Anti-Judaism: A History

This course will examine the history of anti-Judaism from antiquity to the present as an enduring and protean prejudice. It will examine how a series of thinkers - some famous, some less so, some recent, some ancient, some Jews and some not - have used Judaism as a category against which to construct their own ideas. The course will begin in antiquity, in the worlds of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, continue through early and later Christianity, and conclude in the modern period. It will examine both the fundamental distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism as well as the considerable overlaps.