Christian Jew-haters are back Ancient doctrine is fuelling new extremism
In the early hours of Saturday 10 January, the oldest synagogue in Mississippi was burned down. The suspected arsonist, Stephen Spencer Pittman, is only 19 years old; he now faces about that much time behind bars. He had a lot going for him. He was a good student and a good baseball player.
It should go without saying, too, that the attack was antisemitic in nature: Pittman has apparently admitted that he went after the synagogue for its “Jewish ties”.
Crucially, there is good reason to suspect a religious motive. Pittman is said to have referred to his target as “the synagogue of Satan”, a staple of Christian anti-Judaism going all the way back to the 4th-century homilies of John Chrysostom. On social media, he describes himself as a “follower of Christ”; when read out his rights he said, “Jesus Christ is Lord”. It would not be the first time, as it happens, for this synagogue to have been attacked in an act of terror by extremists of the Christian Right: in 1967, it was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan.
There is a powerful tendency to regard modern, racial antisemitism as a phenomenon fundamentally distinct from an earlier, religious anti-Judaism. This is seen most clearly in discussions of Nazism and the Holocaust. “Nazism owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition,” Hannah Arendt asserted: Auschwitz marked a total break from the course of Europe’s Christian civilisation.
The notion that the Nazis had nothing in common with the fanatical, Christian Jew-haters of earlier centuries is no longer tenable. There was no straightforward transition from “religious” to “racial” thinking: in fact anti-Judaism had already long had an important “racial” component. Jews were identified as a group in the Middle Ages not only on the grounds of their rejection of Christianity, but also by their immutable physical characteristics. A Jewish handbook, Sefer Nizzahon Yashan, written in Germany in the early 14th century, tells us how Christians would often taunt their Jewish neighbours by asking, “Why are most Gentiles fair-skinned and handsome while most Jews are dark and ugly?” Around the same time, Jews were already being depicted with hooked noses.
Moreover, modern racial antisemitism, epitomised by National Socialism, was more fundamentally religious — more Christian — than has often been supposed. An influential book by Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, argued more than 20 years ago that there was a “religious dimension to Nazi antisemitism, which coexisted with and in some ways even informed the racist dimension”. Much of Nazi Christianity was built atop the fancy that Jesus had really been an Aryan. “I can imagine Christ as nothing other than blond and with blue eyes,” said Hitler in 1921; “the devil, however, only with a Jewish grimace.” Seeking to keep the SS from fracturing along religious lines, even the pagan Heinrich Himmler forbade “any attacks against Christ”, including the attack, “without doubt historically false”, that Christ had been a Jew.
In Michael: A German Destiny in Diary Form, Joseph Goebbels’s strange semi-autobiographical novel, the protagonist insists that “Christ is the genius of love, [and] as such the most diametrical opposite of Judaism, which is the incarnation of hate”. The Nazi struggle, thought Goebbels, was one “between Christ and Marx”, to be waged “until victory or the bitter end”.
The law of race did not need to contradict the revealed law of Christianity; race, after all, could be construed as an integral part of God’s Creation. “We, the racists, are the only ones who render to Christ the homage that is his due,” wrote the Nazi lawyer Herbert Meyer.
Christianity also played a part in the development of modern antisemitism closer to home. The British Union of Fascists had several churchmen in its ranks. George Henry Dymock, vicar of St Bede’s in Bristol, inveighed against the Jews in 1935 for engaging in “vile usury”. The Reverend M. Yate Allen, influenced perhaps by the religious declarations of Hitler’s top brass, thought that Nazi Germany was “truly on the side of Christ”. The newspaper British Fascism came up with a pithy formula in 1930: “There can be no true Fascism that is not Christian, for Fascism is military Christianity.” An earlier group produced a “Children’s Fascist Creed” in 1925, whose opening is unmistakably Nicene: “I am a Fascist. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His only Son Our Lord, and in the Holy Spirit…”
There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the “trad” Catholicism of Nick Fuentes and his ilk is anything other than sincerely felt. Indeed, it underpins everything they say and do. It is central to their entire narrative about the decadence of modern liberal, secular society — which, predictably, is imagined to have been engineered by the “perfidious Jews”.
Muslim antisemites, as Christopher Hitchens once put it, often “have to borrow — when they want to be anti-Jewish — the rubbish of medieval Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox antisemitism”; though Hitchens was quick to add that they equally possess a vigorous antisemitic tradition all their own.
There is, so to speak, a homegrown strain of antisemitism which is quickly gaining ground. If we are now witnessing a resurgence of antisemitism in the West, we should not be surprised to sometimes find it clad in its ancient, Christian garb.
https://unherd.com/2026/01/christian-jew...-are-back/
In the early hours of Saturday 10 January, the oldest synagogue in Mississippi was burned down. The suspected arsonist, Stephen Spencer Pittman, is only 19 years old; he now faces about that much time behind bars. He had a lot going for him. He was a good student and a good baseball player.
It should go without saying, too, that the attack was antisemitic in nature: Pittman has apparently admitted that he went after the synagogue for its “Jewish ties”.
Crucially, there is good reason to suspect a religious motive. Pittman is said to have referred to his target as “the synagogue of Satan”, a staple of Christian anti-Judaism going all the way back to the 4th-century homilies of John Chrysostom. On social media, he describes himself as a “follower of Christ”; when read out his rights he said, “Jesus Christ is Lord”. It would not be the first time, as it happens, for this synagogue to have been attacked in an act of terror by extremists of the Christian Right: in 1967, it was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan.
There is a powerful tendency to regard modern, racial antisemitism as a phenomenon fundamentally distinct from an earlier, religious anti-Judaism. This is seen most clearly in discussions of Nazism and the Holocaust. “Nazism owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition,” Hannah Arendt asserted: Auschwitz marked a total break from the course of Europe’s Christian civilisation.
The notion that the Nazis had nothing in common with the fanatical, Christian Jew-haters of earlier centuries is no longer tenable. There was no straightforward transition from “religious” to “racial” thinking: in fact anti-Judaism had already long had an important “racial” component. Jews were identified as a group in the Middle Ages not only on the grounds of their rejection of Christianity, but also by their immutable physical characteristics. A Jewish handbook, Sefer Nizzahon Yashan, written in Germany in the early 14th century, tells us how Christians would often taunt their Jewish neighbours by asking, “Why are most Gentiles fair-skinned and handsome while most Jews are dark and ugly?” Around the same time, Jews were already being depicted with hooked noses.
Moreover, modern racial antisemitism, epitomised by National Socialism, was more fundamentally religious — more Christian — than has often been supposed. An influential book by Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, argued more than 20 years ago that there was a “religious dimension to Nazi antisemitism, which coexisted with and in some ways even informed the racist dimension”. Much of Nazi Christianity was built atop the fancy that Jesus had really been an Aryan. “I can imagine Christ as nothing other than blond and with blue eyes,” said Hitler in 1921; “the devil, however, only with a Jewish grimace.” Seeking to keep the SS from fracturing along religious lines, even the pagan Heinrich Himmler forbade “any attacks against Christ”, including the attack, “without doubt historically false”, that Christ had been a Jew.
In Michael: A German Destiny in Diary Form, Joseph Goebbels’s strange semi-autobiographical novel, the protagonist insists that “Christ is the genius of love, [and] as such the most diametrical opposite of Judaism, which is the incarnation of hate”. The Nazi struggle, thought Goebbels, was one “between Christ and Marx”, to be waged “until victory or the bitter end”.
The law of race did not need to contradict the revealed law of Christianity; race, after all, could be construed as an integral part of God’s Creation. “We, the racists, are the only ones who render to Christ the homage that is his due,” wrote the Nazi lawyer Herbert Meyer.
Christianity also played a part in the development of modern antisemitism closer to home. The British Union of Fascists had several churchmen in its ranks. George Henry Dymock, vicar of St Bede’s in Bristol, inveighed against the Jews in 1935 for engaging in “vile usury”. The Reverend M. Yate Allen, influenced perhaps by the religious declarations of Hitler’s top brass, thought that Nazi Germany was “truly on the side of Christ”. The newspaper British Fascism came up with a pithy formula in 1930: “There can be no true Fascism that is not Christian, for Fascism is military Christianity.” An earlier group produced a “Children’s Fascist Creed” in 1925, whose opening is unmistakably Nicene: “I am a Fascist. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His only Son Our Lord, and in the Holy Spirit…”
There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the “trad” Catholicism of Nick Fuentes and his ilk is anything other than sincerely felt. Indeed, it underpins everything they say and do. It is central to their entire narrative about the decadence of modern liberal, secular society — which, predictably, is imagined to have been engineered by the “perfidious Jews”.
Muslim antisemites, as Christopher Hitchens once put it, often “have to borrow — when they want to be anti-Jewish — the rubbish of medieval Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox antisemitism”; though Hitchens was quick to add that they equally possess a vigorous antisemitic tradition all their own.
There is, so to speak, a homegrown strain of antisemitism which is quickly gaining ground. If we are now witnessing a resurgence of antisemitism in the West, we should not be surprised to sometimes find it clad in its ancient, Christian garb.
https://unherd.com/2026/01/christian-jew...-are-back/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
