Gone Medieval - Antisemitism in Medieval Europe

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

Christians had a problematic relationship with Jewish populations as the Medieval period progressed. Jews were frequently persecuted, targeted and pushed out by societies across Europe. In England, Edward I first issued the edict of expulsion in 1290. It remained illegal to be Jewish in England for 350 years. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Professor Ivan Marcus, author of How the West Became Antisemitic, which shows how Christian and Jewish competition in medieval Europe laid the foundation for modern antisemitism.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Ella Blaxill. The producers are Joseph Knight and Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’: https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Medieval Christians had a problematic relationship with Jewish populations as the period progressed.

Frequently persecuted, targeted and pushed out by societies across Europe, they were the focus of hatred and violence. In England, Edward I issued the Edict of Expulsion in 1290 and it remained illegal. to be Jewish in England for 350 years. Antisemitism is a word that we still hear a lot today too, but how and when did it emerge in the medieval Christian West? To try to answer that question, I'm delighted to be joined by Ivan Marcus,

who is the Frederick P. Rose Professor of Jewish History at Yale University. Ivan's new book, How the West Became Anti-Semitic, is available now from Princeton University Press, and Ivan is joining me to answer some of my questions about this complex topic. Welcome to God Medieval, Ivan. Thank you. Good to be here. I've read the book. I really enjoyed it. It's a really fascinating way of exploring how anti-Semitism was kind of born in the Christian West. And there was a few things I wanted to pick out and talk to you about, if I may. Sure. One thing that you mention is Latrine blasphemy is something that you explore in the book.

So why are Jews engaging in that kind of behavior? What is Latrine blasphemy and why are the Jews doing it? The problem starts with the definition of what is hopeful. And it's a shared definition between Judaism and Christianity. And in conceiving of the holy, there is the notion that is the opposite, not only of the physical, but of that aspect of the physical, which is the least attractive, namely bodily elimination. And in different ways, Jews developed this antithesis between the holy and bodily elimination and applied the absolute opposite of the holy to Christianity, and particularly the religious cult of Christianity,

and the association of the most holy figures in Christianity with latrines or bodily elimination. In a reverse parallel way, some Christians thought of Jews themselves as belonging in latrines. And we have some stories about Jews landing in latrines and not being rescued, and Christian clerics giggling about this. But on the Jewish side, there's also a serious aspect to it, and that Jews could not conceive of the incarnation as something possible. And they thought of Jesus and in Mary's body as being not too

anatomically correct in the wrong canals and therefore connected to elimination. And so that was another reinforcement of that negative association. Interesting. So does it grow out of Christianity's connection to that idea of virgin conception and virgin birth and a Jewish desire to explain that that that can't be real? Yes, I think so. I think it's an attack on that idea as inconceivable, and then a counter-argument that the real holy is on the Jewish side and in the promotion of real Jewish families, producing real Jewish children, so that the holy family, in a sense, becomes for Jews the opposite of what Christians think of it as. And each one is talking about the other in a kind of oppositional, polemical fashion. They use the same terms, but they see them

in opposite meanings. Yeah. I mean, if it wasn't for the fact that this is obviously on a continental scale, it sounds like squabbling children a little bit, doesn't it? You smell bad, no, you smell bad, you smell worse. It's that kind of thing. Right, sort of toilet behavior. But I think that there's a deep association between the physical and the spiritual,

which is introduced largely on the Christian side by Paul in his letters of the body versus the spirit. And Jews pick that up, I think, but then apply it in the, the opposite meaning of what Paul would want it to mean. Yeah. And one of the other things that you mentioned in the book that I thought was quite interesting is that we never consider the Jewish population to be part of the three main groups that we talk about in medieval Europe and the Near East. So we talk about Christians, we'll talk about the Byzantines, and we'll talk about the Muslims,

but we don't particularly talk about the Jews. Why do you think they're excluded from that sort of overview that we have? I think our notion of historical reality is conditioned by 19, century nationalism. And the whole notion of a history of a people is defined by the land that they occupied and ruled over. And so Jews didn't occupy territory. They didn't rule over territory. And that denied them historical agency in the mind of Western historical narrators. And so even when we think about avoiding Eurocentrism by adding European contact with the Muslim world or with the Byzantine Christian world in the East, historians who see themselves as very broad-minded by doing that

and avoiding just looking at Latin Christendom, forget that within Latin Christendom, there was an entire civilization of communities, of individuals who actually had a certain kind of local power, but they didn't own land in the territorial sense of any of the other three, and therefore they basically are not seen, they're basically invisible. Yeah, it's a fascinating a mission on behalf of history. And it's interesting that you connect it to that sort of 19th century nationalism in history. I quite often say that I think in an anglacentric way, our view of what makes a good and bad king of England during the medieval period is still very fashioned by that 19th century idea of the kings who went and conquered somewhere are great and the ones who didn't

are poor. And it's interesting that we're still so affected by a hangover from that view of history, I think. Right. I think it's very hard to think. think of Jewish history as a legitimate field because of the concern about land and territory and rulership, it would be similarly difficult in some ways to think of the history of the church as being an historical institution, even though there were lands in Italy that the church was in charge of, papal lands and so on, and Jews didn't even have that. But it becomes a kind of abstraction to think of a group without territory that it ruled over as having a history. And so one of the purposes of the beginning of the book, is to reassert that Jews had a history in Europe.

In fact, they even help shape the majority's history. And this is a story which has been not really confronted directly before. And in the medieval Christian Europe then, was the relationship between Christians and Jewish populations kind of complicated by a shared heritage that had diverged? Because there are some ways in which we might have thought that could have kept them fairly closely knitted together, but it seems to be what drives a wedge between them, that shared heritage. Right. I think you have to think for a moment about the biblical narratives of the patriarchs of

the brothers, starting with Abraham's children, Ishmael and Isaac, and then Isaac's two sons, Esau and Jacob. Both traditions understood that story as their own story, but they understood each one as the story of the younger brother who receives the promise in the Bible, not the older brother, so that Jews thought of themselves as Isaac bearing the promise and of Jacob of bearing the promise, and had the notion as in the Bible in Genesis 25 that the elder shall serve the younger. This notion of the elder serving the younger, this was then understood by Paul in the opposite way, that it was the church who was Isaac, the church that was Jacob. And the Jews were Esau, and the Jews would be serving the younger, so that you have a shared biblical

heritage, but each is rival for the birthright. And so each one sees each of the brothers in the opposite way. It's interesting how those things can be used for whatever purpose. But was that rivalry then kind of made inevitable by this competing claim between Christianity and Judaism that they were God's chosen people? Yes. I think that's the ultimate. bedrock assumption that leads to the conflict. And it's very difficult, if not impossible, to overcome it unless you abolish the notion of the biblical promise to begin with. If you move into a secularized world where individuals have equal human rights and you forget about the biblical legacy, which really could never be forgotten, but if you focus more on the more 18th century

modern concept of individual dignity and human rights, then you can overcome. it by simply bypassing it. And you can separate church and state. You can try to create more of a voluntary set of communities where they may still believe this, but under the state, they will not be able to theoretically do harm to the others if it came to a real dispute. The problem in the West, though, is that for hundreds of years, this was the only basic dichotomy that existed. And there was no neutral public sphere. So that Jews and Christians lived in their own communities, they provided their own social services for each other. There was no neutral sphere. And so this could become a major source of divisiveness when circumstances provoked a departure from every day getting along,

which I think was mostly the norm. I think most of the time we forget that Jews and Christians live in the same towns and they lived nearby each other. There were no ghettos. And most of the time, they interacted with each other economically and even socially. We have lots of evidence from stories about this and legal material as well. But there were occasions when there were huge disruptions and the differences became more important than the similarities. And given all of that sort of inherent and growing rivalry throughout the medieval period, why is it that we still see Jewish communities living with Christian communities across Europe? There are places where Jews were frequently unwelcome, England being a pretty good example of that at various times.

but there were lots of places in Europe where these communities did live together really well, despite the religious differences. Should that be a surprise to us? Because we think of religion dominating the medieval mind so much. How were they able to overcome that and sort of set it aside? Right. Well, I think you had two major institutions promoting Jews living in a Christian society. One were the papal tradition, which goes back to Pope Gregory I, in which, and even beyond, that to the church father Augustine of Hippo. And behind him, St. Paul, that Jews really belonged in a Christian society. They were not to be expelled from it. The parable of the wild olive tree in Paul's letter to the Romans chapter 11 sees the Jews as locked off of the promise, which is

biblical Israel and we're talking about the two brothers before, but they're not to be rejected, ejected. They're supposed to be inside society for the day when they will eventually see the light and convert. So they have a place in Christian society. That notion was turned into policy by all the popes of Rome, at least until the 16th century, when there was a tremendous reaction to the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Reformation, Paul IV, argued really for the first time that Jews should actively be converted to Christianity, and there is no place for Jews in a Christian society. The other institution were the temporal rulers, mainly kings, but also aristocrat. accounts, they saw Jews as bringing liquid capital into their society, which was mostly rural.

So they saw an economic advantage to them and supplying them with luxury goods in the court. And so that there were two basic arguments for Jews to be in society with Christians, one from the papal tradition and the other from the royal or temporal tradition. And when those were disrupted, it was only because Jews were understood at a certain moment as more dangerous within the society. than beneficial to the rulers and to the majority of the population. And you mentioned a little bit earlier that we can view the Jewish populations as helping to craft sort of Western civilization and the Latin Christian traditions to some extent. In what ways can we see Jewish populations in Christian Europe being able to assert themselves

in communities? Well, Jews were understood as having certain abilities to partner with Christians, particularly even in the 10th century when Jews began to migrate into the north after the great invasions were over, and there was some degree of pacification, Jews were able to do business as merchants alongside Christian merchants. So we have lots of evidence in legal and story material from the 10th century of cooperation, partnerships, in fact, special commercial relations between a Jew having a monopoly relationship with a Christian client, which has an Arabic name for a friendly partner, Ma'Rufia. And we have a lot of cases of this, so that Jews and Christians

played a commercial role with each other. And also because most Christians were farmers, they were involved in agriculture. The Jewish story was almost from the beginning, a middle-class urban story in tiny towns that developed in market towns on the rivers. And Christians were sometimes seen as competitors with them. The first charter that we get to protect Jews in Germany is in the town of Schpire, and the bishop there gives a Latin charter, which still exists, today indicating that he was building a wall to protect them from their Berger competitors because he anticipated the possibility of some rivalry. But the bishop wanted to increase the honor of the town and make it from a village into a town by bringing Jews there. So this was an example of the local

ruler seeing Jews as a positive asset. And he took advantage of a fire in nearby Mainz, where Jews were homeless and he invited them to come to his smaller town, his bishopric town. Einz was an archbishopric, a larger city, and to benefit his own Christian population, even though he knew that sometimes there might be some tension between them. And do we see that ability of Jewish populations to assert themselves and to be involved in mercantile activities, potentially as rivals to Christian merchants too? Do we see that driving an emergence of anti-Semitism at all? Not in the beginning. I think in the beginning you have the interaction of Jewish and Christian merchants as mostly cooperative. And the turning point that made this more complicated was the First Crusade, which was launched by a reform pope, Urban II in 1095, which very clearly developed quickly into a campaign not only against the enemy Muslims abroad who are occupying the holy places,

the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and an effort to rescue the Byzantine Christian brethren who were being attacked by the Seljuq Muslim Turks. It soon quickly became something in Europe itself, and arguments were made both in Latin and in Hebrew sources. If you, the fighters of the First Crusade, the knights who were going off at great risk to their lives and their property, if you are ready to go and fight the Muslims far abroad, enemies of far abroad, you certainly should fight the enemies who are nearby, and the references for the first time to the Jews of Europe as the inner enemy. And this made things very complicated after the end of the 11th century. And how does that idea of Jews as an enemy within European society, how does that emerge?

Because if people have been working together for a long time, is it just that crusading fervor begins to identify anyone who isn't a Christian as an enemy? Yes, I think that's what happens. You know, we hear these stories about genocide in different parts of the world and how neighbors suddenly turned against each other and began to kill each other. We don't have the documentation from the late 11th century that we do for contemporary times. We can't interview in depth and we don't have letters and diaries. It's pretty clear from the text that we do have that there was no reference to Jews as

inner enemies before this attack from the East. And suddenly everyone who wasn't Christian was suspect. and Jews being inside were considered the inner enemy. And then everything that could be negative from biblical sources of the death of Jesus, the passion accounts, all of these things suddenly were redeployed in order to justify this sense. And it was really a kind of panic. The way we went after the frenzy for AIDS, the way we went after the fear of COVID, the way we went after communism after World War II.

It was a kind of hysteria about anyone who was not promoting. in Christian faith and seeing them as enemies, and Jews became suspect. It did not turn in to an unmitigating history of Jewish, anti-Jewish persecution, however. It was a phase that existed for several months, and then it was always there as a memory, but it did not become a continuous reality. There was a reversion back to some degree of emotus Vivendi, but it was always there in the memory of those who survived, and it was preserved in the memory of those who wrote about it. Can we consider anti-Semitism then at this period at least as a reaction to sort of losing that

connection between that doctrinal imperative that we've talked about to keep Jews within Christian communities? Is that becoming lost or overridden by crusading zeal, a kind of root cause of a growth in anti-Semitism? I think it was the main trigger and I think then different forms of imagining what Christianity meant, particularly the notion of the body of Christ in contemporary Christian thinking also fed the conception that the Jews were potentially threatening to this. So, for example, if the body of Christ meant during the First Crusade riots in Germany, which took place as an ancillary attack, not on Muslims, but on Jews by Christians who were enthusiastically then trying to find an enemy, if we think about

the crucifixion as a motivation avenging the killing of Christ in the past, the body of Christ then could be reinterpreted to refer to the body of a Christian boy, a Christ-like innocent, potential saint that was then being accused of being killed by Jews in the present. And so you begin to get in the middle of the 12th century in Norwich and England the first time instantiation of what got to be called the ritual murder accusation. If the Eucharist becomes extraordinarily important in the early 13th century with fourth Lateran Council and that lay people are supposed to take communion, at least on Easter, once a year, you begin to see that the blood of Christ becomes something which is now sacred and potentially attacked by Jews. And the ritual murder

accusation morphs into the ritual blood libel that Jews ingest Christian blood. They don't just kill Christian youth and make them into saints. And then the host itself becomes a special object in the 13th century of sanctification as the body of Christ. And as the body of Christ keeps the Jews as the enemy of the body of Christ keeps changing. And these are all fantasies. These are all imagined Jews in the minds of Christian, mostly clerics, who are engaged by this as their reality. And they see this developing out of the antagonism that began in the First Crusade, the inner enemy, and then it gets developed into new forms of antagonism towards the sacred body of Christ. That development is really interesting in the book. And I was

struck by the ways that you describe that Judaism was very good at differentiating between Christianity as a religion and Christians as individual people in a way that Christianity failed to do between Judaism as a religion and Jews as people. And so Christians sort of lost this view of individual Jews as people. And I guess that facilitates the growth in these fantastical stories of blood libel and murders and all of this kind of thing, because they're dehumanizing Jewish people by focusing on Judaism rather than Jews as individuals. And I haven't asked a question yet. But why do you think Judaism was so good at making that distinction and Christianity so bad at it? Well, I think you're right that there's a distinction. There's an asymmetry

between the way Jews looked at Christianity, Christians, and the way Christians looked at Judaism, Jews. So you have two potential targets or sources of appreciation or of criticism. The most overwhelming pattern that I saw, and this is why medieval Christian anti-Semitism could become modern secular anti-Semitism, is that while Jews tended to see, based on a rabbinic statement in the Talmud, that Christians were not really pagans or idolaters. They were just misguided. They didn't understand the truth. And therefore, Jews were not hating Christians per se. They hated the idolatry as they saw it of the Christian cult, so that it was all the invectives and the latrine gestures and language was all directed at Jesus and Mary and the holy icons of Christianity

per se. But Christians were people you could do business with, live next door to, and eventually form some form of a commonality in society. Whereas on the other side, the church was really not able to totally attack Judaism, because Judaism was ultimately the underlying basis of Paul's reinterpretation of the Hebrew Bible into Christianity. But on the other hand, it could hate Jews. And if you hate Jews per se, meaning Jews who haven't converted yet, or Jews who are doing Judaism, but not Judaism itself, as you move into the modern period, hating Jews could be transformed from religious hatred into other kinds of hatred of Jews. The object of the attack allowed for the transformation of the earlier religious form of

anti-Semitism into what became later racial and other forms of anti-Semitism. In this imagined Jew, you created this Jew in your imagination, and it was the source of your anger and distrust. Yeah, and that idea of an imagined Jew, I think, is interesting too. And if I'm reading it right, that's the idea that you almost remove the fact that, you know, I might have a next door neighbor who's Jewish and I get on with him and it's absolutely fine. But I have this imagined Jew who is a threat to me. And I almost am able to erase that personal connection to the man next door by focusing on this idea of an imagined enemy existing within society who is out to get me.

Right. I think we have this great ironic situation where the Jews, where we talked before, never had. coercive territorial power over Christians or over anyone else. In the 12th century and following, after the crusade hysteria, they were now imagined to be an insidious form of power over Christians, a power that threatened their very lives. And so while bodies of children might be found in rivers or in the forest, based on some accident or some local parental neglect or some other We have lots of stories about children being found dead. Suddenly, when certain children were found, usually boys, were found, they suddenly said, it's the Jews who ritually have murdered him. So it took a certain kind of preset notion of an imagined Jew as potential murderer of children

or of reenacting the crucifixion on young, innocent boys. This is invented, and this invention comes about only at a certain time. And we can see it. spreading so that I think that this is something which takes over the reality of everyday existence. And you can coexist with your neighbor at one level, but at certain moments, the imagined Jew kicks in and evidence is no longer important. Don't give me the facts I've made up my mind means I've imposed my cultural grid about what reality must be on whatever it is you actually see. And that's why it's very important not to confuse, well, if we knew more, we would be able to clear up all these kinds of confusions. This is really a form of religious ideology, where it's

impervious to quote facts. It makes up its own facts. And I was struck as well, as we see all of that divergence and anti-Semitism growing and beginning to take a grip. You get these ideas that older Jewish men can't legitimately be converted to Christianity. And that becomes a way, to almost hive off parts of the Jewish community that must have alienated the whole community because if you're not allowed to bring the older men with you, what's the incentive for anybody else to convert? And that felt like another way in which these lines were being drawn between communities that didn't need to be there? Right. I think you've hit that important point. In the structural analysis that I tried to make sense out of all of these different stories and facts

and laws. It seemed to me there were three basic elements that stuck out. One was this story about inverted power, which starts with Paul, that the elder shall serve the younger and who's the elder, who's the younger, varied between the two religions. The second was the inner enemy from the frenzy of the First Crusade. And the third was this notion you just brought up, mostly from the second half of the 13th century on, that conversion, when it could possibly take place, tended to be gender-based and even age-based, that it would be possible, more possible for women to convert to Christianity than men, and that among men, younger men, adolescents in particular, might be more likely to convert, whereas older men now were being seen as having certain physical

characteristics, not just circumcision, which would not change, but something else. There are other factors, the notion of the big, hooked Jewish nose, for example, appears about men, older men, not about women, not about young boys in most of the sources, even in the pictorial versions as well. There is the notion that Jewish men are somehow effeminate but in a negative way and even bleed once a year, that they menstruate on Easter or some other kind of bleeding, which makes them like women. They're not really men. And that there's something physical about Jewish men, especially older men, that makes it impossible for them to really convert.

so that, again, if they did convert, you suspect that they're really still Jewish. It's a kind of parallel to the inner enemy idea. I mean, it just strikes me as horrendously sad that this should have developed in a really unnecessary way, that you have these communities who initially get on really, really well. And then because of a Christian drive to go to the Near East to fight a Muslim population, the Jewish population within Europe gets wrapped up in that wave. and that connection that had existed between the two communities is severed and not just severed, but walls are built between it and this imagination of a threat that was never really there.

It all seems so unnecessary. And as you've kind of said, not based in any kind of fact at all either. Well, I think the crusade frenzy was actually an extension of a program that had begun in Europe, particularly in France, a few decades before, in an attempt to make the Christian European world a perfect society based on Christian law and theory. And this was done by a group of reform popes, one of whom was the Pope Urban II who preached the crusade, which was an extension to the Holy Land of the proper hierarchy of Christians being on top and in charge of their society. But it really had begun earlier with the peace of God and the

truce of God movements in the 11th century to try to pacify society among Christians themselves. So this reform idea of making a perfect Christian society was a goal that very few societies in the world had of this kind of utopian perfectionist drive, which even preceded the crusade. And the crusade was like an extension of it to foreign affairs. Domestically, this was an attempt to make a perfect Christian society. And the only objection in that society to that being a. a fulfillment possibility was the existence of Jews. They might have thought Jews had a positive role to play. And they could have followed Paul and said, well, they belong in society,

followed the early popes. But they sought in a way as an obstacle. And so this is a notion that to create a perfect Christian society, you will necessarily create an imagined opponent to it. It's like God versus the devil. There were heretics as well who were also being persecuted even more than Jews, and there were lepers and other groups in society that had difficult time and were also expelled from time to time. But the Jews were a kind of complicated case because Christians understood that they came out of the tradition of the Bible, of the Hebrew Bible, and that rivalry for who was to get the promise didn't exist with heretics, didn't exist with lepers. It existed with the Jews. So the Jews became the most available negative force impeding the creation of the

perfect Christian society, which really began in the middle of the 11th century, and then it dominates all the way through, and until Jews are either expelled or they are put into a difficult situation and limited in some other way. I mean, anti-Semitism is a word that we still hear it a lot today. It's still something that is around in the world. And whilst I don't want to talk about contemporary politics particularly, how far can we see 20th century and even modern anti-Semitism as a development of medieval anti-Semitism, is there a linear development between those points? Or was there ever a break? Is what we see today something different from what they saw in the medieval period? Or is it essentially the same thing? No, it's not the same thing. And I think we have run across two basic

attempts to deal with that question of what if at all is there a connection. Some have argued very dramatically that the Christian movement leads to Auschwitz and that there is a linear connection from the medieval religious tradition into the modern Nazi period and even beyond. That is a kind of called the teleological approach, meaning that history moves in a certain telos or direction. And the direction is annihilation. And it starts religious and then it becomes racial and it becomes eventually annihilistic. That approach was challenged by some scholars who thought, no, you really can't make that kind of simple-minded connection. You have to look at each period in its own context and see how these different patterns developed and not necessarily assume that there

is an ongoing single story. I think there has to be some kind of recognition that there is an element of commonality between the two, but that they're not the same. The commonality that I found was this three-part structure of the hierarchy, the struggle in the West between the group that should be above and the group that should be below. Christians think Jews should be subordinate to Christians, and Jews, if they had the power to do so, would want Christians to be subordinate to Jews because the promise each one says went to them, part one. Part two was the fear of the inner enemy that started with the crusade. And then the third part, that male Jews at least have something almost racial about them, something physical about them, which makes it impossible for them

to convert. But in all those cases, we're dealing with a religious world and a religious framework. Conversion means religious conversion. Chosenness means religious chosenness. And so there was a rivalry for who is God's chosen people. And that was a medieval Christian context for anti-Semitism then. But somehow, these notions of the imagined Jew were able to transcend time space and cultural frameworks. And they were able to be added to this notion of racial differences of peoples. And the whole pseudo-biological argument of biological racial antisemitism from the end of the 19th century into the 20th and then national religious antisemitism picks up some of these ideas and then transforms them into something more either secular or neo-religious.

We went through a secularization process. But now in the 21st century, ever since 9-11, at least, we see that religion has power in the real world, that it's politically real. People assume religious beliefs and they mean them and they are political actors. So if the structure that starts in religious anti-Semitism in Europe develops through secularization and racial anti-Semitism in late 19th and early 20th, and then it reemerges in a kind of new form of religious nationalist anti-Semitism, and in all these cases, there is a certain degree of continuity of the structure. not necessarily of the stereotypes or the attributes that are given to Jews. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Ivan. It's been absolutely fascinating to try and

explore where these ideas of anti-Semitism may have come from. And I'm struck, I think, by that idea that we very rarely hate people who we know. We hate ideas. If we fail to separate people from ideas, that's the beginning of a path toward trouble. So hopefully one day we'll get better at doing that. Thank you very much. Ivan. I agree. Thank you very much. If you'd like to explore this subject further, Ivan's new book, How the West Became Antisemitic, is available right now. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium

in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also listen to us over on Spotify as well, where you'll find our entire back catalogue of episodes. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us everywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find us. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.