The Devil and the Jews

A THOROUGH scholar’s contribution to the understanding of anti-Semitism, The Devil and the Jews gives us the conception of the “demonic Jew " popularly held in the Middle Ages. As with modern anti-Semitism, what the medieval populace hated was a figment of imagination. Today this figment is supported by racial pseudo-science; in the Middle Ages it sprang from pseudo-theology, the higher Church authorities often trying to combat the superstitious mass-misconception of the Jew. The medieval masses believed that the Jews denied the evidence of Christ because they were not human, but were in fact the Devil’s children. A Jew is full of sorcery, they contended, and they related how Zedekiah, a ninth-century Jewish physician, “threw a man into the air, tore him there into pieces, piled his organs in a heap, and then joined them together again.” The author claims relevance to the present for his researches in the persecution of the Jews; he observes that “the mass mind is eminently retentive” and commends Nietzsche’s definition of man: “the being with the longest memory.”