Anti-Judaism is a framework for negotiating Christian political crises.

Evidence

And David Nirenberg has argued for the Christian origins of what he calls ‘anti-Judaism’—not in the sense of a timeless, unchanging prejudice, but as a pivotal thought framework in which Jews and Judaism are the projection and vehicle through which Christian political and social crises are negotiated. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 84

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Nirenberg’s specific sense of ‘anti-Judaism’ — not timeless prejudice but a structural thought-framework where Jews serve as the vehicle for negotiating crises.
• DEEPTHINKING: This reframing of anti-Judaism as a load-bearing cognitive device rather than mere hostility is genuinely paradigm-shifting — it inverts the usual understanding of prejudice as irrational affect into something structurally functional.
• XREF: Parallels the moral-panic framework in my library (Cohen) where a threat category functions as a vehicle for negotiating broader social anxieties, and resonates with the ‘scapegoat mechanism’ line of thinking. Also connects to the ADL/anti-Zionism-is-antisemitism debate about whether critique functions as a ‘vehicle’ for antisemitism.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 84