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The Jews as the Killers of Christ in the Latin Tradition, from Augustine to the Friars

The noted Anglo-Jewish historian Cecil Roth, in a seldom quoted but highly provocative essay, argued some forty years ago that medieval European Christendom conceived of the Jew not as an infidel who had failed to perceive the truth of Christianity but rather as a deliberate unbeliever, one who knew the truth but refused to accept its consequences. Only if the Jews of first-century Palestine had recognized Jesus as their redeemer, Roth claimed, could medieval churchmen have sought proof for Christian beliefs in the Talmud and Midrash; and only a people deemed willfully evil could have been charged with the unnatural atrocities that medieval Europeans attributed to the Jews: host-desecration, well-poisoning, and ritual murder. To be sure, cautioned Roth, not all medieval Christians could have viewed the Jews in precisely this way. Popes and emperors often expended considerable energy to controvert such popular opinion. ‘But it must have been a very widespread conception, particularly among the less educated; and it explains a good deal in the medieval religious mentality which otherwise remains incomprehensible.’