rking their addresses with a star of David, and wearing armbands, belts, and badges with the star on them.
There was nothing particularly new about these measures as far as European culture was concerned. Hilberg (6-8ff) explains the laws with reference to similar restrictions that had been placed on Jews by the Catholic Church from the Christian era through the Middle Ages. Wistrich locates roots of antisemitism as far back as the pre-Christian Diaspora. The controlling argument is that, the Jews' deliberate dissociation from dominant society, social cohesion, and Judaism's "religiously sanctioned exclusiveness" fostered social and cultural hostility in pre-Christian times and was aggravated by theological competition over the messianic character of Jesus from the Christian period onward. The secular revolt against Christianity did not resolve but rather aggravated hostility to Judaism's persistent spiritu ality from one point of view, or to a rationalist/revolutionary Jewish critique of prevailing Christian society from another. Indeed, advocates of "natural religion" and secular revolution against Christianity could point to Judaism as the origin of what was wrong with Christianity while denying it as the source of spiritual value (Wistrich 44-5).
In Wistrich's formulation, the legacy of hegemonic Christianity, which began in no small part as a response to its spiritual precursor, Judaism, was that Jews became increasingly stereotyped targets of institutional discrimination, even when the enemies of Jews were not Christian. Langmuir develops the view that the modern structures of antisemitism, which entail but is not limited to the Holocaust, originated in the Middle Ages, an outgrowth of Christianity's competition with Judaism as a universalistic religion. The foundational explanation is a distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, the former a consequence of early Christian dogmatic and ideological competition with J...