Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism

Teter, Magda

ISBN 10: 0691242585 / ISBN 13: 9780691242583

Published by Princeton University Press, 2023

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691242585
• ISBN 13: 9780691242583
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

A panoramic cultural and legal history that traces the roots of antisemitism and racism to early Christian theology

Since the earliest days of Christianity, theologians expressed pervasive anxiety about Jews as equal members of society, and, with European expansion in the early modern period, that anxiety extended to people of color. This troubling legacy still haunts us today. Christian Supremacy demonstrates how theological and legal frameworks created by the church centuries ago laid the seeds of antisemitism and anti-Black racism and reveals why Christian identity lies at the heart of the world’s violent white supremacy movements.

In a powerful historical narrative spanning nearly two millennia, Magda Teter describes how Christian theology of late antiquity cast Jews as “children born to slavery,” and how the supposed theological inferiority of Jews became inscribed into law, creating tangible structures that reinforced a sense of Christian domination and superiority. With the dawn of European colonialism, a distinct brand of European Christian supremacy found expression in the legally sanctioned enslavement and exploitation of people of color, later taking the form of white Christian supremacy in the New World.

Drawing on a wealth of primary evidence ranging from the theological and legal to the philosophical and artistic, Christian Supremacy is a profound reckoning with history that traces the roots of the modern rejection of Jewish and Black equality to an enduring Christian heritage of exclusion, intolerance, and persecution.

About the Author

Magda Teter is professor of history and the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth, which won a National Jewish Book Award; Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation; and Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland.