Questioning Anti-Semitism

 Why anti-semitism?

I have to confess that this is a prejudice I have never understood. I can see, on the fringes of my understanding, Some prejudices and group hatreds come from recent, or not so recent wars and genocides. The Armenians and the Turks, for example, make some sense. 

But Jew hatred, the real meaning of anti-semitism (see below) seems to come from hatred of difference and envy of their financial and cultural success. And, to less extent, the medieval mythologies of the Catholic Church about Jewish crimes. 

I listen to at least one "Jewish" or "Jewish affiliated" podcast, the Commentary Magazine podcast, and to others that are pro-Israel--Christianity Today, the Dispatch podcast, Breaking History, and some others. Evangelicals of my stripe are pro-Israel as far as American support for Israel's defense, but we are not anti-Arab or anti-Muslim. That doesn't mean we like everything the State of Israel does. Israel might say they have freedom of religion but it is a tolerance type of freedom, not a "do your own thing and evangelize freely" type of freedom we have in the U.S. But we supported Israel in the latest war, and I have been appalled by the support to Hamas in this country. 

So, from my viewpoint, hating Jews is just weird and evil. Yet that doesn't keep me from digging into where it comes from. 

Based on what I've heard on podcasts about the Heritage Foundation-Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes conflagration, Heritage hired a lot of staffers of Catholic and Eastern Orthodox who are anti-Israel and consider Christian Zionism a heresy. What is Christian Zionism? I suppose it is the kind of support for Israel I have also been taught in evangelical churches and believed in myself. 

Today I read about Catherine Emmerich, a saint of the Roman Catholic church, beatified in 2004. Her writings. From Wikipedia:

In 2003, Hollywood actor and director Mel Gibson used Brentano's book The Dolorous Passion as a key source for his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ.^[8][25][26] Gibson stated that Scripture and "accepted visions" were the only sources he drew on, and a careful reading of Brentano's book shows the film's high level of dependence on it.  

and 

Brentano wrote that Emmerich said she believed that Noah's son Ham was the progenitor of "the black, idolatrous, stupid nations" of the world. The "Dolorous Passion" is claimed to reveal a "clear antisemitic strain throughout",^[12] with Brentano writing that Emmerich believed that "Jews [...] strangled Christian children and used their blood for all sorts of suspicious and diabolical practices".

Now, this person "Brentano" was a poet who interviewed her and used his notes to write her biography later, after her death. There is a lot of controversy there and the Church did not use his materials for the decision to beatify; if anything, those materials meant it took longer to make her a "saint." (Something, of course, as a Protestant I puzzle over, since the New Testament calls us all saints, as well as priests. While I have known evangelicals who became Catholics, I would never consider it despite my respect for many Catholics and Catholic writers.)

What I am saying is that there appears to be a inchoate fear or animus toward Jews in the Catholic church, or the European version of that church. My deeply American experience of Christianity does not intersect with that kind of animus, so it confounds me. 

The origin of the term anti-semitism was in the late 1800s to make it more of a cultural and genetic issue rather than a theological, religious one (as in the blood libel mentioned in the paragraph about Emmerich.)  Semites include Arabs, the origin being "the descendants of Noah's son Shem," so why is it used to refer to hatred only of Jews? It's one of those long, complicated, and rather sordid stories. 

I do believe Jews are being targeted more than anything I have seen in my life, and it is perplexing.