The perception of Jews as forces of darkness in the most fearsome and tangible sense was especially conducive to the expulsions and brutalities that mark late medieval Jewish history, but the belief that Jewish alienness transcends religious differences was important in another context as well. When Jews converted to Christianity singly or in tiny groups, it was relatively easy to accept them unreservedly with the full measure of Christian love. In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Spain, however, Christians had to deal with the new phenomenon of mass conversion. This, of course, created economic tensions that are not generated by individual conversions, but it must also have produced a psychological dilemma: It is extraordinarily difficult for a society to transform its attitude toward an entire group virtually overnight. There were, it is true, plausible arguments that the religious sincerity of these new Christians left something to be desired; nevertheless, the reluctance to accord them a full welcome into the Christian fold went beyond such considerations. Despite the absence of a prominent demonic motif, the Marranos faced at least an embryonic manifestation of racial antisemitism, which served as a refuge for a hostile impulse that could no longer point to palpable distinctions.

This figure of the hated new Christian adumbrates the hated acculturated Jew of later centuries and points the way toward the crucial transition to modern times. Like the passing of pagan antiquity and the emergence of Christian dominance, the waning of the Middle Ages was marked by fundamental ideological change. By the eighteenth century, Christianity began to lose its hold on important elements of the intellectual elite, and once again there seemed to be potential for the eradication or radical weakening of antisemitism. The transition of the eighteenth century, however, was far more complex than that of the fourth.

First of all, the old ideology did not disappear. There were areas of Europe, most notably in the east, where the commitment to traditional forms of Christianity retained its full force into the nineteenth century and beyond. Even in the west, large sectors of the early modern population remained immune to the impact of Enlightenment and secularization, so that old-style hostility to Jews could continue to flourish. A second complicating factor is that this time there are periods and places in which anti-Semitism did wane, and analysis of its modern manifestations must balance explanations for persistence against reasons for decline. Finally, the stated reasons for modern Jew-hatred are more varied and mutable than their medieval equivalents. In the Middle Ages, whatever the role of economic and political factors, the religious basis for anti-Semitism was a constant throughout the period, forming a permanent foundation that served as both underlying reason and stated rationale. In the modern era, on the other hand, we are presented with a shifting, dizzying kaleidoscope of often contradictory explanations: The Jews are Rothschilds and paupers, capitalists and communists, nationalists and deracinated cosmopolitans, religious separatists and dangerous free thinkers, evil geniuses and the possessors of superficial, third-rate minds.

We must beware of easy psychological reductionism, which excuses the historian from a careful examination of the complexities of modern anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, this list of grievances against Jews suggests that by the modern period anti-Semitism had reached the level of a deeply rooted pathology. It is precisely because Jews were the only significant minority in medieval Christian Europe that the fear and hatred of the alien became fixed upon them; a fixation that develops over a millennium is not uprooted merely by the slow weakening of its major cause. Hence, the arguments proposed by modern anti-Semites -- and by historians who try to understand them -- reflect a complex interweaving of reason and rationalization, of genuine cause and shifting, often elusive excuse.

With the passing of Christian dominance, anti-Semitism in the modern West came to be associated with other ideological issues that in large measure replaced Christianity as the focus of European concerns. The first of these was nationalism. At first glance, the egalitarian spirit of the French Revolution appears utterly incompatible with the persistence of Jewish disabilities, and the emancipation of the Jews was, in fact, achieved. But the increasing power of the national state -- and its increasing demands -- provided ammunition for a new, exceptionally powerful argument against such emancipation. The eighteenth-century state demanded not only its residents' toil and sweat but also their hearts and souls: full loyalty, total identification, fervent patriotism. Moreover, the breakdown of the old regime's corporate structure required the citizen to engage in an unmediated relationship with the centralized state. Jews, it was said, failed these tests. In descent and behavior, in communal structure and emotional ties, Jews were an alien nation, a state within a state, no more deserving of citizenship than Frenchmen in Germany or Germans in France. Since the nature of the state had changed so much that retention of medieval status was hardly a realistic option, this analysis posed no small threat to Jewish security.

The only viable response, it seemed, was the denial of Jewish nationhood. So Jews denied it -- and they denied it sincerely. There is at least faint irony in Jews' declaring that they are not a nation while anti-Semites vigorously affirm that they are, but the gradual spread of Jewish emancipation through much of nineteenth-century Europe awakened feelings of genuine, profound patriotism that led to the defining of Judaism in the narrowest confessional terms. Until late in the century, this sacrifice -which most western Jews considered no sacrifice at all -- appeared to have achieved its goal. Barriers crumbled, discrimination eased, redemption-in-exile appeared at hand. . .

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