In this brief volume, Robert Chazan reexamines the historical relationship between antisemitism and Christian theological anti-Judaism. The four chapters of part 1 treat the synoptic Gospels, Paul, Eusebius, and Augustine, and contrast the negative depiction of Jews in the synoptic Gospels to a more nuanced Pauline portrait that foresees the Jews’ future redemption. Augustine's view, according to Chazan, is “profoundly Pauline” (86), and identifies among the Jews a past period of greatness, a present period of error and sinfulness, and a future period of salvation. This assessment undergirds Augustine's policy of toleration for Jewish communities, rooted in his interpretation of Psalm 59:12: “Slay them not,” which became the foundation for medieval Christian-Jewish relations.

Following after the late Gavin Langmuir, however, Chazan adopts the term “antisemitism” to denote the emergence of a highly negative cluster of medieval anti-Jewish images, while reserving the term “anti-Semitism” for modern political, cultural, or racial hostility toward Jews. Although Chazan has criticized Langmuir's attempt to define antisemitism as an irrational hatred of Jews (Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism [University of California Press, 1997], 125–134; for an overview of the debate Langmuir provoked, see the summary in my Marks of Distinction: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages [Catholic University of America Press, 2012], 1–12), both historians share a conviction that antisemitism (and not merely theological anti-Judaism) emerges in the twelfth century. Its anti-Jewish stereotypes appear not only in early thirteenth-century Christian art that depicted Jewish communities as a present danger to Christendom, but also in the writings of the medieval Christian “thought-leaders” treated in separate chapters in part 2: Peter the Venerable, Raymond Martin, Alphonso de Espina, and Martin Luther.

The attempts of these “thought-leaders” to uncover the Jews’ essential nature in history establishes Chazan's narrative template: he presents their conclusions with respect to the Jews’ past, present, and future. Although Augustinian doctrine balanced positive and negative elements in the Jews’ history, medieval Christian constructions transmitted more destructive popular anti-Jewish myths (e.g., the blood libel). The medieval sense of real and present threat contributed to modern anti-Semitism's perception that Jews endanger Christian majority culture. Chazan suggests that because medieval antisemitism was “not theologically grounded” (241) but arose from popular discontent, it helped prepare the way for a more secularized modern anti-Semitism and for the Holocaust.

When and why does the shift arise from theological anti-Judaism to antisemitism? Chazan points to popular antipathy resulting from the growing demographic and economic importance of European Jewish communities after 1000 c.e., and to “the pervasive popular appeal of the Gospel narratives” (111) promoted by the Crusades’ attention upon the place of Christ's Crucifixion. These undermined the Pauline-Augustinian basis for toleration. Although the Crusades targeted Islam's control of Christian holy places in the east, they also generated a popular antagonism that cast Jews as the greater enemy: whereas Muslims merely denied Jesus's divinity, the Jews were the agents of his death.

This antagonism is encouraged by the “thought-leaders” Chazan selects. Chazan contends that Peter the Venerable's view of Jews was very close to that of the radical crusaders that attacked Jewish communities. For Peter, contemporary Jews’ abuse of sacred vessels and their devotion to their Talmud not only reveals the continuing destructive potential of Jews, but also their irrationality and inhumanity. The twelfth century is a vital turning point, Chazan avers, both materially and spiritually: while Paul and Augustine anticipated the future conversion of Israel, Peter the Venerable's vision is far less encouraging.

Indeed, while Peter does acknowledge that grace remains available to Jews, he adds that they will constitute but a “small number from among the number of the saved” (Peter the Venerable, Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews, trans. Irven M. Resnick, The Fathers of the Church: Mediaeval Continuation 14 [Catholic University of America Press, 2013], 51). After comparing Jews unfavorably to dogs and pigs, Peter remarks that he has composed his anti-Jewish polemic “at least for the few who we see are sometimes converted to God” (Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews, 244). In his polemics against Islam he encourages Muslims to imitate Christians who do not “destroy them [Jews] immediately as enemies of their own salvation but instead wait calmly should they at some time, perhaps, be converted” (Peter the Venerable, Writings Against the Saracens, trans. Irven M. Resnick, The Fathers of the Church: Mediaeval Continuation 16 [Catholic University of America Press, 2016], 95). Nonetheless, Peter's depiction of contemporary Jews is highly negative.

In a shortcoming of this volume, Chazan does not consider the role of medieval apocalypticism in the construction of antisemitism. Here too Peter the Venerable may be a “thought-leader,” since he claims that Isaiah prophesied that the Jews “will produce the one who is to come at the end of the world, the Antichrist, the king of all the ungodly” (Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews, 285). This eschatological focus produced in him a more profound sense of a Jewish threat: while some may be saved, most will support Antichrist to destroy Christendom.

Chazan's volume does not present new research so much as it summarizes Chazan's previous and significant contribution to this discussion. Despite the volume's title, Chazan's principal focus is upon the construction of a medieval antisemitism that presented contemporary Jews as bent on the destruction of Christendom. Given the secularizing tendencies of modernity, Chazan concludes: “That the Gospel depictions might have engendered negative perspectives on Jews made sense; that they would have projected Jews as a contemporary and imminent danger to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe did not” (238). This sense of imminent danger that nurtured modern anti-Semitism, Chazan contends, should not be attributed directly to Christian theology, but to the popular projections that formed medieval antisemitism.