the door it claims to be opening. See what about Messianic Jews.

Recognising the Modern Forms

Because antisemitism mutates, Christians need to recognise it in current dress. Conspiracy theories about global finance, shadowy families controlling world events, or a hidden hand behind wars and pandemics, are old antisemitic tropes with the name removed, and they circulate freely in some Christian circles.

Then there is the tendency to hold Jewish people everywhere responsible for the actions of a government in Jerusalem. British Jews are not spokesmen for Israeli policy, and demanding that they denounce it before being admitted to a conversation is a test applied to no other group.

And there is the quieter form: the joke, the assumption about money, the unexamined stereotype passed down in a family. Antisemitism does not begin with violence. It begins with the ordinary acceptance of contempt in living rooms and staff rooms and comment threads, and the violence arrives later when somebody takes the contempt seriously and acts on it.

The Question of Israel and the State

Any honest treatment has to deal with the objection that the charge of antisemitism is used to shield a government from criticism. The objection deserves an answer rather than an accusation.

Criticism of a policy of the State of Israel is not antisemitism. Israeli citizens criticise their own government vigorously, as citizens of every democracy do, and a Christian is free to hold views about a border, a settlement or a military decision. Nobody is obliged to endorse a foreign government in order to avoid the charge.

The line falls elsewhere. It falls at holding Jewish people everywhere responsible for that government, at demanding that individual Jews denounce it as a condition of participation, at denying to that one nation the right of self defence granted to all others, and at reaching for old conspiracy imagery to describe it. Those are the tests, and applying them carefully protects both truth and neighbour.

Christians Who Got It Right

The record is not entirely shameful, and the exceptions are worth knowing because they show that better was possible at the time. Some acted at enormous cost.

Corrie ten Boom’s family hid Jewish neighbours in Haarlem and paid for it with a concentration camp and the deaths of her father and sister. The village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France, under a Huguenot pastor, sheltered thousands. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed at Flossenburg. Andre Trocme, Jane Haining, and a long list of others in Yad Vashem’s records of the Righteous Among the Nations acted when almost everyone else did not.

What is striking about many of them is how ordinary their reasoning was. Asked why they did it, they tended to say something like: these were our neighbours, and they needed help. Resisting antisemitism did not require a sophisticated theology. It required taking two commandments seriously when it was expensive to do so.

What This Costs and Why It Is Worth It

Speaking against antisemitism is not free at the moment, in either direction. In some circles you will be told you are indifferent to Palestinian suffering; in others you will be accused of being politically naive. It is easier to say nothing.

I do not think that option is open to us. The church’s silence in the 1930s was not neutrality; it was participation by omission, and every honest history of the period says so. Having been so badly wrong once, we have a particular obligation to be clear now.

And there is a positive reason, not simply a defensive one. Paul says Gentile believers have been grafted into a Jewish root and warns us not to be arrogant towards the natural branches. Everything we have came through this people: the Scriptures, the covenants, the promises and the Messiah. Gratitude, not condescension, is the proper posture. See Romans 11:17-18.

A Note on Language

A small point about spelling that carries a larger point about meaning. The form antisemitism, written as one word without a hyphen or a capital, is now generally preferred by scholars and Jewish organisations, and the reason is instructive.

The hyphenated form implies opposition to something called Semitism, a nineteenth century racial category that never existed as a real thing. The term was popularised in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr precisely in order to give an old religious hatred a modern scientific respectability.

Writing it as one word refuses that framing. There is no Semitism to be against. There is only hostility towards Jewish people, dressed up over the centuries in whatever language the age found persuasive, and calling it by its plain name is the first step in resisting it.

So, now what?

Start by examining your own speech and your own reading. If a theory you have encountered involves a hidden group controlling world events, check where it came from, because the odds are very good that it is a hundred year old antisemitic forgery with a fresh coat of paint.

Then refuse to let it pass in your hearing. Antisemitism survives on the silence of decent people far more than on the enthusiasm of bad ones, and the church of all institutions has earned the obligation to speak. Pray for the Jewish people, treat them with the honour due to those God calls beloved, and be the kind of Christian whose existence makes the historical record slightly less believable.

And if you are Jewish and have read this far, I am sorry for what has been done to you in the name of a Jewish Saviour. It was a betrayal of Him. Would you be willing to look at Him again, past the people who have misrepresented Him so badly?

As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

Romans 11:28-29 (ESV)

For Further Study

For the history, Edward Flannery’s The Anguish of the Jews remains a sobering survey written by a Catholic priest, and Robert Michael’s Holy Hatred documents the Christian contribution in detail. On the theology, Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s Israelology is the standard dispensational treatment of the relationship between Israel and the church, and his commentaries on the covenants set out the case for their literal fulfilment. J. Dwight Pentecost’s Things to Come and Charles C. Ryrie’s Dispensationalism explain why the distinction between Israel and the church matters here. For Romans 9 to 11, the commentaries of Charles Ryrie and Arnold Fruchtenbaum are useful correctives to supersessionist readings.