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We begin by observing the growing awareness among New Testament scholars of the key issues; the ‘elasticity’ of first century Jewish faith, sufficient to encompass many Jewish Christian groups; and the necessity for a correct terminology which not least distinguishes religious from racial polemic. We also observe the state of relations between Jews and ‘outsiders’ leading up to the first century CE, to discover that, excepting the Alexandrian situation, they were generally good. We then examine John’s use of the Old Testament, first in his citations, then in his allusions. It becomes clear that John not only makes extensive use of the Jewish scriptures, but that those scriptures are essential to every facet of his Gospel. Since he also makes extensive use of contemporary Jewish exegeses of the Old Testament we conclude that he must hail from a Jewish (Ephesian) community, an identity he positively promotes in his presentation of Jesus Messiah. Since he often does not explain his use of the Old Testament, without which his message is lost, we further conclude that his readers too are Jewish. Finally, since his message has a specifically evangelistic as well as confirmatory component, we conclude that John’s purpose is to bolster his community’s faith and, via its members, to convince still wavering members of the synagogue the community has been expelled from, that Jesus is Messiah. This necessitates a reassessment of John’s polemic against ?? ???da???: it refers to all Jews who reject the Messiah (as opposed to us Jews who accept him). John’s replacement christology too must be seen as part of the internal Jewish response to the Temple destruction: he offers Jesus as the restoration of the lost cultus just as the Yavnean inheritors of the Pharisaic legacy offer halakah. We end by noting that the only effective means of ensuring a non-antisemitic interpretation of John’s Gospel among its modern readers, both Jews and Christians, is to return the Gospel to this Jewish setting.

There was no abstract conception of religion in antiquity, but religious beliefs and praxis were closely intertwined with ethnicity in the Greco-Roman period. Building on the groundbreaking studies by Denise Kimber Buell, this thesis investigates the use of ethnic reasoning in centrist Christian identity formation in the second century CE. Specifically, I closely examine four different Christian texts (1 Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, Justin Martyrs Dialogue with Trypho the Judaean and the Epistle to Diognetus) to show how the centrist Christian elites utilized ethnic reasoning to construct a distinct Christian ethnic identity and to manufacture sharp differences between Christians and Judaeans. In order to defend the idea of a homogenous Christian ethnic identity with pure origins,centrist Christian intellectuals re-appropriated the legacy of Israel and represented the Judaeans as an adversarial foil. This rhetorical strategy of othering characterizes the Christian Adversus Ioudaios literature.

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Agobard of Lyon has usually been studied because of his writings about Jews. This dissertation likewise began from a desire to understand Agobard’s anti-Jewish writings, their content, motives, and impact. Approaching that topic from the basis of Agobard’s whole corpus of writings, however, forces an acknowledgment that Agobard cannot be reduced to simply “Agobard and the Jews,” although the subject clearly created a great amount of anxiety for him. Also, by beginning with Agobard’s own works, this dissertation discusses him on his own terms first, without relying on the historiographical tradition which defines him as a Visigoth, a tradition ultimately found wanting. This dissertation effectively dismantles the model of Agobard as a Visigoth working in the Carolingian world, and replaces it with a model of Agobard as a Carolingian. As such, this study explores his anti-Judaism in terms of his immediate historical context and links it with his other anxieties and the Carolingian desire for a perfect, Christian, society. Doing so also opens the door for a re-evaluation of the traditional interpretation of the Carolingian period as the last “golden age” of European Jews outside of Muslim Spain. At its conclusion, this study argues that the Carolingians, by deliberately attempting to create a Christian society, however “well” they treated Jews in their own time, laid some of the ideological groundwork for the later isolation and persecution of Jews in Europe. The introduction begins the exploration of Agobard’s historical context by discussing the history of both Louis’s empire and Agobard’s Lyon. The first chapter provides a quick summary of his life and works. From there, the dissertation turns to its in-depth study of Agobard in the second through fourth chapters. An analysis of his main anti-Jewish work, De iudaicis superstitionibus et erroribus in Chapter 3 is prefaced by a study of the character and possible roots of his anti-Judaism in Chapter 2. The last chapter looks at Agobard’s other concerns, how they relate to his writings on Judaism, and finally how his great amount of worry around Judaism can help shape our understanding of medieval Jewish-Christian relations.

Agobard of Lyon has usually been studied because of his writings about Jews. This dissertation likewise began from a desire to understand Agobard’s anti-Jewish writings, their content, motives, and impact. Approaching that topic from the basis of Agobard’s whole corpus of writings, however, forces an acknowledgment that Agobard cannot be reduced to simply “Agobard and the Jews,” although the subject clearly created a great amount of anxiety for him. Also, by beginning with Agobard’s own works, this dissertation discusses him on his own terms first, without relying on the historiographical tradition which defines him as a Visigoth, a tradition ultimately found wanting. This dissertation effectively dismantles the model of Agobard as a Visigoth working in the Carolingian world, and replaces it with a model of Agobard as a Carolingian. As such, this study explores his anti-Judaism in terms of his immediate historical context and links it with his other anxieties and the Carolingian desire for a perfect, Christian, society. Doing so also opens the door for a re-evaluation of the traditional interpretation of the Carolingian period as the last “golden age” of European Jews outside of Muslim Spain. At its conclusion, this study argues that the Carolingians, by deliberately attempting to create a Christian society, however “well” they treated Jews in their own time, laid some of the ideological groundwork for the later isolation and persecution of Jews in Europe. The introduction begins the exploration of Agobard’s historical context by discussing the history of both Louis’s empire and Agobard’s Lyon. The first chapter provides a quick summary of his life and works. From there, the dissertation turns to its in-depth study of Agobard in the second through fourth chapters. An analysis of his main anti-Jewish work, De iudaicis superstitionibus et erroribus in Chapter 3 is prefaced by a study of the character and possible roots of his anti-Judaism in Chapter 2. The last chapter looks at Agobard’s other concerns, how they relate to his writings on Judaism, and finally how his great amount of worry around Judaism can help shape our understanding of medieval Jewish-Christian relations.

Since the mid 20th century, scholars have paid increasing attention to the anti-Judaism inherent in early Christian writings, identifying John Chrysostom's fourth-century homilies as a particularly hostile example of that heritage. As a "doctor of the church" and an important contributor to Christian orthodoxy as it developed in late antiquity, John is particularly well known for his eight sermons "Against the Jews," which invoke the apostle Paul as a central voice of authority for his thoroughly anti-Judaic Christianity. Yet, as is clear from his broader corpus, he encountered in Paul not only a fellow preacher who warned against Judaizing Christians, but also a self-identified Israelite who preached in Jewish places, observed elements of the Jewish law, and cried out for the salvation of Israel. In this dissertation, I argue that John's engagement with Paul's complex relationship to Judaism offers an especially productive, yet untapped, source for insight into John's anti-Judaic rhetoric. By offering a fresh analysis of John's sermons on Acts and the Pauline epistles, I place John's interpretation of Paul within a trajectory of classical moral philosophy wherein rhetoric was perceived as philosophical therapy for the soul. John frames Paul's persistent participation in Jewish places and practices and amiable rhetoric about his fellow Jews as strategic therapies deployed in order to manage Jewish emotions (pathe) and thus to guide diseased Jewish souls out of Judaism. Paul's own Jewishness is therefore mobilized to bolster a characterization of Jews as diseased and of Paul himself as an exemplary model of non-Jewish Christian orthodoxy. Attention to John's interpretations of Paul's "therapy of the soul" points to a more subtle and pervasive anti-Judaism than previously detected, one that stakes a claim to Christian orthodoxy, and therefore Christian identity more broadly, on the purportedly loving disavowal of Judaism by the apostle himself.

While the majority of German Protestant churches were silent in response to the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, the Deutsche Christen or German Christian movement enthusiastically supported the Nazi regime’s goals and was actively involved in efforts to extract “Jewish” elements from Protestantism in an effort to create a “pure” German religion. Many scholars view the radical form of Protestantism expressed by this group as a by-product of Nazism. However, I argue that ideas promoting the de-Judaization of Protestantism were already existent within Protestant theology and that Hitler’s rise to power merely provided the opportunity for these ideas to come to fruition. I examine this topic by analyzing nationalistic and anti-Jewish ideas in German Protestant theological texts during the early twentieth century, focusing on how these ideas informed the later de-Judaization of certain churches between 1932 and 1945 under the German Christian movement, which included actions like eliminating the Old Testament from the Protestant Bible and refusing to recognize Jewish conversion to Christianity. I approach this topic by situating my analysis of several key Protestant theological texts within broader scholarly discussions about the position of the churches towards the Jews in Weimar and Nazi Germany. / Graduate

Die Sprache der Judenfeindschaft in der frühen Neuzeit (1450–1700) steht im „Grenzbereich zwischen sprach- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Antisemitismusforschung“, die die „zeittypischen Argumentationsstrategien, Begründungsmuster und sprachlichen Darstellungsmittel in antijüdischen Schriften“ der Frühen Neuzeit in den Blick nimmt, um die „Zusammenhänge von vormodernem (religiösem) ,Antijudaismus‘ und modernem (rassistisch-säkularem) ,Antisemitismus‘“ zu erhellen (Klappentext). Methodisch ruht die Studie auf einer Verschränkung zwischen struktureller Semantik und einer die Argumentationsstrukturen hervorhebenden Textlinguistik auf. Sie knüpft damit unmittelbar an die Vorarbeiten von Nicoline Hortzitz an, die in der Sprache der Judenfeindschaft die Ergebnisse ihrer Dissertation zum Früh-Antisemitismus (1988), der Monographie Judenarzt (1994) und diverser Aufsätze in einer „Gesamtbewertung der Befunde“ (S. V) vorlegt. In seiner Besprechung der Dissertation zum Früh-Antisemitismus merkte Matthias Richter kritisch an, daß „infolge des strukturalistischen Ansatzes die individuellen Differenzen zwischen den untersuchten Autoren zu sehr vernachlässigt werden.“¹ Die „minuziöse[] und aufwendige[] Systematisierung des sprachlichen Instrumentariums der Früh-Antisemiten“² setzt die vorliegende Monographie in der Ausweitung des Untersuchungszeitraums fort, ohne dabei jedoch eine „strukturelle Untersuchung“ liefern zu wollen, wie die Akzentverschiebung im Titel nahe zu legen scheint.

This paper deals with the anti-Semitic pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is placed in the historical context of its origin, considering political and social causes behind the formulation of many previous conspiracy theories and anti-Jewish narratives and their motifs, which are eventually reflected in The Protocols. This complex conspiracy narrative is then subjected to structural analysis, which seeks to identify dominant themes structured into binary oppositions, through which it aims to capture a potential "meaning" or significance of the narrative that was relevant to readers of its time but also addresses contemporary conspiracy theorists. Finally, the work attempts to outline one of the root causes that makes Jews ideal adepts for a major role as conspirators in conspiracy narratives, that lies in their extraordinary, liminal state, defined by their relationship to the majority, in this case, Christian society.