But the people among whom Jews lived drew the opposite theological conclusion from Jewish statelessness, which they regarded as confirmation of the moral failure of Judaism. Christians did not see that the Jews were subservient to God, but subservient to them, and claimed that God was punishing the Jews for the killing of Christ. Religion on both sides reinforced opposite interpretations of Jewish political dependency. Jews accepted their share of blame for their political disabilities as a function of their special status in the scheme of all-powerful God, while Christians (as well as Muslims) took Jewish imperfections as proof of Jewish iniquity and of their own truer religious claims.

Christian polemicists demonstrated just this point in the public disputations that were forced upon the Jews. Thus, in the disputation at Barcelona of 1263, the convert to Christianity Pablo Christiani used political evidence to demonstrate that the Jews had betrayed their faith when they denied Jesus. Citing Jacob’s deathbed prophecy, “The scepter shall not pass away from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet; so that tribute shall come to him, and the homage of peoples be his,”²⁴ Christiani pointed out that the very opposite had happened, which proved that the Jews had betrayed their holy mission: “Since, therefore, it is certain that in Judah there is neither scepter nor leader, it is certain that the messiah [i.e., Jesus] who was to be sent has come.” The Jews’ representative, Nahmanides, parried this attack with great wit and rational argument. He countered that the scepter had not been removed from Judah, but merely suspended, as it was in the time of the Babylonian captivity. But this did not convince the Christian, and according to the Christian account of the disputes:

It was proved to him [Nahmanides] that in Babylon they had the heads of the captivity with jurisdiction, but after the death of Christ they had neither leader nor prince nor the heads of captivity such as those attested by the prophet Daniel, nor prophet nor any kind of rule, as is manifestly plain today.²⁵

Thus, in the Christian account, Nahmanides is forced to admit that Jews had not had their own rulers for the last 850 years. And taking their power over the Jews as proof of their ascendancy, these Christians were convinced they had nothing to fear theologically from aggressing against the Jews. (Fittingly, despite having been given assurances of immunity for taking part in the disputation, Nahmanides was tried for blasphemy and forced to leave Spain.)

Just as the theology of Jews and their overlords reinforced opposite interpretations of Jewish political dependency, the folk mythology of Jews and gentiles went in opposite directions as well. The Jewish myth of survival in the diaspora seemed to grow with each new expulsion, massacre and inquisition. As Tisha B’Av, the day commemorating the destruction of the FirstTemple, came to incorporate successive national disasters that occurred (or were said to have occurred) on the same day, so each new catastrophe could be interpreted in the light of the ones before it. David Roskies, a modern anthologist of the literature of destruction, shows how Jewish responses to catastrophe recycled the same archetypes and rituals, each generation commemorating its own tragedies in the imagery and prooftexts of the generations before it.²⁶ Paradoxically, the long history of Jewish tragedy was experienced by those who survived it as proof that they were indomitable. In the Passover Hagada we read: “In every generation they stand up against us to destroy us, and the Holy One saves us from their hand.” The emphasis of this prayer falls not on the repetitive aggressions, but on the fact that some segment of the community survives. In the Jewish day school that I attended as a child, we learned the Yiddish poem “Eternal,” by H. Leivick, in which the suffering Jew triumphs over every kind of humiliation and agony:

The world rings me round with its barbed hands

And bears me to the fire, and bears me to the pyre;

I burn and I burn and I am not consumed—

I lift myself up and stride ever onward.²⁷

Leivick casts the Jewish people as the burning bush, as if the perennial pyre had become proof that the Jews would never be consumed.

But those encircling the Jews with their barbed hands drew much more obvious conclusions from the same body of evidence, namely, that the Jewish people could be persecuted with impunity. The political usefulness of the Jews as targets of aggression increased with each successive expulsion, massacre and relocation. As the Jews were forced to move from place to place, their myth became more potent, representing to gentiles the opposite of what it did to the Jews—the myth of a people destined for abuse. In popular Christian legend Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew is doomed to live restlessly until the end of the world because he had taunted Jesus on the way to the crucifixion.²⁸ So, too, the reputation of the Jews spread with them, from land to land across the Middle East and the continent of Europe, until they became the people with the largest international image, the image of a people whom everyone could attack without fear of reprisal.

Emancipation, in recognizing the dignity of the individual, was meant to enhance human opportunity and freedoms. The decline of autocracy and the granting of individual rights meant that Jews would no longer be defined as a separate estate, but would share in the obligations that citizenship conferred on all individuals alike. When the gates of the ghettos were duly flung open, many Jews eagerly entered the general society. But instead of easing the Jewish political predicament, the beginnings of democratization brought the crisis to a head. The Jews had conducted their politics by adapting to local power, but once that power moved into the hands of “the people,” how were Jews to satisfy the needs and expectations of a public that did not uniformly know its own mind? Political strategy among the Jews was now complicated by the breakdown of communal authority, as some Jews continued to seek corporate protection from the elites, while others pursued liberalization or revolution. But within each national polity, the gentiles who were engaged in the struggle for power often saw their greatest opportunity as stemming from opposition to the Jews. The autocrat rules either well or badly by virtue of the power invested in him, but the democratic power to rule must be won and maintained by an open and competitive appeal to the masses. The elected politician needs political catchwords that can unite diverse constituencies, and perhaps, above all, explanations that can assure those constituencies that their problems can be solved. The democratization of politics proved a mixed blessing for the Jews, because, as Gerson Cohen hinted in his analysis, the liability of the Jews as the most conspicuous minority in Europe made them attractive targets from below as well as above. The modern period saw the Jews trying frantically to satisfy gentile expectations while many gentiles dodged their problems by blaming them on the Jews.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Jews had become the ideal political tool of the demagogue, the politician who pretends to greater power than he actually wields. Because of their exaggerated image and evident accomplishments the Jews could be cast as a major adversary by politicians who knew perfectly well that this “powerful people” could offer no actual resistance. The usefulness of the Jews as an organizing target of politics turned anti-Semitism into one of the most prominent ideologies of Europe. Nationalists had a field day with the Jews, who were everywhere the most notorious resident people, and who served as the perfect example of who was not a Frenchman, not a German, not a Russian or a Pole. Karl Marx had singled out the Jews as the agents of capitalism in a stunningly aggressive attack on the Jewish religion (“The bill of exchange is the Jew’s actual god”), setting the tone for the Left’s opposition to Judaism over and above opposition to religion in general.²⁹ The success of individual Jews became a political liability for the group. Their visibility made it easy to blame the Jews for the major problems and anxieties troubling the electorate: They were charged with cramping the economy, undermining the national spirit or polluting the blood. Hitler famously credited the Jews with being both capitalists and Bolsheviks, appealing simultaneously to fears of the Left and of the Right. Since Jews had to win protection by proving their social value, or at least their harmlessness, potential aggressors knew they were taking no risk in directing their attacks against them. Far from rendering them inert and innocuous, the strategy of accommodation had turned the Jews into the chief instrument of gentile politics.