The most influential religions and ideologies in history were all largely united in their anti-Judaism directed against the people of Israel or the Jews, which I will refer to below using the now common term “antisemitism,” even though they produced quite different forms of it.

The history of Judaism has been accompanied for centuries by a massive violation of its religious freedom. There is no parallel to it against any other people or religion, even to today. Colonization might be considered similar, but that is one nation or people dominating others. There has never been a combination of powers set against a single ethnicity like there has been against the Jews.

Christianity, Islam, and the secular or atheistic perspectives that developed out of the Christian world, with a spectrum of political views from socialism and communism on one hand to fascism and National Socialism on the other, have shaped the modern world and recent world history more than any other international movement. All three have produced widespread forms of antisemitism that have repeatedly intermingled.

When Adolf Hitler met with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, in 1941, for example, the intermingling of Christian, Islamic, and secular conspiracy theories against the Jews became apparent. Hitler, for example, used the argument that Jews were “Christ murderers” and committed “sacrilege,” even though it is confirmed that he did not believe in Jesus Christ in the sense of the Christian creed.

Disproportionate condemnation of Israel

Christian, Islamic, and secular forms of anti-semitism have been merging for a quarter of a millennium into ever new and more radical combinations of anti-Semitism, a development that has been radicalizing even more since the attacks of October 7, 2023.

The United Nations (UN) demonstrates this radicalization. We do not see the UN concerned about North Korea. While the UN rejects the North Korean dictatorship, it does not consider North Koreans to be inherently evil people. In the case of the Jews and Israel, however, all sense of proportion seems to have been lost.

Since World War II, around 13 million people have died in armed conflicts (not including the victims of the consequences of such conflicts, such as famines), around 200,000 of them related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1948, with violence coming from both or multiple sides.

Nevertheless, in the last ten years, twice as many UN condemnations have been directed at Israel compared to all of the other nearly 200 states, with practically only one side being considered responsible. One can be opposed to Israel’s current policies and still recognize that the UN’s treatment of Israel has lost all sense of proportion.

There are no worldwide protests and no far-reaching statements by the UN in favor of the 200 million Dalits in India, who are still being trampled on, even though the Indian constitution has prohibited this since 1947.

China is not condemned for the one million Uyghurs forced into camps.

Russia is only mildly condemned for its war against the civilian population of Ukraine, where the people predominantly belong to the same Christian denomination.

It seems, today, that half the world stands up for Palestine. The question is whether this is really because they care about their welfare, or simply because it allows them to act against Israel, and, by implication, the Jewish people.

While there is a kind of anti-Palestinian sentiment among Arabs found everywhere in the Middle East, the hatred of Israel is much greater, and all Arab countries constantly pay lip service to it. The world sees this, but the fact that these same Arab states do virtually nothing for the Palestinians is ignored. Recently, all Arab states, together with other Muslim countries, called on the whole world to impose sanctions on Israel, even as they themselves continued to conduct business as usual with the democratic Jewish state.

A political flip

From 1949 until about 1967, all left-wing parties and groups in Germany were pro-Israel, and this view was even seen as a socialist project. This happened in parallel with the promotion of war-crimes trials and the demand for denazification. Even socialist activist Rudi Dutschke was pro-Israel. It was only after the Six-Day War that solidarity with Palestinian terrorists began to grow rapidly. Antisemitism rapidly became the norm on the left of the political spectrum.

Of course, it would be necessary to explain exactly what is meant by the left of the spectrum and how each individual party or organization was positioned, but here I would just like to point out in general terms this change of sides after 1967, which ultimately led to the strange phalanx of left-wing organizations and individuals with extremist Muslim organizations that we find today, especially in the media and the arts, as well as at demonstrations in support of Hamas.

Antisemitism lacks a rational foundation

Despite my exhaustive study of antisemitism and my familiarity with all the theories, I have yet to find a truly convincing explanation for it. The strange thing is that antisemitism flourishes on every continent, both where there are few or no Jews and where they are clearly visible in social life.

Any explanation of antisemitism in Christianity, Islam, or secular worldviews fails not only because this spectrum is already very broad in itself, but also because antisemitism existed long before the emergence of all three religions and movements. Furthermore, it emerged in a way like no other ethnic group or religion has ever experienced.

I once had the opportunity while in Indonesia to ask the presidential candidates for their views. They agreed on only one thing: the political problem that needed to be solved for the future of Indonesia was the state of Israel and the Palestinian question. I was speechless, as any solution to the situation in the Holy Land would have virtually no impact on the situation in Indonesia or solve any of the country’s central problems.

Even in ancient times, important writers from Persia, Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Rome provided shocking evidence of the unique exclusion and defamation of Jews. Jews were portrayed as particularly malicious compared to all other peoples of the world and denigrated as fundamental “enemies of humanity” who always resisted state authority.

One need only read what the Egyptian author Manetho wrote in the 3rd century BC, the Roman author Tacitus in 110 AD, or the Christian Emperor Constantine in 325 AD, to see the evil things they attributed to the Jews. This was taken up by some of the Church Fathers and then also in early Islam, where it was further expanded.

Absurd accusations such as well poisoners, ritual murderers, child eaters, or descendants of the devil have persisted for 2,500 years to this day. As late as 1881, the Jesuit magazine in Rome attempted to prove that ritual murder was a central component of the Jewish religion. And in the Islamic world, this belief is still widespread, even though there is no historical evidence for a single case.

The Roman satirist Juvenal (c. 60–c. 127 AD) made many ugly jokes about Jews, including that they worshipped the pig god. It is hard to believe that this led to the medieval “Judensau” (Jew sow), which was found on many of our most beautiful cathedrals and churches and in some cases still is. Martin Luther’s 1543 treatise “Vom Schem Hamphoras” is his most vicious writing ever and is almost unbearable to read, perpetuating a pre-Christian stereotype with the Wittenberg Judensau.

The sources of antisemitism

Antisemitism is always to be rejected, as is racism or slander against any people—e.g. that all Muslims are liars. As a German, whether I have inherited antisemitism myself or developed it, and where my ancestors got it from, is irrelevant for the moment.

For the Jewish visiting professor who was beaten up on a street of my hometown, Bonn, it is irrelevant what the perpetrator’s ancestors thought. In such attacks, each of the perpetrators has a slightly different personal, family history, and social concern influencing their motives.

As a thought experiment, let’s assume that a Muslim in Germany vandalizes synagogues because his grandparents adopted antisemitic ideas from France, England, or Germany. So what? Does that make it any less reprehensible?

The source of a person’s antisemitism may be of interest to historians, and it is also important for adult education if one wants to work on deradicalization, but in itself it does not make antisemitism any better or worse. Germans are not exonerated by the fact that their grandparents were indoctrinated with antisemitism.

When terrible antisemitic sermons are preached every week in conservative mosques in Germany, this cannot be excused by saying that some of this antisemitism came to the Arab world from the West 100 or 60 years ago. Antisemitism must be resisted, whatever the reason for its existence.

The thesis about a European influence on Muslim antisemitic teaching originates with Bernard Lewis in his book “Drive Them into the Sea! History of Antisemitism” (German version 1989). But Lewis himself had already documented the enormous spread of antisemitism among Muslims worldwide at that time.

The view that Arab antisemitism is a Western import is, on one hand, incorrect because antisemitism dates back to the early days of Islam, just as Christian antisemitism dates back to the early days of Christianity.

The conflict between Islam and Judaism dates back to the lifetime of Muhammad. Particular examples include the violent conflicts with the Jewish tribes of Medina and the blanket defamation of Jews as unbelievers, arrogant, greedy, and scheming. Source volumes and source studies with texts from all centuries document centuries of contempt for Jews.

There were already pogroms against Jews in the Islamic world in the Middle Ages, even if, as in the Christian world, periods of protection for Jews were replaced by periods of persecution. In the course of the decolonization of the Islamic states in the Middle East, 850,000 Jews were expelled, and most of these countries are now almost free of Jews.

Massacres of Jews in 1790 in Tetuan, Morocco; in 1828 in Baghdad, Iraq; in 1834 in Safed, now located in Israel; in 1929 in Hebron; in 1934 in Constantine, Algeria; and in 1945 in Tripoli, Libya, took place before the founding of the state of Israel.

On the other hand, a European influence on antisemitism is correct because the traditional antisemitism of the Islamic world was compounded by conspiracy theories originating in the West. As long as Jews were considered weak and losers, they were despised but not seen as a threat, which is why there were no conspiracy theories. When Jews become successful, wealthy, and influential, that is a different story.

Antisemitic conspiracy theories

It was only with the immigration of Jews to Palestine and the rise of Zionism that European antisemitism influenced the thinking of Arabs and other Muslims. Just as Christian antisemitism was the breeding ground for Western antisemitism, Islamic antisemitism was the breeding ground for the development of the Islamic world as a political force in the 20th century.

Contempt for Jews was coupled with European racist conspiracy theories. From 1937 onward, the Nazis deliberately used propaganda to stir up hatred of Jews in the Arab world. But this would not have been successful if antisemitism wasn’t already familiar to the Arab world before then.

Conspiracy theories are used to explain the inexplicable. How could it be that the Arab states, with the support of almost the entire Islamic world, lost several wars against Israel, all of which they began with the feeling that they could quickly wipe Israel off the map? Here, the explanation that Israel was in fact backed by a global Jewish conspiracy of big capital, which had the US firmly in its grip, was (and still is) tempting.

Israel and its military victories in particular are the main reason why global conspiracy theories have become necessary and acceptable in the Islamic world. In earlier centuries, the Jews as losers did not attract as much hatred as the Jews as victors—especially since 1948. This was, of course, based on the humiliating and, to this day, often unresolved confrontation between the Islamic world and Western modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries, with Jews serving as the hated reason for the failure of Islamic regimes—scapegoats.

I must add an additional qualification to underscore my thesis about the antisemitic intermingling of the West, Secularism, and Islam: Western antisemitism first entered the Islamic world through Arab Christian communities in the 19th century. In the Damascus Affair of 1840, for example, the accusation of ritual murder was introduced by Christians, and it has remained prominent in the Middle East to this day. The hatred of Jews felt by many Arab churches and Christians today is much older than the founding of the state of Israel. Some Arab Christians have participated in the persecution of Jews in Arab countries for almost two centuries.

The secular view of antisemitism in Europe had a long run-up before it gained ground, especially in 19th century France, England, and Germany, and then in the 20th century from Russia with the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (a fabricated antisemitic text created in the early 20th century that falsely claims to reveal a secret Jewish plot for world domination) and finally through National Socialism as it began a devastating triumphal march.

The shift from religion to blood

In Spain, a new view prevailed at the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century as a result of the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of all of Spain. Although most Jews and remaining Muslim Moors had been forced to be baptized (or leave the country) since 1492, the prevailing religious intolerance quickly became outright racism.

Because of their ancestry, Jews and Moors often remained enemies in the eyes of the Church even after baptism and were not really regarded as believers. Antisemitism thus took on a new form with the Spanish policy of “blood purity” (limpieza de sangre), in which the practice of the Jewish religion no longer played a constitutive role in being Jewish. Regardless of religious practice, if you had Jewish ancestry you were considered (and penalized for being) Jewish.

Fast forward to the 19th century, where, in the wake of Darwin’s theory of evolution, all kinds of racist variants of antisemitism emerged, in which the evil no longer lay in the Jewish religion but in the nature of the Jews, who were said to be malicious and devious compared to all other peoples.

With the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, the non-religious variant of antisemitism acquired the element that prevails today, namely that Jews, defined in bloodline classification/racial terms, were implementing a dangerous global conspiracy against humanity.

This global conspiracy ideology may have only partially affected and exacerbated Christian antisemitism worldwide, but it has almost completely affected, expanded, and exacerbated Islamic antisemitism.

In the Third Reich, it did not matter whether Jews practiced their religion, were non-religious, or had converted to Christianity generations ago. Jewish blood was the focus of antisemitism. Even when German church leaders (usually from the so called “Confessing Church”) stood up for baptized Jews and no longer regarded them as Jews but as Christians, people were still regarded as Jews because of their ancestry. Such was the racist stance of National Socialism, and, therefore, many German Christians of the time.

Secular conspiracy theories merged with Christian antisemitism in Europe and the US at the end of the 19th century and in the 20th century, and then with Islam, especially in the Arab world, since the immigration of Jews to Palestine and particularly since the war of 1948.

This amalgamation is also the reason why antisemitism as hatred of Jews per se and antisemitism as hatred of the state of Israel is amalgamating and is now virtually indistinguishable in the current anti-Israel protests worldwide.

When, for example, a German of the Jewish faith is spat on in protest against Israel’s policies, or when it is claimed that “the Jews” are committing genocide in Gaza, it becomes clear that most antisemites make no distinction between Jews and Israel. At Princeton University, I interviewed Jewish students who were attacked even though they were protesting against Israel’s policies.

The fact that they spoke out against Netanyahu did not change the perpetrators’ view that, as Jews, they were the bad guys who deserved to be punished.

Christian development of antisemitism

I am convinced that antisemitism is deeply rooted in Christianity in general and Christian theology in particular even though almost all churches condemn it today. To explain this, we need to dive back into Christian history.

The Adversus Judaeos literature is a special genre of early Christian writings that are directed against Judaism. These texts were written from around 175AD onward by Christian authors in order to strengthen the distinction between Christianity and Judaism and to criticize the Jewish religion. In terms of content, these writings often contain theological arguments claiming that God had rejected the Jewish people and that the covenant with Israel had now passed to the Christians.

They criticize the Jewish Torah, reject Jewish concepts and customs, and often portray Jews as disobedient to God and enemies of Christians. Well-known promoters of this perspective are Tertullian, Hippolytus of Rome, and Cyprian, whose works argue polemically against Judaism.

Augustine of Hippo also wrote a famous treatise, “Tractatus adversus Judaeos,” which further shaped this attitude. The above-mentioned figures, along with the Epistle of Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Chrysostom, and Ambrose, represent the elite of the Church Fathers.

Symptomatic of this is the devastating reasoning given by the Council of Nicaea as to why Easter should no longer fall on the date of the Jewish Passover but must be celebrated independently of Jewish rites. Emperor Constantine then wrote an even more vicious letter to all bishops stating that the church should have nothing to do with any Jewish rites, since the Jews had crucified Christ and their rites were superstitious and abominable.

Four years before the council, the emperor had therefore decreed Sunday as a weekly holiday by imperial law. Since then, Jews around the world have had to fight for the right to stop working on Saturday, their Sabbath.

Antisemitism should and could have ended with the Reformation, as this movement distanced itself from many of the evil developments in Church history, and the Old Testament was given high importance as the word of God. The revival of Hebrew studies of the Old Testament, and large parts of Reformed theology, made positive contributions to taking the Jewish religion seriously.

However, the Lutheran wing of the Reformation often contributed to antisemitic theology by arguing that the Old Testament was “Jewish” and legalistic, while at the same time attempting to prove that Catholics were like Jews in that way and therefore wrong.

Certainly, there is much more to be said about 500 years of Protestant history thereafter, but this is a mere example of how deeply rooted antisemitism continued to be.

Antisemitism in theology found broad 19th century expression from the historical-critical theological school and their arguments that the Old Testament had been invented by Jewish priests who, for their own benefit, gave the impression that it was an ancient text.

It was no coincidence that the Old Testament was questioned much earlier and much more vehemently than the New Testament, even though archaeologists and historians came to contrary conclusions with stronger evidence, which later led to books such as Und die Bibel hat doch Recht (And the Bible is Right after All). But this is not the place to go into further detail.

Protestant antisemitism also found several evangelical expressions, although evangelicals generally had a different view, mainly because for them the Old Testament is just as much God’s infallible word as the New Testament.

Nevertheless, despite all their support for the state of Israel, founded in 1948, some forms of dispensational theology emerged in the 19th century that saw the Jews as allies of the Antichrist in the future end times (at least before the future mass conversion of the Jews). But here too, one would of course have to go into detail and differentiate, and it’s beyond the scope of this article to explore further.

The appropriate way forward

Freedom of religion and belief is now widely considered to be a human right. Human rights not only precede the state and are rightly demanded, regardless of whether they are enshrined in the actual laws of a state, they are also a task for the state, which must protect human rights.

This protection necessarily includes punishing violations and actively protecting the persecuted, if necessary, with the use of state force. Similarly, torture is not only wrong and prohibited by the state, but the state must also intervene with law enforcement agencies when people torture other people and prevent such torture as far as possible.

The protection of Jews as fellow citizens is, of course, not based solely on religious freedom—they are entitled to the same protection as every other citizen, especially protection from racist assault. But protecting the right to practice religion is important.

Based on democratic societies’ views about human rights, all people and states have a moral obligation to protect the freedom of religion and belief of Jews, as well as protecting their freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and other rights. If not for the Jews, then why should we protect the rights of others to worship as they wish? If we deny rights to Jews now, who might be next? Where will denial of human rights end? Surely totalitarianism is not a future we desire.

This is where the challenge lies: the more antisemitism is linked to calls for violence or the direct use of violence, and the greater the number of people involved, the more only the state can curb this antisemitism.

As citizens or even as churches we should show moral courage, but we cannot perform sovereign tasks in place of the state. So, when politicians rightly and publicly advocate for Jews to be able to live safely and freely in our countries, or their historic homeland, such politicians must be aware that the current antisemitism on the streets cannot be combated simply with lip service.

Rather, it represents a challenge to democratic state authority in every form—which is especially challenging when the policing or security forces in our nations are often insufficient in number. When strong and clear defense of human rights, and resistance of antisemitism, is demonstrated, every state authority that is involved deserves our gratitude.

Archbishop and Professor Thomas Paul Schirrmacher is the President of both the International Council of the International Society for Human Rights in Frankfurt and the International Institute for Religious Freedom in Costa Rica and Bonn. He was Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance from 2021 to 2024. Prior to this, he served the WEA for 25 years in various roles, including Associate Secretary General for Theological Concerns and Intrafaith and Interfaith Relations. He travels to over 50 countries a year, meeting heads of state and government, religious leaders, and heads of churches of all confessions on behalf of the persecuted church, as well as fighting human trafficking and corruption.