Home » Mind & Soul » Eastern Orthodox Church » Orthodoxy and antisemitism

Orthodoxy and antisemitism

© Steve Hayes

The 20th century will be remembered for many things, good and bad, but one of the worst things it will be remembered for will be genocide -- the attempt to exterminate a race of people. In chronological order there were the German attempt to exterminate the Hereros in 1906, the Turkish attempt to exterminate the Armenians 10 years later, the German attempt to exterminate Jews in the 1940s, and genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s. The list is not exhaustive, but of those the German attempt to exterminate the Jews stands out as the biggest, and the most deliberate.

What drove the Nazi rulers of Germany to genocide was antisemitism, hatred of Jews, that was propagated as an ideology from the middle of the 19th century, and popularised by the Nazi government of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.

Antisemitism is a form of racism. It is hatred of Jews as a race of people. Jews are defined by both race and religion. People who do not practice the religion of Judaism may still regard themselves as Jews by descent. And antisemitism, certainly the Nazi variety, concentrated on descent. Jews who had abandoned Judaism were still likely to face discrimination, arrest, and even death, and many did.

The scale of the genocide in Nazi Germany, and the vehemence of the antisemitism that caused it, have led people, since the end of the Second World War, to try to find the sources of antisemitism. And some have concluded, as a result of their investigations, that Christianity itself is the cause of antisemitism, because Christianity is inherently antisemitic. They assert that the roots of antisemitism are to be found in the earliest Christian documents -- the New Testament, and that all subsequent antisemitism grew and developed from that. The line is traced through the Church Fathers -- St John Chrysostom coming in for particularly heavy criticism -- with the Spanish Inquisition, Martin Luther and pogroms against Jews in Tsarist Russia being mentioned along the way.

St John Chrysostom and the pogroms, in particular, have led to Orthodox Christianity being tarred with the antisemitic brush, at least in the minds of these researchers, and, by extension, in the minds of many of their readers. Is it true? Is Christianity, and in particular Orthodox Christianity, inherently antisemitic?

It is not possible to give a full answer to such a question in a short article like this. The most I can do is give a few pointers, and some suggestions for further reading, and appeal to Orthodox historians to do some research into the subject and perhaps write something more adequate.

The copyright of the article Orthodoxy and antisemitism in Eastern Orthodox Church is owned by . Permission to republish Orthodoxy and antisemitism in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.