The allure of antisemitism lies in its function as a structured and systematic rebellion against the Biblical God — a rebellion carried out through a critique of His handiwork, namely the Jewish people. It allows the believer to re-enact a core worldview in a repetitive yet redemptive fashion, and it grants him the standing of a moral agent who ratifies the two central principles of his religion: original sin, and the divinity of the Son.
Original sin is a doctrine of antagonism toward the outcome of the six days of creation. Jew-hatred, in its Catholic and Lutheran form, is not merely an extension of that hatred toward the object of creation tarnished by sin at its culmination on the sixth day — sinful man — but its ultimate expression.
Without antisemitism, hatred of creation can neither embody itself nor transcend itself. Without the Jew, the Son-savior can be neither enthroned over the Father's message nor denied, and ultimate truth and ultimate falsehood have nothing to stand on. Without Jew-negation, original sin remains undifferentiated: there is no distinction between those who accept salvation from a sinful creation and those who not only refuse it, but swear by the name of that refusal and proclaim its superiority.
Salvation by the Son, and the displacement of the Father-Creator from the center — the movement the Gospels perform — require this Jewish negation and its negative valuation. The Jew must therefore be a radical and dual form of sin. First, by being human, and even a "chosen one," he demonstrates that sin is inescapable. Second, by denying salvation and killing the savior, he becomes the father once more: a generator of sin in real time, a replica of the Father who kills the Son in order to prevent the world of sin — created by the Father and his children — from coming to an end. That world can be healed not by a second coming, which never arrives, but only by the Son and his new believers. The act of salvation must therefore be re-enacted continually, through a rubric of sin that always exists and always serves as the reference point.
Paul's sinful man reaches catharsis only when he is embodied by a Jew, the figure Matthew leaves standing over the fate of the Father's world. If sinful man is a creation of God, the sinful Jew is his late embodiment, clinging to sin and rejecting salvation.
With this we pass from passive belief in Christ into an action-status, defined through the characterization of the Jew. Only in his active denunciation can we testify to a pre-salvation world and make it concrete inside a post-salvation reality that demands active interpretation. Only through him can we witness the blueprint of the original fallen world walking among us. Our relation to him must therefore mimic our distaste for sin itself, and for the parallel, physical, Son-less world he inhabits — a world that, in the absence of a second coming, is the only imaginative promise Christianity makes that enacts its core gnostic dualism of good and evil beyond the promises of the Gospel. This is almost a law.
None of this means that every Christian adopts a hatred of creation, or the displacement of the Father. Some denominations, though still a minority, reject both doctrines outright. But only antisemitism can establish, as a system, an expression of original sin together with its persistence after Christ, uniting these two great evils with a deserving spite aimed at the Father's principal characters — His children. With all due distinction, this is almost a Talmudic move: a Christian Oven of Akhnai, in which believers generate a new category in order to direct their conduct by it.
The Jew — being of sin and directly of the Father, and standing in direct opposition to salvation — is the only creature capable of killing God and then remaining behind to maintain sin, both within a single being. Just as he is at once physically real and mentally resident in a parallel pre-Christ existence, so too, temporally, he can be in two places at once: in a world where God is dead and sin still enjoys life. These two functions render him logically demonic. They emphasize a bearing of sin across generations that transcends time and space, and yet can be placed neatly within concrete spatial and temporal settings — undermining the deification of the Son, and denying the true nature of redemption and of the redeeming divinity, all enacted within his already tormented being.
The Jew, as Augustine understood, is a necessary spectacle, and his existence is proof of the old God's mistakes. As a ghost among the nations, Judaism holds the strange power of bringing life to others, for only through Jew-negation can a theological synthesis emerge in which the two most important ideas of Christianity come alive. Only through it can absolute evil, before sin and after it, appear to stem from the Creator, proving the darkness of this earth; and only through him can obstruction to the displacement of that same Creator's plans take visible form.
This becomes more radical in traditional European Roman Catholicism, where personal salvation is denied outside the Church, and where institutional frameworks continually drive believers to seek an institutional foe. Only the Jew can embody a dual original sin, in body and in doctrine alike — usable not only to reaffirm maxims and to create a referential other, but to lay blame upon the Jew's faulty one-creator. The believer wishes to hurl blame at the Jew for his bad relation to his father; and at that father himself; and also at one of the Jew's own brothers, who suddenly rises to become someone else's father.
Once a denomination severs the link between original sin and the divinity of Jesus as redeemer, it becomes less reliant on the Jew. The Jew no longer serves as a recurring manifestation of original sin, nor as the standing rejection of Jesus' divine role. He reverts to a concrete historical figure, and can even be seen as a founder and a contributor rather than a theological construct. The persistence of antisemitism in some of these circles is then best explained as a remnant of the ancient world — stereotypes absorbed into post-theological perspectives. Where Christian communities adopt pluralism and distance themselves from original sin and from exclusive salvation through Jesus, they become less dependent on anti-Jewish theology; in liberal Christianity there is no longer a need for the Jew as a living witness to sin and to the rejection of salvation. Segments of Protestantism have freed the Jew from his demonic role in precisely this way, as in Unitarian Christianity.
Why, then, did antisemitism persist in the secular world? In Catholic nationalism it survived as the myth of the Jew as contaminator of the national body. In communism it survived because communism functioned as a secularized Catholicism: as in traditional Catholicism, where the Jew was the theological antagonist, Marxist ideology recast him as a class enemy — an obstacle to the revolution rather than to the divine order. And in the reactionary movements that grew out of that same Catholic form, fascism and Nazism, he became the obstacle to the wholeness of the nation's body.
Yet these are all abstractions. It is only through the Jew's deeds, and those of his descendants — which harden into a social category through his peculiar actions across history — that the departed Christ can be deified by the defamation of those who negate him. Without the Jew, this religion is merely an idea, lacking any moral representation. Whether because of his persecution or otherwise, only the negated Jew can generate structural and literary depth of this richness around the religion's core convictions concerning sin and salvation, and bind them into a socio-historical setting — far surpassing what Christian theology and law have managed to produce on their own.
In this sense, antisemitism is the Jew in Christianity: an elegant solution, and a mirror reflecting the theological and legal impoverishment of Catholic and Lutheran Christianity as they stand, without the creation of the Father, and without the forceful negation of the Son as embodied by His children.
