I’ve heard it theorized that in addition to moneylending this is why there are so many Jewish performers. Entertainment was one of the few other available trades. This however seems to me to be, at best, a partial explanation for the fact that an estimated 80% of contemporary comedians are Jewish (from Dr. Klass of Vanderbilt University who teaches a course on Jewish humor).
However my copy of The Haunted Smile by Lawrence Epstein is still on its way from Amazon and I assume it will have more insight.
Lets not forget the current politically correct blood libel of substituting the word Zionitsts for Jews as baby killers. That one is alive and well even here in our BBS.
I hate this so much; no, I’m not protesting being called a monster! I’m clearly a “paid shill”! Because I can’t possibly be offended by the statement that my people are so evil that we are a plague and parasitic influence that start wars “because”.
deep breath
Antisemitism: where it’s apparently easier to believe that there is this vast, centuries-long nefarious conspiracy with a goal of “for the evils” and that every action taken is in furtherance of that conspiracy… rather than just being a small group of people that have been shat on and scapegoated for centuries and are sick and tired of being treated as the source of all evil.
Religious minorities often took the role of traders and financiers, as their outsider status lent itself to sidestepping restrictions and moving between cultures. Armenians held similar roles, and were noted gem-traders.
And then there’s the point that cross-cultural educated travellers tend to make good diplomats and spies…
Much of the conspiracy bullshit does have a loose connection to reality, before spinning off into murderous lunacy. It tends to miss the point that these are things that were done to the Jewish community more than by it, though.
A handful of Jews did dominate medieval European finance, as they were the only ones permitted into such a “sinful” profession, and were barred from most other trades. This came in useful time and again for European monarchs; whenever the national debt gets too high, just release the Inquisition, expel all the Jews from the country and start again from zero…
That is exactly the reason behind it–for the first century or so, they weren’t having any luck with converting Jews to the cult (which hasn’t changed), but then they shifted targets to the Romans, and the rest is (literally) history.
I’ve commented elsewhere on this board about how it took me nearly 30 years of living in the United States to realize there were such things as non-hypocritical, open-minded Christians.
As someone raised Christian, and who was Christian into adulthood for a while, those Christians exist but they are drummed out from churches because of the more extremist people who are more involved in the leadership locally and regionally.
My church from my teen years which encouraged me to question the teachings and draw my own conclusions went from a place that was openly accepting of homosexuality, struggled financially a little, worked heavily in local volunteer work (the very unpopular kind like sorting food banks and cleaning shelters), and whose Sunday school taught about other religions around the world in 1998 into one that condemned homosexuality broadly, filled its coffers easily, kicked out “problem” members, only went on extravagant mission vacations for volunteer work, and who pulled their kids out of Sunday school as long as the teacher stayed because her husband wasn’t baptized by 2004 (the regional leadership even told her she would join her husband in hell if he wasn’t baptized - in the official meeting with no correction by others). My whole life I have seen many churches turn that same way, and in my middle teens I got swept up in the judge-y clique culture stereotypical of churches. The culture of fear and feeding it really works for enough people.
I always hear there are magical churches out there that still open-minded but most people seem to mean it’s simply a “Sunday Christian” church that dangles the keys in front of the audience to keep its doors open instead of catering to the “insider’s only” crowds other do.
