The shared root of antisemitism and White supremacy

In 2018, early in my teaching career, a bright college student challenged me to connect the course I was teaching on the history of the Holocaust to concerns about White supremacy and religious intolerance in our own campus community. The underlying question, of course, was this: How do events of the European past resonate with the issues facing 21st-century America? My student’s call to address the intersectionality of these histories has stayed with me through pandemic shutdowns, George Floyd, January 6, two cross-country moves, a career shift, and the continuing rise in antisemitism.

Magda Teter’s Christian Supremacy provides a timely answer to precisely this question. Her book enters a growing conversation about White supremacy and Christianity—not just their intersections but the inextricable communion of Christian religion with racism—at an important moment. She draws on a wealth of sources, including theology, legal treatises, and visual culture, to chart how the subordination of Jews became structural and contributed to European ideas of Christian domination. Christian Supremacy reminds us that interreligious debates and religious chauvinism are hardly modern inventions. Within the medieval context, thinkers struggling with definitions of religious identity defined themselves implicitly against other religious communities, especially Jews, who were cast as people of servitude.