Nearly all of this had precedents in the Church Luther renounced; and even the medieval Church practiced mimicry. It was Pope Innocent III who implemented the yellow badge of ignominy (Hitler was no innovator, except as to gas chambers) — yet Innocent too was innocent of originality, since he took the idea from Prince Abu-Yusef Almansur, a Moroccan Muslim ruler of the thirteenth century. Post-Enlightenment France may be known for its merciless persecution of a guiltless Dreyfus, and for the anti-Jewish rioting it set off; and, more recently, for the gendarmes who arrested and deported the Jews of Paris with a zeal equal to that of the Germans. But Paris had seen anti-Jewish mobs before-for instance, in June of 1242, when twenty-four cartloads of Talmuds were set afire in a public square. And while elsewhere in France, and all through the Rhine-land, the Crusaders were busy at their massacres, across the Channel the Archbishop of Canterbury was issuing a decree designed to prevent the Jews of England from having access to food.
All this, let it be noted, preceded the barbarities of the Inquisition: the scourgings, the burnings, the confiscations, the expulsions. Any attempt to set down the record, early and late, of Christian violence against Jews can only be a kind of pointillism — an atrocity here, another there, and again another. The nineteenth-century historian Heinrich Graetz (as rationalist in temperament as Gibbon) summed up the predicament of Jews across the whole face of Europe: If Jewish history were to follow chronicles, memorial books and martyrologies, its pages would be filled with bloodshed, it would consist of horrible exhibitions of corpses, and it would stand forth to make accusation against a doctrine which taught princes and nations to become common executioners and hangmen. For, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, the persecutions and massacres of the Jews increased with frightful rapidity and intensity, and only alternated with inhuman decrees issued by both Church and the state, the aim and purport of all of which were to humiliate the Jews, to brand them with calumny and to drive them to suicide...The nations of Europe emulated one another in exercising their cruelty upon the Jews...In Germany they were slain by thousands...Every year martyrs fell, now in Weissenburg, Magdeburg, Arnstadt, now in Coblenz, Sinzig, Erfurt, and other places. In Sinzig all the members of the congregation were burnt alive on a Sabbath in their synagogue. There were German Christian families who boasted that they had burnt Jews, and in their pride assumed the name of Judenbrater (Jew-roaster).
And all this, let it again be noted, before the Shoah; before the Czarist pogroms and the Czarist fabrication of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; before the exclusions, arrests, and gulag brutalities of the Soviet Union; before the shooting of the Soviet Yiddish writers in the basement of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison; before the rise of contemporary Islamist demonization of Jews; before the eight-decades-long Arab assault on Jewish national aspiration and sovereignty; before the Palestinian cult of suicide bombing. Anti-Semitism feeds on itself from continent to continent, from Iceland to Japan: it scarcely requires living Jews. Its source is commonly taken to be the two supersessionist Scriptures that derive from Judaism — in Christianity, the Jews’ cry (in the Gospel of Matthew) of “His blood be on us and on our children,” the fount of the venomous deicide curse; in Islam, the unwillingness of Jews to follow Mohammed in the furtherance of a latter-day faith which accused the Hebrew Bible of distorting the biblical narratives that appear, Islam claims, more authoritatively and genuinely in the Koran.
But anti-Semitism originated in neither Christianity nor Islam. Its earliest appearance burst out in Egypt, in the fourth century B.C.E., during the reign of Ptolemy II, when Manetho, an Egyptian priest, in a polemic directed against the biblical account in Genesis and Exodus, described a people who “came from Jerusalem” as the descendants of a mob of lepers. Against the Hebrew text, which records Joseph as a wise and visionary governor, Manetho charged that Joseph defiled the shrines and statues of the gods and set fire to villages and towns. Nor did Moses liberate the Hebrews and bring them, under divine guidance, out of Egypt, from slavery to freedom. These offspring of lepers, Manetho declared, were ignominiously expelled, having savagely despoiled the country for thirteen years. Such calumnies soon infiltrated Hellenic literature. The Greeks, detecting no plastic representation of the divine order, were quick to name the Jews atheists — lazy atheists, since once in seven days they refrained from labor. The Greek scholar Mnaseas of Patara recycled an Egyptian myth (traces of it later turned up in Plutarch) which asserted that the Temple in Jerusalem harbored the golden head of an ass, the sole object of the Jews’ worship. Another version had the Jews praying before an image of Moses seated on an ass while displaying a book containing laws of hatred for all humanity.
Greek enmity was most acutely encapsulated in the canard spread by Apion, whose contribution to the history of anti-Semitism is the infamously enduring blood libel. In its earliest form a Greek, captured by Jews, is taken to the Temple, fattened, and then killed; his entrails are ritually eaten in conjunction with an oath of hatred toward Greeks. Christian mythology altered Greek to Christian, usually a child, whose blood was said to be drained at Passover for the purpose of being baked into matzah. From its Christian source, the blood libel leached into Muslim societies. It surfaced most recently in a Saudi newspaper, which fantasized Muslim blood in Purim cakes. Mustafa Tlas, the Syrian defense minister, is the author of The Matzah of Zion, which presents the 1841 Damascus blood libel as an established “Jewish ritual.” And in a writing contest sponsored by the Palestinian Education Ministry, the winning entry, by a tenth-grader, described a Mother’s Day gift an Israeli soldier brings to his mother: “a bottle of the blood of a Palestinian child he has murdered.”