Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History (2001) is a book by James Carroll, a former priest, which documents the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the long European history of religious antisemitism as a precursor to racial antisemitism. The primary source of anti-Jewish violence is the perennial obsession with converting the Jews to Christianity; an event which some theologians believed would usher in the Second Coming.
In a culture conditioned to think in categories of Cartesian dualism or of a pre-Copernican cosmology that split the heavens and the earth, Spinoza was taken either as an atheist who reduced everything to matter … or as a pantheist who believed God was everywhere.
