Historical Antisemitism in the Church

Europe’s longstanding antisemitism has roots in the church. And Hitler completed the ethnic cleansing of Europe’s Jews, the Church had laid the groundwork for. Hence the Holocaust was able to occur by reason of the active or passive support of Europe’s historic churches.

The Church’s crusades destroyed many Jewish communities in Europe. In France, Jews were expelled starting in the year 1182, and their property was confiscated. In the 13th century, all Jews were expelled from England, and in the 1490s, all Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal. Illustration: Commons wikimedia

A few generations after the destruction of Jerusalem, Jews were present almost everywhere in the Roman Empire. A thousand years later, many Jewish communities had been established across Europe.
By then, the church’s alliance with political power had become fertile ground for a Christian-branded antisemitism. In the 12th century, the church held crusades and perpetrated massacres and Jewish persecutions, accusing Jews of being “Christ killers.” They were blamed for ritual murders and charged with using the blood of Christian children for their jewish Passover rituals.
In the 14th century, a wave of Jewish persecutions swept across the European continent, whose rulers identified as Christians. In 1290, all Jews were expelled from England; in 1394, the same happened in France; and in 1421, Jews were expelled from Austria. In 1492, Spain’s monarchs declared that all Jews who did not leave the country would be executed, and around 200,000 Jews—whose ancestors had lived there for hundreds of years—were forced to flee. In the 19th century, pogroms occurred in Tsarist Russia with the support of the Orthodox Church.

Antisemitism reached the Nordic countries long before Jews themselves. In Uppsala Cathedral, a 14th-century sculpture depicts Jews suckling a sow. Similar antisemitic “Judensau” (Jew’s sow female pig)) images exist across Europe.
At that time, Jews were not allowed to own land in England, many were arrested or executed, and in 1290 all Jews were expelled from the country. In France, Jews were plundered of their possessions, synagogues were converted into churches, and Jews were expelled in waves. About 300,000 Jews were forced to flee, convert, or were murdered during the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal starting in the late 15th century.
The first evidence of Jews in Sweden is a Jewish doctor in the service of Gustav Vasa in the mid-1500s. On February 4, 1619, three so-called Judaizers (Christians interested in Judaism) were sentenced to death. From 1686 to 1775, a church law was in place that required Jews who came to Sweden and wanted to stay to convert to Lutheranism.
In 1775, the German seal engraver Aaron Isaac came to Sweden and received a letter of protection from King Gustav III. Aaron Isaac, often called “the first Jew in Sweden,” was granted permission to establish Sweden’s first Jewish congregation. Only in February 1870 did the Swedish Parliament decide to grant Jews the right to hold state positions, making it possible for them to be elected to Parliament.

Antisemitism in the Russian Empire led to many pogroms, and during the 19th century, Jews were prohibited from migrating to central Russia unless they converted to the Russian Orthodox state religion.
After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881, extensive anti-Jewish pogroms broke out. Jews were officially blamed for the tsar’s death, and Russian media engaged in unrestrained antisemitic propaganda. The pogroms resulted in a mass exodus of Jews to Western Europe—an estimated 2.5 million Jews left Russia.
The Russian Revolution officially ended centuries of antisemitism in the Russian Empire, but already in August 1919, Jewish properties and synagogues were confiscated by the Soviet government, and many Jewish communities were dissolved.
Antisemitism was later promoted by Stalin and reached new heights after 1948, when many Jewish poets, authors, painters, and sculptors were arrested or killed. Like Hitler, Stalin believed in a “Jewish world conspiracy.” Antisemitism in the Soviet Union again peaked after the Six-Day War in 1967.

The central role of Jews in the Bible became a problem for German theologians already in the late 1800s. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, a loyal Reich bishop was appointed to lead a regime-controlled national church, and a Nazi Bible was produced that eliminated all references to Jews.
This church-based antisemitism became a hotbed of social Darwinist ideas and racial biology.
Shortly before his death in July 2023, Anders Gerdmar, rector of the Scandinavian School of Theology (STH), associate professor at Uppsala University and professor at Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida, completed the book “Salvation is from the Jews,” which was published last year by the prestigious American publisher Brill.
The book describes how the renowned German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, without scientific basis and based on an anti-Jewish interpretation of the Bible, removed Jesus’ own words about salvation coming from the Jews from the German Bible. Bultmann’s actions helped legitimize Hitler’s Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered.