Abstract
“Anti-Judaism” has become an attractive alternative to anti-Semitism to characterize the hatred or persecution visited upon Jews in ancient, medieval, and early modern societies. This chapter argues that anti-Judaism should not be adopted simply because it provides a way of thinking about anti-Jewish animus that seemingly goes beyond an anachronistic racial ideology. The increasing prevalence of the word anti-Judaism in both scholarly and popular writing about Jewish history demands that we scrutinize its origins, its underlying assumptions, and the ways the word itself shapes historical thinking and analysis. We need a word (or words) to describe the survival of anti-Jewish tropes and hatred towards Jews in many modern Christian and Islamic cultures—or in post-religious liberal contexts with a focus on Israel. That word may not be anti-Judaism; but the fragility of the word itself should not lead us to believe that the problem does not exist.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Beller, Steven. 2007. Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Elukin, Jonathan. 1992. “Jacques Basnage and The History of the Jews: Polemic and Allegory in the Republic of Letters.” Journal of the History of Ideas 53: 603–31.
Elukin, Jonathan. 2007. Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Elukin, Jonathan. 2015. “Christianity and Judaism; Christians and Jews.” In The Routledge History of Medieval Christianity 1050–1500, edited by R. N. Swanson. London: Routledge.
Elukin, Jonathan. 2017. “Post-Biblical Jewish History Through Christian Eyes: Josephus and the Miracle of Jewish History in English Protestantism.” In The Jew as Legitimation: Jewish-Gentile Relations Beyond Antisemitism and Philosemitism, edited by David J. Wertheim, 103–16. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Elukin, Jonathan. 2018. “Shylock, the Devil and the Meaning of Deception in The Merchant of Venice.” European Judaism 51 (2): 44–51.
Fredriksen, Paula. 2008. Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism. New York: Doubleday.
Gager, John. 1983. The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes Toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Goodman, Martin. 2007. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. New York: Vintage.
Grafton, Anthony, and Joanna Weinberg. 2011. “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue:” Isaac Casaubon, The Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Groves, Beatrice. 2015. The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gruen, Erich S. 2002. Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Guibbory, Achsah. 2010. Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heschel, Susannah. 2011. “Historiography of Antisemitism Versus Anti-Judaism: A Response to Robert Morgan.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33 (3) (March): 257–79.
Langmuir, Gavin. 1990. “Anti-Judaism as the Necessary Preparation for Antisemitism.” In Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 57–62. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lipton, Sara. 2014. Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Malkiel, David. 2009. Reconstructing Ashkenaz: The Human Face of France-German Jewry, 1000–1250. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Nirenberg, David. 2013. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. New York: W. W. Norton.
Oberman, Heiko. 1984. The Roots of Anti-Semitism: In the Age of Renaissance and Reformation. Translated by James I. Porter. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Pianko, Noam. 2015. Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Reuther, Rosemary. 1974. Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism. New York: The Seabury Press.
Rubin, Miri. 2004. Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Schäfer, Peter. 1997. Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schmitt, Jean-Claude. 2013. The Conversion of Herman the Jew: Autobiography, History and Fiction in the Twelfth Century. Translated by Alex J. Novikoff. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Schwartz, Seth. 2004. Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Shalev, Eran. 2014. American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Vincent, Nicholas. 2013. “William of Newburgh, Josephus, and the New Titus.” In Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts, edited by Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson, 57–90. Woodbridge: Boydell.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Elukin, J. (2021). Anti-Judaism. In: Goldberg, S., Ury, S., Weiser, K. (eds) Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51658-1_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51658-1_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-51657-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-51658-1
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)