A History of Antisemitism: From Ancient World to Modern Times

The Longest Hatred

The historian Robert Wistrich called antisemitism “the longest hatred,” and the description is grimly accurate. For over two thousand years, in nearly every society where Jews have lived, they have faced hostility — sometimes simmering prejudice, sometimes organized persecution, sometimes systematic murder. The forms have changed. The underlying patterns are disturbingly consistent.

Understanding the history of antisemitism is not pleasant. It is necessary. Not because dwelling on persecution is healthy, but because recognizing the patterns is the only way to interrupt them. And because the story of antisemitism is inseparable from the story of the Jewish people — you cannot understand one without the other.

Ancient Hostility

Antisemitism did not begin with Christianity. The earliest recorded anti-Jewish writings come from Greco-Roman Egypt, where Jewish communities had lived since at least the 6th century BCE. Egyptian and Greek writers accused Jews of misanthropy, of hating non-Jews, of practicing bizarre rituals, and of disloyalty to the state.

The Egyptian priest Manetho (3rd century BCE) wrote that the Jews were a colony of diseased lepers expelled from Egypt — a hostile inversion of the Exodus story. The Greek writer Apion repeated these claims and added that Jews worshipped a donkey’s head in the Temple. The Roman historian Tacitus, while grudgingly respectful of Jewish antiquity, described Jews as people who “regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies.”

What made Jews a target? Several factors converged: their refusal to worship other gods in a polytheistic world, their dietary laws and Sabbath observance that limited social mixing, and their sense of chosenness that non-Jews interpreted as arrogance. In a world where religious pluralism meant adding gods to your collection, Jewish monotheistic exclusivism was genuinely unusual — and to many, offensive.

Christian Anti-Judaism

The rise of Christianity transformed anti-Jewish hostility from a cultural prejudice into a theological imperative. Early Christianity emerged from within Judaism, and the two communities’ bitter separation shaped centuries of Christian teaching about Jews.

The accusation of deicide — that Jews were collectively responsible for the death of Jesus — became the cornerstone of Christian anti-Judaism. The Gospel accounts of Jesus’s trial, particularly the cry attributed to the Jewish crowd (“His blood be on us and on our children,” Matthew 27:25), were used for nearly two millennia to justify hatred and violence against Jews.

Church fathers elaborated this theology of contempt. John Chrysostom’s sermons against Jews (4th century) called synagogues “brothels” and Jews “demons.” Augustine argued that Jews should be preserved but in a degraded state, as witnesses to the truth of Christianity — a theological justification for keeping Jews alive but miserable.

This teaching had real-world consequences:

• Jews were barred from owning land and from most professions
• They were confined to ghettos, required to wear identifying badges or hats
• Forced conversions, especially of children, occurred repeatedly
• Jewish books were burned, most notoriously the Talmud in Paris in 1242

The Medieval Nightmare

The medieval period — roughly 1000-1500 CE — was the darkest era for European Jewry before the Holocaust. Several lethal myths emerged during this period:

The Blood Libel (from 1144): The accusation that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals. This lie, first leveled in Norwich, England, spread across Europe and led to countless massacres. It was enthusiastically propagated despite papal condemnations and the obvious fact that Jewish law prohibits consuming any blood at all.

Host Desecration: The accusation that Jews stabbed or burned communion wafers to torture the body of Christ. This charge, which required believing both that Jews rejected Christianity and that they accepted its central miracle, led to entire communities being burned alive.

Well Poisoning: During the Black Death (1348-1350), Jews were accused of poisoning wells to cause the plague. Never mind that Jews died of plague at similar rates. Thousands were massacred across Germany, France, and Spain. Some two hundred Jewish communities were destroyed.

Expulsions

Between the 12th and 16th centuries, Jews were expelled from virtually every country in Western Europe:

• England (1290) — not readmitted until 1656
• France (1306, 1394)
• Spain (1492) — the most devastating, ending the great Sephardic civilization
• Portugal (1497)
• Various German and Italian states repeatedly

Each expulsion followed a similar pattern: Jews were useful (as financiers, physicians, tax collectors) until they became politically inconvenient, at which point they were robbed and expelled. The pattern is important because it reveals antisemitism’s instrumental dimension — Jews were not only hated, they were used, and then discarded.

The Protocols and Racial Theory

The late 19th century brought a new and more dangerous form of antisemitism. The old religious hatred merged with pseudo-scientific racial theory and modern conspiracy thinking to produce something lethal.

In 1879, the German journalist Wilhelm Marr coined the term “Antisemitismus” — deliberately using a racial rather than religious label. Jews were now defined not by what they believed but by what they biologically were. Conversion could not help them. They were, in the racial theorists’ view, inherently alien and dangerous.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (first published 1903) was a fabricated document purporting to reveal a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. It was a plagiarism of a French political satire that had nothing to do with Jews, but it became the most influential antisemitic text ever written. Despite being exposed as a forgery within years of publication, it has been translated into dozens of languages and continues to circulate today.

Dreyfus, Pogroms, and the Road to Catastrophe

Two events in the late 19th century revealed the depth of antisemitism even in societies that considered themselves enlightened.

The Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) shook France to its foundations. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish army officer, was falsely convicted of treason based on forged evidence. His trial exposed a strain of antisemitism in the French military and public that shocked liberals across Europe. The journalist Theodor Herzl, covering the trial, heard Parisian mobs shouting “Death to the Jews!” — and concluded that Jewish emancipation in Europe had failed. He went on to found the modern Zionist movement.

The Russian pogroms of 1881-1884 and 1903-1906 were waves of organized anti-Jewish violence across the Russian Empire. The Kishinev pogrom of 1903 — in which 49 Jews were murdered, hundreds wounded, and homes and businesses destroyed — provoked international outrage and triggered mass Jewish emigration. Between 1880 and 1924, roughly two million Jews left the Russian Empire, mostly for America.

The Holocaust

All of this — the theological hatred, the racial theory, the conspiracy thinking, the political scapegoating — converged in the Holocaust. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered six million Jews — one-third of the world’s Jewish population. Men, women, children, infants. Scholars and farmers. The pious and the secular. The assimilated and the traditionally observant. None of it mattered. In the racial calculus of Nazism, a Jew was a Jew.

The Holocaust was not an aberration. It was the culmination of centuries of antisemitic teaching, legislation, and violence. It could not have happened without the groundwork laid by medieval blood libels, Enlightenment-era racial theory, and modern political movements that made hating Jews respectable.

Modern Antisemitism

The Holocaust did not end antisemitism. In the decades since, anti-Jewish hatred has adapted to new contexts:

• Soviet antisemitism disguised as “anti-Zionism” persecuted Jewish communities across the USSR
• Far-right movements in Europe and America perpetuate white supremacist antisemitism, as seen in the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and the 2017 Charlottesville march
• Islamist antisemitism draws on both European anti-Jewish tropes and selective religious readings
• Left-wing antisemitism sometimes surfaces in anti-Israel activism that deploys classic antisemitic imagery
• Online antisemitism has created new vectors for old hatred, with social media amplifying conspiracy theories

The forms change. The function remains: Jews serve as a screen onto which societies project their anxieties, resentments, and need for simple explanations of complex problems.

“Antisemitism is not merely a matter of Jewish history. It is a barometer of the health of any society in which it appears.” — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Understanding this history is not about cultivating victimhood. It is about vigilance — recognizing the patterns when they emerge, naming them clearly, and refusing to let them run their course. The history of antisemitism is a warning. Whether it is heeded depends on what we do with the knowledge.