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ROBERT S. WISTRICH
historical continuity and development. This necessarily leads us back to
the Hellenistic era, when a widespread Jewish Diaspora first emerged
which was quite distinctive in the ancient world. Not only were the
Jews the only monotheistic minority in this pagan world, bearers of a
doctrine of election which claimed that Judaism was the sole truth, the
supreme ethical teaching; not only did they persist in their historic exis–
tence as a separate social and religious group; not only did they refuse
even to intermingle with the Gentiles because of their own dietary laws,
Sabbath observance and prohibition on intermarriage; above all, this
unique Diasporic nation which had set itself apart asserted spiritual
supremacy over the polytheistic majority.
There is nothing surprising in the fact that such special characteristics
and claims could provide the hostility or resentment which one finds in
Greek and Latin literature. To some extent this pre-Christian anti–
Semitism looks like the normal, xenophobic prejudice which has
prevailed between ethno-religious groups during virtually every period of
history. But such a plausible conclusion ignores the
unique
compactness
and religiously sanctioned exclusiveness. This does not mean that the
cause of Anti-Semitism lay in the Jews themselves, but it can help us to
understand how the peculiar brand of social hostility which we call by
this name first arose as
one
possible re ponse (there were of course others,
ranging from admiration
to
indifference) to the reality of Jewish
exclusiveness.
Pagan anti-Jewishness is important because it provided fertile soil for
its Christian heirs, and it also reminds us that there was a significant form
of hostility to Jews in Antiquity which
preceded
the birth of Christianity.
Not a few early Christians had, for example, absorbed this Jew-hatred as
a consequence of their pagan upbringing. Nevertheless, it is undeniable
that Christianity would appear on the stage of history as a
/legation
of
Judaism in a much deeper sense than its pagan predecessors; that its
theological polemics against Judaism were to be vital to its own identity
far more than was the case for any other religion or culture. No other
religion, indeed, makes the accusation that Christianity has made against
the Jews, that they are literally the
murderers
of God. No other religion
has so consistently attributed to them a universal, cosmic quality of evil,
depicting them as children of the Devil, followers of Antichrist or as the
"synagogue of Satan." The fantasies concerning Jews which were devel–
oped in medieval Christendom, about their plotting to destroy Chris–
tianity, poison wells, desecrate the host, massacre Christian children or
establish their world dominion, represent a qualitative leap compared
with anything put forward by their pagan precursors. Such charges, be–
ginning with deicide, are peculiarly
Christian,
though in the twentieth
