This is the third essay in my series on contemporary antisemitism. This essay traces one of the historical roots of contemporary antisemitism.

For much of Christian history, the Catholic Church saw Judaism as a theological challenge and reminder of Christianity’s origins. Christians believed Jesus fulfilled the promises of the Hebrew Bible, yet the people who both wrote and preserved those scriptures rejected both the Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible and the claim that Jesus is the Messiah. From a Jewish perspective, Jesus was neither the Messiah nor God incarnate. Judaism awaited a fully human Messiah and rejected the Christian claim that God had become human.

To church leaders, that was more than a disagreement. It challenged Christianity’s claim to possess the fullness of God’s truth. If Christianity fulfilled Judaism, why did so many Jews not convert? The answer for church leaders shaped centuries of Catholic hatred toward Jews. It justified efforts to convert them, inspired persecution and murderous violence against them, and eventually became part of a much larger struggle over authority itself. That struggle continues to inform contemporary movements such as Project 2025.

When societies struggle over authority, Jews are repeatedly imagined as the hidden possessors of that authority.

By the Middle Ages, church leaders assumed the obstacle to conversion was the Talmud, not the Hebrew Bible. The Talmud, which Jews identify as their oral Bible, is the collection of discussions and interpretations of Jewish law that shaped Jewish practice, communal life, and the way Jews understood scripture itself. Church leaders believed it had led Jews away from recognizing Jesus as the Christ. If its authority could be discredited, Judaism itself would collapse and conversion would follow. The struggle with Judaism had become part of a larger struggle over authority. Who determines religious truth for Jews? The Church? Rabbinic tradition? Reason? The individual? That question would change form over the centuries, but it would never disappear.

In 1263, Pablo Christiani, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, stood at the center of that effort. The Dominicans embraced him as proof that Judaism could be defeated from within. King James I of Aragon ordered the Barcelona Disputation at the urging of his confessor, the Dominican friar Raymond de Peñafort, who believed Christiani’s knowledge of the Talmud would allow him to dismantle rabbinic Judaism publicly.

There was one problem. No Jew wanted to debate. Earlier disputations ended with the Jewish representative executed for blasphemy and murderous violence brought against Jewish communities. Only after King James personally guaranteed Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, the Ramban, freedom of speech did he agree.

The........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)