Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

ONE Religion and Invention of Racism
It would of course be stretching a point to claim that
there was no ethnic prejudice in antiquity. The refusal of
dispersed Jews to accept the religious and cultural hegemony
of the gentile nations or empires within which they
resided sometimes aroused hostility against them. But
abandoning their ethnoreligious exceptionalism and worshiping
the local divinities (or accepting Christianity once
it had been established) was an option open to them that
would have eliminated most of the Otherness that made
them unpopular. Jews created a special problem for Christians
because of the latter’s belief that the New Testament
superseded the Old, and that the refusal of Jews to recognize
Christ as the Messiah was preventing the triumph of
the gospel. Anti-Judaism was endemic to Christianity from
the beginning, but since the founders of their religion were
themselves Jews, it would have been difficult for early
Christians to claim that there was something inherently defective
about Jewish blood or ancestry. Nonetheless there
was an undeniable tendency to consider the Jews who had
not converted when Christ was among them as a corporate
group that bore a direct responsibility for the Crucifixion.
“For the organization of Christianity,” writes the French
historian Léon Poliakov, “it was essential that the Jews be
a criminally guilty people.” 4 In Matthew 27:25 Jews who
called for the death of Christ cry out after the deed has
been done: “His blood be upon us and our Children.”
The notion that Jews were collectively and hereditarily
responsible for the worst possible human crime—deicide—
created a powerful incentive for persecution. If it had been
believed that the curse fell on individual Jews in such a way
that they could never be absolved of it, racism would be a
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