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Opinion
Understanding the history of hate can help us combat the current spread.
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It’s not often my academic interests become suddenly relevant. Being 500 years old or more, none of them are news (unless you haven’t yet heard of the Renaissance). But occasionally the 16th century can teach us about current things.
Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in October, we’ve experienced a troubling increase of antisemitic hate in Canada. It has seemed to arise out of nowhere, as if hiding mostly dormant in the shadows until emboldened by Hamas. But understanding the 16th century’s antisemitism can help us combat the current spread.
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To its great shame, the era was rife with antisemitic hate. Mass expulsions of Jews from cities and even countries were commonplace. Spain expelled its Jews in 1494 and the city of Regensburg, in Germany, in 1519. Extreme antisemitic violence, including pogroms in which synagogues were burned, property confiscated and scores of Jews murdered, happened with astonishing frequency. Hateful falsehoods, such as “blood libel” — the charge that Jews ritually sacrificed Christians (often children) and drank their blood — were used to execute Jews and destroy their communities. Even major intellectual figures of the Reformation, like Martin Luther or his Catholic opponent Johann Eck, competed for the most vitriolic polemics against Jews. The 16th century even saw the birth of the walled and gated Jewish ghetto, first decreed in Rome by the pope in 1555. Generally, to Christian authorities of the era, it was not tolerable for Jews to remain Jews.
What possible lessons could be learned today from such widespread hate?
First, 16th century antisemitism assumed all Jews were always the same everywhere. The “Jews” who demanded Jesus’s crucifixion were the same “Jews” rebuked by the Hebrew Bible prophets, or who lost Judea and the Second Temple to Roman forces in 70 CE, or who supposedly poisoned wells during the great plague of 1349, or who were accused of ritual murder in Regensburg. In other words, to the hater, a Jew was a timeless archetypal evil person responsible for ancient and contemporary abominations alike. But this idea of “Jew” was a conflation of historical evils and bigoted falsehoods that precluded the innumerable contributions of good that the Jews and Judaism had given to civilization. There was scarcely any critical reflection on it. There’s a first lesson: Be skeptical about any such sweeping, timeless claims about the “Jews” — or any people.
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Second, the 16th century experienced a media revolution, and this new media facilitated hate. The printing press surely facilitated reforms and education; but it also gave antisemitism a new life with the veneer of authority in the printed word. Posters, pamphlets, and treatises, with antisemitic woodcut images, were common and influential — so common that many survive to this day. Rather than challenging prejudices, this new print media amplified and intensified bigotry. There was little critical resistance to the spread of antisemitic propaganda. So, here’s a second lesson: Be critical of arguments about Jews circulating in new, popular media, especially the polemical ones.
Third, as a persecuted minority, subject to expulsions and with few, if any, legal protections, Jews numbered few in 16th century Europe. Even antisemites like Luther could spend their whole lives without meeting a Jew in person. Therefore, vicious antisemitism spread so much further as there was little experience with Jews to falsify it. The more moderate and tolerant voices of the age tended to know and befriend Jews. So, a third lesson: Seek the acquaintance and friendship of actual Jewish people.
Sadly, as we see in our own Canadian communities today, antisemitism is not a hate confined to the 16th century. But neither are some very basic remedies.
Jarrett Carty is a professor and principal at Concordia University’s Liberal Arts College.
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