19. Christian Anti-Semitism seems to have begun after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD
Christianity, lest we forget, came from Judaism, and Jesus was himself a Jew. But it is interesting to note that, according to scholars, serious friction between two faiths which saw the same man as, variously, a heretic and the Son of God did not erupt straight after Jesus was crucified in c.33 AD. Instead, it took the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 AD during the Roman-Jewish Wars to forge a great, and still sometimes-irresolvable, schism. To both Jews and Christians, this seemed an instance of Divine Justice, but who had offended God?
Naturally, rabbis blamed the Temple’s fall on Christians worshipping a false prophet. The Christians in turn amplified the role of the Jews in the death of Christ, whose crucifixion had previously been blamed largely upon the Romans. Now, Gospel passages such as Matthew 27:25 placed the blame squarely on the older faith: when Pontius Pilate asked the Jews if they were sure they wanted Christ executed, they replied, ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children’. For the early Christians, Jewish culpability was evidenced by their exile their homeland, and antisemitism thenceforth became an important part of Christianity.