While it is often assumed that the old European hatred of Jews, rooted in charges of deicide and theological animus, has long since been shunted aside by racial, or Islamic, or anti-Zionist varieties, Alvin Rosenfeld observes that traditional Christian sentiments still have significant purchase among American anti-Semites. He begins his general survey by citing a graffito reading, “The Jews are guilty.”
Surrounded by crudely drawn swastikas, these words were prominently spray-painted on the wall of the Holocaust museum in St. Petersburg, Florida in May 2021. Similar graffiti have appeared time and again on synagogues, Jewish schools, and other Holocaust monuments and memorials. Their purpose is clear: intimidate Jews by defacing their most emblematic institutions with hostile markings. This one, “The Jews are guilty,” is an expression of contempt that originates centuries ago in Christian teachings about Jews as agents of evil; in one form or another, it is alive still today. Versions of it, always accusatory and damning, are part of the contemporary rhetoric of anti-Jewish vilification.
The question needs to be asked: of what precisely are the Jews guilty? Answers vary, but to anti-Semites of all kinds, Jews, and increasingly the Jewish state, are denounced as being eternally at fault for causing whatever is bad, wrong, or evil in the world.
Of course, to numerous medieval preachers, and no small number of modern ones, Jews were guilty above all of killing Jesus. Rosenfeld also notes the association of Jews with Satan or Satanism, a notion with origins in the New Testament’s reference to the “synagogue of Satan.”
The Goyim Defense League, a small but aggressive neo-Nazi hate-group . . . regularly invokes New Testament references to Satanic Jews on large banners it displays on the highways of major American cities. Others who similarly call on Satan as justification for harming Jews may know nothing of the scriptural provenance of such vilification or be regular churchgoers, and yet they have absorbed the widespread image of devilish Jews and sometimes act upon it to assault Jews.
Read more on Fathom: https://fathomjournal.org/the-jews-are-guilty-christian-antisemitism-in-contemporary-america/