Sublime

But if the Jews do not instruct through their history or their presence, and if that presence is so dangerous to Christ and to Christians, why do the Jews survive in Christendom at all?

But the search for a Roman reality behind the charges very much misses the point of these texts: they are the product of an ideology that represented the struggle against tyranny in terms of a struggle against the Jews.

“[To] call someone a Jew amounts to an instigation to work him over until he resembles the image.”

It was in its Renaissance that western Europe achieved what the Middle Ages had at most dreamed of: a world free of Jews.

boundaries of an antiblack world might, in other words, remain virtual (that is, immanent or imagined), yet one's paranoia is still a correct measure of

After all, Jews and their synagogue had long been the whipping boys of preachers and exegetes: “If hatred of Jews makes the Christian, then we are all plenty Christian,” as both Erasmus and Luther put it at much the same time.

But this insistence on a bright contrast between the attitudes and practices of the spiritual Christian toward commerce, and those of the fleshy Jew, was becoming more difficult to maintain in a world in which the wheels of commerce were accelerating, and from which the Jews themselves had vanished.9