It was noted in the first chapter of this book that many modern historians have described the use of the term “antisemitism” before the nineteenth century as an anachronism. These historians have argued that the history of anti-Jewish rhetoric should instead be divided into a “religious” pre-modern period and a “racial” modern period. In many respects, however, this is even more of a historical anachronism. Moreover, it is a dangerous anachronism since it has been conveniently used by modern Catholic and Protestant theologians and apologists to diminish or even negate the responsibility of their churches in the horrors of the twentieth-century holocaust.

The developments in anti-Jewish thought and rhetoric in the medieval period were, from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward, complex and cannot be labelled as merely amounting to an “anti-Judaism” based on a hostility to Judaism as a rival religious movement. Likewise, the concentra-tion on race as the defining feature of modern antisemitism oversimplifies its multifaceted nature. Modern antisemitism has been, and continues to be, characterized by a range of beliefs that go beyond the obsession with defining Jews as a distinct race. These are (i) the fixation on a secret Jewish conspiracy to take political and economic control of the world by subverting Christian society; (ii) the belief that modern Jews follow a form of Judaism that has been perverted by the Talmud and which incites them to undermine Christian society and attack Gentiles in general and Christians in particular; and (iii) the equation of Judaism and Jewish ethnicity.

Whilst the medieval papacy was more-or-less consistent in espousing the Augustinian position of a grudging toleration of the Jews as a “witness people,” it is important to note that its position was not always followed by many Christians, including many men of the Church. By the end of the medieval period, circa 1500, the notion that the Jews were intrinsically inclined to evil and the conflation of Judaism and Jewish ethnicity had become common across Europe. In a short pamphlet detailing a host desecration allegation printed in 1510, the German printer Hieronymus Höltzel, for example, asserted that a Jew attacking a consecrated host was acting out a “hate” and “envy” that was “congenital” (angeboren) among Jews.