On the history of the violation and denial of religious freedom for Jews
(Bonn, 23.12.2025) Below we reproduce an interview with Archbishop Prof. Dr. Thomas Schirrmacher on the occasion of the presentation of the Yearbook on Religious Freedom by the International Institute for Religious Freedom (IIRF) in Berlin. A “non-interview version” was published as an op-ed by Christian Daily International December 9, 2025 (https://christiandaily.com/news/antisemitism-in-christian-islamic-and-secular-perspective).
Interview with Thomas Schirrmacher
You titled your contribution to the launch of the 2025 Yearbook “Anti-Semitism —Christian, Islamic, Secular.” What is the significance of this triad in relation to religious freedom?
The most influential religions and ideologues in history were all largely united in their anti-Judaism directed against the people of Israel or the Jews, which I will refer to below using the now-common term “anti-Semitism,” even though they produced quite different forms of it. There is no parallel to this in history or the present day against any other people or religion. As a result, the history of Judaism has been accompanied for centuries and to this day by a massive violation of its religious freedom, unlike almost any other religious community.
The three parts of my triad are Christianity, Islam, and the secular or atheistic worldviews that developed out of the Christian world, ranging from socialism and communism on one hand to fascism and National Socialism on the other. These three have shaped the world and world history more than any other movements. And all three have produced widespread forms of anti-Semitism that have repeatedly intermingled.
When Adolf Hitler met with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, in 1941, for example, the intermingling of Christian, Islamic, and secular racist conspiracy theories against the Jews became apparent.
Even Hitler, for example, used the argument that Jews were “Christ murderers” and committed “sacrilege,” even though he decidedly did not believe in Jesus Christ in the sense of the Christian creed.
Christian, Islamic, and secular-racist forms of anti-Semitism have been merging for a quarter of a millennium into ever new and more radical combinations of anti-Semitism, a development that has been radicalizing since October 7, 2023.
No other people in history, no other religion in history has ever been and continues to be denigrated by such a wide range of religions and worldviews. The United Nations demonstrates this every day.
What do you mean? Can you elaborate on what was said at the UN?
The UN is not concerned about North Korea and does not conclude from its rejection of the North Korean dictatorship that all North Koreans were and are inherently evil people. In the case of the Jews and Israel, however, all sense of proportion seems to have been lost.
Since World War II, around 13 million people have died in armed conflicts (not including the victims of the consequences of such conflicts, such as famines), around 200,000 of them in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with violence coming from both or several sides. Nevertheless, in the last ten years, twice as many UN condemnations have been directed at Israel as at all of the other nearly 200 states, with practically only one side being held responsible.
There are no worldwide protests and no far-reaching statements by the UN in favor of the 200 million Dalits in India, who are still being trampled on, even though the Indian constitution has prohibited this since 1947.
China is not condemned for the one million Uyghurs in forced camps. Russia is only mildly condemned for its war against the civilian population of Ukraine, where the people predominantly belong to the same Christian denomination. But half the world stands up for the Palestinians every day. The question is whether this is really because they care about their welfare, or simply because it allows them to take action against Israel.
In fact, there is a kind of Arab racism against the Palestinians that can be found everywhere in the Middle East. But the hatred of Israel is so much greater that all Arab countries constantly pay lip service while doing virtually nothing for the Palestinians. Recently, all Arab states, together with other Muslim countries, called on the whole world to impose sanctions on Israel, but they themselves continue to conduct business as usual.
Incidentally, this criticism of the UN’s obsession with Israel applies regardless of how one assesses the decisions of the UN or its departments and organizations in detail and how one views the policies of the 37 governments or cabinets elected in Israel since 1948 and their widely varying policies. One can be opposed to Israel’s policies and still emphasize that the United Nations’ treatment of Israel has lost all sense of proportion.
How do you explain this special position of the Jews or Israel?
Despite studying an entire library on the subject of anti-Semitism, which has made me familiar with many theories, I have yet to find a truly convincing explanation. The strange thing is that anti-Semitism flourishes on every continent, both where there are few or no Jews and where they are clearly visible in social life. And any explanation of anti-Semitism in Christianity, Islam, or secular worldviews fails not only because this spectrum is already very broad in itself, but also because anti-Semitism existed long before the emergence of all three religions and movements, and in such a way that no other ethnic group or religion was similarly affected.
I once had the opportunity while in Indonesia to ask the presidential candidates for their views. They agreed on only one thing: the political problem that needed to be solved for the future of Indonesia was the state of Israel and the Palestinian question. I was speechless, as any solution to the situation in the Holy Land would have virtually no impact on the situation in Indonesia or solve any of the country’s central problems.
Even in ancient times, important writers from Persia, Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Rome provided shocking evidence of the unique exclusion and defamation of Jews. Jews were portrayed as particularly malicious compared to all other peoples of the world and denigrated as fundamental “enemies of humanity” who always resisted state authority. One need only read what the Egyptian author Manetho wrote in the 3rd century BC, the Roman author Tacitus in 110 AD, or the Christian Emperor Constantine in 325 AD to see the evil things they attributed to the Jews. This was taken up by the Church Fathers and then also in early Islam, where it was further expanded. Absurd accusations such as well poisoners, ritual murderers, child eaters, or descendants of the devil have persisted for 2,500 years to this day. As late as 1881, the Jesuit magazine in Rome attempted to prove that ritual murder was a central component of the Jewish religion, and in the Islamic world, this belief is still widespread, even though there is no historical evidence for a single case.
The Roman satirist Juvenal (c. 60–c. 127 AD) made many ugly jokes about Jews, including that they worshipped the pig god. It is hard to believe that this led to the medieval “Judensau” (“Jew sow”), which was found on many of our most beautiful cathedrals and churches and in some cases still is. Martin Luther’s 1543 treatise “Vom Schem Hamphoras” is his most vicious writing ever and is almost unbearable to read, perpetuating a pre-Christian stereotype with the Wittenberg Judensau.
With your thesis of the mixing of Christian, Islamic, and secular-racist versions of anti-Semitism, you are of course also intervening in the German debate on the extent to which the widespread anti-Semitism among Muslims in Germany is not actually Islamic, but rather a European export to the Islamic world.
First of all, anti-Semitism is always to be rejected, as is racism against people with darker skin or the view that all Muslims are liars. Whether I have acquired anti-Semitism myself or inherited it, and where my ancestors got it from, is irrelevant for the moment. For the Jewish visiting professor who was beaten up on the street here in Bonn, it is irrelevant what the perpetrator’s ancestors thought. In such attacks, each of the perpetrators has a slightly different personal and family history of their motives.
But let’s assume that a Muslim in Germany vandalizes synagogues because his grandparents adopted anti-Semitic ideas from France, England, or Germany. So what? Does that make it any less reprehensible? This may be of interest to historians, and it is also important for adult education if one wants to work on deradicalization, but in itself it does not make anti-Semitism any better or worse, just as it does not exonerate Germans that their grandparents were indoctrinated with anti-Semitism. And when terrible anti-Semitic sermons are preached every week in conservative mosques in Germany, this cannot be excused by saying that some of this anti-Semitism came to the Arab world from the West 100 or 60 years ago.
But now to the question itself! Did anti-Semitism come to the Islamic world from the West?
This thesis originally goes back to Bernard Lewis in his book ‘Drive Them into the Sea! History of Anti-Semitism’ (German version1989). But Lewis himself had already documented the enormous spread of anti-Semitism among Muslims worldwide at that time.
The view that Arab anti-Semitism is a Western import is, on one hand, incorrect because anti-Semitism dates back to the early days of Islam, just as Christian anti-Semitism dates back to the early days of Christianity. The conflict between Islam and Judaism dates back to the lifetime of Muhammad. Particular examples include the violent conflicts with the Jewish tribes of Medina and the blanket defamation of Jews as unbelievers, arrogant, greedy, and scheming. Source volumes and source studies with texts from all centuries document centuries of contempt for Jews. There were already pogroms against Jews in the Islamic world in the Middle Ages, even if, as in the Christian world, periods of protection for Jews were replaced by periods of persecution. In the course of the decolonization of the Islamic states in the Middle East, 850,000 Jews were expelled, and most of these countries are now almost free of Jews. Massacres of Jews in 1790 in Tetuan, Morocco; in 1828 in Baghdad, Iraq; in 1834 in Safed, now located in Israel; in 1929 in Hebron; in 1934 in Constantine, Algeria; and in 1945 in Tripoli, Libya, took place before the founding of the state of Israel.
On the other hand, it is correct because the traditional anti-Semitism of the Islamic world was compounded by conspiracy theories originating in the West. As long as Jews were considered weak and losers, they were despised but not seen as a threat, which is why there were no conspiracy theories.
It was only with the immigration of Jews to Palestine and the rise of Zionism that Jews became scapegoats, borrowing from European anti-Semitism. Just as Christian anti-Semitism was the breeding ground for European anti-Semitism, Islamic anti-Semitism was the breeding ground for the development of the Islamic world in the 20th century. Contempt for Jews was coupled with European racist conspiracy theories. From 1937 onwards, the Nazis deliberately used propaganda to stir up hatred of Jews in the Arab world. However, this would not have been successful if anti-Semitism had been foreign to the Arab world until then.
Why were conspiracy theories able to spread so widely in the Islamic world?
Conspiracy theories are used to explain the inexplicable: How could it be that the Arab states, with the support of almost the entire Islamic world, lost several wars against Israel, all of which they began with the feeling that they could quickly wipe Israel off the map? Here, the explanation that Israel was in fact backed by a global Jewish conspiracy of big capital, which had the US firmly in its grip, was tempting.
Israel and its military victories in particular are the main reason why global conspiracy theories have become necessary and acceptable in the Islamic world. In earlier centuries, the Jews as losers did not attract as much hatred as the Jews as “victors”—especially since 1948. This was, of course, based on the humiliating and, to this day, often unresolved confrontation between the Islamic world and Western modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries, with Jews serving as scapegoats for the failure of Islamic regimes.
However, I must add a qualification here that only further underscores my thesis of intermingling: Western anti-Semitism first entered the Islamic world through Arab Christian communities in the 19th century. In the Damascus Affair of 1840, for example, the accusation of ritual murder was introduced by Christians, and it has remained prominent in the Middle East to this day. The hatred of Jews felt by many Arab churches and Christians today is much older than the founding of the state of Israel, and Arab Christians have participated in the persecution of Jews in Arab countries for almost two centuries.
Can we talk about a third influential worldview alongside Christianity and Islam?
The secular, rather racist variant of anti-Semitism in Europe had a long run-up before it gained ground, especially in the 19th century in France, England, and Germany, and then in the 20th century from Russia with the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and finally through National Socialism, it began a devastating triumphal march.
In Spain, a new view prevailed at the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century as a result of the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of all of Spain. Although most Jews and remaining Muslim Moors had been forced to be baptized (or leave the country) since 1492, the prevailing religious intolerance now became racist. Because of their ancestry, Jews and Moors often remained enemies in the eyes of the church even after baptism and were not really regarded as believers. Anti-Semitism thus took on a new form with the Spanish policy of “blood purity” (limpieza de sangre), in which the practice of the Jewish religion no longer played a constitutive role in being Jewish.
Fast forward to the 19th century, where, in the wake of Darwin’s theory of evolution, all kinds of racist variants of anti-Semitism emerged, in which the evil no longer lay in the Jewish religion but in the nature of the Jews, who were said to be malicious and devious compared to all other peoples. With the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the non-religious variant of anti-Semitism acquired the element that prevails today, namely that Jews, defined in racial terms, were implementing a dangerous global conspiracy against humanity. This global conspiracy ideology has only partially affected and exacerbated Christian anti-Semitism worldwide, but it has almost completely affected, expanded, and exacerbated Islamic anti-Semitism.
In summary, it can be said that both religious forms of anti-Semitism were originally directed primarily against Judaism as a different religion. If Jews converted to Christianity or Islam, everything was fine. It was only later that anti-Semitism took on a racist character in some quarters, and Jews remained suspect even if they converted. In Christianity, this development began with the Reconquista in Spain.
The opposite was still evident in the Third Reich, when even those church leaders who said anything at all (mostly representatives of the so-called “Confessing Church” in Germany) stood up for baptized Jews and no longer regarded them as Jews but as Christians, but not for unbaptized Jews. For National Socialism, on the other hand—and unfortunately also for many representatives of the German Christians—it did not matter whether Jews practiced their religion, were non-religious, or had converted to Christianity generations ago.
Secular conspiracy theories merged with Christian anti-Semitism in Europe and the US at the end of the 19th century and in the 20th century, and then with Islam, especially in the Arab world, since the immigration of Jews to Palestine and particularly since the war of 1948.
This amalgamation is also the reason why anti-Semitism as hatred of Jews per se and anti-Semitism as hatred of the state of Israel are increasingly merging and are now virtually indistinguishable in the current anti-Israel protests worldwide. When, for example, a German of the Jewish faith is spat on in protest against Israel’s policies, or when it is claimed that “the Jews” are committing genocide in Gaza, it becomes clear that most anti-Semites make no distinction between Jews and Israel. At Princeton University, I interviewed Jewish students who were attacked even though they were protesting against Israel’s policies. The fact that they spoke out against Netanyahu did not change the perpetrators’ view that, as Jews, they were the bad guys who deserved to be punished.
One more thing: from 1949 until about 1967, all left-wing parties and groups in Germany were pro-Israel, and this view was even seen as a socialist project. This happened in parallel with the promotion of war-crimes trials and the demand for denazification. Even Rudi Dutschke was pro-Israel. It was only after the Six-Day War that solidarity with Palestinian terrorists began to grow rapidly. Anti-Semitism became the norm on the left of the political spectrum. Of course, it would be necessary to explain exactly what is meant by the left of the spectrum and how each individual party or organization was positioned, but here I would just like to point out in general terms this change of sides after 1967, which ultimately led to the strange phalanx of left-wing organizations and individuals with extremist Muslim organizations that we find today, especially in the media and the arts, as well as at demonstrations in support of Hamas.
Let us now turn to our own religion. You also claim that anti-Semitism is much more deeply rooted in Christianity in general, and in theology in particular, than the fact that almost all churches condemn it today would suggest.
Yes, I am convinced of that. But to explain this, we need to take a broader view. May I highlight the early church, the Reformation period, and the 19th century?
Yes, please!
Adversus Judaeos literature is a special genre of early Christian writings that are directed against Judaism. These texts were written from around 175 AD onwards by Christian authors in order to strengthen the distinction between Christianity and Judaism and to criticize the Jewish religion. In terms of content, these writings often contain theological arguments claiming that God had rejected the Jewish people and that the covenant with Israel had now passed to the Christians. They criticize the Jewish Torah, reject Jewish concepts and customs, and often portray Jews as disobedient to God and enemies of Christians. Well-known representatives of this literature are Tertullian, Hippolytus of Rome, and Cyprian, whose works argue polemically against Judaism. Augustine of Hippo also wrote a famous treatise, “Tractatus adversus Judaeos,” which further shaped this attitude. The above-mentioned figures, along with the Epistle of Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Chrysostom, and Ambrose, represent the elite of the Church Fathers.
Symptomatic of this is the devastating reasoning given by the Council of Nicaea as to why Easter should no longer fall on the date of the Jewish Passover but must be celebrated independently of Jewish rites. Emperor Constantine then wrote an even more vicious letter to all bishops stating that the church should have nothing to do with any Jewish rites, since the Jews had crucified Christ and their rites were superstitious and abominable. Four years before the council, the emperor had therefore decreed Sunday as a weekly holiday by imperial law. Since then, Jews around the world have had to fight for the right to stop working on Saturday, their Sabbath.
Anti-Semitism should and could have ended with the Reformation, as this movement distanced itself from many of the evil developments in church history and the Old Testament was given high importance as the word of God. The revival of Hebrew studies of the Old Testament and large parts of Reformed theology made positive contributions to taking the Jewish religion seriously. However, the Lutheran wing of the Reformation often contributed to anti-Semitic theology by arguing that the Old Testament was “Jewish” and legalistic, while at the same time attempting to prove that Catholics were like Jews and therefore wrong. Certainly, there is more to say about 500 years of Protestant history, but the point here is only to give examples of how deeply rooted anti-Semitism was.
Let’s move on to the 19th century. This anti-Semitism in theology found its liberal expression in the view of historical-critical arguments that the Old Testament had been invented by Jewish priests who, for their own benefit, gave the impression that it was an ancient text. It was no coincidence that the Old Testament was questioned much earlier and much more vehemently than the New Testament, even though archaeologists and historians often came to much more positive overall conclusions, which later led to books such as ‘Und die Bibel hat doch Recht’ (“And the Bible Is Right after All”). Here, too, one would of course have to go into detail.
Protestant anti-Semitism also found several evangelical expressions, although evangelicals generally had a different view, mainly because for them the Old Testament is just as much God’s infallible word as the New Testament. Nevertheless, despite all their support for the state of Israel, founded in 1948, some forms of dispensationalism that emerged in the 19th century see the Jews as allies of the Antichrist in the future (at least before their future conversion). Here, too, one would of course have to go into detail and differentiate, and I do not want to give an assessment of which eschatological view of the future most closely corresponds to Scripture.
Finally, let us turn to the current situation. Where do you see the greatest challenge in Europe today with regard to the new, growing anti-Semitism?
Freedom of religion and belief is a human right. Human rights not only precede the state and are rightly demanded, regardless of whether they are enshrined in the actual laws of a state; they are also a task for the state, which must protect human rights, including by punishing violations and actively protecting them, if necessary with the use of state force. Torture is not only wrong and prohibited by the state, but the state must also intervene with law enforcement agencies when people torture other people and prevent such torture as far as possible.
The protection of Jewish fellow citizens is, of course, not based solely on religious freedom, because they are entitled to the sameprotection as every other citizen, but it is also about protecting the freedom of religion and belief of Jews, as well as protecting their freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and other rights. This is where the challenge lies: the more anti-Semitism is linked to calls for violence or the direct use of violence, and the greater the number of people involved, the more only the state can curb this anti-Semitism.
As citizens or even as a church, we can certainly show moral courage, but we cannot perform sovereign tasks in place of the state. So when politicians rightly and publicly advocate for Jews to be able to live safely and freely in our country, they must be aware that the current anti-Semitism on the streets cannot be combated simply with lip service. Rather, it represents a challenge to state authority in every form, unfortunately also because the security forces in our country are often insufficient in number. At the same time, every state authority that is involved in this effort deserves our gratitude.
Thank you for the interview!
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- Photo: Thomas Paul Schirrmacher at the “Wall of Death” of the Memorial Auschwitz I in Poland on March 18, 2024 © IIRF/Schirrmacher
- Jahrbuch Religionsfreiheit 2025 [Yearbook on Religious Freedom 2025]: https://iirf.global/?p=6393
