This chapter examines antagonism toward Jews and Judaism as expressed by leading Church Fathers in the West. Particular attention is paid to the novel and influential perspective of Augustine.

The late Russian empire was notorious in the West for policies discriminating against its large Jewish population and for outbursts of anti-Jewish mob violence known as pogroms. As the country descended into revolution and civil war, antisemitism served the ideological purposes of both the Russo-centric counterrevolution and the anti-imperial nationalist mobilization, with fatal consequences for the Jews.

With Plotinus, Neoplatonism was inaugurated with the positing of a radical transcendence: the first principle, the One, or the Good,1 is beyond the essence, epekeina tēs ousias. In book 6 of the Republic, Plato already designated the Good as beyond essence, which it surpasses in seniority and in power, ‘epekeina tēs ousias presbeiai kai dunamei huperekhontos’ (509b9–10), but whereas in Plato this formula is found only once, and its interpretation is, moreover, disputed,2 it is recurrent and systematized in Plotinus.3 It also allows a series of variations; beyond essence, the One-Good is also ‘beyond thought’, ‘beyond knowledge’, ‘beyond life’, and, again, ‘beyond act’.4

This chapter surveys philo- and alter-Jewish attitudes in some early Christian writings (the Book of Revelation, the Ascension of Isaiah, Marcion’s Antitheses, the Gospel of Judas, and the First Revelation of James). Contrary to commonly held opinion, the circles that produced these texts were more sympathetic toward Judaism than the radically anti-Jewish bishop, Ignatius of Antioch, and other proto-orthodox Fathers.

The circulation and republication of Christian Roman laws on Jews and Judaism gives us a window into the ways imperial attention to the Jewish “other” – sometimes benevolent, sometimes punitive – created multiple paths for the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Laws on economic status, social interaction, and religious custom ultimately produced a Jewish “religion” analogous to imperial Christianity.

During the second half of the Middle Ages, western Christendom became the most powerful sector of the West, in the process attracting a growing Jewish population. Over the course of these centuries, the Christian majority of western Christendom fashioned damaging new imagery of Jews and harmful new limitations on Jewish life, both of which severely impacted Jewish existence.

Knowledge in Plotinus is a complex yet unified phenomenon. His most general term for it, gnōsis (‘cognition’), covers a broad range of phenomena from sense-perception (aisthēsis) via discursive reasoning (dianoia) to intuitive intellectual insight (noēsis).1 The general framework of his epistemology is unambiguously Platonic. Plotinus shares Plato’s conviction, prominently voiced in the Timaeus, that only unchanging intelligible Being admits of real understanding, whereas perception of sensibles only yields opinion or belief.

The epigraph that opens this chapter quotes the statement with which Proclus, one of the last heads of the Platonic Academy in Athens, opens his Platonic Theology, a six-volume elaboration of the metaphysics of the divine as found in Plato’s dialogues. According to Proclus, the history of philosophy is a ‘golden chain’ of Platonic succession, which starts with the Gods, Pythagoras, and Plato, and then, after a period of retreat, finds in Plotinus a ‘coming back into the light’.1

According to Plato’s Timaeus, a benevolent divine craftsman creates the cosmos, guided by his intellect’s reasoning and his ‘forethought’ or ‘providence’ (pronoia, Tim. 30b) about how to make it as good as possible. Similarly, in Laws 10, a wise god is said to exercise oversight over the cosmos, and to have devised laws of fate that promote virtue by assigning souls to positions in the cosmos according to their deserts. These and other Platonic texts were important sources for later Platonist theories of providence, according to which beneficent divine thought ensures the best possible arrangement and management of the cosmos.

This essay analyzes antisemitism in modern German literature from the Enlightenment to post-Holocaust times. It shows how antisemitic stereotypes and theological elements were encoded in fictitious stories and how Jews were portrayed as foreign and demonic by both left-wing and right-wing writers. Both sides fabricated claims that it was the Jews who were responsible for the shortcomings of all forms of modern society.

In this chapter, changing attitudes toward Jews in the countries of Western and Central Europe are discussed, beginning with the early fight for equal rights in the latter part of the 18th century, and continuing up to the First World War. The rise of new forms of anti-Jewish sentiment and ideology during this era is described, including the Romantic-Conservative rejection of Jewish participation in the life of bourgeois society, Jews’ definition as foreigners within the emerging nations, and, finally, their designation as a separate, inferior race – all constituting aspects of a modern form of antisemitism that grew parallel to the process of Jewish integration in contemporary society and culture.

In what sense and to what extent did antisemitism (or anti-Judaism) exist in the pre-Christian world? The attitudes of numerous pagan writers and various episodes of oppression are explored in order to ascertain whether Jews encountered hostility on ethnic, religious, ideological, or political grounds, and whether any of these experiences amounted to antisemitism.