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Soyer on Marcus, 'How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500' [Review]
Marcus, Ivan G.. How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. 384 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780691258201.
Reviewed by Francois Soyer (University of New England)
Published on H-Diplo (December, 2024)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60963
Few questions in the history of Jewish-Christian relations are as controversial as those that relate to the nature and origins of Antisemitism. How is “Antisemitism” defined? Is Antisemitism a purely modern phenomenon, linked to the rise of modern pseudo-scientific racial theories? To what extent is Antisemitism, a term coined in the 1870s, primarily a modern/secular phenomenon distinct from a theological Christian anti-Judaism? Can we talk about a “Christian Antisemitism”? Is it, therefore, a grievous anachronism to speak of Antisemitism before the nineteenth century, especially in the medieval period? For decades, historians, including Gavin Langmuir (Toward a Definition of Antisemitism [1990]) and Robert Chazan (From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism: Ancient and Medieval Christian Constructions of Jewish History [2016]), to name only the most famous, have debated these questions and little consensus exists.
The history of Antisemitism in the Christian West often treats it as a phenomenon in which Jews were passive bystanders. This is probably not surprising given that Antisemitism was built on fantasies and distorted notions about Jews and Judaism that developed among Christians. Saint Augustine’s conception of Jews as a “witness people” to be tolerated was contested when some Christian theologians and polemicists “discovered” the Talmud in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.[1] For these Christians, the Talmud proved that there was no link between the Jews of biblical times and those who lived in medieval Europe. Bowdlerized passages of the Talmud were presented as evidence that medieval Jews were irrational and that they deliberately engaged in acts of blasphemy, sacrilege, and even quasi-ritualized murders of ordinary Christians, in particular children (the infamous “ritual murder” and blood libels). To argue that Jews were not passive but involved in the growth of Antisemitism is a very delicate topic for historians since it risks giving credence to some Antisemitic myths and victim blaming.
In just under two hundred pages (excluding the bibliography), Ivan G. Marcus offers his readers not just a survey of the existing scholarship but also a new perspective and a nuanced argument. To begin with, Marcus does not seek a direct link between medieval and modern Antisemitism by merely looking for evidence of continuity in beliefs, prejudices, and myths. Rather, his objective is to identify and explore the “structure” underpinning a medieval Antisemitism that differed markedly from a mere theological opposition to Judaism. The structure underpinning the deteriorating perception of Jews among medieval Christians, Marcus contends, came in three parts. First, there was a “binary of inverted hierarchy” in Christian society (p. 18). Marcus traces its origins to the rivalry between Jews and Christians in which both groups believed themselves to be God’s chosen people and the other as their inferiors. Medieval Christians perceived acts of assertiveness or resistance by members of the Jewish minority as distortions in a righteous hierarchical order. Second, Marcus points to the emergence of the image of the Jew as an enemy within. From the First Crusade in the late eleventh century onward, the image of the Jew as subverting the established hierarchy took the form of accusations against Jewish usury, sacrilege, blasphemy, treasonous plots, and even the murder of Christian children. The image of Jews as an existential threat not just to the Christian faith but also to ordinary Christians created a context justifying their increased segregation or even wholesale expulsion (as occurred in many medieval Christian kingdoms and states from the late twelfth to the late fifteenth century). The third and final part in this Antisemitic structure is that many Christians came to perceive Jewish identity as “unchangeable or even permanent” and that the genuine conversion of Jews to Christianity was almost impossible (p. 18). This essentialization of Jewish identity and faith turned the religion into a functional equivalent of race and justified violence and exclusion against Jewish people.
To support this argument, the book’s nine chapters follow a thematic, and to a certain extent chronological, pattern. Starting with a discussion of the gradual migration of Jews into early medieval western and central Europe, Marcus proceeds to explore how tensions developed even though Jews integrated socially, economically, and culturally. At the same time, however, competing claims about being God’s chosen people created friction as “Jews were simultaneously attracted to Christians and repelled by Christianity” (p. 13). Marcus argues that Jews “created an imagined Christianity” as a form of paganism to be derided (p. 14). Inevitably, this Jewish assertiveness was not just expressed in a private context but also manifested itself in public acts of blasphemy and of sacrilegious contempt for Christian sacred images by individual Jews. Christians reacted defensively to such unsettling assertiveness and to this apparent inversion of a religious and social hierarchy in which Christianity was manifestly dominant over Judaism. Religious change and reforms in western Christianity encouraged Christians to fashion their own imagined Judaism and imagined Jews who were actively hostile to Christianity and Christians. Of course, many of the accusations targeting Jews, in particular the “ritual murder” and blood libels, had no foundation in reality but served to create an enduring image of the Jew as an enemy within. Finally, Marcus charts the rise of skepticism about the ability of Jews to become genuine converts to Christianity and illustrates how this phenomenon was closely linked to “cultural aesthetics” and the coalescing of Jewish appearance and faith (p. 16).
In the final section of this work, Marcus invites us to consider the wider implications of his three-part structure of Antisemitism. He argues, convincingly, that it is relevant to understand the continuing survival of Antisemitism in the modern era and even today. Antisemitism will develop whenever and wherever Jews are perceived as inverting an established order and seizing power, regarded as an “enemy within” seeking to destabilize society or harm non-Jews, and viewed as a unassimilable racial group even when intermarriage frequently takes place (such as in the modern United States). The book offers no magic solutions to oppose Antisemitism and ends on a rather pessimistic note. Marcus observes that Antisemitism has proven to be remarkably resilient and that the three-part structure of Antisemitism is easily discernable in the contemporary propaganda of white supremacists and nativist groups in the United States. When considering Marcus’s conclusion, it is hard not to remember the striking and haunting image of young white men parading at night with tiki torches and shouting “Jews will not replace us” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.[2]
Overall, the value of Marcus’s book lies not so much in its exploration of the factual history of Jewish-Christian relations in medieval Europe. Numerous modern historians have extensively studied the anti-Jewish accusations detailed in chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6. It is perhaps surprising that the medieval Iberian Peninsula does not feature as prominently given the significant size of its Jewish population and the fact that the notorious “purity of blood” statutes that originated there in the fifteenth century are probably the best example of a proto-racial hatred of Jews before the modern era. Rather, the real value of this work resides in Marcus’s succinct and clear articulation of the three-part structure of Antisemitism as a paradigm through which to understand Antisemitism in both the medieval and modern West. This alone makes the work a valuable addition to the existing corpus of work on this topic, and there is no doubt that this concept will feature prominently in discussions among scholars and students for many years to come.
Notes
[1]. See Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
[2]. Adam Gabbat, “‘Jews Will Not Replace Us’: Vice Film Lays Bare Horror of Neo-Nazis in America,” Guardian, August 16, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/charlottesville-neo-nazis-vice-news-hbo; and “You Will Not Replace Us,” Anti-Defamation League, accessed September 12, 2024, https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/you-will-not-replace-us.
François Soyer is an associate professor of history at the University of New England (Australia). His research focuses on the history of Antisemitism in late medieval and early modern Europe.
Citation: Francois Soyer. Review of Marcus, Ivan G.. How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. December, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60963
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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1. H-Diplo Roundtable Review of Julia Irwin, Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century. University of North Carolina Press, 2024.
Introduction by Megan Black, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Reviewers:
Shoon Murray, American University
Kevin O’Sullivan, University of Galway
Davide Rodogno, Geneva Graduate Institute
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Lauren Turek, Trinity University
Response by Julia Irwin, Louisiana State University
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Reviewed by Michael J. Bustamante, University of Miami
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Nicola Labanca, University of Siena, Italy, Department of History and Cultural Heritage.
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“How I Became an Intellectual Historian.”
Annelien de Dijn, Utrecht University
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Introduction by Timothy Scarnecchia, Kent State University
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Jess Shahan, University of Leicester
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