Religious Antisemitism

Religious antisemitism is one of the oldest and most influential forms of antisemitism in the Western world. It is rooted in myths and theological claims that cast Jews not simply as people with different beliefs, but as a moral and spiritual threat. Over centuries, those ideas helped normalise hostility towards Jews and provided a ready-made framework for exclusion, humiliation, and violence.

Much of this tradition developed within Christian Europe. Jews were portrayed as collectively guilty for the death of Jesus, spiritually "blind" for not accepting Christian claims, and stubbornly resistant to redemption. From these themes flowed a set of recurring accusations: Jews as uniquely malevolent, Jews as corrupters of society, Jews as enemies of the sacred. In medieval life, religious teaching and popular folklore often blurred together, producing fantasies of ritual murder, desecration, and demonic intent that could be weaponised in moments of crisis.

Even where explicit religious belief has faded, the patterns have not disappeared. Older religious stories have often been translated into modern secular language, carrying across the same emotional logic: Jews as the hidden danger, the contaminating influence, the group whose existence is framed as a provocation. Understanding religious antisemitism matters because it helps explain why later forms of antisemitism were able to take hold so easily. The mythic structure was already there. Modern politics simply found new words for it.

This section of the Gallery explores classic examples of religious antisemitism, how they were used historically, and how traces of them continue to appear today.