Malcolm Hay, Europe and the Jews: The Pressure of Christendom on the People of Israel for 1,900 Years, introduction by Thomas Sugrue, preface by Walter Kaufmann (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1992) (From the back cover: "Originally published as Foot of Pride in 1950, this admirably documented and thought-provoking book by historian Malcolm Hay examines the indignities and cruelties Jews have suffered at the hands of Christians and others in the West, from St. John Chrysostom in the fourth century to Hitler in the twentieth. Using Hitler's concentration camps as a point of departure, Hay leads us on a tour of devilish scenes and spectacles which have been produced by Christian hatred of Jews for some nineteen hundred years. He reveals to us the 'chain of error' in the history of anti-Semitism--the infiltration into history books of contemporaneous misunderstandings prejudices, libels, slanders, and simple mistakes, and the perpetuation of these distortions by historians too slipshod or unconcerned to check their sources and work on the original material of their studies." From the "Introduction":"[A] message of warning is necessary for those Americans who read the book. Mr. Hay has never been to America, and he has not included in his book any material on anti-Semitism in the United States, A reader might therefore be tempted to believe that one exists here, and to congratulate himself upon the restrain and tolerance of his countrymen, who have never ordered the Jews to leave their homes, never confiscated their goods, never accused them of ritual murders, never burned them at the stake. Such temptation should be resisted, Americans are as anti-Semitic as the Gentiles of other nations; they have thus far expressed their anti-Semitism less violently than the Germans and Russians of this century and the French and Spaniards and British of other centuries, but only because it has irritated them less. As Christians they are naturally infected with the notion that the Jews bear a holly guilt and are living in a state of penance, doomed to a miserable 'difference' and deservedly burdened with discrimination and segregation. The discrimination and segregation are politely arranged in the United States, and are carried out by the 'Gentleman's Agreement' so effectively publicized by Laura Z. Hobson's recent novel of that same name; but they are not less real or effective because of the manners which attend them. It is not, after all, the degree to which anti-Semitism is expressed which is important; where it exists at all it is engaged in murder--the murder not of Jews, but of Christians. An anti-Semite is a dead Christian; his prejudice has strangled his faith." Id. at xviii-xix. ).
James Carroll, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) (From the book jacket: "In a bold and moving book hat is sure to spark heated debate, . . . James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the Church's battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has provoked in his own life as a Catholic. More than a chronicle of religion, this dark history is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture.").
