This chapter traces the medieval discourse on Jews as usurers from the 12th to the 16th centuries. It argues that European Jews were collectively labeled, then criminalized, as usurers because of their religious difference and not because of their highly exaggerated role as moneylenders.

At their first meeting, Porphyry took Plotinus for ‘a complete fool’ and a sophist. This reaction was by no means exceptional.1 The leading Platonists of the time, most notably Longinus, misclassified Plotinus as a representative of an Oriental, Pythagoreanizing version of Platonism.2 Admittedly, it was not easy to understand the novelty of his views. At stake in the discussions with Porphyry and Longinus was the claim that the intelligibles are not outside the Intellect. Marginal as it might appear at first sight, Plotinus’ thesis actually paved the way to a new interpretation of Plato’s Forms, the kernel for any Platonist system. After an intense exchange, Porphyry ‘finally managed to understand what he was saying’,3 wrote a retraction, and became one of his most faithful pupils for the years to come. Most of the other Platonists, however, continued to endorse their traditional interpretation. But in the meantime, the history of ancient Platonism had entered a new phase.

The contribution of the New Testament to Christian anti-Judaism is a broad and complex question that has generated a vast amount of scholarship, especially in the post-Holocaust era. This essay focuses on the three most important and potent issues: supersessionism, the deicide charge, and the association of Jews with Satan. It concludes with reflections on the question of whether the New Testament and Christian theology are inherently anti-Jewish.

The concept of number is treated at some length in Ennead 6.6, though it is less conspicuous in the rest of the Enneads. This may explain why it does not usually make the headlines of Plotinus’ metaphysics and epistemology – the focus of this part of the Companion – nor of their concomitant scholarship.1 The specialized studies of the concept of number in Neoplatonism in the last twenty years, however, have revealed the essential role of number in the Neoplatonic model of the universe.2 This chapter demonstrates that, below each headline in the Enneads, number writes the story.

Jewish status as citizens of the Roman Empire since 212 CE devolved during the three centuries from Constantine to Heraklios through political, legal, religious, social, and economic restrictions and suffered from mob pressures resulting in periodic pogroms. A complex Christian program led and implemented a state policy to convert the Jews to the dominant Christian religion in order to achieve the eschaton via the return of the crucified messiah, whom the majority now worshipped as God incarnate.

Bad things happen in an imperfect world. This, and in particular the fact that they happen to our souls, was a matter of great concern for Plotinus. Near the end of his life, when he was already severely ill, Plotinus wrote a treatise On What Evils Are and Where They Come From (1.8 [51]).1 The text picks up themes and arguments discussed in several other works and will serve as the basis for our discussion of Plotinus’ views on badness. In his view, matter is primary evil and the cause for badness in souls and bodies.

Martin Luther’s infamous writings against the Jews are brought into focus, examining both their impact from the 16th through the 20th centuries and the different scholarly approaches toward interpreting them. Luther’s treatises are placed into the historical context in which they were written, and the significance of the response to his writings by his Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish contemporaries is highlighted.

Despite their aspirations to shine the light of reason on the world, and with notable exceptions, the thinkers of the Enlightenment provided posterity with numerous indictments of the Jewish character and religion. How much of an influence the writings of such figures as Voltaire and Kant had on the subsequent evolution of antisemitism remains a subject of scholarly debate.

Antisemitism1 is a late 19th-century (1870) term based on pseudo-scientific racial theory that was coined to describe in a new way opposition to, and hatred of, the Jewish People and their form of life. Though a relatively recent linguistic and ideological construction, it draws on and extends a much older tradition of anti-Jewish enmity that has its roots in the pre-Christian world of Greece, Rome, and Hellenistic Egypt and was then reinterpreted and radically reconceived in early Christianity beginning with the writings of Paul and the four Gospels that form the core of the New Testament.

This chapter traces the way that Jews have been depicted in French literature from the 18th century to the present, including writers such as Voltaire, Balzac, Céline, and Proust. It examines both negative (antisemitic) and positive (philosemitic) representations of Jews, arguing that the ambivalence surrounding the figure of the Jew reflects a larger ambivalence toward the various ideas that Jews represent.

A history and periodization of American antisemitism that asks (1) whether to understand the phenomenon as grimly eternal, dependably cyclical, or just as an occasional and episodic factor in American history; (2) whether to interpret antisemitism as a “cultural code,” revealing less about Jews than about the culture that stigmatizes them; and (3) whether antisemitism is different in the United States than in other diaspora lands where Jews have lived.

Antisemitism in medieval art is explored through selected images that develop the popular pictorial themes of “Christ-killing,” spiritual blindness, demonic allegiance, conspiracy, and animality. The imagery is linked to long-standing Christian theological beliefs and considers the social functions and material consequences for medieval Jews.

This chapter examines the social and legal position of Jews in the medieval Muslim world as determined by readings of the Qur'an and Hadith.

The Weimar Republic, established in Germany at the end of World War I, was not a success and led to the rise of radical politics and the birth of the Nazi party. The racial antisemitism of Nazi ideology is discussed, as is Hitler’s control of Germany and his quest for a “Final Solution” to the so-called Jewish problem, leading to the creation of ghettos, Einsatzgruppen (killing squads), concentration camps, and the killing centers of the Holocaust.