Thank You Internet... I Now Have A Different Understanding Of The Phrase... "Anti-Semitic"...

[Douglas Carpenter]

87. different historians have different points of view on these questions. But in general it is thought

that until the 18th/19th Century anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe was primarily religious based rather than primarily ethnically based. Yes Luther wanted to expel the Jews - but he wanted to annihilate the Ana-Baptist - kill every last one of them. Even the Massachusetts legislature in the year 1700 mandated the death penalty for merely practicing Roman Catholicism. Religious persecution was the norm in most of the western world at the time. Christendom in the pre-enlightenment era simply could not countenance anyone who diverged from proper theology and certainly could not countenance anyone who would not even acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. This was a religious based persecution. In the 19th Century the rise of nationalism in Europe including an exclusivity that would not include those who were traditionally viewed as outsiders. At the same time as Jewish people became participants in enlightenment thinking and secularism grew in leaps and bounds - many Jews came to define their Jewishness more by their ancestral heritage and their unique cultural and linguistic traditions than by their religious beliefs. Anti-Jewishness ceased being about the question of who does not believes in Jesus Christ as their Savior and more a racialist label against an identified community who were thought to be outsiders. Early 20th Century anti-Semites no longer cared about whether someone had been baptized - they no longer defined Jewishness in those terms. It was now a racial theory rather than simply old fashioned religious persecution. AT least this is one prevailing point of view on the matter - not that all historians agree.