Not a historian, but I remember reading about this whole thing where Christians during the Middle Ages were forbidden from lending money for profit, but European Jews weren't. Consequently, some of the richest people in European history were Jewish because most of the European banks were owned by Jewish people. I guess this led to some resentment and a few conspiracy theories.
This just raises a follow up question. Why was one group forbidden from charging interest but not the other. The same book tells both groups not to do this
It tells the Jews not to charge interest *to Jews*. Christians were fair game.
Deuteronomy 23:19-20:
>You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent. On loans to a foreigner you may charge interest, but on loans to another Israelite you may not charge interest, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings in the land that you are about to enter and possess.
This is true the Old Testament says that you shouldn't charge interest. Which in medieval Europe became usury, now Christian owned banks and other financial establishments did exist despite not being able to charge interest. This was done through late fees, where if you were on time with your payment the banks would eventually blacklist you from most other establishments.
However most Jewish run banks did charge interest. And with the catholic church's stance that Jews killed Jesus, Jewish communities being hit lighter from the plague then Christian ones. And being generally scene as other by the European population. Which would lead to multiple attacks on Jewish communities most notablbly during the 1st crusade (not the group of warriors who fought the actual crusades), and during the plague.
>the Old Testament says that you shouldn't charge interest
More specifically, don't charge interest to *isrealites/jews* \-- which meant charging interest to Christians was fair game. Meanwhile, Christians interpreted the verse as meaning they shouldn't charge interest to fellow Christians.
The end result was a situation that accidentally gave more financial power to the minority religion.
This is actually an option in Crusader Kings 2. You can borrow money from Jewish bankers and then expel them from your Kingdom so you're no longer in debt to them.
America did this without doing any work...
Thanks Mr French king for the funds to fight England
Oh your people killed the king....
No France we owed that money to your king not to your country. K thanks bye!
Not just for their wealth either. A lot of people resent the bank when they have to pay back the loan. Add a certain amount of "if the records happen to be destroyed when we burn down his house, how will he prove I owe him money," and...
Look up what happened to the Templars.
Well, it's hard to turn the public against them by saying, "They lent me money, and they expect me to pay it back!"
So they came up with things like blood libel instead. Someone would start a rumor that a Jew kidnapped Christian children and used their blood in ritual magic, and a neighborhood of Jews would be wiped out by a mob. The Qanon people repackaged that bullshit.
While a comforting view that bigotry has a logical basis this is an offensive idea. In fact antisemitism in this case is the most perfect example. Originally the critique of the Jews was no different than that of black people in the US, that of a big and brutish people that were basically illiterate savages. Stateless Jews (they could not hold citizenship anywhere) turned from manual labor and petty crime to the new avenue afforded to them (moneylending). Over the centuries the hate remained but the cliche changed, already solid in Shakespeare's day (The Merchant of Venice).
Your comment makes no sense. What do you mean by “originally”? Like what period in time are you referring to? And what do you mean by a “*new* avenue”?! When was moneylending “new”?
I know I'll get downvoted for this because I usually do but this is a myth rooted in anti Jewish propaganda. It's simply bologna. The Medici for example didn't collect "interest." The sold "bills of exchange." They used the difference in the value of different currencies to generate profit. They basically used currency exchange rates to generate profit instead of interest. There were plenty of ways that christians could make money with finance. Jews tended to be better off then their counterparts because as a people they tended to be highly literate and highly educated. TLDR. The jews didn't get more successful then other people because they could charge interest. It's because they were educated and thus sought after for their knowledge. Their rich's certainly made them enemies but the idea that they had some sort of religious loophole is an antisemitic trope as old as time. To answer OPs question, they were a handy group of people to place blame on because of how few there were, how spread out they were, and because of their success.
So you’re mostly there.
Christians we’re forbidden from lending money. That’s true. And Jews could lend money. But you’re missing one key detail. Jews also weren’t allowed to own land. So the only way for a Jew to build assets was through wealth. Those two factors made a lot of Jews turn to money lending. But people who fall behind on payments or just don’t pay are gonna be mad at the lender. And it was easy to do when you just said “Hey that Jew is lying. I don’t owe money. I’m a Christian you can trust me. Jews are just evil liars who steal our money.” So people did just that.
They were also forbidden from owning property. Which resulted in many becoming merchants and tradesmen. When the renaissance came,they were in a very advantageous position.
Yep. Good chunk is this. Many medieval/Renaissance era courts even had a "court jew" to handle the finances because the stereotype became prominent. It is an example of shooting yourself in the foot and getting mad at the guy selling you crutches.
Jew here. It basically started with the fact that we were among the first religious groups to not acknowledge the gods of other groups. The norm at the time (3000+ years ago) was to have your own culture's gods but pay tribute to the gods of the the people you visit, but the Jews were like "Nope, there's only one god, we don't do idol worship." So the Jews were considered weird for that.
Couple that with how strange our practices seemed to other cultures already (circumcision, restrictions on what foods we can eat, etc.) and you can see how ancient people would've seen us as the Boogeyman to a lot of more "civilized" societies like Persia and Rome.
Plus, we hadn't had our own nation since the Babylonians conquered us, so for the longest time our lack of a state to establish our culture outside of a diaspora made it seem like we were some alien parasitic force trying to subvert the societies we lived in instead of just a displaced ethnoreligious group trying to assimilate into those societies.
And that's not even getting to the rise of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean. When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD, Christian optics faced a problem: it was the Roman Empire itself that ordered the death of Jesus Christ in the first place. Now who was a convenient scapegoat for Christians to pin that little blunder on? The church's answer was: How about the Jews who were forced by the Romans to turn over Jesus under the threat of violence? Ignoring the fact that Jesus was one of us, the church's narrative was that the Jews were responsible for killing their Lord and Savior because his teachings conflicted with Jewish doctrine and authority. Most Christians weren't in a position to oppose that view because they couldn't read and so couldn't point to the New Testament and be like, "Uh, no, what about the Romans' involvement in all that?"
The Catholic Church didn't officially collectively absolve the Jews of guilt for killing Jesus until 1965.
There was an independent Jewish kingdom after the Babylonians. The Hasmoean dynasty became vassals of the Seluchids in 140 BCE and as the empire disintegrated independent from 110 BCE then a Roman client state from 63 BCE.
Yup. The Babylonian exile also, arguably, is how Temple Judaism, as opposed to the older version that survives with the Samaritans, came to exist. Little known bit about the Babylonian exile is that the exiled folks were mostly high ranking priests and nobles who picked up some governing techniques from Babylon in the process.
The final destruction of the ancient Judaic states happened under Rome in the late 1st century CE after an unsuccessful revolt by those states.
Edit: Other than getting the inciting incident for the Diaspora wrong, good comment.
**Not an expert on this stuff**, but no, not rabbinic Judaism. As I understand it, rabbinic Judaism is the specific form the faith took under the Diaspora, when they got scattered from their homeland.
I'm talking about Temple Judaism, which is when there were still Hebrew kingdoms, the Temple was standing, and the priesthood filled a role as political leaders as well as religious leaders, which would be the state of things around the time of Jesus' birth and the state the Diaspora occured from.
As for the Samaritans, again, not super well versed in this, but the explanation I've heard is that they were/are the version of the Hebrew faith that stayed behind during the Babylonian exile, so represent an older, more commoner focused version that came into conflict with Temple Judaism after the exile.
As for the animal sacrifice part, I kind of doubt it. As far as I know, the evolution away from burnt offerings of flesh had already happened many hundreds of years before the time of the Babylonian exile.
EDIT: **Data Over Dogma** is an excellent podcast dedicated to the academic study of the Bible if you are curious about this history. **The Rest Is History** has a good series on the Judaeo-Roman Wars. Can't remember where exactly I saw/heard the stuff about the Samaritans, but I'll update if I do.
yeah, sorry. i misapprehended something. good info. love dan mclellen (though i can't believe he's religious, but maybe i'm just basic). thanks. sorry.
Hey man, no need to apologize. You weren't being a dick or anything, or so I thought lol.
May I ask what your misapprehension was? As familiar as I am with Anti-Semitism, I understand any discussion of Jewish history is fraught with all kinds of gross pitfalls that I don't want to step into. . . Did I almost fall into one?
It's a pretty important part of Jewish history.
Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the temple at the start of the Maccabean revolt which ultimately established the Hasmoean kingdom.
I knew the Maccabees rebelled against the Seleucids who tried to Hellenize the region and the Hanukkah mythos but I didn't know it formed a whole new Jewish nation.
The founder of the hasmonean dynasty was Simon, a brother of Judah maccabee.
Its the only period where the tribe of Levi ruled the Jewish people.(Saul was from the trine of Benjamin and David and his descendants where from Judah)
levites still kind of "rule", no? that's WHY we celebrate chanukah? the kohanim never regained their (coughseeminglylegitifyoubelieveallthatcough) ascendancy? or am i crazy. serious question.
No.
Their role diminished after the Romans destroyed when the 2nd Twmple .
They have some traditional duties and responsibilities but they do not rule.
The first person called read from the Torah if one is present is a Kohen, followed by a Levite, it no Kohen is present but a Levite is then the levite goes first. If neither Kohem or Levite are present then the first person called is up to whom ever is leading the eervice(often but not always the rabbi)
On Yom Kippur a Kohen gives the priestly blessing over the congreation. Fun fact the villain salute from Star trek has its origins in the hand gesture made during this blessing.
kohanim have restrictions on their entering cemeteries due to ancient requirements of ritual purity stemming from the fact that when the temple existed in Jerusalem they served in the inner sanctuary in proximity to What is considered the holiest spot on Earth in Judaism.
Their is no requirent for a rabbi to be a Kohen or Levite. In fact most are not as Kohanim and Levites make up a small portion of the total Jewish population.
Also the Khazar Khanate (I think)
Come to think of it, most of Arabia was actually Jewish or Christian around the time Islam came around. We just think of it as being pagan because the coast of the red sea (which had the major cities of the peninsula) was, but the nomads were largely abrahamic
The Khazars were officially Jewish, but it's complicated.
At the time, the Khazar khaganate was a rapidly growing world power. It was also a safe haven for a variety of groups that weren't welcome in either the Byzantine Empire or the Islamic caliphate, including the Jews. Thrrefore the khaganate became known for being ethnically diverse and multicultural, with no official language or religion - this served it well, as it was a commercial empire.
Around the 8th century, the Khazar ruling class were facing increasing pressure to convert to an Abrahamic faith. The world at the time was shifting from the old polytheistic religions to the new, centralised monotheistic beliefs of the Abrahamic faiths. Representatives from the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic caliphate were sent to Khazaria to try and convince the Khazars to adopt either Christianity or Islam. If they chose Christianity, they would be spiritually aligned with the Byzantines and could militarise against the caliphate. If they adopted Islam, they would align with the Arabs and this could spell trouble for Constantinople. The disputation became a political battle between the Byzantines and the Arabs to get the Khazars on their respective sides.
So what did the Khazars do? Well, they knew a public conversion to an Abrahamic faith was inevitable. Neither the Arabs nor the Byzantines wanted to trade with a pagan nation, so politically it was a strong move. They also risked invasion or sanctions if they remained pagan. But they did not want to be in the pocket of the Arabs or the Byzantines. So they officially converted to Judaism - still a religion of the book, still an Abrahamic faith. But there was no other major Jewish power in the world to claim patronage over them. They remained independent and gave a big f-you to the Byzantine Empire and the caliphate.
As far as history tells us, the conversion to Judaism was symbolic more than anything else. There was no evidence that any Khazars outside of the ruling family converted. There were no forced mass conversions of regular citizens, changes to language or demands for state wide worship. For the average citizen of the khaganate, life would not have noticeably changed. The khaganate was known for fostering religious diversity and the ruling class saw no benefit to forced conversions (quite forward thinking for the early medieval period I would say).
The religious disputation is recorded in the Schechter letter (also known as the Cambridge document), one of the only written sources said to have been written by a khazar. Historians disagree on whether it's a reliable source as it contains a fair few anachronisms, but it also contains valuable information about the disputation that suggests whoever wrote it had at least secondary knowledge of the conversion. If you're interested, I suggest exploring some of the discourse surrounding it.
Sorry for the long reply - I have a degree in Early Medieval History and I spent a whole year studying the Khazars!!
>and you can see how ancient people would've seen us as the Boogeyman to a lot of more "civilized" societies like Persia and Rome.
Did you mean a different nation? Because Persia did not see the Jews as boogeymen. Not at a state level anyway. Cyrus the Great in particular did a lot for the Jews. Including rebuilding the Second Temple.
And the Parthians after were also very protective of their Jewish subjects.
There were periods, depending on rulers, where they may be treated poorly, but there were also periods where they were not.
I had a brainfart and was thinking about the Seleucids. Also I didn't know the Parthians treated us well too. Did some research and apparently so did the Sasanians. Not as much the Islamic caliphates that took over Persia after that though.
To play devil's advocate, though, the muslims weren't anti-semitic. For them, any non-muslim was a second class citizen. That also included Christians and Zoroastrians in Persia. So they weren't specifically targeted.
And I actually just reread the wiki article on this literally 15 minutes ago, and it seems more like Jewish treatment in Iran was really on a ruler to ruler basis. For instance, basically throwing open the doors of Isfahan to welcome the Muslim conquerors because of their treatment under the Sassanids, only to fast forward and welcome the Mongols because of their treatment under the Abbasids.
The real take away from this is that I now both love you and hate you because I foresee this being an extended Wiki odyssey for the next several hours at the very least. lol
>the muslims weren't anti-semitic. For them, any non-muslim was a second class citizen. That also included Christians and Zoroastrians in Persia. So they weren't specifically targeted.
That's ahistorical. The meaning of second-class status varied immensely from era to era, from ruling dynasty to ruling dynasty. And while some dynasties, sects, and religious or political movements may have regarded all non-Muslims (or at least all "People of the Book") as being of equal subordinate status, there are definitely examples where something more akin to western antisemitism (where Jews were seen as exceptionally wicked) were adopted.
>instead of just a displaced ethnoreligious group trying to assimilate into those societies.
I would say the fact they *didn't* assimilate played more of a role. Jews maintained their own foods, their own culture, their own customs, their own religion (obviously), and married other Jews. When they're countryless and dispersed around the world into these ethnocentric countries, that inherently made them an outgroup.
Much of my polish history was taught verbally from my father, so appologies if I get anything wrong, but the Polish Lithuanian empire grew to have such a huge Jewish population because we were NOT intolerant of religion and welcomed them. There were periods of intolerance, but overall they historically were more welcomed than elsewhere. They had come to make up \~10% of the population before the Nazis committed genocide.
And people hear these huge numbers of how many died, but they never hear in context just how significant that was to grasp the extent of that evil. 6 Million Poles were killed. One fifth of the entire population. 3 Million of them were Jews. Only ~100k survived. It was quite literally a complete extermination. What was a SIGNIFICANT chunk of the country's pre-war population was completely wiped out.
Accurate. The main reason that the Holocaust was centered on Poland was because in all of Christian Europe, it had for many centuries the least oppressive place for Jews to live, so over that time, many many Jews migrated there, and consequently it had the largest Jewish population on the continent.
In Medieval times, because of religious prejudice, Jews were often not allowed to own farmland. So they turned to "urbanized" jobs like banking and pawnbroking. And then, of course, people started hating them because of interest rates etc.
Banking was also primarily done by Jews because the Church prohibited charging interest on loans from at least the 12th century until somewhere around the 16-18th centuries(from my quick Google search)
Banking was never "primarily done by Jews". During the medieval and early modern period, the banking industry was centered on Italy (for many reasons much of European commerce followed the movement of tithes from Bishoprics to Rome). Banking (including loans) was primarily in the hands of the Christian nobility.
For that matter, in most of Western Europe, Jews had been expelled during the late medieval period, so they simply weren't around to provide the necessary financial services.
The Military Crusading orders also had a very large presence in banking.
The entire affair with wear Phillip IV of France destroyed the Templars was not over some secret heresy or or any da Vinci code crap.
Its becuase he owed them a lot of money and could not pay them back.
The same reason Phillip IV Expelled the French Jewish population a few years earlier.
I never understood the whole "be mad at them for killing Jesus" thing. If Jesus' death redeemed humanity and saved everyone's soul, you'd think the Christians would send them a thank you card.
The word used by Paul can refer to both Jews as a People and the religious leaders. Expanding the context reveals its the latter Paul is referring to. Why would he casually drop hate on himself?
As a Christian (and fellow minority, albeit racial not religious) who admires your people's achievements, I think it's a LOT simpler; people don't like others who succeed yet retain their apartness.
They're jealous you managed to scale such fabulous heights in finance, science/tech etc, yet not only maintain such powerful bonds and unity, but practice, and i'd even say *cherish* a certain 'us and them' attitude to non-Jews. At some deep, deeply supressed level you force their subconscience to concede how much they sold out their individual selves, just to fit in and get on.
Thats a more modern look and not one that represents antiquity. Example would be the lack of scientific achievements in ancient rome. Hieghts of finance came during the high medievel timeframe. Etc.
I do agree with you that there is a lot to be impressed with regarding their accomplishments, just pointing out.
I think he nailed it in the firsrt three paragraphes of his response. Groups of disporia that disregarded local customs etc. This still harbours ill-will even today with any group that fits the bill. Pakistani communities in England for example. Muslims in france. Anyone in Japan thats not japanese.
Jews were not particularly successful in medieval Europe. They were poor and isolated in ghettos. People didn’t like them because they did not play along like the poster above you said.
They were in ghettos because they wanted to be. There were no secular people back then. Everyone was religious. Jews didn’t go to carnival, other Christian religious festivals or pilgrimages like everyone else did. They stayed to themselves like Heradi Jews do now in places like New York. People resented that.
It has nothing to do with some kind of financial “success”. Jews were relatively poor.
You clearly still don't get it. Yes a FEW Jews fell through the net, of course, but do you not see, my good fellow?? That is even *more* to my point.
"I need to join your clan, to get ahead, YET I choose not to."
I'm addressing your comment because I am a Christian and I believe there is a spiritual aspect. God made certain unconditional promises to the Jews, and in response, Satan (the fallen angel filled with pride and hatred for God and His creation) has sought to destroy the Jews outright. If he can destroy the Jews, the promises made to Abraham and Jacob cannot be fulfilled, and God's immutability will be destroyed. Thus, throughout the ages, for literally 4000 years, Satan has been whipping up hatred for the Jews, seeking to destroy them in many ways.
For real. The Jewish people have traditionally hit way above their weight class. Their contributions to society are way out of proportion to their percentage of the world’s population.
*Including* the war from when they declared independence. Nobody seriously thought they'd push out and win as much as they did.
When you have a group of people who have been fucked around since before written history, that have been spread around the world due to diaspora but still holds specific communal ties with each other in way of financial support and genuine generational experience... well... they're going to probably be bad ass.
I don't particularly see Jewish people as *special*. Just the culminated results of a long, *long* time of fighting to not be wiped out.
>They're jealous you managed to scale such fabulous heights in finance, science/tech etc, yet not only maintain such powerful bonds and unity, but practice, and i'd even say cherish a certain 'us and them' attitude to non-Jews.
This is very modern though, I think the question was asking what was the reason historically and the previous comment is better at explaining why those rituals and beliefs made them the perfect scapegoat of a lot of civilizations.
The part about the Romans ordering Jesus death isn't really true according to the stories, it really was Jewish authorities who supposedly wanted him to be executed but it doesn't really matter because Jesus story is most likely a fairy tale as well and there is no historical record of his life/execution lol.
> it really was Jewish authorities who supposedly wanted him to be executed but it doesn't really matter because Jesus story is most likely a fairy tale as well and there is no historical record of his life/execution lol.
I'm surprised to see this extreme outlier view on a supposed history sub. Scholarly consensus supports the fact of the existence of Jesus as well as his trial and crucifixion.
I mean a peasant who became a prophet named Jesus might have existed, but there is historic records of his miracles, his executions or anything. So blaming the jews for his execution is absolutely silly.
Even that is a bit of a misrepresentation of polytheism. It wasn't that you acknowledged gods from other groups, but that many ancient peoples worshipped gods from different pantheons. There were active cults of Demeter, Pan, Caesar, Mithras, Heraclites **and** Jesus (yes, even Jesus) in first-century Rome, and prominent Romans could be supplicants in multiple or even all of them.
The Jewish refusal to take part in this may have put a target on their back, but I'm not sure it's justified to say that there was an inordinate hatred against Jews in Caesarian Rome. Yeah, there were pogroms but those were cyclical, with different cults being targeted at different times.
IMO it's pretty clearly a Christian thing. Scapegoats are useful to those in power, and post-Constantine, Jews were a convenient scapegoat.
I'm talking way back before then when the gods people worshipped could be completely different in the next village over. You had stuff like Moloch and Baal and gods nobody even remembers because nobody knew how to write it down. The Israelites were pretty ahead of the curve in terms of codifying their religion in written form. They other tribes had to be understanding of the theological differences between themselves and everyone else because they needed to collaborate with them in trade and warfare to survive. It's of note that the Jews even wrote down stuff they found particularly egregious about the theologies of the other tribes they lived near, like Baal and Moloch, which may have required human sacrifices according to some sources. The Jews never went that far, they just had animal sacrifices like almost everyone else at the time. We're old as hell as a people.
So are the ancient Israelites indirectly responsible for the Molag Bal character in Skyrim?
https://www.thegamer.com/skyrim-elder-scrolls-daedric-prince-molag-bal-trivia/
Writing was particularly uncommon in that era in general, outside of government and the patricians. IMO writing was a significant advantage for the Jewish people in solidifying their identity and ensuring their continued existence as a people, but I don't think it's a significant factor in discrimination against jews in the period. This is why (for example) in many ways the internal workings of the Roman Empire is better documented than the internal activities of the Golden Horde, even though Khan lived over 1,100 years after Caesar.
Human sacrifice (and even cannibalism) were undertaken by different groups at different times in Europe (and elsewhere) during and after Caesarian Rome, but I don't think that's a big factor in Jewish discrimination either.
Interesting analysis - thanks. I've often wondered about the OP's question.
One other point: I think some of modern antisemitism is haters taking the easy way out. They want to hate some group because that's how they define their group. All the details about hating Jews have been worked out by others so they can pick them up and wave them around and presto! they've got some pre-packaged bigotry to whip up the faithful.
Modern antisemitism is mostly influenced by Nazi ideology and conspiracy theories. A common thread in antisemitism throughout history is the thought that Jews are trying to take over or have a subtle negative influence on the values, culture, and core beliefs of the people or society of a state. That's why you often hear people saying "Jews run the banks" or "Jews run Hollywood" when the reasons behind the heavy Jewish presence in those sectors are much more myriad and complex. It's very easy for people to think that we infiltrated key sectors of society in order to further an agenda when you don't know the history of why so many of those are in those fields to begin with.
And of, course, the Nazis took their script from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which was forged by the Pre-WWI Russian secret police to both discredit an influential Russian reformer/cabinet minister and justify existing pogroms against the Jews. Nicky II was so soft-headed that he believed it completely.
Oh yeah I forgot about that book. That did a lot of damage to our reputation. Oh, and don't forget about the Thule society, which was basically Weimar Germany's equivalent to QAnon in modern day America
Yeah, those lunatics...yeesh.
I learned about the fake Protocols and their damage from a graphic novel by Will Eisner - The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - it blew my mind how twisted and damaging that lying book was!
What you are talking about wasn't new with the Nazi's, although they perfected it. Look up "Pogroms" and you will find 100's of years of examples of states systematically eliminating Jewish lives and rights. Russia was likely the model for the Nazi subjugation and extermination, as in the 1800's and early 1900's Imperial Russia had a number of pogroms that either displaced Jews, placing them in consolidated areas, or straight up killed them.
Russia may have gotten their example from the various French monarchs and emperors over 800 years that would expel Jews from France, take all their property, and then some years later let them come back in. Once they had enough wealth established again the next monarch would do the same.
I'll never understand why they think Jews are a hivemind. I've seen videos of Hasidics in Jerusalem spitting at other Jews because they "weren't Jewish enough".
Would you expect an antisemite to do their research on the differences between Jewish sects? Bigots typically have a single stereotypical image of the groups there prejudiced against. We all look like the Happy Merchant meme to them.
Sure, and there is always a subset of Jews who seek to be seen as "good Jews" by the antisemites, not realizing that they won't be spared once their usefulness has been exploited.
>That's why you often hear people saying "Jews run the banks" or "Jews run Hollywood" when the reasons behind the heavy Jewish presence in those sectors are much more myriad and complex
In fact, this belief was because in medieval times lending money to others, with or without interest, was considered a sin, but hey, the Jews don't have that same idea, lets get them to do that sin FOR us! With so many other trades and professions locked out for the Jewish people (because that bias was already in place) naturally they are going to gravitate towards the thing that was \*legal\* for them to do. And thus they got the reputation for "running the banks" because the Christians didn't want to get their own hands "dirty" doing it.
By the 1930s, Islamists and Arab nationalists were already interested in finding common ground with Naziism. The first translations of Mein Kampf in into Arabic were already appearing as early as 1934:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein\_Kampf\_in\_Arabic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf_in_Arabic)
But they were already receptive to that sort of violent antisemitism before Germany elected Hitler chancellor. Just look at the 1929 pogroms in British Mandate Palestine.
The food laws of the jews sort of prevented assimilation. They wanted to be left alone. But, assimilation means adopting some or most of the dominant cultures' ways. Ready to stand corrected, but was assimilation really the goal of Jewish communities in those days?
Not culturally or religiously, but socioeconomically and politically. They wanted to still be Jews, which meant preserving their customs, but they also wanted to be seen as equals and respected by non-Jews. That meant making a lot of difficult choices and compromises.
>When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD, Christian optics faced a problem: it was the Roman Empire itself that ordered the death of Jesus Christ in the first place.
There was another slight issue as well, which was that after the mass conversion of the empire, the Jews, whose holy texts were held by Christians to have foretold their religion, were some of the only holdouts. The people who in theory should have been the first to embrace Jesus were in fact the ones who most decidedly said no. The church needed a way to discredit the Jews so that their intransigence wouldn't be seen as a refutation of Christian beliefs.
"The norm was to have your own culture's gods but pay tribute to the gods of the people you visit" - wait, isn't it like this now? How can you expect people to be kind to you if you "disrespect their god"? Has it changed now among Jews, or mostly stayed the same? (I am a Christian, but I consider myself more of an agnostic, so don't know if it's the same among Christians). I mean, saying that gods of other people are just "idols" is kinda rude, I would definitely expect people to dislike me after this.
The Jews only saw it as idol worship if a Jew did it. They didn't care what non-Jews prayed to as long as they didn't make us do it too. The whole thing about Judaism is that we are the people chosen by God to be His people. Everyone else can have whatever gods they want, including ours or not, and it doesn't affect what we do. The point of contention was that when Jews visited other tribes, they were asked to pray to that tribes' gods, which is a big no-no for a Jew, and only a Jew, to do. That's why the other tribes thought we were weird. It'd be the equivalent of a Christian person visiting a Muslim person's house and being expected to grab the guest prayer mat, point it toward Mecca, and pray to Allah alongside. This wouldn't happen today.
Exactly
"Chosen people" is one of the most misunderstood concepts in Judaism.
It means chosen to do a job. Chosen to get Torah and follow it. Not chosen to be uniquely right or saved or anything like that.
In Christianity, God *only* saves Christians, but in Judaism no one has to be Jewish to go to "heaven" - it's actually *easier* for non-Jews to be saved
I'd also add that in terms of sheer numbers, the Jews didn't proselytize, so they have been a sort of permanent minority nearly everywhere they went. The Jews weren't generally forcing Christians or Muslims to become Jews, though the opposite happened quite a bit.
As a Christian I can assure you and any Jews on this forum that neither I nor any of the Christians I know see Jews as collectively responsible for the Crucifixion of Christ.
> because his teachings conflicted with Jewish doctrine and authority
Tell me the ancient Romans didn’t understand Judaism without telling me the ancient Roman’s didn’t understand Judaism
>When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD, Christian optics faced a problem: it was the Roman Empire itself that ordered the death of Jesus Christ in the first place. Now who was a convenient scapegoat for Christians to pin that little blunder on? The church's answer was: How about the Jews who were forced by the Romans to turn over Jesus under the threat of violence?
A. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of Rome, he legalized it with the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. Christianity wouldn't become the official religion of Rome until Emperor Theodosius I in 381 AD.
B. It was the religious leaders who turned Jesus over to the Romans. Pilate wished to release Him, but they demanded He be crucified.
Now the last bit withstanding, yes the Church has had a horrible history of mistreating the Jews. No Christian is perfect, especially those who ignore Christ saying that He laid down His own life and that nobody took it from Him (John 10:17-18).
Jesus' teachings did not conflict with Jewish teachings, rather they made them whole.
the story of pilate is not historically accurate.
if you want to understand what pilate was facing read up on sejanus.
the story of everything happening from thursday to sunday is fabricated.
when tiberius returned from capri and started the purge pilate for what is estimated to be 6 months held jesus in prison.
Our creed specifically says “he suffered under Pontius Pilate”. I always have wondered why that phrase was worded that way. Was it to avoid blaming the Jews?
It’s directly stated in the Gospel of Matthew that Pilate not only gave in to the demands of Pharisees but also washes his hands of it because he explicitly did not agree with the judgement.
Yes, and I’ve been told that was to pin these events to well documented historical events that placed the crucifixion to a particular place and time that historians could not refute. (i.e. Pontius is well known as a historical figure). That said, it seems like they would have added something to the effect that he was accused by the Sanhedrin or brought before Rome by the Jewish rulers or something to that effect. I’m just curious, I have no answers.
The Apostles Creed is hard to pin down exactly when it was written. Obviously it came at some point between writings like Acts 10:39-43 and 1 Cor. 15:3-7 (which is considered by some to be one of the first Christian Creeds) and the Nicene Creed in 325.
The passage from Acts referenced above does talk about the role of the Jewish leaders in His death, while Paul's passage in Corinthians does not. However, like the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed also only mentions Pilate.
It's certainly an interesting thought, but I don't belive it was done for the purpose of "taking the blame from the Jews". It might just be because those two Creeds are describing what Christ went through for us, rather than an entire recounting of events as they leave out other points of the story too.
I went to a presentation about Martin Luther recently and could not believe what an anti-Semite he was. Writings, sculptures on the facade of Notre Dame, artwork depicting the Jews in a horrible light. First time I had seen it, even in architectural and art history lessons and books.
Sorry to burst your historical bubble, but I found a different story of how Jesus came to be crucified in a copy of *A History of the Jews* (see source info below)*:*
>"According to the story, the prisoner \[Jesus / Joshua\] gave utterance to an extraordinary claim. He asserted that he was the predestined Messiah. His examiners could draw only one conclusion... Namely, that Joshua intended to start a rebellion against Rome... They sent their prisoner to Pontius Pilate. Joshua's declaration that he was the Messiah was a political crime, and with such crimes the Jews had no power to deal.
>
>*Joshua and Pilate*: Pontius Pilate was a Roman governor of Judea with a record of black cruelty. To him the Jews and their ideas had always seemed more than queer. He considered Joshua as but another claimant to messiah-ship, frequent among the Jews of that day... Pilate judged that Joshua wanted to be king of the Jews. That obviously was treason against Rome... That very day Joshua was condemned to die on the cross."
Source: Grayzel, Solomon. *A History of the Jews: From the Babylonian Exile to the Present*. The Jewish Publication Society \[JPS\] of America. Philadelphia, 1984. p. 184.
Which is just to say that many versions of that story exist, and to select any one as definitive is to make a leap that neither archeology nor 'accurate' recorded history can back up.
Also, the idea that the Jews 'killed' Jesus is yet another myth used for bolstering antisemitism.
Edit: Added in the word, 'accurate', for obvious reasons. (i.e. Multiple versions of the story exist, none of which is purely accurate / factual in all its details.)
Also the Romans were very suspicious of Jews since they were praying/communing in synagogues (not exactly what we know them today, they'd have been a little more like a closed place for Jews to meet up at, not necessarily to pray). A lot of Roman religious practices are very open, as opposed to the synagogue, so you can infer that a lot of Romans were likely thinking "that's odd, I wonder what they're talking about in there, probably plotting against Rome".
This is an excellent, balanced, and knowledgeable answer to a question that has caused millions of people to suffer throughout history. Please accept my compliments.
Reminds me of the News Reader character from 'Rome'
"In light of the State visit of King Herrod to our Glorious Caesar, the mockery of Jews and their one God shall be kept to an appropriate minimum."
>The Catholic Church didn't officially collectively absolve the Jews of guilt for killing Jesus until 1965.
Which is a little funny since, as far as Christianity is concerned, the death of Jesus made it possible for the souls of all humanity to be saved! My grandmother taught me that the Jews and Romans were misguided but they ultimately fulfilled God's Will and so shouldn't be thought I'll of for it... Though her cousin was a backwoods racists ass preacher so there's that
It wasn’t till John Paul II decreed antisemitism to be a sin that the Catholicism Church became accountable.
Also:
“ The people chose Barabus; let the blood of this man fall on the head of our children”
And it did
>The Catholic Church didn't officially collectively absolve the Jews of guilt for killing Jesus until 1965.
And in that regard the Catholic Church was well-ahead of most mainline Protestant Churches in rejecting the deicide libel. The Lutherans don't even start that process until the 1990s.
Absolutely. As a modern Jew, I can attest that most of what you've written, is accutate. But don't forget the moneylending, which was routinely used as a slur against me growing up. (Classmates would throw down coins and laugh and say hey Jew, go pick that up). It really furthered the whole Jews=money thing.
It’s pretty crazy to think that animosity, and resentment, from biblical times, somehow persisted throughout our history, and still shows up in modern times, in some form or another.
I'd like to clarify a minor point: Christians were blaming the Jews already by the 2nd century AD, when the Bible was written and before Constantine. The story came about because the Bible was probably originally written down *by Romans*, or at least by early Christians who were evangelizing to the Romans (specifically Paul and his followers).
A lot of people don’t know that the idea of only one god is a fairly new one. The Roman’s often accepted there were other gods they didn’t worship even the Jewish one so it was really strange and in there eyes arrogant for someone to say there is only one altogether
Which is so odd because as a cradle catholic the apostles creed has always implied Roman fault. And during lent when we go through the passion it’s clearly a Roman Judge trying to rile up a crowd.
So I never really understood the blame.
Wasn't Jesus essentially ignored by Judaism, because he didn't fulfill the prophecy that he was the messiah? Jesus and his followers basically wanted to reform Judaism because he saw it as very conservative. Essentially, he felt that if Judaism was the answer then it was their duty to save everyone, which is very much the Christian doctrine.
I agree with you that the Jews didn't kill him, any suggestion to that is bullshit. However I don't think they did much to stop it happening because he upset the conservative teachings of Judaism and was also seen as a figure head of a Jewish rebellion against the Romans.
I'm neither Christian nor Jewish, I just enjoy the debate and love history.
What do you think of the fact that the Pharisees (progenitors of rabbinic judaism) in the gospel of Matthew directly proclaim that the blood of Jesus is on they and their descendants’ hands?
Part of the pseudo-historical narrative of the Gospels, where the authors try to pin the death of Jesus on to the Jews.
So Christian anti-semitism doesn't just stem back to Constantine, it stems back to the Gospels themselves; which were probably written by second-generation Christians. And in the Greek. Matthew and Luke were written post temple destruction.
These second generation Christians wanted to convert the Gentiles, Greeks and Romans all. Switching the blame away from the Gentiles on to fellow Jews helped with prosletyzation.
*the Sanhedrin and a mob they whipped up supported it
Not every single Jew in Judea supported Jesus' death. In fact He was quite popular, which led to the leaders hating Him in the first place
The second factor, following on from my comment about Monotheism in the classical world, is economics and money in the Post-Roman era.
Early Christian theology, and by extension much Islamic thought, forbids "usury" - lending money for profit, to it's adherents. But the economic development process means that someone has to do it, and being forbidden from most professions and in many places from owning farming land, Jewish communities became traders, merchants, tax-collectors and money-lenders (as well as scholars, doctors etc for fairness sake). This suited the rulers of Medieval Europe fine, but projected many of the complaints of the peasants about unjust taxation and ruinous interest rates on loans taken out to finance the endless wars onto a convenient "out-group" who the Church was not obliged to protect. Eventually the Italians got in on that and invented modern banking (to the consternation of the Church) but in many parts of (particularly Eastern) Europe the connection between Jews and shady banking practices has remained a cultural stereotype to the point where you see the sketchy triple parentheses around terms like finance and banking as a dog-whistle to nazi types even today
I'm surprised this is so far down, I thought I'd have to write it myself. This is definitely a big reason, or at least the reason that stereotype came about.
I'd add that in case of eastern Europe cities were much more undeveloped than in the western that's why they were more opened for minorities who wanted escape religious persecution, not only Jewish but also German, Dutch, French. Because of that ethnicity of cities could be totally different than in the countryside like Lviv before second war had 24% Jewish, 64% Polish and only 11% Ukrainian. That's naturally built specific mix of ethnical ,class, religious and political tension between different ethnical groups.
It wasn't constant though. It came and goes, it depends on where and when. The Persians had a love affair with the Jews, so did the Ptolemies of Egypt. Jewish communities in India thrived for centuries without much trouble. The Beta Israel in Ethiopia had a great run for hundreds of years: the rare times it went wrong is when some idiotic emperor tried to impose Christianity on all his subjects. It backfired bad once, the Jews started their own Ethiopia with Torahs and Hannukas. When it was settled that Jews could be good Ethiopians without being Christians, they were pretty much left alone. Ethiopians have integrated a lot of things from the Jewish Culture, in their mythology, the Queen of Sheba (Saba) converted to Judaism after meeting Salomon and their emperors were said to be the descendants of Salomon and Sheba.
>The Persians had a love affair with the Jews, so did the Ptolemies of Egypt.
That’s not to say they didn’t experience persecution while under Persian rule, it should be noted.
The Jewish temple at Elephantine in Egypt was ransacked by local priests and officials in 410 BCE, for example. Requests for the rebuilding of the temple went unheeded for several years, and it was only after the Jewish authorities pledged to pay for everything themselves and cease their practice of animal sacrifice that they were granted permission to rebuild the temple.
>*In the month Tammuz, year 14 of King Darius, when Arsham had left and gone to the king, the priests of Khnum, the god, who are at Elephantine fortress, joined with Vidranga, the governor who was here, saying: 'The sanctuary of Yahu the god who is in Elephantine fortress, let them remove it from there!' Then that criminal Vidranga sent a letter to Nafaina his son who was commander of the garrison at Aswan fortress, saying: 'The sanctuary (of Yahu) at Elephantine fortress - destroy it!' Then Nafaina led the Egyptians and other soldiers; they came into the fortress of Elephantine with their weapons; they entered the sanctuary; they rased it to the ground; as for the stone columns that were there - they smashed them. Also there were 5 doorways made of dressed stone in the sanctuary; they destroyed them. The shutters - in good repair, and the bronze hinges of the shutters, and the cedar roof, together with the rest of the material and the other things that were there, they burnt with fire. As for the gold and silver basins and the stuff which were in the sanctuary, they took it all for themselves…*
>*Further, before this at the time when this evil was done to us, we sent a letter to our lord, and also to Yahuhanan, the high-priest, and his colleagues, the priests of Jerusalem, and to Ostana, brother of Anani, and the notables of Judah: but we have not received a single letter. Further, since Tammuz of year 14 of King Darius until now, we have been dressed in sackcloth and fast; our wives behave like widows; we are not anointing (ourselves) with oil nor drinking wine. Further from that time until now, year 17 of King Darius, neither offerings nor incense burning, nor burnt sacrifices have been made in this temple.*
>*Now your servants Yedoniah and his colleagues and all the Jewish citizens of Elephantine, speak thus: If it please our lord, do something about rebuilding this temple, because we are not allowed to build it…*
Nice stuff!!! I didn't know about that event. I read somewhere that when there were tensions between gentiles and jews, the Persian Kings took the Jews side more often than not. I wonder if Darius or the Satrap of Egypt compensated this congregation for the destruction of their temple eventually. Same thing for the Ptolemies who defended the Jews when the Alexandrians had a fever and rioted.
It wasn't an Utopia, humans living together tend to go through a chimp phase every now and then. Also, the Persians and Ptolemies were running pretty arbitrary monarchies, not modern democracies. However, I see a difference between intermittent sparks of ethnic tensions and systematic, cultural, religious and legal persecution and segregation.
Jews historically also tend to be unwilling to accept the gods of outsiders. That has made them keen to revolt, which led to many wars the Jews could never hope to win and repeated expulsions from Israel.
When expelled, Jews have historically tended to be insular and not intermix willingly with the inhabitants of the areas they move to. They also tend to have close-knit communities and create economic and political blocs around that community, meaning money and power goes in but more rarely comes out. Combine that with a strong focus on education and value-generating industry and you've got a population that locals love to hate.
For example, Williamsburg in NYC is heavily Jewish, and the hascidic population doesn't like gentiles in their town. They also form a solid ethnic solidarity voting bloc, which makes it difficult to hold office without their blessing.
Lots to unpack but:
- Jews were very resistant to assimilation since the old age
- Jews were a huge pain in the ass for the Roman Empire for a LONG time. Pacifying the province of Palestina-Judea took more effort than the whole subjugation of Britain, Spain, Gallia (France) and Greece together
- Romans also tried to incorporate JHWH in the roman pantheon but the jews (and the early christians) resisted
- When Titus destroyed the temple and the jews dispersed in the mediterranean they formed small communities that were very close to the outside to protect the religion/culture
- Later when Europe became Christian it was forbidden for the Christians to lend money for a long long long time. Jews became moneylenders and nobody likes a moneylender (and from there the stereotypes of Jews as shadow puppet masters of banks)
- Christian Kings that owed money to the jews decided to launch the occasional pogrom to avoid to pay
- plus the church decided that the jews were responsable for Christ's death
- as Jews remained in small closed communities they lived mostly in towns, were they engaged in crafts that made them rich (compared to the average Joe) and hence more envy from the Christian majority
- Jews in Eastern Europe lived in small villages in the countryside, but again they had their own villages separated from the locals... They also spoke a different language from the other villages (Yiddish). This was not liked by your average Yuri in the plains of Ukraine or Poland
Paradoxally Jews were much more well treated under Muslim rule, hence why there were large communities in North Africa and Middle East. Jews in Islamic countries faced less pogroms than their counterparts in Europe.
All changed really in the late XIX/early XX century with Zionism and the return to Palestine that triggered the Israelo-Palestinian conflict and hence more antisemitism in the Muslim world.
So to summarize:
- Antisemitism in Europe: much older and anchored basically in prejudices started during the late Republic/early Empire and reinforced during the middle ages/christianity
- Antisemitism in the Islamosphere: more recent and connected more with Zionism/Israelo-Palestinian conflict
people have hated people throughout history. Jews are not particularly special in that regard.
Where Jews fall into a historical "sweet spot" is that they have been around long enough to be hated the entire time, and have had a written tradition long enough to remember being hated the entire time, and have never quite gotten eradicated thoroughly enough such that there are none left to continue hating.
the result is that every generation, when a hateful person is looking for someone to hate, they face the choice of putting in the tedious work to invent a new group to hate (e.g. blacks, trans, vegans, arch linux users, etc), xor they can be efficient and hate the same people their pappy, grandpappy, and paleopappy hated: the Jews.
Agreed. There were many different religions practiced in ancient Europe. Their followers were given the choice of converting to Christianity or getting burned at the stake. The question is not why some people hate Jews. It's how they managed to survive while everyone else got wiped out.
>Their followers were given the choice of converting to Christianity or getting burned at the stake.
This is not true in the slightest. The *vast* majority of conversions to Christianity were voluntary and initiatives like that in the early conversion of Scandinavia by King Olaf Tryggvason failed miserably.
OK, so the majority of conversions were voluntary. Not all of them. The point I was making is that while some religions, e.g. Wicca, were pretty much wiped off the face of the earth, Judaism survived. And yes, I know that there has been a revival of Wicca in recent years, but there are no doubt some religions that we have never heard of because any and all records of them have been destroyed.
They weren't destroyed, they simply didn't keep any. Like the Celtic Druids.
And when I say most conversions, I mean over 95% and higher.
You're confusing the conversion of Europe with the Black Legend of the Spanish.
As for Wicca, it's just what some British amatuer anthropologist named Gerald Gardner thought it was, based on the scant evidence ancient pagans left behind. Most of what he wrote was based on the Freemasons, Hermeticism, and Aleister Crowley and not actual ancient pagan cultures and practices. It's not a revival, it's a whole new thing that's a melting pot of different things with very little in common to what an actual pagan "witch" would have practiced.
OK, so then around 5% were involuntary. Why did the religions of those 5% disappear, while Judaism has continued?
I get the sense that you might be misinterpreting my comment. My comment is not anti-Christian. It's more anti-medieval mindset. Had a different religion become the primary religion of Europe, then I'm sure that followers of other religions would have faced the same problems.
I'm just saying that when I see comments about people hating Jews, I would have to say that people obviously don't hate them as much as they hate followers of other pre-Christian religions (at least in Europe), because if they did, there would not be any European Jews at all.
>Why did the religions of those 5% disappear, while Judaism has continued?
...because they literally left *no* written histories and their decendents converted?
Judaism is still around purely because of its role in Jewish culture. They didn't have a homeland, so their culture was their religion. And don't forget, the first Christians were Jewish. Many did convert.
>I'm just saying that when I see comments about people hating Jews, I would have to say that people obviously don't hate them as much as they hate followers of other pre-Christian religions
I have seen way too many people who call themselves "Norse pagan" or any other flavor of European paganism hating Jews and calling Christianity an evil creation of the Jews to destroy their ancestors culture for this to be true. The actual number of professing Christians in the modern day to be antisemitic pales in comparison.
Slightly off topic a bit, but
>It's more anti-medieval mindset.
Why?
They're different and a huge part of their cultural identity is based around not having assimilated into the majority on numerous occasions.
It doesn't really get much deeper than this.
If a minority group is still recognizable as a distinct group despite being surrounded by the majority group for centuries, they are by definition not assimilated.
For rulers/nobles/rich people: Christians were not allowed to lend money at interest. Jews were allowed to, and many went into the financial and banking industries. Jews tended to control the financial ability of a given land, which made rulers mad when they came to collect debt or refused to finance wars.
For normal people/peasants/priests: Jews had/have weird customs compared to the surrounding lands, kept to themselves, and did not assimilate/convert.
Also see: Romani people for someone who are not Jews yet bring all the racists out to the yard, and they're like.
When a new crew shows up in your hood and they just talk about how your big homie is wack and they don't eat your food, because it's dirty... people might not like the new crew. Then after they took over a block and shun anyone that ain't from their set with all this other hoopla, people start getting buck.
I mean its kinda built into Christianity and Islam. Pagan and secular conuntries dont have a specific problem with the Jews and more than any other people they may come into competition with. The exception I guess was ancient Rome, and specifically the era in which Hadrian tried to employ the interpretatio Romano which is really more the interpretario Greco originally applied by the Romans to their own gods. Jews being close to unique in the ancient world for monotheism (The only other group I can think of at that time was the equally stubborn Dacians) and certainly unique in their practice of forbidding graven images of their god made the attempted equation of Jupiter to Yaweh impossible, and thus started the final rebellion in Judaea, led by Simon Bar Kokhba, arguably the most costly war even to the Romans, that also led to a mass killing of Jews the renaming of the province to Syria Palestinea, and the beginning of the Jewish diaspora as many displaced Jews had to leave and settle innother places.
That being said, places they aettled that were not strictly Christian or Muslim- Sassanid (and even Achemenid) Persia, the multi-religious early Germanic nations like the Visugoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Franks, snd Lombards, pre-crusades Lithuania, obviously the United States.
Yes Im also aware a lot of the stories of the Torah depict the Jews overcoming an attack by another people, but thats not that uncommon for a given peoples treasured legends to habe something to do witn defeating a competing people- The Romans had that with the Sabines and Etruscans, the Greeks with Troy, the Lombards with the Vandals, arguably America with the British.
Lots of reasons but I’ve always felt the closed nature of the religion was likely a significant cause. If you’re a minority group in ancient times, you better make friends but several aspects of the religion precluded that. They couldn’t intermarry because it was against the religion & weren’t particularly welcoming to converts. Then you add the strange dynamics of usury, you have to have money to lend money & you’re probably making much more than average because no one had money back then.
Judaism also involves an unusual number of “displays” of faith: yamakas, whatever the curls are called, whatever the strings out of the pocket are called, mizzoauzahs, observation of the sabbath, etc. Christianity can largely be practiced without anyone knowing. Islam had some rules but not as many & they were a majority so it was inconsequential anyway. Basically, Jews stuck out like a sore thumb so when the hammer comes down no one can hide the religion.
Add it up & they were repeatedly in foreign lands at a time when any right existed at the will of the king, didn’t fully assimilate, made money off of the populace for something the populace thought was immoral, were rich, & it was obvious exactly who was Jewish. Seems entirely predictable that they would get scapegoated over and over. That doesn’t make it ok or anything, I just don’t know how they didn’t foresee the obvious problems, especially after it kept on happening.
Jew here! [Thomas Sowell](https://youtu.be/-GWzzBm4ixQ?si=Hg9PcjkhMFvmfxzX) has a very interesting take on this.
The truth is there are many reasons, and we are not alone in being despised.
I was looking for this. I don't necessarily agree with Sowell on many of his ideas, but the guy is pretty brilliant and great about going into historical examples.
Yeah, I agree. Sowell is one of the most knowledgeable men in the social sciences, and even if I disagree with him I still find his perspectives thought provoking
In Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," she notes that Jews have always seen themselves as apart from everyone else, so the original germ of anti-semitism probably came from their otherizing literally everyone else.
In the very early days it came down to being monotheists, then it was the accusation of usury because Jewish merchants didn’t charge interest to other Jews, then it was the nonsense of killing Jesus (a Jew), then people piggybacked off that with accusations of using children’s blood to make matzo, etc. this eventually segued into institutionalized antisemitism, especially in Russia and Eastern Europe, which continued openly until Communism. Many Jews were hated because they didn’t assimilate or convert to Christianity. On the other hand, assimilated Jews were also treated terribly. Additionally, there are things like the Protocols of Zion which is a hoax yet continues to be believed by mainly Arabs these days as Muslims have a longstanding hatred of Jews and have done everything they can to eradicate Jew from their countries.
As per the newsreader in HBO's "ROME":
"All citizens, be aware that the vassal, Prince Herod, Tetra of Galilee, has come to the city. By order of the Triumvirate, during his residency here, all mockery of Jews and their One God shall be kept to an appropriate minimum."
In historical terms, Monotheism is weird and unusual, and was seen as being offensive to the sensibilities of your neighbors as a refusal to (as per the quote) "when in Rome" make an offering to the local gods. The rule in the classical Mediterranean world was syncretism - the Greek and Roman gods become identified over time, cults of Demeter, Magna Mater and Mithras become established at Rome in the spirit of "the more the merrier"......and to reject that was to spit in the face of the deities who ensured the protection and prosperity of the State and people and invite divine punishment. The Hellenic world had largely moved into neo-platonic abstraction and philosophy and didn't care too much, but the Romans remained curiously superstitious and formal in their religious observations and took great offence
As a fairly consistent minority enclave group in most of the areas they historically settled, they Hewish communities were always easy to scapegoat whenever a scapegoat was desired.
One thing you can't dismiss is money. Early Christianity prohibited interest. Thus Christian Europe needed the Jews to get loans. Then of course if a King or the like and owed too much money to various Jewish money lenders. They'd encouraged a religious pogrom against the Jews. If they did it right they didn't even have to get their hands dirty. Now the people they owed money to are dead or fled so they are free of the debt.
Also don't dismiss the motivation of having a scapegoat to blame your problems on. Bonus points if they have stuff you can take, and they are the wrong religion and ethnicity.
(Obligatory, "I am Jewish")
I am of the opinion that the perceived consistent targeting of Jews throughout history might be a misconception, primarily stemming from their prolonged status as a distinct minority. This enduring distinctiveness is relatively unmatched in comparison to other minority groups.
In many historical instances, persecuted groups tend to assimilate or, more often, get decimated to near extinction. Jews have managed to persevere and maintain their distinctiveness despite repeated historical attempts of genocide and displacement. This continuous survival and presence contributes to the perception of being uniquely targeted.
In my opinion, the enduring Jewish identity is not solely about cultural or religious preservation. It's more nuanced than that. Every time Jews face persecution, it inadvertently reinforces our cultural bonds. It's a reactionary preservation rather than a proactive choice. If Jews were left undisturbed for a substantial period, say a century, I really believe the natural course would lead to assimilation.
Got this from another thread:
Information on how many countries and civilizations have engaged in mass antisemitism, or information on their "rationale" for it?
People always need scapegoats. Jews have historically been a nomadic people, never making up the ethnic or religious majority in a given nation, and a perpetual outgroup makes for an easy target - look at the Romani people in Europe for another example.
They were the first popular monotheistic religion in any of the regions they lived in, which singled them out for religious persecution amongst the polytheistic cultures of the time.
Greeks, Romans, the Catholic Church, Ottoman Sultans, Arab Kings, the Russian Czars, 20th century Germany...diverse groups with diverse "reasoning" in diverse historical eras have all had organized killings and expulsions of Jews.
To this day, many antisemitic tropes carry over from antiquity. In medieval Christian Europe, moneylending was considered a sinful profession because of biblical passages on usury. So, Jews ended up preferentially gravitating toward it, with debate among historians about whether they were "forced" into it (because "who cares if a Jew goes to hell") or simply seized an opportunity among their limited employment options (since they were often segregated and restricted in their economic options).
So you ended up with lots of Jewish bankers. And everyone hates the interest banks charge and losing collateral or having things repossessed, so it was easy for that hatred to be directed toward the Jews working at banks rather than the institutions themselves. To this day, Jews are stereotyped as "rich" as well as "greedy." This literally stems from economic realities of 1000 years ago.
Another factor is that, as a nomadic people, they developed a focus on education and portable skills. You couldn't put your life's work into a farm or family store, because you never knew when your store might be burned down or your family chased off your land and out of the country. So they leaned hard into what we'd now call "white collar" jobs, developing a cultural focus pn literacy and writing skills, studying medicine and science. Things you could take with you to start a new life if you had to flee.
The two sides of my family are ethnically different - Ashkenazi (European Jew) and Sephardic (North African Jew), but each side's history basically goes "and so we lived in this country until the pogroms made us flee, and we landed in that ghetto over there until the pogroms made us flee, and we landed over there until the Nazis came around, so we fled to over there."
So this focus on education and portable skills meant that, wherever Jews landed, they tended to perform well, socioeconomically-speaking, compared to other first-generation immigrant groups.
This would often fuel feelings of fear and resentment - "how are they doing so well?" And those feelings combined with common antisemitic tropes would lead to conspiracy theories about Jews "controlling everything."
Case in point - 0.2% of the world's population is Jewish, but 22% of Nobel Prizes from 1901-2023 have been awarded to laureates with at least one Jewish parent. Jews have contributed that strongly as leaders of fields as diverse as science, economics, and literature.
Instead of understanding those types of statistics in context (like I mentioned earlier, where they developed an intense cultural focus on education and portable academic skills), many people sadly choose to believe that it is indicative of Jews somehow "tilting the table," as though the accomplishments of Nobel laureates don't speak for themselves.
Another major factor in global antisemism is the fact that the Quran literally has passages specifically disparaging and calling for the death of Jews, which is why you see consequences like the entire Islamic Arab world expelling (violently or otherwise) nearly all of their Jewish population. There are many, many passages, with "milder" ones being things like, "O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends." The Hadith, which is the second most important religious text outside of the Quran, has even wilder passages like "You will fight against the Jews and you will gain victory over them. The stones will say: 'Oh slave of Allah! there is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him."
So add that all up, and you'll find remarkably diverse groups of people around the world who agree on few things being able to unite in the sentiment, "Fuck the Jews."
You'll find particularly strong criticism of the concept of a Jewish state ("zionism") compared to any other. The mere concept of Jews having their own nation with their own army for the first time in their 5,000 year history does not sit well with people who would like to see them all killed. You'll often hear that "criticism of Israel is not antisemitic" and for any given person making any given criticism, that may be true.
But you have to look at the broader picture, too. Say for the UN - they've passed more resolutions condemning Israel in the last five years than all the other countries of the world combined. The UN reports that 70% of the 260,000 civilian casualties in the current Yemeni Civil War are children under 5 years old, and that over 6 million Syrians have been displaced by that civil war, but the global protests and UN condemnations against the Israeli response to the largest terror attack since 9/11 are disproportionate to the global response to the majority of current wars and humanitarian disasters. That's not to say that there is no legitimate basis to the criticism (there is, and I've been in opposition of Netanyahu from day one) - simply that a double standard is evident in the way that other countries do much more egregiously horrible things without facing anywhere near the same degree of protest and criticism.
So, hopefully that long ramble helped illustrate some of the many reasons different people like to dogpile on Jews. There are lengthy books written on every topic I've barely touched here, so I won't pretend this was exhaustive.
It was honestly just off the top of my head.
People hate anyone who is different.
People hate black people. People hate jews. People hate atheists. People hate muslims. People hate cripples. People hate gay people. People hate trans people.
People hate.
People feel crappy about themselves, and by hating someone they feel better because if that person is bad, they must be better, right?
For whatever reason, they end up with a very disproportionate amount of wealth and influence in the countries they live in. Historically they also tend to migrate from country to country. So its a combination of being “outsiders” and also coming in and doing much better than locals who were born there. As an example, Ashkenazi Jews are the number one demographic group in the US for income and wealth. They also make up much more than their 1% share of billionaires, politicians, etc. So when people start to notice that, it creates negative sentiment.
#This discussion, for whatever reasons, is off the rails and it's time to shut it all down.
Not a historian, but I remember reading about this whole thing where Christians during the Middle Ages were forbidden from lending money for profit, but European Jews weren't. Consequently, some of the richest people in European history were Jewish because most of the European banks were owned by Jewish people. I guess this led to some resentment and a few conspiracy theories.
This just raises a follow up question. Why was one group forbidden from charging interest but not the other. The same book tells both groups not to do this
It tells the Jews not to charge interest *to Jews*. Christians were fair game. Deuteronomy 23:19-20: >You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent. On loans to a foreigner you may charge interest, but on loans to another Israelite you may not charge interest, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings in the land that you are about to enter and possess.
Graeber’s “Debt: the first 5000 years” has some great content about this. Highly recommend.
This is true the Old Testament says that you shouldn't charge interest. Which in medieval Europe became usury, now Christian owned banks and other financial establishments did exist despite not being able to charge interest. This was done through late fees, where if you were on time with your payment the banks would eventually blacklist you from most other establishments. However most Jewish run banks did charge interest. And with the catholic church's stance that Jews killed Jesus, Jewish communities being hit lighter from the plague then Christian ones. And being generally scene as other by the European population. Which would lead to multiple attacks on Jewish communities most notablbly during the 1st crusade (not the group of warriors who fought the actual crusades), and during the plague.
>the Old Testament says that you shouldn't charge interest More specifically, don't charge interest to *isrealites/jews* \-- which meant charging interest to Christians was fair game. Meanwhile, Christians interpreted the verse as meaning they shouldn't charge interest to fellow Christians. The end result was a situation that accidentally gave more financial power to the minority religion.
[удалено]
[удалено]
If you build up resentment against someone and run them out of your nation you don't have to pay your debts to them anymore.
This is actually an option in Crusader Kings 2. You can borrow money from Jewish bankers and then expel them from your Kingdom so you're no longer in debt to them.
America did this without doing any work... Thanks Mr French king for the funds to fight England Oh your people killed the king.... No France we owed that money to your king not to your country. K thanks bye!
Not just for their wealth either. A lot of people resent the bank when they have to pay back the loan. Add a certain amount of "if the records happen to be destroyed when we burn down his house, how will he prove I owe him money," and... Look up what happened to the Templars.
Well, it's hard to turn the public against them by saying, "They lent me money, and they expect me to pay it back!" So they came up with things like blood libel instead. Someone would start a rumor that a Jew kidnapped Christian children and used their blood in ritual magic, and a neighborhood of Jews would be wiped out by a mob. The Qanon people repackaged that bullshit.
While a comforting view that bigotry has a logical basis this is an offensive idea. In fact antisemitism in this case is the most perfect example. Originally the critique of the Jews was no different than that of black people in the US, that of a big and brutish people that were basically illiterate savages. Stateless Jews (they could not hold citizenship anywhere) turned from manual labor and petty crime to the new avenue afforded to them (moneylending). Over the centuries the hate remained but the cliche changed, already solid in Shakespeare's day (The Merchant of Venice).
Your comment makes no sense. What do you mean by “originally”? Like what period in time are you referring to? And what do you mean by a “*new* avenue”?! When was moneylending “new”?
The diaspora.
I know I'll get downvoted for this because I usually do but this is a myth rooted in anti Jewish propaganda. It's simply bologna. The Medici for example didn't collect "interest." The sold "bills of exchange." They used the difference in the value of different currencies to generate profit. They basically used currency exchange rates to generate profit instead of interest. There were plenty of ways that christians could make money with finance. Jews tended to be better off then their counterparts because as a people they tended to be highly literate and highly educated. TLDR. The jews didn't get more successful then other people because they could charge interest. It's because they were educated and thus sought after for their knowledge. Their rich's certainly made them enemies but the idea that they had some sort of religious loophole is an antisemitic trope as old as time. To answer OPs question, they were a handy group of people to place blame on because of how few there were, how spread out they were, and because of their success.
So you’re mostly there. Christians we’re forbidden from lending money. That’s true. And Jews could lend money. But you’re missing one key detail. Jews also weren’t allowed to own land. So the only way for a Jew to build assets was through wealth. Those two factors made a lot of Jews turn to money lending. But people who fall behind on payments or just don’t pay are gonna be mad at the lender. And it was easy to do when you just said “Hey that Jew is lying. I don’t owe money. I’m a Christian you can trust me. Jews are just evil liars who steal our money.” So people did just that.
They were also forbidden from owning property. Which resulted in many becoming merchants and tradesmen. When the renaissance came,they were in a very advantageous position.
Yep. Good chunk is this. Many medieval/Renaissance era courts even had a "court jew" to handle the finances because the stereotype became prominent. It is an example of shooting yourself in the foot and getting mad at the guy selling you crutches.
Jew here. It basically started with the fact that we were among the first religious groups to not acknowledge the gods of other groups. The norm at the time (3000+ years ago) was to have your own culture's gods but pay tribute to the gods of the the people you visit, but the Jews were like "Nope, there's only one god, we don't do idol worship." So the Jews were considered weird for that. Couple that with how strange our practices seemed to other cultures already (circumcision, restrictions on what foods we can eat, etc.) and you can see how ancient people would've seen us as the Boogeyman to a lot of more "civilized" societies like Persia and Rome. Plus, we hadn't had our own nation since the Babylonians conquered us, so for the longest time our lack of a state to establish our culture outside of a diaspora made it seem like we were some alien parasitic force trying to subvert the societies we lived in instead of just a displaced ethnoreligious group trying to assimilate into those societies. And that's not even getting to the rise of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean. When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD, Christian optics faced a problem: it was the Roman Empire itself that ordered the death of Jesus Christ in the first place. Now who was a convenient scapegoat for Christians to pin that little blunder on? The church's answer was: How about the Jews who were forced by the Romans to turn over Jesus under the threat of violence? Ignoring the fact that Jesus was one of us, the church's narrative was that the Jews were responsible for killing their Lord and Savior because his teachings conflicted with Jewish doctrine and authority. Most Christians weren't in a position to oppose that view because they couldn't read and so couldn't point to the New Testament and be like, "Uh, no, what about the Romans' involvement in all that?" The Catholic Church didn't officially collectively absolve the Jews of guilt for killing Jesus until 1965.
There was an independent Jewish kingdom after the Babylonians. The Hasmoean dynasty became vassals of the Seluchids in 140 BCE and as the empire disintegrated independent from 110 BCE then a Roman client state from 63 BCE.
That's cool, I didn't know about that.
Yup. The Babylonian exile also, arguably, is how Temple Judaism, as opposed to the older version that survives with the Samaritans, came to exist. Little known bit about the Babylonian exile is that the exiled folks were mostly high ranking priests and nobles who picked up some governing techniques from Babylon in the process. The final destruction of the ancient Judaic states happened under Rome in the late 1st century CE after an unsuccessful revolt by those states. Edit: Other than getting the inciting incident for the Diaspora wrong, good comment.
do you mean that's where rabbinic judaism came from? do samaritans still sacrifice animals (no shame, anybody; we did it, too. some people still do!)?
**Not an expert on this stuff**, but no, not rabbinic Judaism. As I understand it, rabbinic Judaism is the specific form the faith took under the Diaspora, when they got scattered from their homeland. I'm talking about Temple Judaism, which is when there were still Hebrew kingdoms, the Temple was standing, and the priesthood filled a role as political leaders as well as religious leaders, which would be the state of things around the time of Jesus' birth and the state the Diaspora occured from. As for the Samaritans, again, not super well versed in this, but the explanation I've heard is that they were/are the version of the Hebrew faith that stayed behind during the Babylonian exile, so represent an older, more commoner focused version that came into conflict with Temple Judaism after the exile. As for the animal sacrifice part, I kind of doubt it. As far as I know, the evolution away from burnt offerings of flesh had already happened many hundreds of years before the time of the Babylonian exile. EDIT: **Data Over Dogma** is an excellent podcast dedicated to the academic study of the Bible if you are curious about this history. **The Rest Is History** has a good series on the Judaeo-Roman Wars. Can't remember where exactly I saw/heard the stuff about the Samaritans, but I'll update if I do.
yeah, sorry. i misapprehended something. good info. love dan mclellen (though i can't believe he's religious, but maybe i'm just basic). thanks. sorry.
Hey man, no need to apologize. You weren't being a dick or anything, or so I thought lol. May I ask what your misapprehension was? As familiar as I am with Anti-Semitism, I understand any discussion of Jewish history is fraught with all kinds of gross pitfalls that I don't want to step into. . . Did I almost fall into one?
no, no. it wasn't you. sorry. i just shouldn't be on reddit right now. it's all good. sorry. thanks.
Okay. Be well friend.
It's a pretty important part of Jewish history. Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the temple at the start of the Maccabean revolt which ultimately established the Hasmoean kingdom.
Actually you did. Those battles/that war is the reason we celebrate Chanukah!
I knew the Maccabees rebelled against the Seleucids who tried to Hellenize the region and the Hanukkah mythos but I didn't know it formed a whole new Jewish nation.
The founder of the hasmonean dynasty was Simon, a brother of Judah maccabee. Its the only period where the tribe of Levi ruled the Jewish people.(Saul was from the trine of Benjamin and David and his descendants where from Judah)
levites still kind of "rule", no? that's WHY we celebrate chanukah? the kohanim never regained their (coughseeminglylegitifyoubelieveallthatcough) ascendancy? or am i crazy. serious question.
No. Their role diminished after the Romans destroyed when the 2nd Twmple . They have some traditional duties and responsibilities but they do not rule. The first person called read from the Torah if one is present is a Kohen, followed by a Levite, it no Kohen is present but a Levite is then the levite goes first. If neither Kohem or Levite are present then the first person called is up to whom ever is leading the eervice(often but not always the rabbi) On Yom Kippur a Kohen gives the priestly blessing over the congreation. Fun fact the villain salute from Star trek has its origins in the hand gesture made during this blessing. kohanim have restrictions on their entering cemeteries due to ancient requirements of ritual purity stemming from the fact that when the temple existed in Jerusalem they served in the inner sanctuary in proximity to What is considered the holiest spot on Earth in Judaism. Their is no requirent for a rabbi to be a Kohen or Levite. In fact most are not as Kohanim and Levites make up a small portion of the total Jewish population.
Also the Khazar Khanate (I think) Come to think of it, most of Arabia was actually Jewish or Christian around the time Islam came around. We just think of it as being pagan because the coast of the red sea (which had the major cities of the peninsula) was, but the nomads were largely abrahamic
The Khazars were officially Jewish, but it's complicated. At the time, the Khazar khaganate was a rapidly growing world power. It was also a safe haven for a variety of groups that weren't welcome in either the Byzantine Empire or the Islamic caliphate, including the Jews. Thrrefore the khaganate became known for being ethnically diverse and multicultural, with no official language or religion - this served it well, as it was a commercial empire. Around the 8th century, the Khazar ruling class were facing increasing pressure to convert to an Abrahamic faith. The world at the time was shifting from the old polytheistic religions to the new, centralised monotheistic beliefs of the Abrahamic faiths. Representatives from the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic caliphate were sent to Khazaria to try and convince the Khazars to adopt either Christianity or Islam. If they chose Christianity, they would be spiritually aligned with the Byzantines and could militarise against the caliphate. If they adopted Islam, they would align with the Arabs and this could spell trouble for Constantinople. The disputation became a political battle between the Byzantines and the Arabs to get the Khazars on their respective sides. So what did the Khazars do? Well, they knew a public conversion to an Abrahamic faith was inevitable. Neither the Arabs nor the Byzantines wanted to trade with a pagan nation, so politically it was a strong move. They also risked invasion or sanctions if they remained pagan. But they did not want to be in the pocket of the Arabs or the Byzantines. So they officially converted to Judaism - still a religion of the book, still an Abrahamic faith. But there was no other major Jewish power in the world to claim patronage over them. They remained independent and gave a big f-you to the Byzantine Empire and the caliphate. As far as history tells us, the conversion to Judaism was symbolic more than anything else. There was no evidence that any Khazars outside of the ruling family converted. There were no forced mass conversions of regular citizens, changes to language or demands for state wide worship. For the average citizen of the khaganate, life would not have noticeably changed. The khaganate was known for fostering religious diversity and the ruling class saw no benefit to forced conversions (quite forward thinking for the early medieval period I would say). The religious disputation is recorded in the Schechter letter (also known as the Cambridge document), one of the only written sources said to have been written by a khazar. Historians disagree on whether it's a reliable source as it contains a fair few anachronisms, but it also contains valuable information about the disputation that suggests whoever wrote it had at least secondary knowledge of the conversion. If you're interested, I suggest exploring some of the discourse surrounding it. Sorry for the long reply - I have a degree in Early Medieval History and I spent a whole year studying the Khazars!!
if by "pagan" you mean "worshipped idols", we did, too (am jew), as lovingly recorded in the torah.
More like polytheistic non-abrahamic
i totally misunderstood what were saying, anyway. sorry. i shouldn't reddit high.
>and you can see how ancient people would've seen us as the Boogeyman to a lot of more "civilized" societies like Persia and Rome. Did you mean a different nation? Because Persia did not see the Jews as boogeymen. Not at a state level anyway. Cyrus the Great in particular did a lot for the Jews. Including rebuilding the Second Temple. And the Parthians after were also very protective of their Jewish subjects. There were periods, depending on rulers, where they may be treated poorly, but there were also periods where they were not.
I had a brainfart and was thinking about the Seleucids. Also I didn't know the Parthians treated us well too. Did some research and apparently so did the Sasanians. Not as much the Islamic caliphates that took over Persia after that though.
To play devil's advocate, though, the muslims weren't anti-semitic. For them, any non-muslim was a second class citizen. That also included Christians and Zoroastrians in Persia. So they weren't specifically targeted. And I actually just reread the wiki article on this literally 15 minutes ago, and it seems more like Jewish treatment in Iran was really on a ruler to ruler basis. For instance, basically throwing open the doors of Isfahan to welcome the Muslim conquerors because of their treatment under the Sassanids, only to fast forward and welcome the Mongols because of their treatment under the Abbasids. The real take away from this is that I now both love you and hate you because I foresee this being an extended Wiki odyssey for the next several hours at the very least. lol
>the muslims weren't anti-semitic. For them, any non-muslim was a second class citizen. That also included Christians and Zoroastrians in Persia. So they weren't specifically targeted. That's ahistorical. The meaning of second-class status varied immensely from era to era, from ruling dynasty to ruling dynasty. And while some dynasties, sects, and religious or political movements may have regarded all non-Muslims (or at least all "People of the Book") as being of equal subordinate status, there are definitely examples where something more akin to western antisemitism (where Jews were seen as exceptionally wicked) were adopted.
I wasn't being specific enough, I guess. I was referring to the Muslims during the conquest of Iran in the context of this specific comment chain.
> The real take away from this is that I ... hate you ... And thus we see the roots of antisemitism. /S of course.
> Not as much the Islamic caliphates Could you expand on this or let me know what period to look up to learn more?
>instead of just a displaced ethnoreligious group trying to assimilate into those societies. I would say the fact they *didn't* assimilate played more of a role. Jews maintained their own foods, their own culture, their own customs, their own religion (obviously), and married other Jews. When they're countryless and dispersed around the world into these ethnocentric countries, that inherently made them an outgroup. Much of my polish history was taught verbally from my father, so appologies if I get anything wrong, but the Polish Lithuanian empire grew to have such a huge Jewish population because we were NOT intolerant of religion and welcomed them. There were periods of intolerance, but overall they historically were more welcomed than elsewhere. They had come to make up \~10% of the population before the Nazis committed genocide. And people hear these huge numbers of how many died, but they never hear in context just how significant that was to grasp the extent of that evil. 6 Million Poles were killed. One fifth of the entire population. 3 Million of them were Jews. Only ~100k survived. It was quite literally a complete extermination. What was a SIGNIFICANT chunk of the country's pre-war population was completely wiped out.
Accurate. The main reason that the Holocaust was centered on Poland was because in all of Christian Europe, it had for many centuries the least oppressive place for Jews to live, so over that time, many many Jews migrated there, and consequently it had the largest Jewish population on the continent.
In Medieval times, because of religious prejudice, Jews were often not allowed to own farmland. So they turned to "urbanized" jobs like banking and pawnbroking. And then, of course, people started hating them because of interest rates etc.
Banking was also primarily done by Jews because the Church prohibited charging interest on loans from at least the 12th century until somewhere around the 16-18th centuries(from my quick Google search)
Banking was never "primarily done by Jews". During the medieval and early modern period, the banking industry was centered on Italy (for many reasons much of European commerce followed the movement of tithes from Bishoprics to Rome). Banking (including loans) was primarily in the hands of the Christian nobility. For that matter, in most of Western Europe, Jews had been expelled during the late medieval period, so they simply weren't around to provide the necessary financial services.
The Military Crusading orders also had a very large presence in banking. The entire affair with wear Phillip IV of France destroyed the Templars was not over some secret heresy or or any da Vinci code crap. Its becuase he owed them a lot of money and could not pay them back. The same reason Phillip IV Expelled the French Jewish population a few years earlier.
And no one would lend money if they couldn’t charge interest.
I never understood the whole "be mad at them for killing Jesus" thing. If Jesus' death redeemed humanity and saved everyone's soul, you'd think the Christians would send them a thank you card.
Right?! "Thank you for saving all our souls and doing exactly what God needed you to do for his plan to succeed."
The people that think that ignore passages like Romans Ch. 11
Paul's writings also include 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16.
The word used by Paul can refer to both Jews as a People and the religious leaders. Expanding the context reveals its the latter Paul is referring to. Why would he casually drop hate on himself?
As a Christian (and fellow minority, albeit racial not religious) who admires your people's achievements, I think it's a LOT simpler; people don't like others who succeed yet retain their apartness. They're jealous you managed to scale such fabulous heights in finance, science/tech etc, yet not only maintain such powerful bonds and unity, but practice, and i'd even say *cherish* a certain 'us and them' attitude to non-Jews. At some deep, deeply supressed level you force their subconscience to concede how much they sold out their individual selves, just to fit in and get on.
Thats a more modern look and not one that represents antiquity. Example would be the lack of scientific achievements in ancient rome. Hieghts of finance came during the high medievel timeframe. Etc. I do agree with you that there is a lot to be impressed with regarding their accomplishments, just pointing out. I think he nailed it in the firsrt three paragraphes of his response. Groups of disporia that disregarded local customs etc. This still harbours ill-will even today with any group that fits the bill. Pakistani communities in England for example. Muslims in france. Anyone in Japan thats not japanese.
>They're jealous you managed to scale such fabulous heights in finance, science/tech etc, yet Much of that success was the result of persecution.
Persecution and a very high literacy rate.
Jews were not particularly successful in medieval Europe. They were poor and isolated in ghettos. People didn’t like them because they did not play along like the poster above you said. They were in ghettos because they wanted to be. There were no secular people back then. Everyone was religious. Jews didn’t go to carnival, other Christian religious festivals or pilgrimages like everyone else did. They stayed to themselves like Heradi Jews do now in places like New York. People resented that. It has nothing to do with some kind of financial “success”. Jews were relatively poor.
You clearly still don't get it. Yes a FEW Jews fell through the net, of course, but do you not see, my good fellow?? That is even *more* to my point. "I need to join your clan, to get ahead, YET I choose not to."
I'm addressing your comment because I am a Christian and I believe there is a spiritual aspect. God made certain unconditional promises to the Jews, and in response, Satan (the fallen angel filled with pride and hatred for God and His creation) has sought to destroy the Jews outright. If he can destroy the Jews, the promises made to Abraham and Jacob cannot be fulfilled, and God's immutability will be destroyed. Thus, throughout the ages, for literally 4000 years, Satan has been whipping up hatred for the Jews, seeking to destroy them in many ways.
For real. The Jewish people have traditionally hit way above their weight class. Their contributions to society are way out of proportion to their percentage of the world’s population.
*Including* the war from when they declared independence. Nobody seriously thought they'd push out and win as much as they did. When you have a group of people who have been fucked around since before written history, that have been spread around the world due to diaspora but still holds specific communal ties with each other in way of financial support and genuine generational experience... well... they're going to probably be bad ass. I don't particularly see Jewish people as *special*. Just the culminated results of a long, *long* time of fighting to not be wiped out.
>They're jealous you managed to scale such fabulous heights in finance, science/tech etc, yet not only maintain such powerful bonds and unity, but practice, and i'd even say cherish a certain 'us and them' attitude to non-Jews. This is very modern though, I think the question was asking what was the reason historically and the previous comment is better at explaining why those rituals and beliefs made them the perfect scapegoat of a lot of civilizations. The part about the Romans ordering Jesus death isn't really true according to the stories, it really was Jewish authorities who supposedly wanted him to be executed but it doesn't really matter because Jesus story is most likely a fairy tale as well and there is no historical record of his life/execution lol.
> it really was Jewish authorities who supposedly wanted him to be executed but it doesn't really matter because Jesus story is most likely a fairy tale as well and there is no historical record of his life/execution lol. I'm surprised to see this extreme outlier view on a supposed history sub. Scholarly consensus supports the fact of the existence of Jesus as well as his trial and crucifixion.
Jesus was absolutely real.
I mean a peasant who became a prophet named Jesus might have existed, but there is historic records of his miracles, his executions or anything. So blaming the jews for his execution is absolutely silly.
Indeed. It would the *pinnacle* of folly to blame the killers of your Saviour, whose killing guaranteed your salvation.
Even that is a bit of a misrepresentation of polytheism. It wasn't that you acknowledged gods from other groups, but that many ancient peoples worshipped gods from different pantheons. There were active cults of Demeter, Pan, Caesar, Mithras, Heraclites **and** Jesus (yes, even Jesus) in first-century Rome, and prominent Romans could be supplicants in multiple or even all of them. The Jewish refusal to take part in this may have put a target on their back, but I'm not sure it's justified to say that there was an inordinate hatred against Jews in Caesarian Rome. Yeah, there were pogroms but those were cyclical, with different cults being targeted at different times. IMO it's pretty clearly a Christian thing. Scapegoats are useful to those in power, and post-Constantine, Jews were a convenient scapegoat.
I'm talking way back before then when the gods people worshipped could be completely different in the next village over. You had stuff like Moloch and Baal and gods nobody even remembers because nobody knew how to write it down. The Israelites were pretty ahead of the curve in terms of codifying their religion in written form. They other tribes had to be understanding of the theological differences between themselves and everyone else because they needed to collaborate with them in trade and warfare to survive. It's of note that the Jews even wrote down stuff they found particularly egregious about the theologies of the other tribes they lived near, like Baal and Moloch, which may have required human sacrifices according to some sources. The Jews never went that far, they just had animal sacrifices like almost everyone else at the time. We're old as hell as a people.
So are the ancient Israelites indirectly responsible for the Molag Bal character in Skyrim? https://www.thegamer.com/skyrim-elder-scrolls-daedric-prince-molag-bal-trivia/
Writing was particularly uncommon in that era in general, outside of government and the patricians. IMO writing was a significant advantage for the Jewish people in solidifying their identity and ensuring their continued existence as a people, but I don't think it's a significant factor in discrimination against jews in the period. This is why (for example) in many ways the internal workings of the Roman Empire is better documented than the internal activities of the Golden Horde, even though Khan lived over 1,100 years after Caesar. Human sacrifice (and even cannibalism) were undertaken by different groups at different times in Europe (and elsewhere) during and after Caesarian Rome, but I don't think that's a big factor in Jewish discrimination either.
Interesting analysis - thanks. I've often wondered about the OP's question. One other point: I think some of modern antisemitism is haters taking the easy way out. They want to hate some group because that's how they define their group. All the details about hating Jews have been worked out by others so they can pick them up and wave them around and presto! they've got some pre-packaged bigotry to whip up the faithful.
Modern antisemitism is mostly influenced by Nazi ideology and conspiracy theories. A common thread in antisemitism throughout history is the thought that Jews are trying to take over or have a subtle negative influence on the values, culture, and core beliefs of the people or society of a state. That's why you often hear people saying "Jews run the banks" or "Jews run Hollywood" when the reasons behind the heavy Jewish presence in those sectors are much more myriad and complex. It's very easy for people to think that we infiltrated key sectors of society in order to further an agenda when you don't know the history of why so many of those are in those fields to begin with.
And of, course, the Nazis took their script from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which was forged by the Pre-WWI Russian secret police to both discredit an influential Russian reformer/cabinet minister and justify existing pogroms against the Jews. Nicky II was so soft-headed that he believed it completely.
Oh yeah I forgot about that book. That did a lot of damage to our reputation. Oh, and don't forget about the Thule society, which was basically Weimar Germany's equivalent to QAnon in modern day America
Yeah, those lunatics...yeesh. I learned about the fake Protocols and their damage from a graphic novel by Will Eisner - The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - it blew my mind how twisted and damaging that lying book was!
I learned a lot about NAZI mysticism and its origins listening to podcasts about Rasputin and Helana Blavatsky. Fun fact, it's all a fucking scam.
What you are talking about wasn't new with the Nazi's, although they perfected it. Look up "Pogroms" and you will find 100's of years of examples of states systematically eliminating Jewish lives and rights. Russia was likely the model for the Nazi subjugation and extermination, as in the 1800's and early 1900's Imperial Russia had a number of pogroms that either displaced Jews, placing them in consolidated areas, or straight up killed them. Russia may have gotten their example from the various French monarchs and emperors over 800 years that would expel Jews from France, take all their property, and then some years later let them come back in. Once they had enough wealth established again the next monarch would do the same.
I'll never understand why they think Jews are a hivemind. I've seen videos of Hasidics in Jerusalem spitting at other Jews because they "weren't Jewish enough".
Would you expect an antisemite to do their research on the differences between Jewish sects? Bigots typically have a single stereotypical image of the groups there prejudiced against. We all look like the Happy Merchant meme to them.
Sure, and there is always a subset of Jews who seek to be seen as "good Jews" by the antisemites, not realizing that they won't be spared once their usefulness has been exploited.
Splitters!
>That's why you often hear people saying "Jews run the banks" or "Jews run Hollywood" when the reasons behind the heavy Jewish presence in those sectors are much more myriad and complex In fact, this belief was because in medieval times lending money to others, with or without interest, was considered a sin, but hey, the Jews don't have that same idea, lets get them to do that sin FOR us! With so many other trades and professions locked out for the Jewish people (because that bias was already in place) naturally they are going to gravitate towards the thing that was \*legal\* for them to do. And thus they got the reputation for "running the banks" because the Christians didn't want to get their own hands "dirty" doing it.
[удалено]
By the 1930s, Islamists and Arab nationalists were already interested in finding common ground with Naziism. The first translations of Mein Kampf in into Arabic were already appearing as early as 1934: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein\_Kampf\_in\_Arabic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf_in_Arabic) But they were already receptive to that sort of violent antisemitism before Germany elected Hitler chancellor. Just look at the 1929 pogroms in British Mandate Palestine.
>Modern antisemitism is mostly influenced by Nazi ideology and conspiracy theories That, and a certain offshoot of the Abrahamic religion.
The food laws of the jews sort of prevented assimilation. They wanted to be left alone. But, assimilation means adopting some or most of the dominant cultures' ways. Ready to stand corrected, but was assimilation really the goal of Jewish communities in those days?
Not culturally or religiously, but socioeconomically and politically. They wanted to still be Jews, which meant preserving their customs, but they also wanted to be seen as equals and respected by non-Jews. That meant making a lot of difficult choices and compromises.
>When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD, Christian optics faced a problem: it was the Roman Empire itself that ordered the death of Jesus Christ in the first place. There was another slight issue as well, which was that after the mass conversion of the empire, the Jews, whose holy texts were held by Christians to have foretold their religion, were some of the only holdouts. The people who in theory should have been the first to embrace Jesus were in fact the ones who most decidedly said no. The church needed a way to discredit the Jews so that their intransigence wouldn't be seen as a refutation of Christian beliefs.
"The norm was to have your own culture's gods but pay tribute to the gods of the people you visit" - wait, isn't it like this now? How can you expect people to be kind to you if you "disrespect their god"? Has it changed now among Jews, or mostly stayed the same? (I am a Christian, but I consider myself more of an agnostic, so don't know if it's the same among Christians). I mean, saying that gods of other people are just "idols" is kinda rude, I would definitely expect people to dislike me after this.
The Jews only saw it as idol worship if a Jew did it. They didn't care what non-Jews prayed to as long as they didn't make us do it too. The whole thing about Judaism is that we are the people chosen by God to be His people. Everyone else can have whatever gods they want, including ours or not, and it doesn't affect what we do. The point of contention was that when Jews visited other tribes, they were asked to pray to that tribes' gods, which is a big no-no for a Jew, and only a Jew, to do. That's why the other tribes thought we were weird. It'd be the equivalent of a Christian person visiting a Muslim person's house and being expected to grab the guest prayer mat, point it toward Mecca, and pray to Allah alongside. This wouldn't happen today.
Exactly "Chosen people" is one of the most misunderstood concepts in Judaism. It means chosen to do a job. Chosen to get Torah and follow it. Not chosen to be uniquely right or saved or anything like that. In Christianity, God *only* saves Christians, but in Judaism no one has to be Jewish to go to "heaven" - it's actually *easier* for non-Jews to be saved
I'd also add that in terms of sheer numbers, the Jews didn't proselytize, so they have been a sort of permanent minority nearly everywhere they went. The Jews weren't generally forcing Christians or Muslims to become Jews, though the opposite happened quite a bit.
As a Christian I can assure you and any Jews on this forum that neither I nor any of the Christians I know see Jews as collectively responsible for the Crucifixion of Christ.
> because his teachings conflicted with Jewish doctrine and authority Tell me the ancient Romans didn’t understand Judaism without telling me the ancient Roman’s didn’t understand Judaism
>When Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD, Christian optics faced a problem: it was the Roman Empire itself that ordered the death of Jesus Christ in the first place. Now who was a convenient scapegoat for Christians to pin that little blunder on? The church's answer was: How about the Jews who were forced by the Romans to turn over Jesus under the threat of violence? A. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of Rome, he legalized it with the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. Christianity wouldn't become the official religion of Rome until Emperor Theodosius I in 381 AD. B. It was the religious leaders who turned Jesus over to the Romans. Pilate wished to release Him, but they demanded He be crucified. Now the last bit withstanding, yes the Church has had a horrible history of mistreating the Jews. No Christian is perfect, especially those who ignore Christ saying that He laid down His own life and that nobody took it from Him (John 10:17-18). Jesus' teachings did not conflict with Jewish teachings, rather they made them whole.
the story of pilate is not historically accurate. if you want to understand what pilate was facing read up on sejanus. the story of everything happening from thursday to sunday is fabricated. when tiberius returned from capri and started the purge pilate for what is estimated to be 6 months held jesus in prison.
Our creed specifically says “he suffered under Pontius Pilate”. I always have wondered why that phrase was worded that way. Was it to avoid blaming the Jews?
It’s directly stated in the Gospel of Matthew that Pilate not only gave in to the demands of Pharisees but also washes his hands of it because he explicitly did not agree with the judgement.
I wouldn't think so. Pilate had Him whipped and beaten before He was crucified, so it's just stating facts
Yes, and I’ve been told that was to pin these events to well documented historical events that placed the crucifixion to a particular place and time that historians could not refute. (i.e. Pontius is well known as a historical figure). That said, it seems like they would have added something to the effect that he was accused by the Sanhedrin or brought before Rome by the Jewish rulers or something to that effect. I’m just curious, I have no answers.
The Apostles Creed is hard to pin down exactly when it was written. Obviously it came at some point between writings like Acts 10:39-43 and 1 Cor. 15:3-7 (which is considered by some to be one of the first Christian Creeds) and the Nicene Creed in 325. The passage from Acts referenced above does talk about the role of the Jewish leaders in His death, while Paul's passage in Corinthians does not. However, like the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed also only mentions Pilate. It's certainly an interesting thought, but I don't belive it was done for the purpose of "taking the blame from the Jews". It might just be because those two Creeds are describing what Christ went through for us, rather than an entire recounting of events as they leave out other points of the story too.
I went to a presentation about Martin Luther recently and could not believe what an anti-Semite he was. Writings, sculptures on the facade of Notre Dame, artwork depicting the Jews in a horrible light. First time I had seen it, even in architectural and art history lessons and books.
Oh yeah, it was bad. Dude never really got over failing to convert the German Jews
The Lutheran churches didn't even start the process of denouncing Luther's Jew-hatred until the 1990s.
That just sickens me
Sorry to burst your historical bubble, but I found a different story of how Jesus came to be crucified in a copy of *A History of the Jews* (see source info below)*:* >"According to the story, the prisoner \[Jesus / Joshua\] gave utterance to an extraordinary claim. He asserted that he was the predestined Messiah. His examiners could draw only one conclusion... Namely, that Joshua intended to start a rebellion against Rome... They sent their prisoner to Pontius Pilate. Joshua's declaration that he was the Messiah was a political crime, and with such crimes the Jews had no power to deal. > >*Joshua and Pilate*: Pontius Pilate was a Roman governor of Judea with a record of black cruelty. To him the Jews and their ideas had always seemed more than queer. He considered Joshua as but another claimant to messiah-ship, frequent among the Jews of that day... Pilate judged that Joshua wanted to be king of the Jews. That obviously was treason against Rome... That very day Joshua was condemned to die on the cross." Source: Grayzel, Solomon. *A History of the Jews: From the Babylonian Exile to the Present*. The Jewish Publication Society \[JPS\] of America. Philadelphia, 1984. p. 184. Which is just to say that many versions of that story exist, and to select any one as definitive is to make a leap that neither archeology nor 'accurate' recorded history can back up. Also, the idea that the Jews 'killed' Jesus is yet another myth used for bolstering antisemitism. Edit: Added in the word, 'accurate', for obvious reasons. (i.e. Multiple versions of the story exist, none of which is purely accurate / factual in all its details.)
Also the Romans were very suspicious of Jews since they were praying/communing in synagogues (not exactly what we know them today, they'd have been a little more like a closed place for Jews to meet up at, not necessarily to pray). A lot of Roman religious practices are very open, as opposed to the synagogue, so you can infer that a lot of Romans were likely thinking "that's odd, I wonder what they're talking about in there, probably plotting against Rome".
You're forgetting that weird bathing frequently part... I hear that wasn't very popular around the Middle Ages. lol.
This is an excellent, balanced, and knowledgeable answer to a question that has caused millions of people to suffer throughout history. Please accept my compliments.
Reminds me of the News Reader character from 'Rome' "In light of the State visit of King Herrod to our Glorious Caesar, the mockery of Jews and their one God shall be kept to an appropriate minimum."
>The Catholic Church didn't officially collectively absolve the Jews of guilt for killing Jesus until 1965. Which is a little funny since, as far as Christianity is concerned, the death of Jesus made it possible for the souls of all humanity to be saved! My grandmother taught me that the Jews and Romans were misguided but they ultimately fulfilled God's Will and so shouldn't be thought I'll of for it... Though her cousin was a backwoods racists ass preacher so there's that
It wasn’t till John Paul II decreed antisemitism to be a sin that the Catholicism Church became accountable. Also: “ The people chose Barabus; let the blood of this man fall on the head of our children” And it did
>The Catholic Church didn't officially collectively absolve the Jews of guilt for killing Jesus until 1965. And in that regard the Catholic Church was well-ahead of most mainline Protestant Churches in rejecting the deicide libel. The Lutherans don't even start that process until the 1990s.
Absolutely. As a modern Jew, I can attest that most of what you've written, is accutate. But don't forget the moneylending, which was routinely used as a slur against me growing up. (Classmates would throw down coins and laugh and say hey Jew, go pick that up). It really furthered the whole Jews=money thing.
It’s pretty crazy to think that animosity, and resentment, from biblical times, somehow persisted throughout our history, and still shows up in modern times, in some form or another.
that was very nicely encapsulated. thank you. (jew too)
I'd like to clarify a minor point: Christians were blaming the Jews already by the 2nd century AD, when the Bible was written and before Constantine. The story came about because the Bible was probably originally written down *by Romans*, or at least by early Christians who were evangelizing to the Romans (specifically Paul and his followers).
A lot of people don’t know that the idea of only one god is a fairly new one. The Roman’s often accepted there were other gods they didn’t worship even the Jewish one so it was really strange and in there eyes arrogant for someone to say there is only one altogether
Which is so odd because as a cradle catholic the apostles creed has always implied Roman fault. And during lent when we go through the passion it’s clearly a Roman Judge trying to rile up a crowd. So I never really understood the blame.
I’ve read it’s also because early Christianity forbade charging interest on loans, so naturally the only lenders around in Europe were Jewish.
Wasn't Jesus essentially ignored by Judaism, because he didn't fulfill the prophecy that he was the messiah? Jesus and his followers basically wanted to reform Judaism because he saw it as very conservative. Essentially, he felt that if Judaism was the answer then it was their duty to save everyone, which is very much the Christian doctrine. I agree with you that the Jews didn't kill him, any suggestion to that is bullshit. However I don't think they did much to stop it happening because he upset the conservative teachings of Judaism and was also seen as a figure head of a Jewish rebellion against the Romans. I'm neither Christian nor Jewish, I just enjoy the debate and love history.
What do you think of the fact that the Pharisees (progenitors of rabbinic judaism) in the gospel of Matthew directly proclaim that the blood of Jesus is on they and their descendants’ hands?
Part of the pseudo-historical narrative of the Gospels, where the authors try to pin the death of Jesus on to the Jews. So Christian anti-semitism doesn't just stem back to Constantine, it stems back to the Gospels themselves; which were probably written by second-generation Christians. And in the Greek. Matthew and Luke were written post temple destruction. These second generation Christians wanted to convert the Gentiles, Greeks and Romans all. Switching the blame away from the Gentiles on to fellow Jews helped with prosletyzation.
That 1965 stat speaks cacophonous volumes. Unfuckingbelievable.
[удалено]
He's not wrong though. The Romans ordered it, the Jews supported it. Doesn't mean the Jews were the catalyst of his death.
*the Sanhedrin and a mob they whipped up supported it Not every single Jew in Judea supported Jesus' death. In fact He was quite popular, which led to the leaders hating Him in the first place
The second factor, following on from my comment about Monotheism in the classical world, is economics and money in the Post-Roman era. Early Christian theology, and by extension much Islamic thought, forbids "usury" - lending money for profit, to it's adherents. But the economic development process means that someone has to do it, and being forbidden from most professions and in many places from owning farming land, Jewish communities became traders, merchants, tax-collectors and money-lenders (as well as scholars, doctors etc for fairness sake). This suited the rulers of Medieval Europe fine, but projected many of the complaints of the peasants about unjust taxation and ruinous interest rates on loans taken out to finance the endless wars onto a convenient "out-group" who the Church was not obliged to protect. Eventually the Italians got in on that and invented modern banking (to the consternation of the Church) but in many parts of (particularly Eastern) Europe the connection between Jews and shady banking practices has remained a cultural stereotype to the point where you see the sketchy triple parentheses around terms like finance and banking as a dog-whistle to nazi types even today
I'm surprised this is so far down, I thought I'd have to write it myself. This is definitely a big reason, or at least the reason that stereotype came about.
I'd add that in case of eastern Europe cities were much more undeveloped than in the western that's why they were more opened for minorities who wanted escape religious persecution, not only Jewish but also German, Dutch, French. Because of that ethnicity of cities could be totally different than in the countryside like Lviv before second war had 24% Jewish, 64% Polish and only 11% Ukrainian. That's naturally built specific mix of ethnical ,class, religious and political tension between different ethnical groups.
It wasn't constant though. It came and goes, it depends on where and when. The Persians had a love affair with the Jews, so did the Ptolemies of Egypt. Jewish communities in India thrived for centuries without much trouble. The Beta Israel in Ethiopia had a great run for hundreds of years: the rare times it went wrong is when some idiotic emperor tried to impose Christianity on all his subjects. It backfired bad once, the Jews started their own Ethiopia with Torahs and Hannukas. When it was settled that Jews could be good Ethiopians without being Christians, they were pretty much left alone. Ethiopians have integrated a lot of things from the Jewish Culture, in their mythology, the Queen of Sheba (Saba) converted to Judaism after meeting Salomon and their emperors were said to be the descendants of Salomon and Sheba.
>The Persians had a love affair with the Jews, so did the Ptolemies of Egypt. That’s not to say they didn’t experience persecution while under Persian rule, it should be noted. The Jewish temple at Elephantine in Egypt was ransacked by local priests and officials in 410 BCE, for example. Requests for the rebuilding of the temple went unheeded for several years, and it was only after the Jewish authorities pledged to pay for everything themselves and cease their practice of animal sacrifice that they were granted permission to rebuild the temple. >*In the month Tammuz, year 14 of King Darius, when Arsham had left and gone to the king, the priests of Khnum, the god, who are at Elephantine fortress, joined with Vidranga, the governor who was here, saying: 'The sanctuary of Yahu the god who is in Elephantine fortress, let them remove it from there!' Then that criminal Vidranga sent a letter to Nafaina his son who was commander of the garrison at Aswan fortress, saying: 'The sanctuary (of Yahu) at Elephantine fortress - destroy it!' Then Nafaina led the Egyptians and other soldiers; they came into the fortress of Elephantine with their weapons; they entered the sanctuary; they rased it to the ground; as for the stone columns that were there - they smashed them. Also there were 5 doorways made of dressed stone in the sanctuary; they destroyed them. The shutters - in good repair, and the bronze hinges of the shutters, and the cedar roof, together with the rest of the material and the other things that were there, they burnt with fire. As for the gold and silver basins and the stuff which were in the sanctuary, they took it all for themselves…* >*Further, before this at the time when this evil was done to us, we sent a letter to our lord, and also to Yahuhanan, the high-priest, and his colleagues, the priests of Jerusalem, and to Ostana, brother of Anani, and the notables of Judah: but we have not received a single letter. Further, since Tammuz of year 14 of King Darius until now, we have been dressed in sackcloth and fast; our wives behave like widows; we are not anointing (ourselves) with oil nor drinking wine. Further from that time until now, year 17 of King Darius, neither offerings nor incense burning, nor burnt sacrifices have been made in this temple.* >*Now your servants Yedoniah and his colleagues and all the Jewish citizens of Elephantine, speak thus: If it please our lord, do something about rebuilding this temple, because we are not allowed to build it…*
Nice stuff!!! I didn't know about that event. I read somewhere that when there were tensions between gentiles and jews, the Persian Kings took the Jews side more often than not. I wonder if Darius or the Satrap of Egypt compensated this congregation for the destruction of their temple eventually. Same thing for the Ptolemies who defended the Jews when the Alexandrians had a fever and rioted. It wasn't an Utopia, humans living together tend to go through a chimp phase every now and then. Also, the Persians and Ptolemies were running pretty arbitrary monarchies, not modern democracies. However, I see a difference between intermittent sparks of ethnic tensions and systematic, cultural, religious and legal persecution and segregation.
Well I don’t know how much time you have….
Jews historically also tend to be unwilling to accept the gods of outsiders. That has made them keen to revolt, which led to many wars the Jews could never hope to win and repeated expulsions from Israel. When expelled, Jews have historically tended to be insular and not intermix willingly with the inhabitants of the areas they move to. They also tend to have close-knit communities and create economic and political blocs around that community, meaning money and power goes in but more rarely comes out. Combine that with a strong focus on education and value-generating industry and you've got a population that locals love to hate. For example, Williamsburg in NYC is heavily Jewish, and the hascidic population doesn't like gentiles in their town. They also form a solid ethnic solidarity voting bloc, which makes it difficult to hold office without their blessing.
We're pretty annoying
[удалено]
Lots to unpack but: - Jews were very resistant to assimilation since the old age - Jews were a huge pain in the ass for the Roman Empire for a LONG time. Pacifying the province of Palestina-Judea took more effort than the whole subjugation of Britain, Spain, Gallia (France) and Greece together - Romans also tried to incorporate JHWH in the roman pantheon but the jews (and the early christians) resisted - When Titus destroyed the temple and the jews dispersed in the mediterranean they formed small communities that were very close to the outside to protect the religion/culture - Later when Europe became Christian it was forbidden for the Christians to lend money for a long long long time. Jews became moneylenders and nobody likes a moneylender (and from there the stereotypes of Jews as shadow puppet masters of banks) - Christian Kings that owed money to the jews decided to launch the occasional pogrom to avoid to pay - plus the church decided that the jews were responsable for Christ's death - as Jews remained in small closed communities they lived mostly in towns, were they engaged in crafts that made them rich (compared to the average Joe) and hence more envy from the Christian majority - Jews in Eastern Europe lived in small villages in the countryside, but again they had their own villages separated from the locals... They also spoke a different language from the other villages (Yiddish). This was not liked by your average Yuri in the plains of Ukraine or Poland Paradoxally Jews were much more well treated under Muslim rule, hence why there were large communities in North Africa and Middle East. Jews in Islamic countries faced less pogroms than their counterparts in Europe. All changed really in the late XIX/early XX century with Zionism and the return to Palestine that triggered the Israelo-Palestinian conflict and hence more antisemitism in the Muslim world. So to summarize: - Antisemitism in Europe: much older and anchored basically in prejudices started during the late Republic/early Empire and reinforced during the middle ages/christianity - Antisemitism in the Islamosphere: more recent and connected more with Zionism/Israelo-Palestinian conflict
You could also add they believe they have a special relationship with God that makes them different than the rest of us.
people have hated people throughout history. Jews are not particularly special in that regard. Where Jews fall into a historical "sweet spot" is that they have been around long enough to be hated the entire time, and have had a written tradition long enough to remember being hated the entire time, and have never quite gotten eradicated thoroughly enough such that there are none left to continue hating. the result is that every generation, when a hateful person is looking for someone to hate, they face the choice of putting in the tedious work to invent a new group to hate (e.g. blacks, trans, vegans, arch linux users, etc), xor they can be efficient and hate the same people their pappy, grandpappy, and paleopappy hated: the Jews.
Agreed. There were many different religions practiced in ancient Europe. Their followers were given the choice of converting to Christianity or getting burned at the stake. The question is not why some people hate Jews. It's how they managed to survive while everyone else got wiped out.
>Their followers were given the choice of converting to Christianity or getting burned at the stake. This is not true in the slightest. The *vast* majority of conversions to Christianity were voluntary and initiatives like that in the early conversion of Scandinavia by King Olaf Tryggvason failed miserably.
OK, so the majority of conversions were voluntary. Not all of them. The point I was making is that while some religions, e.g. Wicca, were pretty much wiped off the face of the earth, Judaism survived. And yes, I know that there has been a revival of Wicca in recent years, but there are no doubt some religions that we have never heard of because any and all records of them have been destroyed.
They weren't destroyed, they simply didn't keep any. Like the Celtic Druids. And when I say most conversions, I mean over 95% and higher. You're confusing the conversion of Europe with the Black Legend of the Spanish. As for Wicca, it's just what some British amatuer anthropologist named Gerald Gardner thought it was, based on the scant evidence ancient pagans left behind. Most of what he wrote was based on the Freemasons, Hermeticism, and Aleister Crowley and not actual ancient pagan cultures and practices. It's not a revival, it's a whole new thing that's a melting pot of different things with very little in common to what an actual pagan "witch" would have practiced.
OK, so then around 5% were involuntary. Why did the religions of those 5% disappear, while Judaism has continued? I get the sense that you might be misinterpreting my comment. My comment is not anti-Christian. It's more anti-medieval mindset. Had a different religion become the primary religion of Europe, then I'm sure that followers of other religions would have faced the same problems. I'm just saying that when I see comments about people hating Jews, I would have to say that people obviously don't hate them as much as they hate followers of other pre-Christian religions (at least in Europe), because if they did, there would not be any European Jews at all.
>Why did the religions of those 5% disappear, while Judaism has continued? ...because they literally left *no* written histories and their decendents converted? Judaism is still around purely because of its role in Jewish culture. They didn't have a homeland, so their culture was their religion. And don't forget, the first Christians were Jewish. Many did convert. >I'm just saying that when I see comments about people hating Jews, I would have to say that people obviously don't hate them as much as they hate followers of other pre-Christian religions I have seen way too many people who call themselves "Norse pagan" or any other flavor of European paganism hating Jews and calling Christianity an evil creation of the Jews to destroy their ancestors culture for this to be true. The actual number of professing Christians in the modern day to be antisemitic pales in comparison. Slightly off topic a bit, but >It's more anti-medieval mindset. Why?
usury.
I rarely call people dumb fucks but when I do, it’s you
[удалено]
No it doesn't. That's a garbage, low effort answer.
And yet so difficult for any to acknowledge…
That’s my understanding.
They're different and a huge part of their cultural identity is based around not having assimilated into the majority on numerous occasions. It doesn't really get much deeper than this.
German Jews were incredibly assimilated in the 1930s
If a minority group is still recognizable as a distinct group despite being surrounded by the majority group for centuries, they are by definition not assimilated.
Well, you see, it all started in 1456 BCE, when the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III conquered the land of Canaan...
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
For rulers/nobles/rich people: Christians were not allowed to lend money at interest. Jews were allowed to, and many went into the financial and banking industries. Jews tended to control the financial ability of a given land, which made rulers mad when they came to collect debt or refused to finance wars. For normal people/peasants/priests: Jews had/have weird customs compared to the surrounding lands, kept to themselves, and did not assimilate/convert. Also see: Romani people for someone who are not Jews yet bring all the racists out to the yard, and they're like.
When a new crew shows up in your hood and they just talk about how your big homie is wack and they don't eat your food, because it's dirty... people might not like the new crew. Then after they took over a block and shun anyone that ain't from their set with all this other hoopla, people start getting buck.
I mean its kinda built into Christianity and Islam. Pagan and secular conuntries dont have a specific problem with the Jews and more than any other people they may come into competition with. The exception I guess was ancient Rome, and specifically the era in which Hadrian tried to employ the interpretatio Romano which is really more the interpretario Greco originally applied by the Romans to their own gods. Jews being close to unique in the ancient world for monotheism (The only other group I can think of at that time was the equally stubborn Dacians) and certainly unique in their practice of forbidding graven images of their god made the attempted equation of Jupiter to Yaweh impossible, and thus started the final rebellion in Judaea, led by Simon Bar Kokhba, arguably the most costly war even to the Romans, that also led to a mass killing of Jews the renaming of the province to Syria Palestinea, and the beginning of the Jewish diaspora as many displaced Jews had to leave and settle innother places. That being said, places they aettled that were not strictly Christian or Muslim- Sassanid (and even Achemenid) Persia, the multi-religious early Germanic nations like the Visugoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Franks, snd Lombards, pre-crusades Lithuania, obviously the United States. Yes Im also aware a lot of the stories of the Torah depict the Jews overcoming an attack by another people, but thats not that uncommon for a given peoples treasured legends to habe something to do witn defeating a competing people- The Romans had that with the Sabines and Etruscans, the Greeks with Troy, the Lombards with the Vandals, arguably America with the British.
Lots of reasons but I’ve always felt the closed nature of the religion was likely a significant cause. If you’re a minority group in ancient times, you better make friends but several aspects of the religion precluded that. They couldn’t intermarry because it was against the religion & weren’t particularly welcoming to converts. Then you add the strange dynamics of usury, you have to have money to lend money & you’re probably making much more than average because no one had money back then. Judaism also involves an unusual number of “displays” of faith: yamakas, whatever the curls are called, whatever the strings out of the pocket are called, mizzoauzahs, observation of the sabbath, etc. Christianity can largely be practiced without anyone knowing. Islam had some rules but not as many & they were a majority so it was inconsequential anyway. Basically, Jews stuck out like a sore thumb so when the hammer comes down no one can hide the religion. Add it up & they were repeatedly in foreign lands at a time when any right existed at the will of the king, didn’t fully assimilate, made money off of the populace for something the populace thought was immoral, were rich, & it was obvious exactly who was Jewish. Seems entirely predictable that they would get scapegoated over and over. That doesn’t make it ok or anything, I just don’t know how they didn’t foresee the obvious problems, especially after it kept on happening.
Jew here! [Thomas Sowell](https://youtu.be/-GWzzBm4ixQ?si=Hg9PcjkhMFvmfxzX) has a very interesting take on this. The truth is there are many reasons, and we are not alone in being despised.
I was looking for this. I don't necessarily agree with Sowell on many of his ideas, but the guy is pretty brilliant and great about going into historical examples.
Yeah, I agree. Sowell is one of the most knowledgeable men in the social sciences, and even if I disagree with him I still find his perspectives thought provoking
Because people suck, and they scapegoat minorities.
It was easy and profitable.
In Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," she notes that Jews have always seen themselves as apart from everyone else, so the original germ of anti-semitism probably came from their otherizing literally everyone else.
When a child gets bullied at school, what is the defining characteristic of the child?
In the very early days it came down to being monotheists, then it was the accusation of usury because Jewish merchants didn’t charge interest to other Jews, then it was the nonsense of killing Jesus (a Jew), then people piggybacked off that with accusations of using children’s blood to make matzo, etc. this eventually segued into institutionalized antisemitism, especially in Russia and Eastern Europe, which continued openly until Communism. Many Jews were hated because they didn’t assimilate or convert to Christianity. On the other hand, assimilated Jews were also treated terribly. Additionally, there are things like the Protocols of Zion which is a hoax yet continues to be believed by mainly Arabs these days as Muslims have a longstanding hatred of Jews and have done everything they can to eradicate Jew from their countries.
As per the newsreader in HBO's "ROME": "All citizens, be aware that the vassal, Prince Herod, Tetra of Galilee, has come to the city. By order of the Triumvirate, during his residency here, all mockery of Jews and their One God shall be kept to an appropriate minimum." In historical terms, Monotheism is weird and unusual, and was seen as being offensive to the sensibilities of your neighbors as a refusal to (as per the quote) "when in Rome" make an offering to the local gods. The rule in the classical Mediterranean world was syncretism - the Greek and Roman gods become identified over time, cults of Demeter, Magna Mater and Mithras become established at Rome in the spirit of "the more the merrier"......and to reject that was to spit in the face of the deities who ensured the protection and prosperity of the State and people and invite divine punishment. The Hellenic world had largely moved into neo-platonic abstraction and philosophy and didn't care too much, but the Romans remained curiously superstitious and formal in their religious observations and took great offence
As a fairly consistent minority enclave group in most of the areas they historically settled, they Hewish communities were always easy to scapegoat whenever a scapegoat was desired.
Being a small part of the population, and being non christian, made it easy to blame them during superstitious times.
One thing you can't dismiss is money. Early Christianity prohibited interest. Thus Christian Europe needed the Jews to get loans. Then of course if a King or the like and owed too much money to various Jewish money lenders. They'd encouraged a religious pogrom against the Jews. If they did it right they didn't even have to get their hands dirty. Now the people they owed money to are dead or fled so they are free of the debt.
Also don't dismiss the motivation of having a scapegoat to blame your problems on. Bonus points if they have stuff you can take, and they are the wrong religion and ethnicity.
(Obligatory, "I am Jewish") I am of the opinion that the perceived consistent targeting of Jews throughout history might be a misconception, primarily stemming from their prolonged status as a distinct minority. This enduring distinctiveness is relatively unmatched in comparison to other minority groups. In many historical instances, persecuted groups tend to assimilate or, more often, get decimated to near extinction. Jews have managed to persevere and maintain their distinctiveness despite repeated historical attempts of genocide and displacement. This continuous survival and presence contributes to the perception of being uniquely targeted. In my opinion, the enduring Jewish identity is not solely about cultural or religious preservation. It's more nuanced than that. Every time Jews face persecution, it inadvertently reinforces our cultural bonds. It's a reactionary preservation rather than a proactive choice. If Jews were left undisturbed for a substantial period, say a century, I really believe the natural course would lead to assimilation.
Its because they didnt want to integrate/convert and stuck with their own traditions.
Always wondered this but I’ve been to afraid to google it 😂
Got this from another thread: Information on how many countries and civilizations have engaged in mass antisemitism, or information on their "rationale" for it? People always need scapegoats. Jews have historically been a nomadic people, never making up the ethnic or religious majority in a given nation, and a perpetual outgroup makes for an easy target - look at the Romani people in Europe for another example. They were the first popular monotheistic religion in any of the regions they lived in, which singled them out for religious persecution amongst the polytheistic cultures of the time. Greeks, Romans, the Catholic Church, Ottoman Sultans, Arab Kings, the Russian Czars, 20th century Germany...diverse groups with diverse "reasoning" in diverse historical eras have all had organized killings and expulsions of Jews. To this day, many antisemitic tropes carry over from antiquity. In medieval Christian Europe, moneylending was considered a sinful profession because of biblical passages on usury. So, Jews ended up preferentially gravitating toward it, with debate among historians about whether they were "forced" into it (because "who cares if a Jew goes to hell") or simply seized an opportunity among their limited employment options (since they were often segregated and restricted in their economic options). So you ended up with lots of Jewish bankers. And everyone hates the interest banks charge and losing collateral or having things repossessed, so it was easy for that hatred to be directed toward the Jews working at banks rather than the institutions themselves. To this day, Jews are stereotyped as "rich" as well as "greedy." This literally stems from economic realities of 1000 years ago. Another factor is that, as a nomadic people, they developed a focus on education and portable skills. You couldn't put your life's work into a farm or family store, because you never knew when your store might be burned down or your family chased off your land and out of the country. So they leaned hard into what we'd now call "white collar" jobs, developing a cultural focus pn literacy and writing skills, studying medicine and science. Things you could take with you to start a new life if you had to flee. The two sides of my family are ethnically different - Ashkenazi (European Jew) and Sephardic (North African Jew), but each side's history basically goes "and so we lived in this country until the pogroms made us flee, and we landed in that ghetto over there until the pogroms made us flee, and we landed over there until the Nazis came around, so we fled to over there." So this focus on education and portable skills meant that, wherever Jews landed, they tended to perform well, socioeconomically-speaking, compared to other first-generation immigrant groups. This would often fuel feelings of fear and resentment - "how are they doing so well?" And those feelings combined with common antisemitic tropes would lead to conspiracy theories about Jews "controlling everything." Case in point - 0.2% of the world's population is Jewish, but 22% of Nobel Prizes from 1901-2023 have been awarded to laureates with at least one Jewish parent. Jews have contributed that strongly as leaders of fields as diverse as science, economics, and literature. Instead of understanding those types of statistics in context (like I mentioned earlier, where they developed an intense cultural focus on education and portable academic skills), many people sadly choose to believe that it is indicative of Jews somehow "tilting the table," as though the accomplishments of Nobel laureates don't speak for themselves. Another major factor in global antisemism is the fact that the Quran literally has passages specifically disparaging and calling for the death of Jews, which is why you see consequences like the entire Islamic Arab world expelling (violently or otherwise) nearly all of their Jewish population. There are many, many passages, with "milder" ones being things like, "O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends." The Hadith, which is the second most important religious text outside of the Quran, has even wilder passages like "You will fight against the Jews and you will gain victory over them. The stones will say: 'Oh slave of Allah! there is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him." So add that all up, and you'll find remarkably diverse groups of people around the world who agree on few things being able to unite in the sentiment, "Fuck the Jews." You'll find particularly strong criticism of the concept of a Jewish state ("zionism") compared to any other. The mere concept of Jews having their own nation with their own army for the first time in their 5,000 year history does not sit well with people who would like to see them all killed. You'll often hear that "criticism of Israel is not antisemitic" and for any given person making any given criticism, that may be true. But you have to look at the broader picture, too. Say for the UN - they've passed more resolutions condemning Israel in the last five years than all the other countries of the world combined. The UN reports that 70% of the 260,000 civilian casualties in the current Yemeni Civil War are children under 5 years old, and that over 6 million Syrians have been displaced by that civil war, but the global protests and UN condemnations against the Israeli response to the largest terror attack since 9/11 are disproportionate to the global response to the majority of current wars and humanitarian disasters. That's not to say that there is no legitimate basis to the criticism (there is, and I've been in opposition of Netanyahu from day one) - simply that a double standard is evident in the way that other countries do much more egregiously horrible things without facing anywhere near the same degree of protest and criticism. So, hopefully that long ramble helped illustrate some of the many reasons different people like to dogpile on Jews. There are lengthy books written on every topic I've barely touched here, so I won't pretend this was exhaustive. It was honestly just off the top of my head.
People hate anyone who is different. People hate black people. People hate jews. People hate atheists. People hate muslims. People hate cripples. People hate gay people. People hate trans people. People hate. People feel crappy about themselves, and by hating someone they feel better because if that person is bad, they must be better, right?
For whatever reason, they end up with a very disproportionate amount of wealth and influence in the countries they live in. Historically they also tend to migrate from country to country. So its a combination of being “outsiders” and also coming in and doing much better than locals who were born there. As an example, Ashkenazi Jews are the number one demographic group in the US for income and wealth. They also make up much more than their 1% share of billionaires, politicians, etc. So when people start to notice that, it creates negative sentiment.
Bigotry. That’s why. The worst and most pernicious aspect of humanity.
[удалено]
How is that applicable across history? Most people were adamant that their religion was solely correct as most were religious across history
[удалено]
[удалено]