Religious Anti-Semitism

Abstract

This chapter examines and compares theories in the general political science literature to those in the anti-Semitism literature which posit that religion is a cause of discrimination against Jews. While the perspectives of the two literatures are different, the predictions and arguments are similar and predict religion to cause more discrimination. The authors use data on government support for religion from the Religion and State data set to test whether countries which are closely associated with a single religion discriminate against Jews more and confirm that this is the case. However, when using data from the World Values Survey measuring religiosity, the authors find that in countries where people are more religious there is less discrimination against Jews. This is an unprecedented finding. The authors theorize that this is due to the influence of secularism where religious Christians see religious Jews as potential allies in the fight against the common threat of secularism.