Ancient Antisemitism: From Blog Posts to Book
The purpose of “Ancient Antisemitism” and these blog posts is to combine them into a published book entitled Safe Schools for Jewish Students: An Educator’s Guide to Preventing Antisemitism and Strengthening Belonging.
Go here for the full Table of Contents.
Chapter 2 – Ancient Antisemitism
“It is easy to hate, but difficult publicly to justify hate. Throughout history, when people have sought to justify antisemitism, they have done so by recourse to the highest source of authority available within the culture. In the Middle Ages, it was religion. So we had religious anti-Judaism. In post-Enlightenment Europe it was science. So we had the twin foundations of Nazi ideology, Social Darwinism and the so-called Scientific Study of Race. Today the highest source of authority worldwide is human rights. That is why Israel—the only fully functioning democracy in the Middle East with a free press and independent judiciary—is regularly accused of the five cardinal sins against human rights: racism, apartheid, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide.”
—Rabbi Sacks, September 27, 2016 at the European Parliament
Ancient Antisemitism
Antisemitism—the prejudice or hostility toward Jews—has been traced back to at least the 3rd century BCE. The word “antisemitism,” however, did not originate until 1879 as a way to justify Jew-hatred, distinguishing between religion and race, between the acceptable Aryan roots and the unacceptable Semitic roots.
Even without having a label for Jew-hatred, antisemitism was present throughout history. The excuses for hating Jews has changed over time. When studying why people chose antisemitism, their decisions formed from a mindset of “There must be a reason to hate the Jews.”
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it this way: “[Antisemitism is] a prejudice that like a virus, has survived over time by mutating. So in the Middle Ages, Jews were persecuted because of their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries they were reviled because of their race. Today, Jews are attacked because of the existence of their nation state, Israel. Denying Israel’s right to exist is the new antisemitism.”
Ancient and Pre-Christian Antisemitism
When Israel was conquered by the Greeks in 332 BCE—the second time the commonwealth of Israel was conquered—the Greeks saw the Jewish people as odd because they only worshipped one god, they worshipped the air, and didn’t have statues of their god. As a result, the Greeks called the strange practices of these people from Judea “Judaism.”
In 167 BCE, Antiochus IV forbade the practice of Judaism, desecrating the Jewish temple, forbidding the practice of the Sabbath, and imposing idolatry and eating pork. In response, the Maccabees rebelled and reclaimed Judea.
The Philistines, Greek enemies of the Israelites who lived in Canaan, resided in Canaan starting around 1175 BCE. While their cities came under control of Assyria by the 7th century BCE, the memory of their adversarial nature remained in Jewish memory.
The Romans conquered Judea in 63 BCE, and Jews were once again restricted from practicing their religion. The Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, and that initiated the Jewish exile from Israel. When the Jewish Bar Kokhbah Revolt failed in 132-136 CE, Hadrian renamed the region after the Jewish enemy, the Philistines: from “Israel” to “Syria Palestina,” erasing the Jewish connection to the land.
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Author Biography of Safe Schools for Jewish Students
Ezra Barany loves riveting readers with Jewish thrillers. His first two books in The Torah Codes series were award-winning international bestsellers. In his free time, he has eye-opening discussions on the art of writing novels with his wife and book coach Beth Barany. A high school physics teacher, Ezra lives in Oakland with his beloved wife and two cats working on the next book. Ezra, not the cats.
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