Introduction

Summary

Antisemitism¹ is a late 19th-century (1870) term based on pseudo-scientific racial theory that was coined to describe in a new way opposition to, and hatred of, the Jewish People and their form of life. Though a relatively recent linguistic and ideological construction, it draws on and extends a much older tradition of anti-Jewish enmity that has its roots in the pre-Christian world of Greece, Rome, and Hellenistic Egypt and was then reinterpreted and radically reconceived in early Christianity beginning with the writings of Paul and the four Gospels that form the core of the New Testament.