Europe\u2019s longstanding antisemitism has roots in the church. And Hitler completed the ethnic cleansing of Europe\u2019s 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\u2019s historic churches.<\/p>\n
A <\/span>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.\u2028By then, the church\u2019s 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 \u201cChrist killers.\u201d They were blamed for ritual murders and charged with using the blood of Christian children for their jewish Passover rituals. Antisemitism reached the Nordic countries long before Jews themselves. In Uppsala Cathedral, a 14th-century sculpture depicts Jews suckling a sow. Similar antisemitic \u201cJudensau\u201d (Jew\u2019s sow female pig)) images exist across Europe.\u2028At 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. 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.\u2028After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881, extensive anti-Jewish pogroms broke out. Jews were officially blamed for the tsar\u2019s death, and Russian media engaged in unrestrained antisemitic propaganda. The pogroms resulted in a mass exodus of Jews to Western Europe\u2014an estimated 2.5 million Jews left Russia. 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.\u2028This church-based antisemitism became a hotbed of social Darwinist ideas and racial biology. Europe\u2019s longstanding antisemitism has roots in the church. And Hitler completed the ethnic cleansing of Europe\u2019s Jews, the Church had laid the groundwork for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4214,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-historic-flashback"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4218"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4562,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4218\/revisions\/4562"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIn 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\u2019s monarchs declared that all Jews who did not leave the country would be executed, and around 200,000 Jews\u2014whose ancestors had lived there for hundreds of years\u2014were forced to flee. In the 19th century, pogroms occurred in Tsarist Russia with the support of the Orthodox Church.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nJews Plundered and Killed<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
\nThe 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.
\nIn 1775, the German seal engraver Aaron Isaac came to Sweden and received a letter of protection from King Gustav III. Aaron Isaac, often called \u201cthe first Jew in Sweden,\u201d was granted permission to establish Sweden\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nPogroms in Russia<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
\nThe 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.\u2028Antisemitism 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 \u201cJewish world conspiracy.\u201d Antisemitism in the Soviet Union again peaked after the Six-Day War in 1967.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nJesus Quotes Removed<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
\nShortly 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 \u201cSalvation is from the Jews,\u201d which was published last year by the prestigious American publisher Brill.\u2028The book describes how the renowned German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, without scientific basis and based on an anti-Jewish interpretation of the Bible, removed Jesus\u2019 own words about salvation coming from the Jews from the German Bible. Bultmann\u2019s actions helped legitimize Hitler\u2019s Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"