BiblioVault - Books about Christianity and antisemitism

Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem's Hymns in Fourth-century Syria (Patristic Monograph Series)
Christine Shepardson
Catholic University of America Press, 2008
Library of Congress BR65.E636S54 2008 | Dewey Decimal 270.2092

This book investigates the complex anti-Jewish and anti-Judaizing rhetoric of Ephrem, a fourth-century poet, deacon, and theologian from eastern Roman Syria whose Syriac-language writings remain unfamiliar and linguistically inaccessible to centuries of scholars who study the well-known Greek and Latin writings of his contemporaries.

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The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore
Alan Dundes
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991
Library of Congress BM585.2.B58 1991 | Dewey Decimal 305.8924

Alan Dundes, in this casebook of an anti-Semitic legend, demonstrates the power of folklore to influence thought and history. According to the blood libel legend, Jews murdered Christian infants to obtain blood to make matzah. Dundes has gathered here the work of leading scholars who examine the varied sources and elaborations of the legend.   Collectively, their essays constitute a forceful statement against this false accusation.
    The legend is traced from the murder of William of Norwich in 1144, one of the first reported cases of ritualized murder attributed to Jews, through nineteenth-century Egyptian reports, Spanish examples, Catholic periodicals, modern English instances, and twentieth-century American cases. The essays deal not only with historical cases and surveys of blood libel in different locales, but also with literary renditions of the legend, including the ballad “Sir Hugh, or, the Jew’s Daughter” and Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale.”
    These case studies provide a comprehensive view of the complex nature of the blood libel legend. The concluding section of the volume includes an analysis of the legend that focuses on Christian misunderstanding of the Jewish feast of Purim and the child abuse component of the legend and that attempts to bring psychoanalytic theory to bear on the content of the blood libel legend. The final essay by Alan Dundes takes a distinctly folkloristic approach, examining the legend as part of the belief system that Christians developed about Jews.
    This study of the blood libel legend will interest folklorists, scholars of Catholicism and Judaism, and many general readers, for it is both the literature and the history of anti-Semitism.

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Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth
Magda Teter
Harvard University Press, 2019
Library of Congress BM585.2.T48 2020 | Dewey Decimal 305.892404

Drawing on sources in eight countries and ten languages, Magda Teter tells the history of the antisemitic blood libel myth, whose long shadow extends from premodern monastic chronicles to Facebook. The vocabulary and images that crystallized and spread with the invention of the printing press are still with us, as are their pernicious consequences.

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Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History
Hannah R. Johnson
University of Michigan Press, 2012
Library of Congress BM585.2.J64 2012 | Dewey Decimal 305.8924009

The ritual murder accusation is one of a series of myths that fall under the label blood libel, and describes the medieval legend that Jews require Christian blood for obscure religious purposes and are capable of committing murder to obtain it. This malicious myth continues to have an explosive afterlife in the public sphere, where Sarah Palin's 2011 gaffe is only the latest reminder of its power to excite controversy.Blood Libel is the first book-length study to analyze the recent historiography of the ritual murder accusation and to consider these debates in the context of intellectual and cultural history as well as methodology. Hannah R. Johnson articulates how ethics shapes methodological decisions in the study of the accusation and how questions about methodology, in turn, pose ethical problems of interpretation and understanding. Examining recent debates over the scholarship of historians such as Gavin Langmuir, Israel Yuval, and Ariel Toaff, Johnson argues that these discussions highlight an ongoing paradigm shift that seeks to reimagine questions of responsibility by deliberately refraining from a discourse of moral judgment and blame in favor of an emphasis on historical contingencies and hostile intergroup dynamics.

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Catholics and Jews in Twentieth-Century America
Egal Feldman
University of Illinois Press, 2006
Library of Congress BM535.F43 2001 | Dewey Decimal 261.2609730904

From Enemy to Brother
John Connelly
Harvard University Press, 2012
Library of Congress BM535.C627 2012 | Dewey Decimal 261.26

In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that God loves the Jews. Yet the Church had taught for centuries that Jews were cursed by God, and had mostly kept silent as Jews were slaughtered by Nazis. How did an institution whose wisdom is said to be unchanging undertake one of the largest, yet most undiscussed, ideological swings in modern history?

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The Papacy, the Jews, and the Holocaust
Frank J. Coppa
Catholic University of America Press, 2006
Library of Congress BM535.C636 2008 | Dewey Decimal 261.26088282

This work not only examines Rome's reaction during the fascist period but delves into the broader historical development and the impact of theological anti-Judaism

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Pilgrimage and Pogrom: Violence, Memory, and Visual Culture at the Host-Miracle Shrines of Germany and Austria
Mitchell B. Merback
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Library of Congress BX2320.5.G3M47 2012 | Dewey Decimal 263.04243

In the late Middle Ages, Europe saw the rise of one of its most virulent myths: that Jews abused the eucharistic bread as a form of anti-Christian blasphemy, causing it to bleed miraculously. The allegation fostered tensions between Christians and Jews that would explode into violence across Germany and Austria. And pilgrimage shrines were built on the sites where supposed desecrations had led to miracles or to anti-Semitic persecutions. Exploring the legends, cult forms, imagery, and architecture of these host-miracle shrines, Pilgrimage and Pogrom reveals how they not only reflected but also actively shaped Christian anti-Judaism in the two centuries before the Reformation.

Mitchell B. Merback studies surviving relics and eucharistic cult statues, painted miracle cycles and altarpieces, propaganda broadsheets, and more in an effort to explore how accusation and legend were transformed into propaganda and memory. Merback shows how persecution and violence became interdependent with normative aspects of Christian piety, from pilgrimage to prayers for the dead, infusing them with the ideals of crusade. Valiantly reconstructing the cult environments created for these sacred places, Pilgrimage and Pogrom is an illuminating look at Christian-Jewish relations in premodern Europe.

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Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy
José M. Sánchez
Catholic University of America Press, 2002
Library of Congress BX1378.S319 2001 | Dewey Decimal 282.092

In this highly accessible work, José M. Sánchez offers a new approach to the controversy.

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Tainted Greatness: Antisemitism and Cultural Heroes
Nancy Harrowitz
Temple University Press, 1994
Library of Congress DS145.T35 1994 | Dewey Decimal 305.8924