Emotion and the popularization of anti-Jewish discourse in early modern Europe

Abstract

The work argues that we need to nuance the perception of the early modern period as one of bland continuity in European anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic thought and discourse by closely examining early modern printed works of anti-Jewish propaganda created for a ‘popular’ readership and their ‘emotional’ dimension. There are discernible trends in some early modern polemics and their anti-Jewish discourse that the study of emotions can help us understand why the notion that the Talmud taught the Jews to hate and want to kill Gentiles became a perennial and dominant feature of anti-Jewish propaganda produced in the West in the early modern period. Authors seeking to create a sense of collective ‘self’ needed a fear- and horror-inducing Jewish ‘other’. The traditional image of the obdurate, pitiful but essentially helpless Jew of Augustinian theology was, accordingly, discarded by such authors. In its place, Rabbinic Judaism became caricatured as a death cult whose leaders the Rabbis - or rather ‘Talmudists’ as they were derisively called - inspired hatred of Christians from one generation of Jews to another; a hatred supposedly enacted not only in supposed economic parasitism but in the systematical and ritualized murder of innocent Christian men, women, and children.