Christian Hair

At the heart of Christian historical understanding was the idea of supersession. The idea was this: the new faith would replace Judaism, thus establishing its own superiority. This religious, political, and ethical concept was translated into legal and administrative procedures over the centuries, thereby shaping relations between Christians and Jews. Supersession has therefore been much discussed as the conceptual bedrock of anti-Judaism. Now Magda Teter’s Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism argues that supersession offered foundations for white supremacy, too.

To make her case, Teter begins with the early believers who understood Christianity as a new dispensation, yet one whose roots were deep and whose truths were ancient. Supersession was the claim of Christ’s followers to be living in a new age of grace that had been foretold in Jewish prophecies and realized by the coming of the Messiah from the house of David—Christ himself. Christianity replaced Judaism and yet was nourished by its Jewish origins. Jews who were able and willing would progress from life under the law to life under grace. Those who were not were destined for the margins of history, as a people merely to be tolerated. At the same time, many outside the Jewish fold—Gentiles—joined what was called the New Israel.

Christian scripture chronicled this transition, from the conception of Jesus by a Jewish woman, Mary, and on to the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. But it took another Jew, from Tarsus in the Roman province of Cilicia (in modern-day Turkey), who never knew Jesus, to teach the full import of this change. Saul, later Paul, developed a theology that spelled out the terms whereby the old ceded to the new and the new superseded the old: Jews were caught up in the letter of their laws, while Christ’s followers were people of the spirit, transformed by the grace received at baptism. This distinction, as Teter says, led to a hierarchy in the reading of Hebrew scripture. The new reading interpreted biblical figures as demonstrating the supersession: Christians were superior to Jews as Jacob was to his dispossessed elder brother, Esau, or as Sara was to her servant Hagar.

This hierarchical vision was developed in the early centuries of Christian emergence, when Christians lived in communities occasionally persecuted by the Roman state. By the early fourth century Emperor Constantine had joined his empire’s destiny with that of Christianity, and by the turn of the next century Saint Augustine was creating the theological underpinning for a Christian empire, wherein Jews were consigned to live in subjection to a Christian state. The Jews served as guardians of Christianity’s essential books—“for the sake of the Church,” according to Augustine in Against Faustus, “bearing the Law and the Prophets, and testifying to the doctrine of the Church.” It was the Jews’ destiny to live, not perish, but as protected inferiors. Augustine invited his contemporaries to behold the mystery: God had so arranged for good to follow from bad, for the Jews’ blindness to the faith and servitude to Christians to offer proof of the Church’s triumph. In the course of the fifth century the imperial state began excluding Jews from civil and military roles.

As the Roman Empire gave way in Europe to several Germanic kingdoms later in the century, bishops and local rulers became the champions of the Catholic Church and adopted the Roman legal system. This inheritance contained laws that kept Jews apart and disparaged their religion. In the early sixth century the Visigoth king Sisebut sought unsuccessfully to convert the large and ancient Jewish community in Iberia; his successors continued to employ the rhetoric of Christian supremacy in support of their claims to sacred kingship.

When Europe underwent a commercial revolution in the twelfth century, a cultural revolution followed and inspired new styles of learning and public discussion. Christian supremacy was accordingly reexpressed in monasteries, in schools, in universities, and at the papal court. Jewish servitude was treated in new genres of canon law, of sermons, of visual forms, and of devotional works. The small number of European Jews—usually only tens or hundreds in any urban center—inhabited a vast imaginative space in a Latin Christendom that was still expanding its reach to the north, east, and south. Thinkers encountered Jews in their foundational texts—the Bible, Church law—and administrators dealt with them in chanceries that often employed Roman law. That Jews were servants of the emperor was discussed with new vigor, its convenience holding a particular attraction for European kings, counts, prince-bishops, and dukes. Medieval rulers from Hungary to England developed a uniquely direct lord–servant relationship with Jews out of the combined legacies of theology and law.

It is useful to remember that Jews served sovereigns great and small—as supervisors of mints, as collectors of taxes, as diplomats—just as all European states were developing as administrative, fiscal, and military entities. William, Duke of Normandy, conquered England in 1066 and brought Norman Jews to his kingdom; they were heavily and capriciously taxed but lived under royal protection. In return Jews offered financial services as money changers and, ultimately, moneylenders. In this manner they became identified with the interests of the rulers, who offered them a narrow pathway toward settlement and accumulation of wealth, one profoundly vulnerable to royal whim. In 1253 King Henry III explained his position: “No Jew should stay in England unless doing service to the King. As soon as a Jew is born, be it male or female, that Jew should serve us in some way.” Henry’s son Edward I expelled all the Jews from England in 1290; King Philip the Fair of France followed suit in 1306.

Jews lived in medieval cities, where they were familiar neighbors. This sometimes troubled the agents of the Church, who attempted—with only limited success—to erect boundaries between Christians and Jews by marking the latter with badges and limiting their access to some civic functions, such as holding public office and participating in guilds. Preachers, artists, and poets worked to make Jews seem ugly and dangerous. A libel about their predation on Christian children was invented by a monk of Norwich around 1150,¹ and around the same time it became common in Western imagery to depict Jews as antagonistic to Christ, using a distinctive nose that set them apart from Christian believers at scenes of the Crucifixion (see illustration, middle figure on the left).

In the following century Franciscan preachers made an even stronger claim: Jews were deicides—killers of God. Brilliant artists like Duccio of Siena, in the early fourteenth century, developed iconographies that portrayed Jews in Crucifixion scenes as angry, rabid crowds lusting for Christ’s blood. Rulers were torn between the benefit of working with Jews who were dependent, expert, and loyal and the pressure exerted by religious authorities and preachers who wished them degraded or gone. In the fifteenth century German burghers with whom Jews competed in business had them driven from dozens of cities and large towns of the Holy Roman Empire. Most spectacularly, tens of thousands of Jews were banished from the recently united kingdom of Spain in 1492, a royal display of Christian commitment. Similar treatment affected the much larger Muslim minority, with recurrent expulsions of Muslim converts to Christianity in later decades.

Having laid out much of this history, Teter connects it to modern racism by arguing that the concepts of Christian supremacy were later used to justify the enslavement of Africans and their trafficking to the Caribbean and the Americas. This leads one to ask whether Christian supremacy was a sufficient cause of racism or a necessary cause that operated alongside political and economic factors. What seems to me most helpful in Teter’s argument is the recognition that an ancient Christian legacy enabled ideas about Jews to be used against those peoples Christian Europeans encountered, conquered, and enslaved. These ideas about hierarchy and worth informed the economic and political desires of nations and empires across the globe.

Christian supremacy developed into a sensibility about Jews’ supposed inherited biological difference. In addition to being banned from civic participation, Jews were also racialized by claims that their bodies were dark, ugly, malignant, or queer. After tens of thousands of Jews in Aragon and Castile were forced to convert in 1391 following outbursts of urban violence, it became clear just how racialized such attitudes were. Courtiers and theologians denied the power of these baptisms to fully erase the stain of Jewish blood, and so baptized Jews were considered a category apart—not Christians but New Christians. A Jewish body, especially a male circumcised body, could never be anything else. The promotion of “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre)—first legally applied in 1449—introduced distinctions aimed at separating New Christians, or recent converts, from Old Christians in Castile and later across the Hispanic world. The Castilian word raça, meaning a defect in a gem or piece of cloth, came to describe an immutable human quality.

While these debates about blood and destiny were taking place, European rulers and merchants were turning their gaze toward Africa. In 1442 Pope Eugene IV issued a bull recognizing the slaving raids sent by Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator to West Africa as a “crusade” against “Saracens and other enemies of the Christian name.” Slaves were to be “encouraged to the faith” rather than forced to convert. With new Christian names and the prospect of manumission if they did adopt the new faith, Black Africans—enslaved and freed—became a growing presence in southern European cities. At the same time, enslaving Africans became part of the business plan of the Iberian kingdoms; by the 1480s the House of Slaves was established in Lisbon, a department of state that managed the slave trade. Atlantic conquest invited further application of the principle of enslavement inherent in Christian supremacy to Native Americans, though lobbying by religious orders led to official papal censure of the practice. Dominated through conquest, Native Americans were deemed ripe for conversion, and hence were not to be enslaved. The demand for slaves was to be supplied by Black Africans through violent trade that never at the time amounted to full-scale conquest of the African homelands.

As that commerce developed, Europeans became, as Teter puts it, “obsessed with Blackness.” All their intellectual tools, from medicine to theology, were mobilized to make trafficking slaves supportable. Blacks were the subject of racialized mockery and entertainment in European arts, as Noémie Ndiaye has shown in her recent book, Scripts of Blackness. While some were employed in aristocratic households and were respectfully depicted by artists such as Rubens and Wenceslaus Hollar, the mass transportation, enslavement, and torture of people of African descent in colonized lands required and produced harsh racial distinctions. No part of the body escaped, as the Boston lawyer and abolitionist James Otis was to remark in 1764: “Does it follow that ’tis right to enslave a man because he is black? Will short curl’d hair like wool, instead of Christian hair, as ’tis called by those whose hearts are as hard as the nether millstone, help the argument?”

Christian supremacy was a legacy shared by Catholics and Protestants, but Teter suggests in passing that the most consequential form was in fact the Protestant. Once English and Dutch ascendancy in the Atlantic was established, Christian supremacy was untethered from the critique of slavery expressed by religious missionary orders bent on conversion. In 1697 the English assembly in Barbados made clear that to become free, a man had to be both white and Christian. Jews could own property, sometimes even slaves, but could not serve as electors or jurors, just as had been the case in Europe for centuries.

The Christian supremacy of those deemed white was little challenged by Enlightenment thinkers. David Hume did not support slavery but did believe in a racial hierarchy, as expressed in his 1748 essay “Of National Characters”:

There are negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; tho’ low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession.

Although Immanuel Kant later revised his thinking, he stated more boldly that “humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of whites” and constructed a hierarchy of rational capacity wherein Black people were placed just above the lowest type, Native Americans. The revolutions that enshrined inalienable rights for man ushered in the transformation, as Teter says, of “monarchies with subjects and estates to democracies and republics with citizens equal before the law.” These were republics of propertied white men. In theory Jews could be considered white, and they gained civic rights in many European states in the nineteenth century. Yet even where liberal constitutions were established, there was public debate about Jews’ full political enfranchisement. The weight of Christian supremacy was heavy, as one writer in The Edinburgh Review put it as late as 1830: “It would be monstrous…that a Jew should legislate for a Christian community.”

Teter explores cases from the Americas and the United States in which Christian supremacy operated differently on Jews and on people of African descent. Slavery was legal in almost all the colonies until the early nineteenth century, when it was abolished state by state in the North. At the same time, Jews were free by law, but the effect of Christian supremacy was strong, and they struggled to be considered socially equal citizens. Even though the Constitution recognized no religious bar, local practices assumed that to be American was to be Christian. When in 1844 the governor of South Carolina instituted a day of thanksgiving, he required that citizens “offer up their devotions to God, their creator, and his Son Jesus Christ.” Jews wrote an open letter protesting that were the decree to stand uncondemned, in the future “the Catholic, the Unitarian, the Israelite, and numerous other sects, may find their privileges discriminated away.”

While Jews argued about the terms of their inclusion in a free citizenry, African Americans in the South were owned and abused. Christian supremacy was white and rampant, and it even affected the constitutional protections that prevailed in states that prohibited slavery. When Virginia-born Dred Scott was sold by his owner to the army surgeon John Emerson, he followed his new master throughout his peripatetic career. They lived in Missouri, Illinois, and the Wisconsin Territory, and then again in Missouri. There, in 1846, Dred and Harriet Scott sued their master’s heir for the freedom they should have gained upon arrival in slave-free Illinois. The case reached the Supreme Court, and in 1857 Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that Congress had no authority to ban slavery in federal territory and that people of African descent

are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.

This applied equally to “the free negro or mulatto and the slave.”

Eleven years later the judgment was overturned by the Fourteenth Amendment. During the Civil War, enslaved African Americans, as Erik Mathisen has shown in the case of the Mississippi Valley, offered intelligence and even their service to the United States (as did free Blacks) in the hope of future recognition as citizens entitled to the freedoms celebrated in the Constitution.²

American Jews, meanwhile, were struggling to establish their equality within the public sphere, a very different enterprise. Antisemitism was odious and humiliating, sometimes violent, but it did not deprive Jews of the constitutional rights shared by whites and by most free people of African descent. Christian supremacy adapted to demographic change and soon racialized Irish and Italian immigrants, deeming them neither quite white nor the right kind of Christian.

Teter’s book has led me to think about what connects the victims of Christian supremacy. Some European Jews in the late nineteenth century and many African Americans in the early twentieth concluded that the racism enacted by states and performed in neighborhoods and public squares would never end. Zionism and Garveyism—Marcus Garvey’s doctrine of Black separation and self-governing Black nations in Africa—were comparable defenses against that outcome; each movement turned to self-reliance, national uplift, and the aspiration for an ancestral home. Leon Pinsker, a Russian Jewish physician from Odessa who had fought in the Crimean War, described the predicament:

For the living, the Jew is a dead man; for the natives an alien and a vagrant; for property holders a beggar; for the poor an exploiter and a millionaire; for patriots a man without a country; for all classes, a hated rival.

The Russian pogroms of the 1880s and the experience of reporting on the Dreyfus affair from Paris led Theodor Herzl to imagine an “old new” state for Jews where they could flourish and feel safe.

Garvey also believed in such self-assertion, as he put it succinctly in 1919:

We may make progress in America, the West Indies and other foreign countries, but there will never be any real lasting progress until the Negro makes of Africa a strong and powerful Republic to lend protection to the success we make in foreign lands.

Though Garvey frequently discussed the idea, he did not in fact develop a pragmatic plan for immigration to Africa, nor did he ever visit the continent. Like Zionists in Europe, his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) promoted culture, education, and mutual help, and created for many African Americans a sense of worth and zones of sovereignty.³ His message resonated in urban Black neighborhoods in the North and in hundreds of branches of the UNIA in the rural South, just as Zionism had found its followers among poor Jews in the small towns and villages of tsarist Russia.

Jews who immigrated to the United States encountered new forms of discrimination and violence that reminded them of the old country. Against the rise of Nazism in Europe, the Scottsboro affair, and the recurrent lynching of Black men, Jewish poets—writing in English and in Yiddish—expressed the sense of shared destiny. To the Yiddish poet Malka Lee, born in 1904, both Jews and Blacks appeared to be victims of the Cross. She used the image of the lamb led to slaughter, so central in the poetry that commemorated pogroms, in her 1932 poem “Gots shvartser lam” (God’s Black Lamb), inspired by a recent lynching:

They led him outside,
with bare feet, and bound hands.
His skin burnt by southern sand.
His flesh became suddenly oily,
his black body sparkled in tears…

The woods bowed low as if cut by a knife
go back, go back—
God’s black lamb
tore himself from the rope…

As Lee depicts Christian-on-Christian violence using Christian symbols ironically, she describes the victim’s mother as the mourning Virgin Mary.

Christian Supremacy offers an occasion to reflect on the historical intersections between antisemitism and anti-Black racism not because they are the same but because they rhyme. The Christian tradition offered a well-established language of supremacy over a marginalized group: Jews. This language was then used against Blacks and Jews in Africa and the Americas by rulers more motivated by political and economic considerations than by religion alone. Where structures of domination—like slavery, economic exploitation, or legal discrimination—prevailed, Christian supremacy helped normalize their practices. And where Jews and Blacks endured these structures, they took similar initiatives, as in Garveyism and Zionism, and even developed mutual affinities, as in the foundation of the NAACP in 1909 by a coalition of Jewish and African American activists following the Springfield race riots of 1908.

The recognition of such affinity took an additional turn after the Holocaust: W.E.B. Du Bois wrote movingly after his postwar visit to Europe, and especially to the site of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1949, that he acquired there “not so much clearer understanding of the Jewish problem in the world as…a real and more complete understanding of the Negro problem.” Paul Gilroy acknowledged in his pathbreaking book The Black Atlantic (1993) that conversations between Blacks and Jews were at the heart of that Atlantic diaspora,

an underutilized device with which to explore the fragmentary relationship between blacks and Jews…and the manner in which carefully preserved social histories of ethnocidal suffering can function to supply ethical and political legitimacy.

And as Michael Rothberg noted in his Multidirectional Memory (2009), such links safeguard both Jewish and African American memory from the “risks of stultification and banalization” that come with insisting on their uniqueness or utter similarity.

At a time when this allyship is so badly frayed, Teter’s book challenges us to think harder about what the legacies of Christian supremacy have bequeathed its victims. Jews and Blacks have both sustained vicious attacks on their very right to exist as humans among humans. In the autumn of 2024 anti-Black and anti-Jewish were by far the most common categories of hate crime in the US. Christian supremacy helped make such suffering possible.