Rise Of Antisemitism During The Middle Ages

423 Words1 Page

Antisemitism began in 1 A.D. after the Romans had crucified Jesus Christ. The new religion of Christianity began to falsely blame the Jews for killing Christ and accused them to be children of Satan which dehumanized and demonized them. The Christian beliefs became widespread and thus antisemitism was born. After being rooted in religion, antisemitism began to grow in politics during the Middle Ages. When the Caesars came into power, the Jews refused to worship them because they believed there was only one god and the Roman emperors were not him. This made others think Jews were not able to assimilate and continued to consider them as “other.” In addition, when the Black Death struck in the 1300s, no scientific explanation was available to explain the outbreak. …show more content…

They were charged with poisoning the wells and using the blood of Christians for ritual purposes. As a result of these accusations, Jews were massacred or forcibly converted to Christianity. However, by the nineteenth century during the Enlightenment, not even converting would save the Jews. Racism as a pseudoscience surfaced and anyone who had Jewish blood was a Jew, even if they practiced a different religion. The Jewish race was classified as inferior to all other races in the hierarchy and there was nothing any Jew could do about it. In 1901, the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a newspaper of a false document that supposedly portrayed a secret proposal by the Jews to take over the world, was published and eventually spread throughout the world, strengthening the belief of

Open Document