Jews, Christian attitudes to. Christianity shares much common ground with Judaism.
Jesus Christ was a Jew, as were the earliest members of the Church. The foundation for the separation of Christianity from Judaism was laid by St
Paul's practice of not requiring
Gentile converts to Christianity to be circumcised and his contention that their new covenant relationship with God was based on faith in God, not works of the law. The persecution of Jewish Christians and their expulsion from the
synagogue caused bitterness. All four Gospels tend to exonerate the Roman power that crucified Jesus by shifting blame to the Jewish authorities, and from the early 2nd cent. Christian writers put forward a negative image of the Jews. Ecclesiastical councils legislated to end social and religious contact with the Jews, except for purposes of converting them, and the triumph of the Church in the Roman Empire led to a similar tendency in imperial legislation. Nevertheless, measures aimed at the forcible extinction of Judaism were rare in the first six centuries. In the early 7th cent. the Baptism of all Jews was decreed in several countries (
Spain in 613, the Byzantine Empire and
France in 632), and the position of Jews was circumscribed. From the time of the First
Crusade there were violent attacks on Jews and in some places whole communities were massacred. The Fourth
Lateran Council (1215) imposed the wearing of distinctive dress so that Jews could be distinguished from Christians. Massacres were succeeded by expulsions from various countries and by 1500 most of Europe was free of Jews; those that remained lived under severe restrictions under both Catholics and Protestants. At the same time efforts were made to convert them, sometimes by threats of death; those who were converted and their descendants were subjected to discriminatory measures, especially in Spain and
Portugal. In the 18th cent., under the influence of the
Enlightenment, efforts were made to improve the conditions of the Jews, often opposed by Churchmen. Meanwhile new missions arose directed specifically at Jews. Antisemitism, an anti-Jewish political movement originating in the later 19th cent., exploited many of the traditional Christian arguments and counted on Christian support (both RC and Protestant). It was favoured in various forms by Christian movements in Austria, Germany (see
GERMAN CHRISTIANS), France, and elsewhere; many prominent Christians opposed it.
After the
Holocaust a new era opened. In 1947 a conference was convened under the auspices of the newly-formed International Conference of Christians and Jews; it issued a list of ‘ten points’ aimed at eradicating anti-Judaism from Christian teaching. The
World Council of Churches in 1948 and the Second
Vatican Council in 1965 both condemned antisemitism directed against Jews. In most of the main Churches attempts are being made to foster relations between Christians and Jews, to heal the wounds of the past, and to revise those teachings which are recognized as having been harmful.
