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Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present (review)

Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present. By Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2002.) Pp. x, 309. $35.00.) Two professors, respectively at Baruch College and Manhattan College, collaborate on a topic on which they have previously edited a similar volume, JewishChristian Encounters over the Centuries: Symbiosis, Prejudice, Holocaust, Dialogue (Peter Lang, 1994). Capable of good historiography, they largely desert its canons for a prose that regularly employs terms such as "vicious," "vitriolic""violent,""satanic""irrational," and "lethal." Normally, the material thus described is such as to require no verbal qualifiers.Another technique is the quotation of contemptuous remarks of some highly placed person that are then cited in notes "as found in."This is distressing enough if the source is a newspaper or magazine article but if it is a quotation from someone like Josephus or Eusebius, it cannot be checked in the original. Elsewhere the citation scheme is all that one could ask, but the ambivalence is an indication of the uncertainty as to whether the authors have a scholarly or a popular readership in view. One regrets having to make these observations because of the book's importance as a compendium of Christian antipathy to Jews and Judaism over the centuries.As such it is probably not suitable for use in college, seminary, or graduate school courses, where such a volume is badly needed. Professors are likely to know either too much or too little about the subject to be at ease with portions of the presentation. Thus, while the first chapter on "The Trial and Death of Jesus" correctly describes the gospel narratives as kerygma, the proclamation of religious faith, rather than as a chronicle of historical events, there is the assumption that four writers not themselves Jews were laying responsibility for Jesus' death on the Jewish people.Any speculation as to why the evangelists who wrote from within the people of Israel like the prophets of old chose to exculpate a pagan outsider and charge the pilgrims in Jerusalem with responsibility for Jesus' death, as in Acts, would have been at least helpful. With the writings of Origen, Chrysostom, and other Church fathers, the problem is the same.Their position as gentiles in a religious minority relative to the religious majority of Jews, both engulfed by the pagan populations around them, could have been explored societally and not solely religiously. …