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

proper term for the prejudice against them. But the doctrine,
as expounded by Saint Augustine and others, that the
conversion of the Jews was a Christian duty and essential
to the salvation of the world meant that the great hereditary
sin was not an indelible and insurmountable source of
difference. Anti-Judaism became antisemitism whenever it
turned into a consuming hatred that made getting rid of
Jews seem preferable to trying to convert them, and antisemitism
became racism when the belief took hold that Jews
were intrinsically and organically evil rather than merely
having false beliefs and wrong dispositions. 5
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the attitudes of
European Christians toward Jews became more hostile in
ways that laid a foundation for the racism that later developed.
Once welcomed as international merchants and traders,
Jews were increasingly forced by commercial competition
from Christian merchant guilds into the unpopular and
putatively sinful occupation of lending money at interest.
But in this period of intense religiosity, it was the spiritual
threat Jews allegedly represented that inspired most of the
violence against them. Massacres of Jews began at the time
of the First Crusade in 1096. In a few communities, mobs,
stirred up by the rhetoric associated with the campaign to
redeem the Holy Land from Muslims, turned on local Jews.
Later Crusades stimulated more such pogroms. The church
and the civil authorities viewed Muslims as a political and
military threat to Christendom, while Jews had seemed to
them to be relatively harmless and even somewhat useful.
The church valued the presence of dispersed and suffering
Jews as witnesses to divine revelation, and rulers sometimes
employed them as fiscal agents. Consequently the ruling
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