In their search for the origins of antisemitism in the Middle Ages, which they regard as the forerunner of modern antisemitism, many leading scholars arrived at the conclusion that the roots of antisemitism must be sought in Christianity, its teachings and the campaign it conducted against the Jews. One of the most eloquent spokesmen of this view is the well-known Christian scholar James Parkes, whose numerous works on the Jewish question are all distinguished by vast learning, sound judgment and lucid exposition. Parkes is also more consistent and convincing than most of the scholars who share his approach. We shall therefore examine some of his statements as representative of this line of thought.

Parkes does not overlook the fact that Jews were disliked and molested by their neighbors a considerable time before Christianity arose, but he claims that this dislike originated in reasons "similar to those which have animated dislikes of other peoples" in many times and places. Parkes considered such dislikes "normal," stemming from the natural collective antagonisms that underlie conflicts between neighboring groups. Accordingly, he says, "the dislike of the Egyptians for the Jews of Alexandria was a normal dislike. The jealousy of the Greek cities in the time of Pompey was a normal jealousy." In contrast, he regards the massacres of 1O96, during the first Crusade, as "abnormal," for they indicate a "disparity between cause and effect." "This is the abnormality whose ultimate explanation lies in the history of the Christian Church.

Elsewhere, too, Parkes tries to convince us that the "anomalous" hatred known as antisemitism was not to be found in the pre-Christian world. For in that world, he claims, many instances could show "how completely Jew-ish-Gentile relations followed the normal pattern of relations bet'ween neighbors, now good, now bad, now roused to active enmity by some special irritation, now moved to approval and imitation by something which was admirable. But it would bring us no nearer the understanding of antisemitism. For antisemitism is a unique expression of group prejudice, and arises out of a unique cause.

Parkes, then, makes a sharp distinction between antisemitism in the Middle Ages and Jew hatred in the Greek world. In his opinion, the two developments belong to two different categories of phenomena and two separate historic courses. The later course i.e., the medieval had its own starting point and stemmed from a different cause. That cause, he insists, was Christianity, or rather the "action of the Christian Church," which "changed the normal pattern of Jewish-Gentile relations."

With this view of Parkes we sharply disagree. To our way of thinking, his whole view of the relations between Jews and gentiles in antiquity misses the core of the historical reality that produced ancient antisemitism and sustained it. Because of this he sees no similarity and no real link between Jewish-gentile relations in the ancient world, which he regards as "neighborly,'' and the medieval hostility toward the Jews, which alone he designates as antisemitism. Our own view, in contrast, is that the Jewish question in antiquity was produced by essentially the same factors that fashioned it in later times; that antisemitism in the Christian period was, fundamentally, a continuation of the anti-Jewishness that preceded it; and that the origins and manifestations of both phenomena were fundamentally the same.

To prove this, it is sufficient, we believe, to compare some expressions of Jew hatred in the Hellenistic world with those we know from medieval Europe. Philo, who left us a vivid description of the pogrom in Alexandria in 38, provides ample information for such a comparison. As he put it:

So excessive were the sufferings of our people that anyone who spoke of them [i.e., of the Jews] as undergoing wanton violence and outrage would be using words not properly applicable. [Such a man would lack] adequate terms to express the magnitude of cruelty so unprecedented that actions of conquerors in war, who are also merciless to the conquered, would seem kindness itself in comparison.

Philo supports this general evaluation with numerous data of a horrid nature. "Multitudes" of Jews were destroyed in Alexandria with "manifold forms of maltreatment," he recounts; for "any Jews who showed themselves anywhere" in the city "were stoned and knocked about with clubs," the blows being first aimed at "the less vital parts," so that a speedier death might not give the victims "speedier relief from the consciousness of their anguish. But "more pitiable," he adds, "was the fate of those who were burnt to death in the middle of the city." For sometimes "through lack of proper wood," the pogromists collected brushwood, and "after setting it on fire, threw it upon the victims who perished half burnt more through the smoke than by the fire.'' Even this, however, did not mark the peak of the atrocities. For "many," Philo tells us,

while still alive, they [i.e., the pogromists] tied with thongs and nooses and, binding their ankles, dragged them through the middle of the market, leaping on them and not even sparing their dead bodies. For, more brutal and savage than fierce wild beasts, they severed them limb from limb and piece from piece and trampling on them destroyed every lineament, so that not even the least remnant was left which could receive burial.

I do not know wherein this outburst of savage hatred differed essentially from the anti-Jewish outbursts that Parkes relates to the era of antisemitism. During the Crusades, when the Jews of the Rhineland were butchered and robbed in orgies of violence, or when the Jews of Alsace in 1338 were hacked to pieces by the murderous gangs of Zimberlin (the Armleders), the methods of killing may have differed from those commonly used by the Greeks in Alexandria, but the cruelty and inhumanity of the killers were the same. Nor do we see greater disparity between cause and effect in the medieval atrocities than in the ancient excesses. Rather the reverse seems often the case. For when the Jews of Colmar men, women and children were pushed into one cave to be burned there together, or when the Jews of Strasbourg, two thousand strong, were all driven into a lighted pyre, there was ostensibly a justifiable reason for these outrages: The Jews were charged with having caused the Black Death. But what similar libel could have motivated the Greeks to burn the Jews of Alexandria? Above all, the wild outburst in Egypt we have just mentioned was not by any means an isolated occurrence, suggesting a one-time irregular deviation from an otherwise "normal" course of behavior. As we have indicated above, and shall further show below, it reflected a trend of rising hatred which was aimed at one goal: the Jews' annihilation. Nor was the pogrom in Alexandria its peak.

E. H. Flannery, another Christian scholar who, like Parkes, surveyed the history of Jew hatred, said that "after Apion Greek antisemitism withered. This conclusion, too, is based, in our judgment, on a misconception of the actual development. The opinion of the Jews preserved from such authors as Nicarchus and Damocritus, Aristides and Philostratus, Clearchus and Ptolemaeus and many others indicates that the antisemitic current in Greek literature was flowing strongly after Apion's time; and we ought to bear in mind that the documents that have reached us represent only a fraction of the literature produced. Indubitably, many pamphlets and propaganda sheets composed by second-rate writers were not preserved, and there is also no doubt that, more than by writings, the agitation against the Jews was carried on by public speeches, abusive talk and offensive deeds. Had this not been the case, Josephus would not have been impelled to write his great apology for the Jewish people, and his passionate counterattack against the pagan antisemites, more than sixty years after Apion had committed his andf-Jewish railings to writing. For Josephus' book was no mere exercise in theoretical wrangling, aimed at proving the antiquity of the Jews or confuting false arguments against them which he found in old books. When we read his work, we have a live feeling that he was fighting current libels and calumnies widely circulated in his time, and indeed he often speaks of the foes of the Jewish people in the present, not in the past tense ("The Egyptians are notoriously our bitterest enemies")? In any case, the great fire of hatred for the Jews, which burst out in the pogrom of 38, was by no means suppressed after Apion; it continued to burn and spread; and if additional disasters like that of 38 did not occur shortly thereafter, it was because Rome was on guard to prevent them and because the Jews' ability to defend themselves was still a real deterrent. But as soon as conditions seemed opportune, the Greeks returned to the use of force. This happened in the year 66, following the outbreak of the great Jewish revolt against Roman rule in Palestine.

Believing that the Romans would now refrain from disturbing them, the Greeks resumed their assault upon the Jews in many cities, including Alexandria. Though the data we possess about these events are far from adequate to reconstruct them in full, they are sufficient to show that the pogroms of that year proved another stage in the escalation of antisemitism in the countries around the eastern Mediterranean? Indeed, when Josephus wrote his work against Apion, he must have felt a thickening atmosphere of danger; and perhaps he thought that he might help to clear it by means of his counteroffensive. If so, he was mistaken. For not many years later the treatment of the Jews in Egypt became so abusive and humiliating indeed so provocative and intolerable that the Jews of Egypt, Cyrenaica and Cyprus (that is, of the whole former Ptolemaic empire) decided to rise against their tormentors and try to inflict on them so heavy a punishment as to deter them from further acts of aggression. That is how the so-called Jewish War of 115-117 broke out.

The Greek authors who wrote about this war went out of their way to describe the brutalities committed by Jews against Greeks. That in addition to true facts they reported false rumors circulated by avowed enemies of the Jews is evident from the contents of their narratives? But bearing in mind the barbarous atrocities perpetrated against the Jews during the first pogrom in Alexandria, we may readily agree that many of the Jews, moved by an ungovernable urge for vengeance, treated many Greeks who fell into their hands in just as ruthless a manner. In all likelihood, however, their main aim in the war was, as we have indicated, not vengeance but preemption, or rather suppression of the Greeks' desire to repeat their assaults upon them. It was of course an unrealistic hope, yet it does not appear too fantastic when we note that the Jews had the upper hand in many theaters of war, until the Romans, who sought to restore order, interfered. Even then, the war did not end soon; it went on for almost three years, and in some places perhaps for a decade. In any case, it involved not only clashes like those of the year 66 which, however terrible, had gravely affected a rather limited number of cities. What we have before us is a conflict far more violent and of incomparably greater magnitude. It embraced vast regions in three countries; the casualties on both sides amounted to many myriads; whole provinces were laid waste in its wake; and countless communities were wiped out. How can one talk, in view of these developments, of the "withering of Greek anti-semitism after Apion" or define the relations between the Jews and the Greeks as "normal relations between neighbors"?

V

If the pogroms of 38 and 66 provided the background of popular strife against which the war of 115 broke out, the war itself must have further deepened the antagonism between Greeks and Jews. If until that war many Greeks were still inclined toward Judaism and the Jewish people, the suffering of many innocent Greeks, struck down inadvertently by the Jews' retaliation, must have made Greek hatred of the Jewish name far more widespread and intense. One would assume that this drastic deterioration in Greek-Jewish relations adversely affected the chances of the Christians to draw support from those Greeks, whose sympathy for Christianity was based, in large measure, on their sympathy for Judaism. One might conclude that conversions to Christianity were greatly reduced in the wake of the war; and this indeed seems to have been the case in the first decades following the upheaval. Shortly thereafter, however, Christianity resumed its forward march on a front much broader and at a pace much swifter than those that marked its earlier progress. To understand this seemingly irregular development, we have to note the following.

The spread of Christianity from the middle of the 2nd century until it became, in 325, the dominant religion of the Roman empire has usually been ascribed to its ideological evolution and the irresistible influence exercised by its message on the pagan population of the Empire. Since the impact of the Greek-Jewish conflict has generally been excluded from the causes of that evolution, the expansion of Christianity was commonly portrayed as an abstract outgrowth of religious theories, with little regard to the sociological factor that lay at the bottom of that development. That factor was the Greek-Jewish relationship, which after the war of 115-117 must have become more tense and troubled, since the war left the Greeks more hostile toward the Jews than they had ever been. As this hostility has generally been underrated, and more often than not completely ignored, what should have been the crucial question for historians has rarely even been considered. And thus we remained with the puzzling query which applies especially to the time referred to: How could the masses of the Hellenistic world, imbued as they were with burning hatred for the Jews, accept a basically Jewish doctrine, originating in Jewish thought and literature and advocated by Jewish apostles? Or, to put it more succinctly: How can we explain the swelling current of converts to Christianity from about the year 150 onward a current that engulfed the eastern half of the Empire and overflowed into its western regions?

The answer to this question lies in the crucial change effected in the posture of Christianity toward Judaism and in its relationship toward the Jewish people. The change implied not merely greater emphasis upon the distinction between the two faiths, but also a total separation of Christianity from Judaism as a religion, a cult, and a way of life.

It may of course be argued that the trend toward separation was already begun by Paul, when he freed the gentiles from the burden of the Commandments and thereby made it easier for them to accept his version of Christianized Judaism. There is no doubt much truth in this contention, as there is in the claim that many pagans in the Empire had long been craving a message of salvation of the kind offered by Jewish messianism. Yet while these factors paved the way for Christianity, they could not draw to it the enormous gentile following that it was to gain in the course of time.

In fact, as we see it, "Jewish" Christianity had from the outset no chance of becoming a mass movement among the Hellenists, whose masses became increasingly permeated with hatred of the Jews. Paul, with his praise of his Jewish "brethren," and his limitless admiration for their achievements, could not perform the feat. Nor could the writers of the first three Gospels, as they too were steeped in Jewish thinking, Jewish religious and legal concepts, and Jewish hopes of redemption. It was only a Christianity that broke with Judaism in all that truly mattered to its essence a Christianity that developed a new view of God, new dogmas, and a new historic outlook, quite different and indeed remote from those of Judaism--that could become an attraction to the gentile world.

This radical departure from Judaism can first be noted in the Gospel according to John which, judging by available information, was composed about 125. It was this Gospel that first replaced the Jewish idea of God with the conceptual basis of the Trinity, the Jewish view of the Messiah (as the son of David) with the notion of the incarnated logos, and the Pauline view of His universal mission with a revised conception that does not grant the Jews any preference in any respect. Nowhere can we find here, of course, an indication that Israel was the sole object of Jesus' mission, such as occurs in other Gospels e.g., that Jesus came to redeem only the "lost sheep of Israel," that the "bread" of salvation assigned for the "sons" (i.e., the Jews) cannot be thrown to the "dogs" (i.e., the gentiles), or that His disciples were forbidden by Him to preach among the Samaritans. On all these matters the Gospel of John takes quite a different position. Nor does it present Jesus as an advocate of strict adherence to the Law indeed to its last jot or tittle (Matt. 5.17-18) but rather as its direct and open antagonist. For when addressing the Jews, who opposed His views, He calls the Law "your Law" (i.e., not His), thus making it apparent that He differed from them not on interpretative but on substantive issues. What is more, while the other three Gospels make it clear that Jesus' foes among the Jews were specific groups (the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the "chief priests" and the elders), the Gospel of John points out indeed stresses that His conflict was not only with those groups but with the Jews in general, and accordingly, that the Jews sought to kill Him, even with their own hands. It is in conformity with all these assertions that we find there Jesus' sharp reproach to the Jews as the sons of the Devil, the arch-murderer, as an explanation of their desire to take His life.

Such a presentation of Jesus' divinity, of His relations with the Jews, and of His view of the Jewish people could of course appeal to the Greek pagans, who were filled with hatred of the Jews. It could help to convince them that the Christians were not just a "Jewish sect" and Christianity not a mere version of Judaism, as so many had believed and asserted, but a religion quite independent of Judaism, which differed from it on all major issues and was in such bitter conflict with Judaism as to admit no compromise and no reconciliation. The Greek pagans' growing inclination to embrace Christianity from the middle of the 2nd century indeed, the fact that, from about that time, the narrow flow of pagan converts to Christianity became an ever broader stream must be related to the evolution of the new ideas whose beginning we note in the Gospel of John. This, however, represents only part of the explanation of that unique phenomenon. The other part must be related to a parallel development which was of no lesser importance.

For with all the radical changes that took place in the basic religious concepts of Christianity, there remained the problem of the reliance on the Bible and the admiration for the Prophets and Israel's heroes as reflected in the words of both Jesus and Paul a reliance that stood in direct contradiction to the anti-Jewish sentiment of the Greek masses. The question which arises from that contradiction may perhaps be best framed as follows: How could the Hellenistic masses come to view the Bible, which was produced by Jews, as the supreme spiritual expression of mankind, and how could they accept the ancestors of the Jewish people with such unqualified veneration, when they so hated their descendants and disciples? The answer lies in the work done by a throng of Christian apologists, teachers and exegetes, who interpreted the Bible in such a way that it appeared not as a pro- but an anti-Jewish book a book in which the Fathers of Israel assumed the role of the Fathers of Christendom, now perceived as the True Israel, while Israel the people was presented as the false Israel, which was identified with the Jews. Naturally, the attainment of such a result called for an indefatigable effort and a relentless process of casuistic thinking; every sentence and word of the Bible had to be interpreted so as to agree with all the other parts as newly construed; and consequently, allegoric and symbolic understanding had often to replace the plain, unvarnished meaning. But the "final sentence" could at last be pronounced: "The Old Testament, from cover to cover, has nothing whatever to do with the Jews." To be sure, it was argued, the Jewish teachers "illegally and insolently had seized upon it, confiscated it, and tried to claim it as their own property; they had falsified it by their expositions, and even by corrections and omissions." "But every Christian must . . . deny them the possession of the Old Testament. It would be a sin for Christians to say, 'this book belongs to us and to the Jews,' seeing that the book belonged from the outset, as it belongs now and evermore, to none but Christians, whilst the Jews are the worst people, the most godless and God-forsaken, of all the nations upon earth, the devil's own people,.., a fellowship of hypocrites ... stamped by their crucifixion of the Lord. As Harnack said in summarizing the whole process:

Such an injustice as that inflicted by the Gentile church on Judaism is almost unprecedented in the annals of history. The Gentile church stripped it of everything, she took away its sacred book; herself but a transformation of Judaism, she cut off all connection with the parent religion. The daughter first robbed her mother, and then repudiated her!

This disengagement of Christianity from Judaism represented its battle for a new identity--a battle that indicated its deep dissatisfaction with itself as a Jewish or semi-Jewish sect. We ought to bear in mind that by 125, and certainly by 150, the overwhelming majority of Christians were gentiles, or rather of gentile origin--a fact which should be taken into consideration in any attempt to explain that discontent. It should also help us realize that what Christianity was then yearning for was not some formal change, but a new inward life and outward appearance that would make it clearly distinct from Judaism, and bring it much closer to Greek habits of behavior and Greek forms of speculation. The force of this peculiar desire may be gauged by the strength of the aversion for the Jewish people that animated Christian ranks at the time, and it was indeed the rising anti-Jewish feeling that moved many Greek Christians to "rethink" their Christianity and try to adjust it to their frame of mind. Then came the theologians, and performed the task of theoretical accommodation. Christian theology did not create or initiate the hatred of the Jews that saturates its teachings it was, on the contrary, created and shaped by it. The instinct of hatred was simply hardened into a doctrine that constituted the foundation of the new religious edifice.

VI

If no ordinary evolution of theological thought can explain the transformation of the Christian faith from its Pauline form to that of the Nicene Creed; if indeed that transformation cannot be explained without bearing in mind the background of emotions which forced Greek thought to employ its ingenuity in that extraordinary and anomalous manner, it must also be conceded that the leading Christian thinkers, representing the mainstream of Christian theology, could not have formed their final positions without making a careful, pragmatic calculation of the needs that Christianity had to meet at the time. Only by considering these needs and that approach can we explain their tenacious adherence to the Old Testament as the fountainhead of the Christian faith.

For one thing must be taken for certain: the intellectual ferment that evolved in Greek Christianity in the wake of the war of 115-117 produced conflicting pressures upon the Christian theologians from both poles of Christian opinion. On the one hand, there were the extreme antagonists of Judaism, chief among whom were Marcion and his followers, who urged complete desertion of the Old Testament as the very antithesis of true Christianity, while, on the other hand, there were Greeks who remained faithful to the Judaic heritage in Christianity and sought to preserve it at all costs. These were the Monarchians (of the "dynamic" brand) who, in reaction to the Marcionites, again raised the banner of pure monotheism and viewed Jesus as essentially a prophet, entrusted by God with the mission of salvation and therefore endowed, more than the other prophets, with supernatural powers. The mainstream theologians, however, rejected both these approaches. In no way could they approve the fundamentally "Judaic" view, which they considered suicidal for Christianity, but they were equally opposed to the idea that Christianity ought to abandon the Old Testament. They conceded that to make the "Jewish" Bible conform to the dominant view of Christianity about the Jews, it had to be differently comprehended and interpreted a Herculean task no doubt, whose feasibility could be questioned. But they also realized that Christianity would be groundless, shorn of authenticity, and denied far-reaching influence, if it could not rely on the Old Testament's antiquity, sanctity, authority and fame. Consequently, they preferred to divorce Judaism from the Bible rather than divorce the Bible from Christianity.

But the task on which these Christian authors embarked aimed not only at the reinterpretation of the Bible; it aimed also at the expurgation from Christianity of any Jewish trait, notion or custom affecting any part of its religious life i.e., its dogmas, its forms of worship and, above all, its conception of God. It is indeed by the effort of so many Christian thinkers to shake off from Christianity anything "Jewish" that one may best gauge the depth of their antipathy toward Judaism and the Jewish people. In the two centuries of Christianity's transformation from the Pauline mold to the Nicene Creed (c. 125-325), it is difficult to find a single Christian writer who did not disparage Judaism and its followers. But it is not in the invectives, or criticisms, or denunciations hurled at Judaism by such Christian authors as Justin Martyr or Tertullian or Athanasius that the true attitude toward the Jews was revealed. In the altered political climate of Rome which since iyo appeared favorable to the Jews, but hostile and frequently stormy for the Christians the Christian author would often moderate his style, so as not to give offense that might provoke persecution. In his comments on the Bible, however, and his discussions of its teachings all seemingly of a purely academic nature he could freely express his opposition to Judaism, and thereby give vent to his anti-Jewish feelings. This is why we believe that in that particular age, Christian hatred for Judaism and the Jewish people should be assessed less by the sharpness of the shafts then flung by Christian authors against the Jews than by the intensity of the labor those authors invested in building the new Christian doctrine.

The greatest effort was undoubtedly put into the formation of the new concept of God, where obstacles were met at almost every step. Here again the struggle centered on the measure of Jewishness that the opponents of the theory upheld by the mainstream sought to retain in the idea of the Godhead. So bitter was the struggle on this issue that nothing less than excommunication was the punishment considered fit for the opponents. This was indeed what the Council of Nicaea decreed for Arius and his followers. The Arians denied the full divinity of Jesus, thereby approaching the Jewish view of the Savior, and consequently demoted the concept of the Trinity, which had been made the cornerstone of the new Christian faith.

The Nicaean blast at Arianism, however, did not crush it as many had expected, and the battle against it continued unabated until the Council of Constantinople (380, whose decision, supported by Theodosius I, proved fatal to Arianism in the Roman empire. Triumphant over its great enemy within, Christendom developed a multiple attack upon the enemy without the Jewish people. We say "multiple" because the literary assault upon the Jews and Judaism had never ceased, and, in the decades preceding the Council of Constantinople, had become more violent than ever before. Having frequently enjoyed since 325 the outspoken favor of the Roman empire, most Christian authors abandoned all restraint in their attacks upon the Jewish people. The works of such writers as Ephraem Syrus, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa are notorious for their venomous vituperations against the Jews. But none surpassed in vehemence and ferocity the anti-Jewish diatribes of John Chrysostom of Antioch and none contributed as much as he did to the transition from literary attacks upon the Jews to physical forms of aggression against them.

Chrysostom began his campaign against the Jews in 387, and shortly thereafter, in the following year, some Christians in Syria came to believe that, like their Greek forefathers in the first and second centuries, they could accompany their insults with violence. Accordingly, they destroyed the Jewish synagogue at Callinicum, an event which signaled the opening of a new era in the history of anti-Jewish persecution an era characterized by popular violence carried on under the banner of the cross.

The reaction of the emperor, Theodosius I, to the Christian-Greek insult at Callinicum (he would not let the culprits go scot-free) showed that Rome was still holding fast to its traditional legal and religious policies. What bolstered these policies in preceding decades had been the opposition to civil discrimination on the part of the pagan forces in the Empire (who were still strong, especially in its western part) and the leaning of some emperors toward Arianism, which moved them to uphold the principle of toleration. But by the end of the fourth century paganism was enfeebled, while Arianism in the Empire proper was crushed. This changed the situation materially. When the anti-Jewish forces in northern Syria decided to take the law into their own hands, they were driven to do so not only by their Jew hatred (which had long sought an outlet in violence), but also by their newborn feeling of strength, generated by the great expansion of Christianity and the unification of its ranks. What gave that feeling its peculiar vigor was the widespread opinion, raised to axiomatic levels, that to hurt the Jews was a holy duty; and this reigning view was of crucial value. For when hatred and jealousy drive the masses to a point at which they are eager to break the law, an ideology justifying their wishes is needed to give them the necessary moral support. The anti-Jewish ideology of Christianity now performed the task which in earlier centuries had been fulfilled by the Hellenistic theories of Jew hatred. It proved its effectiveness not only in the agitation that preceded the attack at Callinicum, but also in the defense it offered the crime after it had been committed. Such was the intellectual climate of the time that St. Ambrose, then bishop of Milan, was able to move the all-powerful emperor to withdraw his order to punish the lawbreakers. It was a minor retreat involving a single case, but it foreshadowed the breakdown of the imperial system, once it was subjected to greater strain.

In 395, such a strain developed when a radical change took place in the structure of the Roman government. The Empire was divided into two parts; the influence of the West was greatly diminished both by the division and by the reduction of its power under the impact of the barbarian invasions, while the eastern half could be considered Greek and virtually dominated by the Christian population. Under Theodosius II, the emperor of the East, the authorities increasingly displayed their inability to resist the pressures of the antisemitic masses. The license and impudence of the latter grew, and at the beginning of the fifth century, pogroms against the Jews broke out in Illyria and other parts of the Empire. Most serious was the attack upon the Jews of Alexandria, followed by their expulsion at the order of the bishop, Cyril of Alexandria, their sworn enemy (415). The emperor later confirmed the order, which foreshadowed his own decree to banish the Jews from Constantinople.

Yet the most sinister development touching the Jews of the Empire took place in the field of law. We have seen that the first goal of the Greeks in the East was to reduce the Jews, socially and politically, to a legal level inferior to their own. And there can be no doubt that the spokesmen of the Christians direct heirs of the Greek antisemites began to press for anti-Jewish legislation from the moment they felt that Rome's internal policies were veering in their direction. The emperors, however, were generally not anxious to renounce the equal treatment granted by their laws to all the citizens of the Empire (and all licit religions) and adopt a policy of discrimination against the Jews; and Constantine the Great set the example in this respect. Although he imposed some restrictions on the Jews, all formally related to religious matters, these restrictions were presented as defensive of Christianity rather than as offensive to Judaism, and, with one exception, none of them affected the Jews' economic and social interests. This exception, which consisted of a ban on the purchase of Christian slaves by Jews, had of course nothing to do with religion or with humanitarian considerations. Its sole purpose was to give the Christian Greeks a competitive economic advantage over the Jews. The Roman authorities soon recognized this fact, and the law was simply not enforced. Then it was reenacted by Constantius, only to fall again into disuse. But the restraining attitude displayed by the government toward this and other anti-Jewish edicts virtually disappeared within two decades after the division of the Empire.

Thus, in 417 the law forbidding Jews to employ Christian slaves was reissued for the third time, with the supplement prohibiting the Jews from owning pagan slaves as well. In 418 the Jews were debarred from the offices of imperial inspection, as well as from those of the Court and the army? In 429 they were hit politically when the Patriarchate in Palestine was abolished. Then, after 429, they were denied the right to practice law, and in 438 they were forbidden to serve in any administrative or public office? Yet even this did not constitute the end of the repression. More legal restrictions were enacted under Justinian; and under Phocas (602-610) bloody outbreaks occurred in Antioch, notorious as the scene of such outrages. In the course of a quarrel between the city's Jews and Greeks (in 608), the emperor Subjected the Jews of Antioch, and probably also of large neighboring regions, to a decree of forced conversion. The decree moved the Jews of Antioch to rebel, which was in accord with their known martial vigor. But the rebellion was quelled after fierce resistance, following which the surviving Jews of Antioch were banished from the city.

What emerges from the above observations may be summarized as follows. The genesis of antisemitism, its growth, and its development to full maturity and prime capacity took place in the Hellenistic world that is, geographically, in the belt of lands encircling the southeastern Mediterranean. Here was the birthplace of that particular hatred which far surpassed the animus that any majority may ordinarily feel for a minority. For here first appeared that particular campaign (termed in our own time propaganda) which was aimed at mobilizing public opinion against the Jews as a prelude to violent attacks upon them; here also developed the method of besmirching them, of sullying their reputation and of rendering them odious by means of libels, calumnies and lies of the most vicious kind in brief, of their deJbmation; here also was the birthplace of the popular outbreaks (known in modern times as pogroms), whose purpose was to cause the Jews such heavy losses as to annihilate them or frighten them away; here, too, was inaugurated the anti-Jewish legislation, specifically designed to degrade the Jews socially, and subject them perpetually to a variety of restrictions civil, economic and political; here evolved that particular form of an intensely anti-Jewish Christianity, which was to serve as a dominant ideology justifying the repression and harassment of the Jews; and here, finally, arose that state persecution of the Jews which culminated in expulsions and forced conversions. Thus all the forms of warfare against the Jews in the Diaspora had their origin in regions dominated demographically by Greek masses, inspired culturally by Greek civilization, and organized politically as the Eastern Roman Empire. When, at the beginning of the 7th century, antisemitism was about to strike in the West, it had before it the heritage and model of the eastern movement.