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Originally posted by rogue06
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Originally posted by rogue06
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Firstly, that comment is not from Goodman. It is the Wiki article writer’s interpretation of Goodman.
Secondly, here are some comments by Goodman in his Epilogue “The Origins of Anti-Semitism” from that same work. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilisations, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 2007.
Much has been written on the origins of antisemitism in classical antiquity. Hatred of the Jews has been traced by some to Egypt in the third century BCE, by others to the propaganda against the Jews produced by Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century BCE. Some have emphasized the resentment aroused in neighbouring Greek cities by the expansionist policies of the Hasmonaeans in Judaea, others the separateness of Jewish communities in the diaspora which made Jews distinctive and therefore vulnerable as scapegoats. [...]
The Romans were well aware that Jews were different in many aspects of their lifestyle and outlook, but they were used to ruling over strange peoples and revelled in the variety of their subjects. The presence of a Jewish community in Rome gave them opportunities to discover rather more about this nation than others, although they did not always understand what they saw. They thought that Jewish taboos against worshipping other gods than their own or engraving human images on coins were bizarre, but that they could easily be accommodated. [....] Jews were exotic in the eyes of Romans and the Roman state, and they were sometimes treated as despicable because they were a defeated nation, but they were not seen as dangerous or hostile.
Such tolerance came under stress when revolt broke out in Jerusalem in 66 CE.... The initial Roman response was little more than a police action, a show of force, but it escalated in response to the disaster suffered by Cestius Gallus in his incompetent withdrawal after he had almost conquered the city. His loss of the equivalent of a complete legion at the hands of the inhabitants of an established province of the empire was without precedent and could not be kept quiet. Punitive action was required before other subjects of Rome tried to follow suit.
[...]
But in the long term the most significant development in the century after 70 was a by-product of the hostility of Rome to the Jews, the emergence of Christian antisemitism. Roman imperial power gradually disintegrated in the western Mediterranean and northern Europe from the beginning of the fifth century CE, and although the empire of New Rome, in Byzantium, continued far longer, it too fell in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks. But Rome's living legacy in Europe throughout the Middle Ages to our own times has been the institution and ideology of the Church, and in the eyes of some Christians, ever since the first generation, Judaism has been a religion that ought to have ceased to exist in the first century CE ...it was not by accident that some Christians began in the second century to distance themselves from Jews with language of increasing vitriol at the same time that similar terminology was being used in the centre of imperial power at Rome.
The impetus for Christians to distance themselves from Jews after 70 was much more clear-cut. By that date many, probably most, Christians lived outside Judaea, and most of them had not been born Jews.... But, more crucially in the development of antisemitism, to gain credibility in the Roman world after 70 Christians needed not only to deny their own Jewishness but to attack Judaism altogether....if Christians were to defend their own good name and seek converts in a Roman world in which, after 70, the name of the Jews excited opprobrium, it was easier to join in the attack and agree with the pagans that the defeat of the Jews and the destruction of the Temple were to be celebrated as the will of God. [...] some Christians, like Augustine, made the even stronger claim that the miserable state of the Jews was testimony to the truth preached by the Church, and that it was necessary to preserve Jews in subjection, rather than convert them to Christianity, in order that observation of their parlous condition might strengthen the faithful...Of course the antagonism to Judaism found in many Christian writings of the second century was given a theological gloss. The Jews were those who had rejected Christ and suffered accordingly; in a more extreme form, the Jews were those who had killed him. The accusation is too familiar to appreciate readily how bizarre it is.[...] In any case, as during the second and third centuries Christian theological discourse took on a life of its own, attitudes towards the Jews hardened. By the time of Constantine, Christians took for granted that Jews were to be despised and shunned. The assumption was inherited by medieval Christendom from the Christian Roman empire, and has by no means wholly faded away in the modern world.
My emphasis.
All of which lends support to the argument that I have been making concerning anti-Semitism as we understand it today and Christianity.
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