Free A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism by Phyllis Goldstein

mercenaries.” 5
    Aurelius Augustinus (later St. Augustine), a leading theologian of the early church who lived about 50 years after Chrysostom, took a more complex view of Jews—a view that would have major consequences for the Jews of Europe. Augustine wrote that God had dispersed the Jews but had not destroyed them. In his view, God had kept Jews alive as a permanent reminder that Christianity had replaced Judaism as the true faith. He argued that the humiliated, defeated Jews showed what happens to those who reject God’s truth.
    Although Augustine did not want the Jews to be murdered, he did want them to suffer for what he claimed they had done to Jesus. And he wanted them to be present at the “end of days,” when Jesus returned, so that they could see that they had been wrong. Like Chrysostom, Augustine described and defined Jews in terms of the purpose he thought they served for Christians—examples of the punishment inflicted by God on non-Christian believers. Such a view of Jews tended to deny their humanity and their existence as people with their own beliefs and purposes.
    The language used by Chrysostom, Augustine, and other church leaders was designed to persuade Christians to cut all ties between themselves and Judaism. It had the desired effect. That language shaped attitudes and supported opinions long after the fourth century ended. It was also reflected in numerous acts of violence against Jews. As early as 414, church leaders in Alexandria led an assault on synagogues that destroyed the city’s Jewish community for a time. Similar events occurred in other parts of the empire. The perpetrators were rarely punished. Increasingly, the tightening links between the political power of the Roman emperors and the religious power of church leaders left Jews isolated and vulnerable. More and more, they were viewed as outsiders—a status that would have a profound effect on Jewish life at other times and in other places.

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Conquests and Consequences
     
    (395–750 CE )
     
    The way a people (whether an ethnic group, a nation, or a religious community) defines itself has enormous significance. That definition indicates who holds power in the group (such as rabbis or priests, kings and noblemen, or men in general) and how the group as a whole sees itself in relation to the larger world. It also determines who belongs and who does not. From the fourth through the eighth centuries of the Common Era, Jews in the Middle East and beyond were increasingly seen as outsiders—people who do not belong. That view had consequences in a world in which politics and religion were tightly linked.
WARRING EMPIRES
    In 395 CE , the Roman Empire was formally divided into two parts. People in the western part, which included much of North Africa and parts of Spain, spoke mainly Latin; those in the east spoke mainly Greek. Although the western part of the empire eventually collapsed, the eastern part managed to survive and even expand. It became known as the Byzantine Empire, and its capital was Constantinople. (Byzantium was the site on which Constantine built Constantinople, which is now known as Istanbul.) To its east was the Persian Empire, which had dominated western Asia for more than a thousand years.
    In the sixth and seventh centuries, the Byzantine and Persian Empires competed for land and power. To defeat its enemy, each needed money and armies. Each also demanded the loyalty of its people. In the Byzantine Empire, demands for loyalty were connected to an insistence on belonging to the dominant religion—Christianity. The two kinds of loyalty, religious and political, were intertwined. For example, the Christian governor of Carthage, a city located near modern-day Tunis in Tunisia, challenged the loyalty of his subjects with these words: “Are you servants of the emperor? If you are, you must be baptized.”

     
    Fragment of a bowl from the early Byzantine Empire. Both details, including a shofar (a ram’s horn