I fell asleep and awoke only after the pogrom was over. The sun, in all its glory, was shining on a spectacle of horror. The street was piled high with mutilated bodies. In their ripped-open homes men, women and children lay massacred, disembowelled, shrivelled. Reb Gamaliel: a cross of blood cut into his forehead. Asher, the gravedigger: crucified. Manya, his wife: her throat slashed. Their eight sons and daughters: beaten to death. Where to begin? What to do first? Whom to help?

Elie Wiesel's account of a pogrom suffered by Jews during Holy Week in pre-revolutionary Russia is a reminder that anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with the Nazi death camps. The recent controversy over some of the Labour Party's trial pre-election advertising - eventually withdrawn - is a reminder that such anti-Semitism did not end with the liberation of Auschwitz. I do not believe that the depiction of Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin - both Jewish - as pigs in one poster and Michael Howard as Fagin in another was accidental: the posters sullied our nation's political discourse, as did the Labour Party's refusal subsequently to apologise.

The historian Robert Wistrich has called anti-Semitism 'the longest hatred' and for centuries Christian violence against the Jews of the sort described by Wiesel was justified by a warped theology, espoused by all branches of Christianity, that viewed Jews as God-killers. For this reason Holy Week, particularly, was often a dangerous time for Jewish communities. Such theology is now, thankfully, rejected by most Christians, and one of the fruits of this rejection has been a deeper realisation that the Jewish faith of Jesus Christ is key to our own self-identity - 'the rock from which we were hewn' to paraphrase Isaiah. Given this renewed understanding of our origins, and the woeful history of our violence against the Jews, Christians have a particular responsibility to challenge anti-Semitism wherever, and in whomever, we encounter it.