A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (7 page)

In the months and years that followed Jesus’s death, small groups of Jews met regularly to pray together and discuss his teachings. Among them
were James and Peter, two of Jesus’s disciples, or followers. They tried to share their understanding of their messiah with fellow Jews in synagogues and other gathering places. Convinced that the Day of Judgment was near, they urgently sought not only to be faithful to Jesus’s teachings but also to persuade as many people as possible to join in their hope and expectations. In doing so, they reached out to gentiles, or non-Jews, as well as to their fellow Jews. Gradually, the Jesus movement became one that included both Jews and gentiles.

The main leader in the effort to bring Jesus’s teachings to non-Jews was Paul. Originally named Saul, Paul was a devout Jew who had studied with the great Pharisee sages. He described himself as “a Hebrew born of Hebrews.” He had been a fierce opponent of the Jesus movement in its early years and had tried to stamp it out as heresy, until a vision led him to embrace the very faith that he had previously condemned. Eventually Paul brought the message about Jesus to Jews and non-Jews in major cities around the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea.

Some of Paul’s ideas were controversial. For example, he thought that he and other Jewish believers in Jesus, later called Christians, should continue to honor many of the laws of Judaism, but gentiles did not have to convert to Judaism in order to become Christians. Paul did not say that Christianity should replace Judaism, even though others later claimed that he had said this. Instead he spoke of the mystery of God’s working for the salvation of all. And even though he did compare Jews who rejected Jesus to branches cut off from the tree that had nurtured them, Paul cautioned non-Jewish Christians to show respect to Jews as a people who had a covenant, or agreement, with God.

At first many Christian leaders disagreed with Paul’s ideas on conversion, but they eventually agreed that converts to Christianity did not have to come to God through the Torah as Jews did but could reach God directly through Jesus. Paul’s explanation of what it meant to be a Christian opened the new religion to many more people, and Christianity began to grow rapidly in the large cities of the Roman Empire.

When the Romans destroyed the second Temple in 70
CE
, about 40 to 45 years after Jesus’s death, some Christians saw the destruction as a sign from God. In their view, it confirmed their belief that as Christians, they were now the “true Israel.” They believed that God had allowed the Temple to be destroyed in order to punish Jews for rejecting Jesus.

Other Jews also saw the destruction of the Temple as a sign from God, but they interpreted that sign differently. They took it to mean that Jews needed to atone for their sins by rededicating themselves to a stricter observance of Jewish law. They believed the destruction was proof that the bitter arguments and divisions among Jews had only served to harm the Jewish people as a whole and strengthen the power of Rome. They called for a return to traditional Jewish rituals and practices, emphasizing moral values and the rule of law.

In the years after the destruction of the second Temple, only two major Jewish groups, or sects, survived—the Pharisees and the followers of Jesus. The Pharisees’ emphasis on traditional Jewish law contributed to the development of rabbinic Judaism—the Judaism practiced in homes and synagogues by many Jews in the world today. Rabbinic Judaism places great importance on what Jews call “the tradition of the fathers”—the non-biblical laws and customs passed down orally and by example from one generation to the next.

As part of his mission to spread and explain the teachings of Jesus, Paul wrote letters, or epistles, to Christians throughout the Roman Empire. Scholars have used those letters, along with other New Testament writings, to trace changes in the relationship between Jews and early Christians. The Gospels, which are the first four books in the New Testament, describe Jesus’ life. Most scholars believe the four books were written between 68 and 100
CE
—40 to 70 years after the crucifixion. Paul’s epistles were written somewhat earlier, between 50 and 60
CE
.

Paul wrote mainly about the meaning and the effects of Jesus’s teaching, often in response to questions from and crises in the communities to whom his letters were addressed. The Gospels, on the other hand, are compilations of oral material about Jesus’s teachings and about his life, death, and resurr ection. It is customary to attribute each of the Gospels to individual early Christians called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but most scholars now believe that none of the Gospels actually had a single author or even a single editor.

Jesus did not write down his teachings. He spoke Aramaic—the everyday language of Jews in Galilee in his day. The authors and editors of the Gospels most likely lived in the large Greek-speaking cities of the Diaspora, and they wrote in Greek. When stories are translated from one language to another, changes inevitably occur, and when those stories are passed on orally, the changes are even more numerous. No original manuscripts of the Gospels survive; the earliest existing versions are small portions of handwritten copies made in the second and third centuries
CE
. As a result, the texts that have come down from the early centuries are usually copies of copies of copies, each with different scribes who sometimes produced differing wordings at key places.

J
EWISH
C
OMMUNITIES IN THE
R
OMAN
E
MPIRE
(100–300
CE
)

During the first four centuries of the Common Era, most Jews still lived near the Mediterranean Sea, although some were beginning to move into western Europe.

Each Gospel tells approximately the same story, emphasizing different ideas and sometimes interpreting the same events in different ways. At one time there were as many as twenty Gospels. The early church chose the four that it believed were the most authentic, along with other writings from its own history, to form the New Testament. Those four Gospels are referred to as the “canonical” Gospels.

The Gospel according to John, the last of the four Gospels, differs significantly from those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In the earlier Gospels, Jesus is shown debating questions of Jewish law with the Pharisees. Although these disagreements are depicted as often heated, they take place within Judaism among Jews. Jesus acts as a rabbi; he is not portrayed as separating himself from Jews whose views differ from his. The Gospel of John, however, portrays Jesus as the revelation of God and views those who disagree with him as enemies of God, choosing the darkness over the light.

The earliest Gospels suggest that a number of Jewish groups, or sects, collaborated with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, in calling for the death of Jesus. In John’s Gospel, the story shifts from a description of Jesus’s disputes with individuals and groups—Pharisees, scribes, and high priests—to an angry attack on “the Jews” and their beliefs. Some historians think that change in tone may reflect the experience of the community in which John’s Gospel arose. Jews may have expelled that community from the synagogue because of its beliefs about Jesus.

Other historians think that the change in tone may reflect the times. By the end of the first century, when the Gospel of John was probably written, some Christians no longer saw themselves as Jews; indeed, by this time, many Christians never had been Jews. The churches were becoming more gentile and less Jewish. It is possible, too, that the writers of this Gospel hoped to prevent Roman persecution of Christians and perhaps even to convert Romans to the teachings of Jesus. Thus, they may have thought it would be helpful to place the responsibility for Jesus’s death on someone other than the Roman governor—namely, “the Jews.” Yet many Christians at that time were aware that Jews lacked the power or authority to kill Jesus or any other “troublemaker.” Furthermore, only the Romans used crucifixions to deal with their enemies. Jews saw the practice as contrary to their traditions and beliefs.

Rome allowed Jews to practice their religion, even though many Roman leaders considered Jews barbaric and superstitious. And as long
as Christians were considered a group within Judaism, they had the same rights as other Jews. But as Christians separated from Judaism, many Jews began to insist that Christians could no longer claim to be Jews. As a result, the Romans began persecuting Christians as a threat to the empire. After all, Christians were proclaiming the teachings of Jesus, a man the Romans had crucified as a troublemaker.

Many scholars believe that Jews began to view Christians as outsiders at least partly because they felt betrayed by Jewish believers-in-Jesus who had left Jerusalem for the safer countryside during the rebellion of 66–70
CE
that led to the destruction of the second Temple. Most early Christians, influenced by the example of Jesus, believed in nonviolence and therefore refused to fight under any circumstances. Some also believed that fighting would be useless because the terrible events of that time were the inevitable beginning of the “end of days”—the period just before the coming of the messiah.

Another sign of the times is the way the Pharisees are described in the Gospels. They are shown as rigid, overly pious, and often hypocritical. The Pharisees were only one of several Jewish sects in Jesus’s time, yet they are often portrayed as his major opponents, even though some scholars believe they were the group with whom he had the most in common. The high priests who belonged to the Jewish sect known as the Sadducees were Jesus’s more likely opponents, but many of them were killed during the wars with Rome. It was only after the destruction of the Temple in 70
CE
that the Pharisees gained religious supremacy. At the time that the early Gospels were written, the Pharisees and the early Christians were competing for the hearts and minds of their fellow Jews.

The menorah indicates that this sarcophagus (stone coffin) belonged to a Jew—in this case, one who lived in Rome in the first century of the Common Era.

In the years after 70
CE
, Jewish survivors of the war with Rome tried to unite all Jews under the leadership of rabbis and sages. Terms like
Pharisee
or
Sadducee
tended to divide Jews rather than bring them together, and they were now used much less often. Synagogues and houses of study became more central to Jewish life, as prayer and study replaced the animal sacrifices that had been the focus of worship in the destroyed Temple.

During those years, rabbis and sages began to collect and edit the non-biblical laws and customs that made up the oral traditions of Judaism. The work they created is known as the Mishnah—a vast collection of centuries’ worth of oral laws and customs. It was completed in Palestine in 200
CE
. Jewish scholars in Palestine and Babylonia also began to compile commentaries on the Torah and the Mishnah. Those commentaries are known as the Talmud.

Although the rabbis rarely spoke of Christians in their writing and preaching, they, like many Jews, had strong feelings about them, particularly as the number of gentiles associated with the Christian movement increased. The war with Rome in 66–70
CE
was one of several critical events that shaped the relationship between Christians and Jews. The process of separation did not happen everywhere in the same way or even at the same time.

A few scholars trace the formal separation to a decision made in Yavne, a town in Palestine, in 80
CE
. Rabbis and sages, continuing the earlier work of the Pharisees, had gathered there to compile the Mishnah. They added a new blessing to the
Shemoneh Esreh
, the Eighteen Benedictions (blessings) that observant Jews recite three times a day. This new blessing referred to Jews who still practiced Judaism but believed that Jesus was the messiah as heretics. Some scholars believe that this condemnation may have contributed to the growing separation between the new and old religions.