Born Together, Broken Apart - Part II of II.

Part II of II. — Rebrands, Reckonings, and the Debt Still Owed

By the Middle Ages, antisemitism had become a cultural reflex. Jews were accused of blood libel, well poisoning, desecrating communion wafers, and causing plagues. These accusations were incoherent, fantastical, and repeatedly disproven—even by popes and kings. They persisted because they were useful.

Christian Europe expelled Jews again and again: England in 1290, France multiple times, Spain in 1492, Portugal, and German principalities. There is no century in medieval Europe without a massacre, expulsion, or forced conversion of Jews.

And yet Christians continued to imagine themselves morally superior.

When did Christianity finally say “enough”?

The honest answer is: very late.

The Catholic Church formally rejected collective Jewish guilt only in 1965 with Nostra Aetate, nineteen centuries after Christianity began. Mainline Protestant churches followed, slowly and often under cultural pressure rather than theological repentance. Eastern Orthodoxy has been slower still.

Christian institutions did not lead the fight against antisemitism after the Holocaust. They followed it—quietly, defensively, and often without fully reckoning with their own role.

Christian antisemitism did not disappear. It secularised and rebranded.

Today, it often appears as anti-Zionism.

Changing the name does not change the behaviour. It is like Walmart announcing that customers are now “guests” and employees are “one big happy family.”

No one is fooled. You still ask where the marshmallows are, and the employee still shrugs and walks away. The branding changed. The reality did not.

There is no other country on earth whose right to exist is met with its own bespoke ideological negation. No mass movement argues that Pakistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey should never have come into being—despite borders drawn in blood and states explicitly founded on religion. Only Israel is subjected to metaphysical erasure.

Zionism long predates the Holocaust. It is rooted in history, law, and scripture—Psalm 137’s aching return to Jerusalem. Israel’s legal foundation is solid. Those who deny it reliably collapse into incoherence when asked to explain themselves without chants, costumes, or crowds.

Remove the keffiyeh and megaphone, and you are left with a yellowish puddle of recycled resentment melting into the Canadian winter ice.