The Changing Faces of Antisemitism

The Changing Faces of Antisemitism is Muriel Seltman’s examination into the roots and causes of antisemitism. Starting with the Gospels and moving forward across time, she identifies the causes of modern, globalised antisemitism. It was Muriel Seltman’s own experience of unwitting antisemitism that was the catalyst for her writing this book – the discovery that many well-meaning people, whose religious education has been Christian and who know that Jesus was Jewish ethnically, find it hard to accept that he was a devoutly religious Jew. The opening chapters deal with the Jewishness of Jesus and the Gospel treatment of the trial and crucifixion, showing that it was not the Jews who killed Jesus – it was the Roman secular authorities in collusion with the Jewish religious authorities who were responsible for the crucifixion. From then on, the Church set about distancing Jesus from his Jewishness and this was followed by the development of Christian, Muslim and secular antisemitism (including that of Martin Luther and Karl Marx), which persists today but in new forms. Muriel Seltman, a nontheist with no personal religious agenda, investigates the roots and causes of antisemitism to find out what this tells us about the rise of antisemitism in the modern world.