In an earlier chapter, A Christian Introduction to Christendom’s Jewish Problem, I referred to several well-known and respected Christian thinkers who describe the threat of Jewish survival by Christianity as nothing less than “existential,” born of early Christian claims to have replaced Judaism. Augustine’s Witness Doctrine describes “the Jews” eventual voluntary conversion as the final justification for those claims. In the modern world no longer ruled by religious authority Jewish affirmation of Christian “truth” has both lost its relevance regarding Christian claims; and religion no longer even offers protection to Jews previously provided by conversion. Traditional religious anti-Judaism has, through the agency of the “Age of Reason,” transformed that ancient religious fear into today’s secular antisemitism. And as the Jews, a minority dispersed across Europe and the West throughout most of Western history are today a tiny remnant of their past population. As President Roosevelt reminded Henry Morgenthau, his Jewish treasury secretary, “this is a Protestant country, and the…Jews are here under sufferance.”

Christian Insecurity: “Jewish rejection of [Jesus] remains a mortal threat”