(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)
Ancient Greeks “distinguished between the civilized and the barbarous“; Romans between slaves and citizens; Christians and Jews between believers and unbelievers, but racism as we understand it today did not exist in the ancient Mediterranean world. (p. 17)
Turning to the medieval era, Fredrickson distinguishes among anti-Judaism and antisemitism: “Anti-Judaism became antisemitism whenever it turned into a consuming hatred that made getting rid of Jews seem preferable to trying to convert them, and antisemitism became racism when the belief took hold that Jews were intrinsically and organically evil rather than merely having false beliefs and wrong dispositions.” (p. 19)
It was in the 12th and 13th centuries—in the wake of the First Crusade (1096)—that massacres of Jews became more common across Europe. Even then, Fredrickson observes, baptism was typically an alternative to death. “That so many Jews chose to die was a testament to the strength of their faith and that of their executioners rather than a prelude to the Holocaust.” (p. 20)
The emerging racism of late medieval Europe wasn’t aimed solely at Jews and Muslims. Fredrickson cites historian Robert Bartlett’s argument that as Catholic European powers expanded, “the prejudice and discrimination directed at the Irish on one side of Europe and certain Slavic peoples on the other foreshadowed the dichotomy between civilization and savagery that would characterize imperial expansion beyond the European continent“. Some German laws banned intermarriage with Slavs and Anglo-Irish cities barred membership in guilds to those of “Irish blood or birth“. (p. 23)
Despite that, Fredrickson resists calling these behaviors racist: “What was missing—and why I think such ethnic discrimination should not be labeled racist—was an ideology or worldview that would persuasively justify such practices.” (p. 24) Even the increased demonization of Jews by Christians in the wake of the catastrophic Black Death epidemics of the 14th century does not rise, in Fredrickson’s view, to the level of racism.
