To quote the wellknown pair of Clerihews
How odd
Of God
To choose
The Jews
But not so odd
As those who choose
A Jewish God
And spurn the Jews
Christianity is of course a Jewish sect in origin; and although there certainly were tensions (i.e. out and out war) between Christianity and orthodox Judaism from the outset, that is different from antisemitism - there were plenty of Christian Jews.
It was only when Christianity spread widely in the Gentile world, and when persecution severed communication with the Jewish Christian Churches that genuine antisemitism is even hinted at. But it was the general collapse of communications after the fall of Rome that let antisemitism become widespread, essentially among communities that had never seen or heard of a real Jew - they were mythical baddies like bogeymen or trolls. In areas like France where there were many Jews there was a great deal of rivalry between Christians and Jews, but no true antisemitism - at one point it even seemed possible that France could become a Jewish state.
Now as the dust settled, and Jews and everybody else began to travel more freely, Jews found themselves barred from owning land, and from many trades, because the Church influenced them. But the trade of moneylending - er, sorry, banking - was legal but disapproved of by the Church; so Jews could practise it, while good Christians could not. Unfortunately, everyone hates a creditor. Thus antisemitism slowly deepened both in the Church and outside.
Then came the Renaissance and the Reformation.
They had generally a good influence - not an overnight miracle of unity, just a change in the trend. Antisemitism ceased to deepen, and in many parts of the world tended even to lessen slowly. But where the renaissance and the reformation failed to reach - basically east of Warsaw - antisemitism continued very much in its mediaeval mould almost to the present.
But there was a disaster. Martin Luther, a great man in so many ways, was deeply antisemitic. Consequently the Church he founded - again a Church with many great qualities - inherited his antisemitic attitudes; not in its constitution, but in the minds and thoughts of much of its early writing. In the minds and hearts of many of its members antisemitism seemed to have been given a seal of approval by their Church. But the antisemitism began to have a different quality from the mediaeval form to the East: because of the emphasis of the Lutheran Church on rational thought and personal understanding, German antisemitism began to try to be supported on apparently rational foundations, instead of the essentially irrational and emotional attitudes of earlier days. In this way antisemitism began to be the accepted norm not only in the Church, but also in academic circles.
In the nineteenth century German scholars began to apply to the Bible methods of textual analysis originally developed to examine Homer's works. But they did not apply them rationally. Instead, they thought they at last had the key to answering the problem posed by the Clerihews: how to worship a Jewish God and reject the Jews.
For the Old Testament, by dating as many books as possible to after the Exile, and by inventing major postexilic revisions to the remainder, they were able to claim all important religious insights in the Old Testament as resulting not from God's nurturing of His people, but instead as derived from - i.e. stolen from - the 'Aryan' empires of the Medes and Persians, and even from the 'Aryan' Greek culture of Alexander the Great's empire. Thus they could now claim that they worshipped not a Jewish God at all, but an 'Aryan' God distorted by Jewish corruption and theft.
Similarly they took the casual references in the New Testament to disagreements between Paul and Peter and inflated them into a major division within the early Church between Jewish Christians and Gentile - i.e. 'Aryan' - Christians, with Paul and the 'Aryans' preserving true Christianity from the pseudochristian Jews. To do this, they had to artificially force the dates of the New Testament documents as late as possible, to give time both for the development of the split and for the evidence of the split to have faded.
So although they never quite managed to make Jesus Christ into an 'Aryan', they were able to split an 'Aryan' Christianity - the polite phrase was 'liberal Christianity' - from its Jewish 'corruption'.
It was not all bad. It must be understood that within this framework, the scholars did produce some very valuable insights and brought out many truths which had not been recognised before, and enabled a much wider understanding of yhe ways in which the Bible can be true and can reveal truth. It was these aspects which made the German liberal paradigm so attractive to scholars in other countries, who therefore often adopted the conclusions blindly without recognising - or unfortunately, in many cases shutting their eyes to - the underlying irrational antisemitism which was its driving force.
This led therefore to a fundamental split in Christianity. The 'liberals' adopted the German paradigm, watering down the antisemitism and struggling to find alternative justification for its basic conclusions, because they were reluctant to lose the new insight and freedom. The 'conservatives' rejected the German paradigm completely, both from an instinctive sense of the falseness of the framework, but also too often from mental inertia; they put nothing in its place. The result has been that it is in the 'liberal' wing of the Church that antisemitism flourishes unrecognised, while it is the 'conservative' wing that is falsely accused of antisemitism on historical grounds.
It may be asked why the 'liberals' failed to recognise the antisemitism in themselves. The reason is that the only other 'respectable' religion around was atheist humanism, which was - and is - far more deeply antisemitic than any branch of Christianity, leading as it did to the 'eugenics' movement and open support of the Nazi policies of racial cleansing. Next to the openly racist humanism even the most 'liberal' Christianity looked tolerant.
The fall of Hitler should have led to the elimination of antisemitism from the Church; no doubt it would have done if the Church had recognised the antisemitism in the liberal tradition. As it was, it only affected the conservative wing, where there was already much less of a problem anyway.
The present situation borders on farce. We see a liberal wing, retreating step by step as the irrationality of position after position is made untenable by historical evidence or proper textual study, but still refusing to acknowledge the underlying antisemitism that liberalism is built on; ands a conservative wing that simply refuses to accept any rational argument at all, but relies entirely on Church tradition.
And to think that theology was once called the Queen of sciences.