The first thing I want to clarify is that this post is not in any way being done with an agenda to exonerate Christianity of the Antisemitism we've been guilty of. The origins of Antisemitism have nothing to do with the fact that The Church has over a Millennia of Jewish Blood on it's hands. Antisemtism was creeping into the Church already before Constantine and once we held state power we quickly became it's driving force.
And yes that means that during the last 15 centuries even most Antisemitism committed by non Christians is still indirectly a product of the cultural influence of Christian Antisemitism. Islamic Antisemitism has it's roots in the Antisemitism of the Eastern Roman Empire and the Axumite kingdom that had been festering for decades before Muhammad was born. And whatever your theory on the actual religious views of the Nazi Party leadership, they didn't invent German Antisemitism, it was a bandwagon they jumped onto that had been jump-started by Martin Luther's On The Jews and Their Lies and reached it's zenith with Houston Stewart Chamberlain who definitely saw himself as a Christian whether you like his doctrines or not.
If this post has an agenda at all, it's to convince Christians not to be Antisemitic, a common tactic in trying to argue that something the Church has been doing for a long time is something we shouldn't do is to point out it was already a part of the Pre-Christian Pagan Greco-Roman culture and so our adopting it rather then opposing it is evidence of the Church's corruption. I've on this blog already taken that tactic in my wars against Homophobia and Puritan Sexual Morality and the doctrine of Endless Torment.
In other words I'm arguing the fact that the Pagans did it first is all the more reason we should have known better.
Still there are some secularists out there, particularly of the New Atheist persuasion, who want to claim Antisemitism is an inherently Christian problem and would never have existed without Christianity. So refuting that can be viewed as a secondary goal of this post, but it's of much lower priority.
You might at first assume the thesis of this post is going to be that Antisemitism began with the Hebrews being slaves in Egypt, but while the Exodus narrative has a role to play in what I'll talk about here, directly speaking no it's not.
The fact is there isn't really anything much like what we today think of as Antisemtism in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), just Israel as a nation having enemies the way most nations inevitably do. The closest would be the example of Haman in the book of Esther, but even then that is the story of one weird nut-job who tried to commit Genocide because one Jew bruised his ego. Some modern fiction based on the book has sought to make Haman more like a modern Antisemite, the movie where he's played by Gaius Fraking Baltar is a ridiculously fun film, but not a good history lesson. Antiochus Epiphanes is another kinda Biblical figure often linked to the history of Antisemitism, but he was a King oppressing the indigenous people of a land in his empire, so an asshole but a different kind of asshole.
What we're looking for is Diaspora Jews being painted as a simultaneously internal and external threat to the nation they live in, as a boogeyman who is simultaneously incredibly weak and incredibly powerful.
The Jewish Diaspora in Egypt probably begins with the Elephantine Colony, the origin of which is controversial. But it's traditionally said to have ended when the various Pagans of the Island suddenly rioted and destroyed the Elephantine temple, but that narrative too is shrouded in oral legend.
The history of Jews in Alexandria and Ptolemaic followed by Roman Egypt is what the focus of this post shall be.
Alexandria was founded by Alexander The Great in 332 BC, and from it's foundation Alexander gave any Jews who chose to move there the same privileges as the Greeks and Macedonians. This city wound up becoming where Alexander would be buried and the capital of Ptolemy's Successor Kingdom, the "King of the South" of Daniel 11. I can't discern when tensions between these different populations of Alexandria began, but tensions did emerge.
Manetho was an Egyptian Priest who lived in the Third Century BC, during the reign of either Ptolemy I or Ptolemy II Philadelphus he wrote a History of Egypt in Greek that is the source of our modern system of organizing the Kings of Egypt into 30 Dynasties. We do not have what Manetho wrote in full, only how he was quoted and paraphrased by later sources, the oldest surviving of which is Josephus in his Against Apion, some scholars think even by Josephus time the original works of Manetho were already lost and he was only known from later revisions of what he wrote. So maybe what I'm about to talk about didn't actually come from Manetho, but it was part of Manetho's history as it was known in the 1st Century AD.
That History included a sort of alternate Egyptian POV account of the Exodus narrative and the origins of the Jews, which later Greco-Egyptian writers expanded on. Josephus while seeking to refute this narrative wound up accepting part of it, the identification of the Hebrews with the Hyksos. That identification was made for the purpose of changing the Jews from the oppressed to the oppressors.
While this revisionist narrative began with the Hyksos identification it doesn't end there. Moses is identified with an Egyptian Priest said to have lived much later then the Hyksos expulsion named Osarseph during the reign of a Pharaoh named Amenophis. Amenophis is how Manetho commonly rendered the name Amenhotep, but chronologically this Amenophis seems to be the one who reigned after Rameses Miamun, the Pharaoh we commonly know as Merneptah. This Osarseph led a revolt of lepers and other "unclean" people of Egypt and conspired with the Hyksos to temporarily drive Amenophis out of Egypt. This is also the origin of thinking the Exodus happened during the 19th Dynasty, conventional chronology actually points more to an 18th Dynasty Exodus at the latest.
You can already see how a narrative like that parallels a lot of modern Antisemitic myths about where the Jews came from, like the whole Edomite Mud People nonsense, (when I first watched the pilot of Justified I figured that couldn't possibly be real a real thing, but I eventually learned it was). A desire to see them as inherently degenerate and untrustworthy.
An apocryphal 1st Century text known as III Maccabees tells a story about Ptolemy IV trying to kill all the Jews of Alexandria by gathering them together and having them trampled by drunk Elephants but then being saved by divine intervention. Josephus in Against Apion says this attempted Genocide was tried by Ptolemy VIII. I'm amused by how many Christians like Bishop James Ussher prefer to side with III Maccabees on which one did this even though that text is clearly a dramatized narrative while Josephus was a Historian who in this particular work was focusing on things he was confident his enemies could fact check for themselves in the gentile sources they had. But it could be this incident simply happened twice, Ptolemy VIII doesn't seem like someone known for having completely original ideas.
Remember all of this was going on in Alexandria while Alexandria was the cultural and intellectual capital of the Hellenistic world. So what people thought of the Jews there often spread elsewhere.
Fortunately places where Antisemitism festered often had Philosemites to balance things out. Cleopatra II was a great friend of the Jews who I'm a big fan of and think is much more worthy of having 100 films made about her then Cleopatra VII who we descendants of Rome find interesting simply because she shagged a couple famous Romans. Speaking of Cleopatra VII, Josephus also records that during the siege of Alexandria she made a deliberate decision to try to starve the Jewish population to death.
Now we come to the Antisemitic crisis that occurred during the reign of Gaius Caligula. Which Josephus talks about more in Antiquities of The Jews then in Agaisnt Apion. But our main primary source isn't Josephus but Philo of Alexandria. Philo wrote 5 books on this subject but only two of them have survived, Flaccus and Embassy to Gaius. Most of our sources on the notorious Caligula are sources written after he died, Philo's Embassy is actually the only eye witness account of the Mad Emperor we have.
The Reign of Caligula is after Christianity already started to exist (unless you're a New Atheist conspiracy theorist), but we were still a sect of Judaism and hadn't really spread outside of Judea and Syria yet. I remember reading one early source I've forgotten that said it was 12 years after the Crucifixion that the Apostles first left Judea, even by the earliest plausible date for the Crucifixion, 29 AD, the entirety of Caligula's reign is within 12 years.
The Governorship of Flaccus was only when these tensions finally first boiled over into the Alexandrian Riots of 38 AD. In Embassy we see that Caligula himself was quite Antisemitic, which may well be a product of how much he desired to be like the Ptolemies which was also part of the reason for his incest with Drusilla. He called the Jews "hated of the gods" showing even the desire to make Antisemitism theological was already there.
This crisis was not the end of the Antisemitism in Alexandria, Josephus was born after Caligula died and he wrote Against Apion after he'd already written Wars of the Jews and Antiquities of The Jews in response to Antisemitic Alexandrians saying his history of the Jews was BS. But at the same time Josephus was opposing those views Tacitus was reinforcing them.
But the question now is, can I draw a line from that Antisemitism to the beginnings of Christian Antisemitism?
There is one quote of Ignatius of Antioch that is sometimes called Antisemitic. What he says in that quote I consider wrong as it's an early expression of what I call Reverse Legalism, which is an attitude often expressed by Antisemtic Christians but I do not consider it inherently Antisemitic on it's own. It was solely him expressing an opinion on what Christians should and shouldn't do in our worship.
So the first really major expression of Antisemitism in the Early Church was the Pseudepigrapha known as the Epistle of Barnabas. There are a few reasons to suspect that epistle was Egyptian in origin. Our earliest references to it among Early Church writers are Clement and Origen, and the oldest text of it we have is it's inclusion in the Sinaticus, one of the Alexandrian Bibles. I also have another theory I'm working on that would explain why Alexandrians would have been particularly interested in forging a work in the name of Barnabas, but that would be a distraction here.
There is an Antisemitic quote attributed to Origen, but I can't find a place online saying specifically what writing of Origen it's from. So I have to consider this one iffy for now.
Constantius II was the first Christian Emperor to persecute the Jews and he's also known as the Arian Emperor because he was influenced by Arians, Arius was a deacon of Alexandria originally and his heresy is derivative of things Origen and Clement taught. Some try to make Arius more philosophically Anitochian but there is no solid evidence Lucian actually taught anything proto-Arian.
John Crysostom is a source of some very Antisemitic quotes, but he seems to be atypical of the general attitude of Antiochian Christians at the time as the very context of those quotes are his outrage that most Christians in Antioch were actually getting along with The Jews.
But the major vital escalator of Antisemitism in Christianity was Cyril of Alexandria via his influence on Theodosius II and Augustine of Hippo.
And it was permanently cemented by Justinian as he was seeking to reconcile the Chlaceodnian and Miaphsyte traditions (which both revered Cyril) by scapegoating the Nesotrians and other Anitochians, and increased persecution of non-Christians in the Empire. Revolts broke out against him in the Holy Land.
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