The Saint of Antisemites

If you follow antisemitism in any detail, you cannot help but be struck by the sameness of it all. Over a very wide range of time, and through a number of ideological variations, a lot of the same themes emerge—complaints about “scheming” and conspiratorial control, the “synagogue of Satan” and other dehumanizing tropes, and the blood libel in any number of variations.

These tropes are literally ancient, and we can’t necessarily point to a single, concrete point of origin, but we can identify major channels of transmission, and that’s the goal of my latest paper for the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, with CTEC’s Michael Broschowitz.

Fourth century cleric John Chrysostom is a canonized saint in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, and he’s an early church father credited by some as being the “the greatest preacher ever heard in a Christian pulpit.” He’s also the author of perhaps the second-most notorious work of antisemitic hate speech, Eight Homilies Against the Jews. Chrysostom’s attacks on Jewish people are not precisely identical to modern iterations of antisemitism, but modern readers will still find them all too familiar. The paper looks at this in detail and shows how Chrysostom’s words have echoed through millennia, were frequently cited by the Nazis,  and are still widely quoted today. You can get the paper at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism’s website.

My interest in Chrysostom was first sparked while researching my forthcoming (soon, I swear) dissertation, which includes a chapter on identity construction in early Christianity. The separation of Christian and Jewish identity in the first four centuries was an irresistible topic for me, in part because of my longstanding personal interest in early Christian history, but mostly because I think the ideological concepts developed during that period have been incredibly consequential, and not just in the Christian or Western world. While the documentation of early Christianity is notably lacking on some tantalizing details, the emergence of a distinct Christian identity from Judaism is extremely well documented and tells us a lot.

Chrysostom was a late-stage development in this separation process. Acrimony between Christians and Jews grew steadily in the years after the death of Jesus, leading to an entire genre known as Adversus Judeaeos (Against the Jews), which mostly featured Christians in dialogue with Judaism over theology. Chrysostom’s entry in the genre is a level beyond most of its peers, a scathing and all-encompassing attack on Jewish people, whom he accused of corrupting Christians among his flock in ancient Antioch. It’s easily defined as an extremist text according to the definition I am always talking about here—the belief that an in-group’s health or success can never been separated from the need to take hostile action against an out-group.

The circumstances and ideological development around the emergence of Christianity from Judaism echoes a lot of my recent work by strongly hinting at the possibility that extremism—all extremism—may be the result of dynamics that unfold within groups, evolutions and shifts within in-group identities, rather than being precipitated by the out-groups who are blamed for the in-group's woes. Soon enough, you’ll have my whole argument on this. For now, I hope you find the latest installment in this week’s paper interesting.

Still time to register for the VICE Panel!

We’re just days away from our CTEC online panel discussion about journalistic challenges of covering extremism and conspiracy theories. Our all-star guests include Mack Lamoureux, Anna Merlan, and Tess Owen, of the late lamented Vice News. We’ll discuss some of the stories they found most interesting and challenging, and we’ll talk about some of the broader issues faced by journalists in a world where extremism is going increasingly mainstream. You won’t want to miss it!

Register here

J.M. Berger is a writer and researcher focused on extremism as a Senior Research Fellow for the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism (CTEC) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS). Views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of CTEC or MIIS.

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