The Imaginary Synagogue: Anti-Jewish Literature in the Portuguese Early Modern World (16th–18th Centuries), written by Bruno Feitler

Readers of anti-Judaism/anti-Semitism scholarship know that there is no need of Jews to find Jewish hatred: whether in England after the expulsion of its Jewish population in 1290, or in twentieth-century Japan. According to Jeremy Cohen, medieval Christianity developed a prolific adversus Judaeus literature, which rather antagonized with virtual Judaism than with flesh-and-bones Jews. Not to say that in his Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (Norton, 2014), David Nirenberg claimed that the centrality of this phenomenon in Western cultures stems from a negative idea of Jewishness associated with debased forms