Adversus Judaeos

Why this Chapter exists

The teaching that came before the violence.

For centuries, Christian Europe taught that the Jewish people bore collective guilt for the death of Jesus, crucified under Rome’s authority in Jerusalem around the year 30. The charge was later called deicide, the killing of God. In 1965 the Catholic Church rejected it in Nostra Aetate (Latin for “In Our Time”), a declaration of the Second Vatican Council, the Church’s worldwide council of bishops. The declaration states that what happened in the Passion, the suffering and death of Jesus, “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”

The teaching that came before that rejection is the body of Christian theological writing known as Adversus Judaeos, “against the Jews.” The hostility of the ancient Greek and Roman world came earlier still, and the contrast shows what the new teaching changed.

The tradition was written by the Church Fathers, the leading Christian theologians of roughly the second to fifth centuries, and by their medieval successors. After the Second World War, the Catholic Church and many Protestant churches repudiated its central positions. Those repudiations, treated in the Nostra Aetate Chapter, are part of this record too.

What it is

A definition, before the history.

Adversus Judaeos, Latin for "against the Jews", names a continuous tradition of Christian theological writing that ran from the second century into the early-modern period. The phrase comes from the title of an early work by Tertullian (c. 200 CE) and became the generic label for the whole genre.

The literature made three main claims. The Christian Church had replaced the Jewish people in God's plan, a position scholars call supersessionism. The Jewish people bore collective guilt for the crucifixion, the deicide charge. And Jewish "blindness" to Christ explained and justified their dispersion and their subordination. The scattered Jewish existence long predated 70 CE, but the theologians dated it to Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple and read it as punishment. Those theological claims, repeated and elaborated over centuries, became the framework within which medieval European law, art, and violence toward Jews operated.

The ancient world · 5th century BCE–2nd century CE

The ancient world: the hostility that already existed.

Writers in the Greek and Roman world had been producing anti-Jewish texts for three centuries before the first Christian sermon was preached.

A people apart. Every city in the Greek and Roman world had its gods, and most gods had statues. The Jews had one God and no statue at all. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around 110 CE and no friend of the Jews, said they “have purely mental conceptions of Deity, as one in essence.” They “do not allow any images to stand in their cities, much less in their temples.” Jews also rested on the seventh day, ate only what their law allowed, and married within the community. How these communities lived is told in The Diaspora.

Some neighbors were drawn in. The satirist Juvenal mocked Roman fathers who kept the Sabbath and sons who went on to “revere the Jewish law.” The philosopher Seneca complained that “the conquered have given laws to the conquerors.” Others resented the difference. Tacitus wrote that the Jews “regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies,” and that converts were taught “to despise all gods, to disown their country.”

The oldest surviving record of an attack on a Jewish community comes from Egypt. In 410 BCE, under Persian rule, Egyptian priests and a local governor destroyed the temple of the Jewish garrison community at Elephantine, in southern Egypt. The community’s petition to rebuild it survives and is shown below. The earliest surviving written charge against the Jews comes from Egypt as well. Around 270 BCE, a history written in Greek and attributed to an Egyptian priest named Manetho retold the Exodus, the departure of the Israelites from Egypt told in the Hebrew Bible, in reverse. In this version their ancestors were a colony of lepers, cast out as impure. Their leader, whom Manetho identifies with Moses, ordered them not to worship the Egyptian gods.

When kings were gods. In the world Alexander the Great left behind, a king could be a god. Antiochus IV, a king of the Greek-speaking Seleucid dynasty that ruled Syria, called himself a god on his coins: “of King Antiochus, God Manifest, Bearer of Victory.” Jews could not join in. A Jew could pray for a king, but never to one. Antiochus also ruled Jerusalem. Jason, brother of the high priest Onias, bid for the high priesthood itself, promising the king “three hundred and threescore talents of silver” (a talent was a large weight of silver). Antiochus later entered the Temple and “took away the golden altar” and “the hidden treasures which he found.” In 167 BCE he outlawed Jewish practice in Judea. The revolt that followed brought a Jewish dynasty, the Hasmoneans, to power as kings and high priests.

Rome came next. In 63 BCE the Roman general Pompey forced his way into the Temple’s innermost room. Tacitus records what he found there: no image, and an empty room. Roman emperors were honored as gods too, and Philo, a Jewish philosopher of Alexandria, describes temples to Augustus rising in city after city. Yet Augustus paid for whole burnt offerings in the Temple every day, offered, in Philo’s words, “to the most high God,” and not to himself.

In Rome in 19 CE, four swindlers persuaded Fulvia, a Roman woman “of great dignity” who had embraced Judaism, to send purple and gold to the Temple. They kept it for themselves. Their leader was a Jew who had fled punishment under his own people’s law. The emperor Tiberius punished the whole Jewish community of Rome, and four thousand were sent to Sardinia. Tacitus, who counts followers of Egyptian rites among them, called their deaths “a cheap sacrifice.”

The quarrel grew sharpest in Alexandria, a great Greek-speaking city in Egypt with a large Jewish community. Disputes over citizenship and taxes produced a literature of accusation. Its best-known author, a Greek-Egyptian scholar named Apion, wrote that the Jews kept a donkey’s head in their Temple and worshipped it, and that once a year they fattened a Greek captive for sacrifice.

In 38 CE the words turned physical. Local faction leaders told the Roman governor Flaccus, who had lost his friends at court, how to win the new emperor’s favor. “You cannot confer a greater benefit upon it,” they said of the city, “than by abandoning and denouncing all the Jews.” Synagogues were desecrated. The mob looted Jewish homes and “divided the booty among themselves as if they had obtained it in war.” Jews were crammed into a small part of the city. Whole families were burned alive in the middle of the city, and community elders were flogged in the public theater. Philo lived through it and wrote two eyewitness accounts.

Two years later the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, ordered a giant statue of himself, bearing the name of the god Jupiter, set up in the holiest room of the Temple. Philo was in Italy with a Jewish delegation from Alexandria when the news reached them. To Jews, he wrote, turning a man into a god was “the most terrible of all impieties.” Apion was among the rival Greek delegates. He accused the Jews of refusing to honor the emperor, “by which he hoped to provoke Caius to anger at the Jews,” the Jewish historian Josephus wrote. When the Jewish delegates finally stood before Gaius, he greeted them with an accusation. “You are haters of God,” he said, “inasmuch as you do not think that I am a god.” They answered that the Temple had offered sacrifices for him. He replied that they had sacrificed to another god, and not to him.

The statue was never set up. The governor of Syria delayed, and Agrippa I, a Jewish king and a friend of the emperor, pleaded against it. Within months, Gaius was dead. In 41 CE the next emperor, Claudius, answered the Alexandria violence in a letter that survives on papyrus and is shown below.

After Rome destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, the emperor Vespasian ordered every Jew in the empire to pay the old Temple tax to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol in Rome. The sum was “two drachmae every year” (a drachma was a Greek silver coin). Around 95 CE Josephus answered Apion in a book called Against Apion, the first surviving point-by-point rebuttal of anti-Jewish claims. About fifteen years later, Tacitus opened his account of Jerusalem’s destruction with a survey of Jewish origins and customs. He called the customs base and repeated the donkey story as fact, a few pages before he recorded Pompey’s empty room.

Three questions the sources answer.

Did the Jews provoke their neighbors? Josephus described the ideal: “the custom of our country is to keep our own laws, but not to bring accusations against the laws of others.” Moses, he wrote, had “expressly forbidden us to laugh at and revile those that are esteemed gods by other people.” Practice could differ. Philo mocked the Egyptians as a people who treat “dogs, and wolves, and lions, and crocodiles” as gods. When their Temple or law came under attack, Jews sent delegations, as Philo did to Gaius, and at times they went to war: against Antiochus, and against Rome in 66 and 132 CE. In 115–117 CE, Jews in Egypt, Cyrene, and Cyprus rose against their Greek and Roman neighbors, and Roman forces crushed the revolt. Eusebius, a church historian writing two centuries later, recorded that the Roman general Marcius Turbo “slew many thousands of Jews” of Cyrene and Egypt.

Were they trying to convert people? Josephus wrote that the law “admits all those that have a mind to observe our laws” and does so “after a friendly manner.” Some Romans joined, as Fulvia had. Under Jewish rule, conversion was at times forced. Josephus reports that the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus let the conquered Idumeans, south of Judea, stay in their land only “if they would circumcise their genitals, and make use of the laws of the Jews.” The Greek geographer Strabo told it differently. Driven from their own country, he wrote, “they passed over to the Jews, and adopted their customs.”

Why did rulers care what they believed? In that world the gods were believed to protect the city, and honoring them, and later the emperor, was how a city showed its loyalty. Jews were almost the only community in that world whose law allowed one God only. They did not bow to statues or eat at the shared sacrifices. Rome protected the exemption, and most of the time the arrangement held. In a crisis it could be read as disloyalty. Tacitus made the connection himself. The Jews’ refusal of images, he wrote, meant that “this flattery is not paid to their kings, nor this honour to our Emperors.” Apion claimed the Jews swore to bear goodwill to no foreigner, “particularly to none of the Greeks.”

The charge that Jews were disloyal outlived the ancient world. The Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter follows it into the present.

How we know. The evidence here is layered. The oldest layer is an excavated archive, the Elephantine papyri, the working papers of the Jewish garrison community in southern Egypt. A papyrus letter of the emperor Claudius, shown below, confirms the Alexandria violence from outside the Jewish sources. The rest is manuscript tradition: Philo’s two eyewitness works, Josephus, and Tacitus, copied and preserved like the other classical texts. Manetho’s and Apion’s charges survive mainly because Josephus quoted them in order to answer them.

“They entered that temple, they destroyed it to the ground, and the pillars of stone which were there they broke … Also since the month of Tammuz in the 14th year of Darius the king till this day we wear sack-cloth and fast. Our wives are made widow-like, we do not anoint ourselves with oil and we drink no wine.”

The community describes the destruction of its local temple, and the three years of mourning since. From the petition shown above, written 407 BCE. English translation: A. E. Cowley, 1923.

“… the riot and feud (or rather, if the truth must be told, the war) against the Jews … I conjure you yet once again that, on the one side, the Alexandrines show themselves forbearing and kindly towards the Jews who for many years have dwelt in the same city, and offer no outrage to them in the exercise of their traditional worship …”

The emperor describes the fighting, then turns to the Greeks of Alexandria. Letter of Claudius to the Alexandrians, 41 CE, shown above. English translation: H. Idris Bell, 1924.

The older hostility grew out of quarrels over citizenship, taxes, and custom, and it was fed by rumor. None of these writers claimed that the Jewish people had killed a god. None wrote their hostility into the founding story of a rival faith. That changed in the second century.

The origins · 2nd century

The literature emerges as Christianity separates from Judaism.

The Adversus Judaeos literature emerged in the second century CE, as the Christian movement, which began inside first-century Judaism, separated itself from the wider Jewish world. Historians call that separation the "parting of the ways," and the timing is itself a live scholarly question. The older account placed the split early, in the decades just after 70 CE. More recent work traces a slower process across the second, third, and fourth centuries. An influential statement of the later view is Daniel Boyarin's Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

The writers who built the tradition drew on the New Testament. In Matthew’s Gospel, the crowd before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate answers, “His blood be upon us and upon our children” (Matthew 27:25). In 1965 Nostra Aetate stated that the Jews “should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”

The earliest surviving texts (works titled "Against the Jews," or polemics addressing Jewish-Christian disagreement) date to the second century:

• The Epistle of Barnabas (c. 130 CE, possibly Alexandria). The earliest surviving Christian treatise built wholly on the argument against Judaism. It argues that Israel forfeited the covenant at Sinai and so never validly held it, and that the Jewish people no longer stood as God's chosen community.
• Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho (c. 155–160 CE, Rome). The main surviving second-century polemic, written as a debate between Justin and Trypho, a Jewish interlocutor. It sets out the supersessionist case and the claim that the biblical prophecies point to Jesus rather than to the Jewish reading.
• Melito of Sardis, Peri Pascha ("On the Passover") (c. 160–170 CE, Sardis). A liturgical homily for Christian Easter observance. It carries the earliest surviving explicit charge that the Jewish people had killed God by handing Jesus over to crucifixion. Later writers made that charge central.
• Tertullian, Adversus Judaeos (c. 200 CE, Carthage). The Latin work whose title gave the whole genre its name. It continues the supersessionist framework laid down by its Greek-language predecessors.

The patristic period · 2nd–5th centuries

The literature develops.

Across the third, fourth, and fifth centuries the literature grew, as many leading Church Fathers added to it. Scholars call the era of the Church Fathers the patristic period. Major contributors:

• Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 263–339), the historian whose Ecclesiastical History framed early Christian self-understanding, also wrote extensive anti-Jewish material in his Demonstratio Evangelica.
• Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306–373), the leading Syriac theologian, composed anti-Jewish hymns and homilies, treated in scholarly work by Christine Shepardson and others.
• Aphrahat the Persian Sage (c. 270–c. 345), whose Demonstrations argue that the Christian community had inherited the standing the Jewish people lost.
• Cyprian of Carthage (died 258), writing earlier still, carried the tradition forward in Latin after Tertullian, in his Ad Quirinum (To Quirinus).

The tradition deepened in the decades that followed. John Chrysostom’s Eight Homilies Against the Jews and Augustine’s framework are treated in their own sections below.

The principal references include Robert Wilken's John Chrysostom and the Jews (1983), Marcel Simon's Verus Israel (1986), and Miriam Taylor's Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity (1995). The French historian Jules Isaac summed up the case in L'enseignement du mépris ("The Teaching of Contempt," 1962). He had pressed it since 1948 and put it personally to Pope John XXIII in 1960. His work helped drive the Catholic reckoning treated in the Nostra Aetate Chapter.

John Chrysostom · the Antioch homilies

The rhetorical apex.

John Chrysostom (c. 349–407) preached his Eight Homilies Against the Jews at Antioch in 386–387. He was then a priest (presbyter) at Antioch, a major city of the Roman East, and later became archbishop of the imperial capital, Constantinople. He was reacting to Christians in his own congregation who kept up Jewish practices. They attended synagogue for the High Holidays (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the holiest days of the Jewish year). They observed Jewish fasts, swore oaths in synagogues, and sought healing from Jewish religious figures. The homilies were meant to drive that engagement to a stop. His modern English translator, Paul W. Harkins, titled them Discourses Against Judaizing Christians, meaning Christians who adopted Jewish practices.

The rhetoric is severe, among the most intense surviving examples of patristic anti-Jewish language. The animal imagery, the comparison of Jewish practice to debauchery and demonic activity, and the deicide framing shaped the Christian rhetoric that followed.

How to read that rhetoric is debated. Robert Wilken argues that it should be read inside the conventions of fourth-century rhetoric. Later Christian readers met the homilies outside their original setting and carried Chrysostom's language about the Jewish people into their own.

Augustine · the witness-people doctrine

The framework that organized the medieval tradition.

The position that organized the medieval Catholic stance toward the Jewish people came chiefly from Augustine of Hippo (354–430), whose work shaped nearly every part of later Western theology. Augustine set out his view across several works, among them City of God (completed 426) and the Tractatus Adversus Judaeos.

Where Chrysostom preached contempt, Augustine built a rationale for Jewish survival. His position (later known as the "doctrine of Jewish witness") rested on three claims:

• The Jewish people preserved the Hebrew Bible as authentic ancient witness to the prophecies Christian theology read as predictions of Christ. Their preservation of the text was therefore useful to Christian argument: the Christian reading could not be dismissed as Christian invention if the Jewish people themselves kept the same scriptures.
• Continuing Jewish existence served as theological evidence. Augustine read the Jewish presence, in what he saw as a state of dispersion and subordination, as witness to the truth of Christian claims about the consequences of rejecting Christ.
• The Jewish people should therefore not be killed or forcibly converted. Drawing on Psalm 59:11 ("Slay them not, lest my people forget"), Augustine held that they should be allowed to continue, though only in the subordinate status his framework prescribed.

For roughly the next thousand years the Church's official position operated within Augustine's framework. Medieval Europe's Jewish communities were allowed to continue, under heavy restriction and legal subordination. The framework aimed to preserve the Jews, not to destroy them.

The reference study is Jeremy Cohen's Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (1999). It traces how Augustine's framework worked across the medieval period and where it broke down. Historians still study how that framework related to medieval violence against Jews. That violence included the First Crusade massacres in the Rhineland, in western Germany, in 1096, the killings of the Black Death plague years of 1347–1351, and the expulsions. During the Second Crusade, when preaching set off massacres of Jews in the Rhine valley, the abbot Bernard of Clairvaux protested, holding that Jews were not to be destroyed. The framework set a theological boundary that prevented some violence and failed to prevent the rest.

The themes

What the literature said.

Across its patristic and medieval span, the literature held a fairly consistent set of theological positions:

• Hard supersessionism. The claim, in its strongest form, that the Church had replaced the Jewish people and that God’s covenant with them was revoked. This is the foundation of nearly the whole tradition. The Catholic Church has since repudiated it, as the Nostra Aetate Chapter shows. The Vatican’s 2015 document The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable states, “The covenant that God has offered Israel is irrevocable.”
• The deicide charge. The claim that the Jewish people, across all generations, bore guilt for the crucifixion. It was first stated explicitly by Melito of Sardis and grew across the patristic and medieval literature. Nostra Aetate rejected it in 1965, in the words quoted at the opening of this Chapter. Its full text is discussed in the Nostra Aetate Chapter.
• A theological reading of Jewish dispersion. The claim that the dispersion after 70 CE was divine punishment for rejecting Christ, the frame through which continuing Jewish existence was then read.
• The "fulfillment" reading of the Hebrew Bible. The claim that the Hebrew Bible was really about Christ and the Church, with the Jewish reading treated as a misreading of texts said to belong to the Christian tradition.
• Polemic against rabbinic Judaism. Across the medieval period the literature turned more directly on rabbinic Judaism, the Judaism of the rabbis and their legal tradition, which the patristic-era writing had engaged less. The medieval Christian engagement with the Talmud, the vast written record of Jewish law and debate, including the book-burnings and forced disputations below, worked inside this framework.

The medieval disputations

The forced engagement.

Eight centuries separate the Church Fathers from the scenes below. The tradition traveled that distance through the monasteries, schools, and sermons of medieval Europe. Across the medieval period the literature was staged as a series of formal public disputations, debates between Jewish rabbinic figures and Christian representatives, held under conditions that left the Jewish side heavily constrained. The major ones:

• The Paris Disputation (1240). In 1239 Pope Gregory IX ordered Jewish books seized, and the disputation was held under King Louis IX of France. The Christian side was argued by Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert who had accused the Talmud of blasphemy against Christianity. The Jewish defender was Rabbi Yehiel of Paris. The outcome was the formal condemnation of the Talmud and its burning at Paris in June 1242, an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 manuscript volumes, twenty-four cartloads by the contemporaries’ count, destroyed. It was the first Christian condemnation and burning of the Talmud, and it set the pattern for those that followed.
• The Barcelona Disputation (1263). Convened under King James I of Aragon. The Christian side was argued by Pablo Christiani, a Jewish convert. The defender was Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman (Nahmanides, the Ramban, c. 1194–1270), one of the leading Spanish-Jewish authorities of the age. The two surviving accounts disagree. The Latin record states that Nahmanides fled the city early. His own Hebrew account, written soon after, has him staying on for more than a week. He left with a gift of 300 sólidos (coins) from the king. That account is one of the fullest surviving records of any medieval disputation from the Jewish side. The Dominicans, an order of Catholic friars, prosecuted Nahmanides for publishing his account, and he was forced into exile. He settled in the Land of Israel in 1267, as told in the Continuous Presence Chapter.
• The Tortosa Disputation (1413–1414). The longest and most extensive, held at Tortosa, Aragon, under Benedict XIII, one of the rival claimants to the papacy during the Western Schism. The Christian side was argued by Jerónimo de Santa Fe (formerly Joshua Lorki, a Jewish convert). Roughly twenty rabbinic figures from across the Aragonese communities were compelled to attend across its 21 months. It ended in mass conversions among Aragonese Jews, made under the pressure of the debate and in the shadow of the massacres of Spain’s Jews in 1391. It left the Aragonese Jewish community badly weakened in the decades before the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

The pattern held across all of them. Christian authorities (royal, papal, or ecclesiastical) convened the debates. The Jewish defenders argued under threat of lost standing, violence, or reprisal against their communities, and the procedure privileged the Christian side at nearly every turn. The scholarship is extensive. See Robert Chazan's Daggers of Faith (University of California Press, 1989) and Hyam Maccoby's Judaism on Trial (Littman Library, 1982).

Ecclesia and Synagoga · visual iconography

The translation into visual culture.

The theological tradition was also translated into a distinctive visual language. The convention, called "Ecclesia and Synagoga," paired two female figures: Ecclesia, the Church personified, and Synagoga, the figure standing for Judaism. It developed from the ninth through twelfth centuries and became standard in medieval European Christian art.

Across the many surviving examples the pairing follows a fixed grammar. Ecclesia appears crowned and regally dressed, holding symbols of authority (a cross, a chalice, sometimes a scepter) upright and triumphant. Synagoga appears blindfolded, her crown falling or fallen, holding a broken staff or a downturned Torah scroll, often turned away from the central Christian scene. The pairing put the supersessionist claim into visible form: Ecclesia the successor, Synagoga the superseded.

Surviving examples include the two figures at Strasbourg Cathedral (c. 1230), among the finest thirteenth-century Gothic sculpture. At Notre-Dame de Paris, the pair on the west facade was remade by the workshop of the architect Viollet-le-Duc in the nineteenth century. Others stand at the Princes' Portal of the Cathedral of Bamberg (c. 1235) and in programs at the cathedrals of Reims, Worms, and Bordeaux, among many others.

The iconography carried the theological tradition to people who could not read it. The supersessionist framework (and, in harsher images, open contempt) was part of medieval Europeans' ordinary experience of religious space.

The contemporary reckoning has taken visual form too. In 2015 Saint Joseph's University, a Jesuit university in Philadelphia, installed a bronze pairing by Joshua Koffman for the fiftieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate. Titled "Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time," it shows two crowned figures seated side by side, one holding a Torah scroll and the other a Bible. Neither is placed above the other.

Object Spotlight

Ecclesia and Synagoga, Strasbourg, c. 1230.

Look first, before you know their names. Two stone women stand side by side. The one on the left is calm and upright, a crown on her head, a cup in her hand. The one on the right has slipped into a long S-curve, her head tipped, a strip of cloth tied across her eyes. The staff in her hand is snapped, and a set of stone tablets is sliding from her grip. One figure is whole and composed. The other is coming apart, gracefully.

These are sculptures carved around 1230 for the south doorway of Strasbourg Cathedral, in what is now eastern France, but they are not a one-off invention. They are an example of a fixed visual type that medieval Christian art repeated for centuries: a matched pair of women with standard names, Ecclesia, Latin for "the Church", and Synagoga, "the Synagogue," meaning Judaism. Once the convention was set, artists across Europe reached for the same pair the way a modern designer reaches for a familiar logo. It was a way of teaching, to a crowd that mostly could not read, a picture-argument about two religions, and because it was a type rather than a single artwork, it could appear almost anywhere.

Here is the argument the carving makes. What the Adversus Judaeos writers had claimed in words for a thousand years is set here in one image: the crown against the bare bowed head, the upright cup against the snapped staff, the clear gaze against the bound eyes. One faith is shown risen and whole, the other fallen and fading. The contrast makes the claim that the Church had superseded the Synagogue.

Look closer at the one detail that does the most work: the blindfold. In the visual shorthand of the period, covered eyes did not mean a person who cannot see. They meant a person who will not, who has the truth right in front of her and refuses to look. That is the old charge of "blindness" and "stubbornness" from the sermons, turned into an image a passerby could grasp in a second. Notice what the carver chose not to do: Synagoga is not ugly or monstrous. She is a beautiful young woman, graceful even in defeat, and the hostility travels inside that beauty.

From roughly the ninth century to the sixteenth, the Ecclesia-and-Synagoga pair turns up on object after object. It was carved on cathedral fronts, glowed in stained-glass windows, was painted into illuminated prayer books, and was struck on seals, ivories, and altarpieces. The same two figures, with the same crown-against-blindfold contrast, met worshippers in town after town across most of a millennium. That repetition is what turns one statue into a type. In the twentieth century its meaning came under hard scrutiny, above all after the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate (1965). The Strasbourg originals are now read as evidence of how an idea was taught to the eye, over and over, for centuries.

Translation into legal architecture

The tradition and medieval European law.

Across the medieval period the theological tradition was translated into the law that governed Jewish life in Christian Europe, through several channels:

• The Church canons. Canon law, the Church’s own legal system, restricted Jewish life from the early fourth century on. The Council of Elvira, in Spain, forbade Christians to marry Jews or share meals with them.
• Roman imperial law. Laws later gathered in the Theodosian Code, the Roman emperors’ collected laws, restricted Jews too. A law of 418, for example, barred Jews from government service and the army.
• The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the badge. Canons 67–70 restricted Jewish moneylending, barred Jews from public office over Christians, and kept converts from returning to Judaism. Canon 68 required that Jews and Muslims be “marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress.” From that rule local rulers later developed the badge. The Ghetto System Chapter traces the wider consequences. For the badge's full history, from its eighth-century Islamic origins through the medieval variations to the Nazi revival, see the USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia.
• The papal bulls. A long line of these formal papal decrees set specific positions on Jewish life. The Sicut Judaeis bull, first issued by Pope Calixtus II around 1120 and reissued by later popes, protected Jews within Augustine's framework. Innocent III’s version of 1199 forbade forcing Jews into baptism, harming them or seizing their property without judgment, disturbing their festivals, and damaging their cemeteries. It protected only Jews who did not plot “for the subversion of the Christian faith.” The Cum Nimis Absurdum of Pope Paul IV (1555), treated in the Ghetto System Chapter, marked the early-modern hardening.
• Secular law. Kings and towns wrote their own rules for Jews, and many drew on the Church's positions.

The legal record is followed in The Blood Libel, The Expulsions, and The Ghetto System.

The reception into the modern period

The inheritance into the twentieth century.

The tradition ran on through the late-medieval, early-modern, and modern periods. Its passage through the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the rise of modern European Christianity kept much of the patristic and medieval material, sometimes intact and sometimes altered. Key reception moments:

• Martin Luther's later writings. Martin Luther was the German monk whose 1517 theses began the Protestant Reformation (treated in the Nostra Aetate Chapter). In 1543 he wrote On the Jews and Their Lies, an anti-Jewish treatise that drew on the wider Adversus Judaeos tradition. In 1994 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) acknowledged “the violent recommendations of his later writings against the Jews.” It also deplored “the appropriation of Luther's words by modern anti-Semites.”
• The Counter-Reformation Catholic position. Through the early-modern Counter-Reformation the Church mostly kept the framework. The hardening under Pope Paul IV is traced in the Ghetto System Chapter.
• The Enlightenment and emancipation. The emancipation of European Jews across the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (France 1791, the Habsburg lands 1867, the German Empire 1871) proceeded mainly by contesting the framework's legal and political effects. The theology itself, though, lived on in Church settings even as its civil consequences were dismantled.
• The link to modern racial antisemitism. Historians have studied closely how the patristic-medieval theology connected to the racial antisemitism of the late nineteenth century, which the Nazi regime later took up. Robert Chazan’s Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism (1997) traces how twelfth-century images of Jews developed and their lasting role in the history of antisemitism. Saul Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews (1997, 2007) treats the Nazi period itself. The theology cast the Jew as a religious enemy. Racial antisemitism recast the Jew as a biological one.

Distinguishing the framework

What Adversus Judaeos was, and what it was not.

Adversus Judaeos is often confused with two other frameworks. A fourth, the older hostility of the Greek and Roman world, is set out in the ancient-world section above. It had no doctrine about the Jews to carry it.

1. Adversus Judaeos was a sustained theological project specifically about Jews. The continuous patristic and medieval literature theorized Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus and Jewish "blindness" and "stubbornness." Those constructions were invoked to justify legal disability, expulsion, and the ghetto, and were taken up by some who carried out massacres. It targeted Jews as Jews, with a worked-out theological theory of their condition.

2. Classical Islamic subordination of dhimmi populations was different in kind. The dhimma was the legal status of non-Muslim "People of the Book" under Muslim rule, and a dhimmi was a person who held it. It was a hierarchical status applied to Jews and Christians together as one religious-legal category. Its rules are associated with the Pact of Umar tradition (eighth–ninth century) and lasted through the Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Ottoman, and other periods. It was discriminatory, and at times violent (the 1066 Granada massacre, the Almohad persecutions of twelfth-century Iberia and the Maghreb, the exile of Yemen’s Jews to Mawza, a barren coastal strip, in 1679, and Sultan Moulay Yazid’s attacks on Morocco’s Jewish quarters in 1790–1792). Some medieval Muslim scholars also wrote polemics, written attacks, against Judaism, arguing that its scripture had been falsified and its law cancelled. But the dhimma was not a continuous theological project aimed specifically at Jews. Historians such as Bernard Lewis and Mark R. Cohen have compared the two worlds. Cohen explains why medieval relations between Jews and Muslims were less confrontational and violent than those between Jews and Christians in the West. The Dhimma Chapter treats the dhimma in full. The MENA Departure Chapter treats the twentieth-century antisemitism imported from Europe. It was one of several forces behind the uprooting of roughly 850,000 Jews from Arab countries between 1945 and 1972.

3. Nazi racial antisemitism was different again, and it closed the conversion exit. The 1879 racial turn, treated in the Racial Turn Chapter, redefined Jewishness as a hereditary biological category with no possible escape. Both classical dhimma and Christian Adversus Judaeos allowed conversion as an exit, however coerced, though Spain's purity-of-blood statutes, beginning at Toledo in 1449, held converts' ancestry against them. Under Nazi racial antisemitism, no Jew could escape persecution by converting.

Persecution in Christian Europe drew on that religious framework for centuries. The break to biological-racial categories was a nineteenth-century development that built on that framework and then transformed it. The further entries are at the Misconceptions reference.

The repudiation

The postwar reckoning.

After the Holocaust, the churches turned to face this tradition. In 1965 the Second Vatican Council approved Nostra Aetate by a vote of 2,221 to 88. It rejected collective Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus and began the Catholic Church’s reckoning with the supersessionist framework, a story told in full in the Nostra Aetate Chapter. In 1984 the Lutheran World Federation distanced its member churches from Luther’s writings against Jews, and other Protestant churches issued statements of their own. Scholars from Jules Isaac on, among them Wilken, Simon, Boyarin, Cohen, and Chazan, reexamined the tradition itself.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History & Belief Systems: the Christian theological tradition that developed in late antiquity (the patristic Adversus Judaeos literature).
• Medieval European History: the tradition’s translation into law, the disputations, and the Ecclesia-and-Synagoga iconography.
• Early-Modern History: the inheritance into the Reformation (Luther, 1543) and the Counter-Reformation hardening.
• Comparative Religious Studies: the tradition read beside today’s Jewish-Christian dialogue, as the pre- and post-Nostra Aetate phases of one relationship.
• Historical Thinking & Source Analysis: a named teaching, its mechanism, and its documented effects, while keeping the theological tradition, the legal measures it justified, and later racial antisemitism distinct.
• Pairs with the Nostra Aetate Chapter: the record of the phenomenon and the record of the repudiation.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Global History & Geography: 9.2 (belief systems: the rise of Christianity) and 9.3 (classical civilizations) and 9.6 (social and cultural conflict in the medieval world: the disputations, the iconography, and the translation into law).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.9–10.6 and RH.9–10.9 (comparing authors’ points of view, and comparing primary and secondary sources on one topic). RH.11–12.6 and RH.11–12.9 (source perspective and the analytical use of sources).