Europe long imagined Jews as strangers — tolerated but never at home. Yet Jewish life in Europe was not imported. It was constructed. Jews were assigned a role and sustained as part of Europe’s own ecosystem [1].
A powerful myth holds that the Judeans possessed a unique genius, a moral law unlike any other. In truth, they were one Semitic people among many in the Near East [2]. The region was crowded with codes and visions: Babylonian statutes, Egyptian wisdom, Hittite law, Mesopotamian precedents, Zoroastrian fire rituals, Ugaritic hymns, Mithraic mysteries. Nothing set Judeans apart as destined for world prominence [3].
Their later centrality was an accident. A series of historical contingencies lifted one strand of their tradition above the rest. The Roman world was fractured and restless. New cults appeared constantly. One Judean sect spread beyond its birthplace, catching on among Gentiles [4].
Not through design or inevitability, but through circumstance: plagues that discredited the old gods, imperial crises that made people hunger for certainty, the unpredictable favor of emperors [5]. It might have been Mithraism. It might have been the cult of Isis, or the mysteries of Zoroaster. By chance, it was Christianity — and with it, the law and scripture of the Judeans. And the common idea that Israelite religion was somehow the necessary one among these Eastern faiths is a retroactive mind trick, an after-the-event rationalization that makes history sound more inevitable than it was.
Even the chosen scripture was not ready-made. What we now call the Bible began in cuneiform scratches on tablets, fragments of law and story, edited and re-edited over centuries [6]. For nearly a thousand years it was translated, compiled, reshaped. Only when this process was completed, the text crystallized into the Bible we know.
From this accident of adoption came the myth of Jewish uniqueness. What had been one code among many was suddenly elevated as the moral cornerstone of Europe. Admiration and resentment followed in equal measure. Centuries later this would transform into industrialized genocide.
Europe also required an economic order. Aristocrats held land, peasants were bound to it. To protect their own power, aristocrats denied peasants and others the possibility of social mobility. Instead, they set apart a distinct group — Jews — to perform economic functions barred to others [7].
Jews were excluded from the peasant economy and placed in a separate role: merchants, moneylenders, administrators. Their position was contradictory — granted privileges yet hemmed in by discrimination, indispensable yet precarious. Their privileges could be revoked overnight. The peasant, suffering under lordship, was told his enemy was the Jew. Theology reinforced it: worldly success balanced by eternal damnation.
And yet the people in this role did not arrive ready-made. They had to be formed into it. They were forged within Rome itself. They spoke Latin and Greek, lived in Roman towns, married Roman women, absorbed Roman customs — some carried patrician bloodlines [8].
By the time Jewish communities moved into Italy and northward into Europe, they were more Roman than Judean in ancestry — in particular descended from literate urban classes. Genetics confirms this (Atsmon; Behar): Jews trace back to the very urban Romans who helped create Europe itself [9]. To call them outsiders is to erase the fact that they were born from Europe’s own body.
The supposed clash between Judaism and Christianity was less a timeless feud than a ritual antagonism. Europe needed an opposite, and it contrived one: Jews cast as Antichrist, a necessary shadow that kept Christendom’s image sharp [10].
The antagonism was no accident of difference but a deliberate feature, sustained because Christianity required its reflection — dark, distorted, and indispensable. In this sense, Jews were almost a branch of Christianity itself: its unwanted double, the projection of what Christendom disowned in itself.
And we Jews need to see this too — we were never a rival faith battling Christianity for supremacy. We were more its footnote, preserved as its necessary shadow.
The twentieth century revealed the irony. Nazis idolised Rome and Athens, marching in imitation of marble antiquity. Yet the Jews they persecuted were living continuities of that same world — descendants of literate, urban Romans, the very people who had created Europe.
To worship stone while destroying flesh was history turned on its head.
Racism is never merely prejudice; it is a political instrument, fashioned to turn resentment downward rather than upward. It reduces people to shadows and scapegoats, stripping away humanity and recasting them as embodiments of evil.
Nationalism offers no remedy. Like Zionism, it rests on the illusion that survival requires separation. The real task is not to divide humanity further, but to dismantle the very machinery of racism itself.
References
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage, 1979.
Liverani, Mario. Israel’s History and the History of Israel. Equinox, 2005.
Smith, Mark S. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton University Press, 1996.
Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Carr, David M. The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Salo, Baron. A Social and Religious History of the Jews. Columbia University Press, 1952.
Goodman, Martin. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. Penguin, 2008.
Behar, Doron M., et al. “The Genome-Wide Structure of the Jewish People.” Nature, vol. 466, 2010, pp. 238–242.
Boyarin, Daniel. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.