Anti-Semitism: an All-American Attribute

You know me.

I am a Jew, and I am stubborn.

I persecuted Jesus, refusing to accept his message of salvation. I spit in his face; I hit him with my fists. I have his blood on my hands.

That’s what New York basketball players Charlie Ward and Allan Houston told a reporter last month, sparking anger and surprise in America’s Jewish community. As a Jew, I share the anger. But as a historian of America, I am not surprised.

The slur of “Christ killer” has haunted Jews wherever they have gone. Americans like to pretend that they are exceptional, insulated by history--or by God--from the violence and prejudice that have permeated the rest of the world. Even on these shores of liberty, however, Jews have not escaped the Christ-killing accusation and the vicious hatred that accompanied it.

In the 1600s, for example, New England mothers rocked their children to sleep with this lullaby:

Yet to read the shameful story

How the Jews abused their king

How they served the Lord of Glory

Makes me angry while I sing

A century later, the famed theologian Jonathan Edwards argued that God had scattered Jews across the globe to punish them for the murder of Jesus.

But they still denied Christ’s divinity and persecuted his followers, Edwards thundered, which ensured their anguish in this world, as well as their torture in the hell to come.

By the mid-1800s, when American public schools boomed, millions of children would encounter this idea in their classrooms. The era’s most popular textbooks, McGuffey’s Readers, indicted Jews for persecuting Christians. So did an enormously successful text by Dorothea Dix, best known for her reform efforts on behalf of the insane. “The Gospel was first sent to the Jews, but they rejected its precepts, and ignominiously crucified their Savior,” wrote Dix, whose book went through 60 different editions.

Such sentiments gained fresh force in the early 1900s, when a new wave of Jewish immigrants flooded into the public schools. On the playground, Jewish children were teased and bullied as “Christ killers.” The charge was dropped from most elementary primers, only to resurface in high school textbooks. As late as 1950, several leading world-history texts stated flatly that Jews killed Jesus.

The image of the Jew as Christ killer cut across the racial divide in the U.S., infecting blacks as well as whites. Growing up as a minister’s son in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, novelist James Baldwin frequently heard pastors denounce Jews for murdering Jesus. So did Richard Wright, who taunted Jewish shopkeepers in his Arkansas hometown by chanting:

Bloody Christ killers

Never trust a Jew

Bloody Christ killers

What won’t a Jew do?

Since Ward and Houston are black, some observers might be tempted to attribute their comments to a special African American strain of anti-Semitism. But that’s another fantasy of national innocence, a convenient way to absolve the rest of us of our sins. However despicable their remarks, Charlie Ward and Allan Houston spoke in a deeply American tradition. Or so it seems to me.

But I am stubborn.