David B. Sloan, “‘The Jews’ in John and Anti-Semitism” (4.16.24), davidbsloan.com.
I was asked yesterday if critical use of the word “the Jews” began with Hitler. Sadly, not at all. The Romans often despised the Judeans for not worshiping the Roman gods, so there was already critical use of the term at play in the first century (but that does not mean John himself used it critically!). By the second century you had so many non-Jews who embraced the Gospel of John that they already began to read the phrase critically … even though they spoke in Greek. Hitler was one person in a long line of people, including Martin Luther and already Ignatius of Antioch in the second century, who took passages like this to justify their own anti-Jewish biases. It’s not just that “the Jews” became a word of derision and so we shouldn’t use it in Bible translation. We could go so far to say as the Bible itself contributed to this use of the word. John himself uses the Ioudaioi critically. For him, it didn’t mean “the Jews,” but he was critical of a group nonetheless. And ironically his criticism was simply widened to include his own people group just decades later.
The Amateur Exegete 