Anti-Judaism

But if the Jews do not instruct through their history or their presence, and if that presence is so dangerous to Christ and to Christians, why do the Jews survive in Christendom at all?

After all, Jews and their synagogue had long been the whipping boys of preachers and exegetes: “If hatred of Jews makes the Christian, then we are all plenty Christian,” as both Erasmus and Luther put it at much the same time.

But the search for a Roman reality behind the charges very much misses the point of these texts: they are the product of an ideology that represented the struggle against tyranny in terms of a struggle against the Jews.

“[To] call someone a Jew amounts to an instigation to work him over until he resembles the image.”

“I declare that neither pope nor bishop nor any other person has the right to impose a syllable of law upon a Christian man without his own consent.”

It was in its Renaissance that western Europe achieved what the Middle Ages had at most dreamed of: a world free of Jews.

Communication and interpretation have long been associated with lending and obligation, as the etymology of those words themselves makes clear.33 In Shakespeare’s age, a number of prominent theorists understood every communicative act, regardless of whether it involved words, objects, or money, as a promise of meaning to others. Words are, to quote

But this insistence on a bright contrast between the attitudes and practices of the spiritual Christian toward commerce, and those of the fleshy Jew, was becoming more difficult to maintain in a world in which the wheels of commerce were accelerating, and from which the Jews themselves had vanished.9

The royalists soon retook Toledo, and the bachelor was hanged in the public square. His treatise became a founding document of the Castilian ideology of “purity of blood,” hence of importance to anyone interested in the history of racial ideologies.