Antisemitism: Medieval, Modern, Postmodern Part I

In 1996 I wrote an essay on Jewish-Christian relations entitled “What Has 2000 to Do with 5760?,” in which I expressed concern over the possible effect that the passage of 2000 might have on the exceptional period of philo-Judaism that has marked Western society from the end of the Holocaust until the present. Indeed, the last 60 years may well mark the most exceptional and sustained period of philo-Judaism in the history of JewishGentile relations, and the results—a flourishing and creative civil society precisely where those relations are best—seem to support the larger argument of this essay about the relationship between Judaism and civil society. On the other hand, as a historian familiar with the pattern of Christian and post-Christian history, in which periods of philo-Judaism end up flipping into their opposite and generating a sometimes furious episode of anti-Judaism, I wondered about a downswing in the aftermath of 2000. I chose this date as the point of the downturn for two reasons. First, it was the date of choice for many of the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians whose support of Israel and whose love of Jews is intimately