Overview

In medieval Europe, Jews were not passive victims of the Christian community, as is often assumed, but rather were startlingly assertive, forming a Jewish civilization within Latin Christian society. Both Jews and Christians considered themselves to be God's chosen people. These dueling claims fueled the rise of both cultures as they became rivals for supremacy. In How the West Became Antisemitic, Ivan Marcus shows how Christian and Jewish competition in medieval Europe laid the foundation for modern antisemitism. Marcus explains that Jews accepted Christians as misguided practitioners of their ancestral customs, but regarded Christianity as idolatry. Christians, on the other hand, looked at Jews themselves--not Judaism--as despised. They directed their hatred at a real and imagined Jew: theoretically subordinate, but sometimes assertive, an implacable ""enemy within."" In their view, Jews were permanently and physically Jewish--impossible to convert to Christianity. Thus Christians came to hate Jews first for religious reasons, and eventually for racial ones. Modern antisemitism, based on the imagined Jew as powerful and world dominating, is a transformation of this medieval hatred. How the West Became Antisemitic is an ambitious new interpretation of the medieval world and its impact on modernity.

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Ivan G. Marcus is the Frederick P. Rose Professor of Jewish History at Yale University. He is the author of Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany; Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe; The Jewish Life Cycle: Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times; and ""Sefer Hasidim"" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe. David de Vries can be seen in a number of feature films, including The Founder, The Accountant, Captain America: Civil War, and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. On television, his credits include House of Cards, Nashville, Halt and Catch Fire, the National Geographic film Killing Reagan, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for HBO. As a veteran stage actor, David appeared as Lumiere in Disney's Beauty and the Beast on Broadway, as Dr. Dillamond in the Los Angeles and Chicago companies of Wicked, and in hundreds of shows in regional theaters throughout the country. He is an Audie and Odyssey Award-winning narrator for his performance in Pam Munoz Ryan's Echo and has voiced over 100 titles in every genre, including his Audie Award-nominated performance of the 2011 Caldecott winner A Sick Day for Amos McGee.

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