For years, scholars, educators, Jewish organizations and public institutions have tried to explain the difference between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism. And yet the confusion persists. Sometimes it is genuine. Sometimes it is politically convenient.

So perhaps it is worth trying again – this time with the help of a major historian who is not often invoked in public debates today: Gavin I. Langmuir.

Langmuir, one of the most important historians of medieval antisemitism, argued that antisemitism is not simply another form of xenophobia. Hatred of outsiders can be based on fear, competition, cultural difference, religious hostility, ignorance or crude generalization. It can be ugly and dangerous. But antisemitism, in Langmuir’s analysis, becomes something more distinctive when it attributes to Jews imaginary, impossible or monstrous qualities that are not grounded in empirical reality.

He called these “chimerical assertions.” The chimera is a mythological creature composed of parts of different animals. In Langmuir’s usage, a chimerical assertion is a claim that attributes to an outgroup, with certainty, characteristics that have never actually been observed. These are not merely exaggerations or hostile stereotypes. They are fantasies: Jews as ritual murderers, well-poisoners, desecrators of the host, secret rulers of the world, or demonic enemies of humanity.

Langmuir used this framework primarily to explain the transformation of Christian anti-Judaism in the Middle Ages. In the Augustinian tradition, Jews were seen as spiritually blind, mistaken and humiliated, but they were also to be preserved as witnesses to Christian truth. They had failed to recognize Christ, but their failure was understood as blindness rather than fully conscious demonic rebellion. This outlook led many Christians to view Jews primarily with contempt and condescension rather than as demonic enemies.

From the twelfth century onward, however, this image began to change. As Christian scholars encountered the Talmud and rabbinic literature, some came to believe that Jews were not merely blind to Christian truth, but had knowingly rejected it. If Jews had knowingly rejected Christ, and if they had knowingly participated in the crucifixion of the Son of God, then, in the Christian imagination, only a satanic force could explain such a crime.

From this world emerged the blood libel, accusations of host desecration, charges of well poisoning and other fantasies that presented Jews not as a mistaken religious minority, but as demonic enemies of Christian society. From this moment, Jews were not only despised;........

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