18. Soon the Christian Church had a Liturgy which explicitly told worshippers that the Jews were guilty of deicide
The Church Fathers are full of anti-Jewish sentiment. In c.155-160 AD, Justin Martyr wrote that the Torah (Judaic law) was imposed on the Jews as a punishment by God: ‘the custom of circumcising the flesh, handed down from Abraham, was given to you as a distinguishing mark, to set you off from other nations and from us Christians.’ Other Church Fathers picked up on Justin Martyr’s desire to cast the Jews as an alien, condemned race, like John Chrysostom, who described synagogues as ‘worse than a brothel… the den of scoundrels and the repair of wild beasts’.
The influential St Augustine went further in his antisemitism: ‘how hateful to me are the enemies of your Scripture! How I wish that you would slay them [the Jews] with your two-edged sword!’ Such antisemitic thought directly informed the Christian Liturgy, which informed ordinary people that the Jews were guilty of deicide, the enemies of God and all Christians, and thus to be reviled. The readings for Good Friday (the day Christ was crucified), in particular, focused on Jewish responsibility for the Crucifixion and the role of Judas (commonly depicted as a monstrous Jew in medieval art) in betraying Jesus.
