This post is dedicated to Warren McGrew and Lloyd De Jongh who are more than happy to accuse the Protestant reformers of antisemitism (which is true) and then ignore the [Roman Catholic] Church Fathers when guilty of the same sin.
The violence of the language used by St. John Chrysostom in his homilies against the Jews has never been exceeded by any preacher whose sermons have been recorded [that includes Martin Luther]. Allowances must, no doubt, be made for the custom of the times, for passionate zeal, and for the fear that some tender shoots of Christian faith might be chilled by too much contact with Jews. But no amount of allowance can alter the fact that these homilies filled the minds of Christian congregations with a hatred which was transmitted to their children, and to their children’s children, for many generations. These homilies, moreover, were used for centuries, in schools and in seminaries where priests were taught to preach, with St. John Chrysostom as their model – where priests were taught to hate, with St. John Chrysostom as their model.
There was no “touch of heaven” in the language used by St. John Chrysostom when he was teaching about Jewish synagogues. “The synagogue,” he said, “is worse than a brothel . . . it is the den of scoundrels and the repair of wild beasts . . . the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults . . . the refuge of brigands and debauchees, and the cavern of devils.”
The synagogue, he told his congregations in another sermon, was a “criminal assembly of Jews . . . a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ . . . a house worse than a drinking shop . . . a den of thieves, a house of ill fame, a dwelling of iniquity, the refuge of devils, a gulf and abyss of perdition.” And he concluded, exhausted at length by his eloquence: “Whatever name is more horrible could be found, will never be worse than the synagogue deserves.”
These sermons have not been forgotten; nor the contempt for Judaism diminished among the Christian congregations since they were first preached more than fifteen hundred years ago: “The synagogue is nigh to a curse. Obstinate in her error, she refuses to see or to hear; she has extinguished within herself the light of the Holy Spirit; she will go deeper and deeper into evil, and at length fall into the abyss.” St. John Chrysostom was right in suggesting that future generations would think of even more horrible insults. “Sympathy for the Jews,” wrote Leon Bloy, “is a sign of turpitude . . . It is impossible to earn the esteem of a dog if one does not feel an instinctive disgust for the Synagogue.”
Malcoln Hay, “The Roots of Christian Anti-Semitism”, pp. 27-28