Scholars agree that the term Anti-Semitism has often been used in an anachronistic fashion projecting our modern notions of race to time periods where people did not organize themselves into nations and races. For example, during the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans did not hate the Jews any more or less than any other non-Roman people, all of whom they considered to be illiterate. The Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 CE because the Jews were rebelling against them, not because of any ideas of race or irrational categorical hatred.
Christians living in the early centuries of the first millennium may have hated the Jews either because they did not accept Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah or because the Christians held the Jews responsible
