Author Description

Presents a succint history of antisemitism throughout the ages. Argues that anti-Judaism is an integral component of the history of Christian culture in the West. Christianity and gnosticism portrayed the Jew as responsible for all the evil in the world. The persecution of Jews in the late medieval period foretold events in modern times, by transforming religious transcendence into political immanence. Socio-scientific theories often misjudge the influence of theological thinking on the Western self-perception. The persecution of European Jewry in the modern period is a result of the rejection of the Jews by Church Fathers in the ancient period. The Enlightenment and Romanticism constituted a summit of utopian development which reintroduced sacrifice as a way toward redemption into modern thinking. This meant a declaration of total war on behalf of the apocalyptic modern spirit, expressed in Jew-hatred; for Nazism, the annihilation of the Jews served as a premise for salvation. Deals also with Nazi ideology, Soviet communist antisemitism, and antisemitism in the postmodern period.