The reasons shift over time, but the real reason is quite simple: Jews did not participate in local religious rites, and to make things even more confounding they had no missionary zeal at all. And from the end of the Roman Empire until the Second World War, there was no nation or powerful lobby really interested in sticking up for them as one of their own.
So group of people, with no ties to any powerful nation for most of European history, were a perfect scapegoat for when things went bad. To make things worse, a lot of them found ways to prosper a little despite how much harder laws were making it for them. That annoyed their neighbouring peasants to no end.
You’re forgetting the part where people in power made them active targets to deflect from their own failures. Just existing is not usually what causes such deep-seated hatred of one group or another, it’s actively being targeted by people in power.
Yeah, I glossed over that part with the “no lobby” aspect. Having no nation or lobby that might rattle its sabres made Jews a popular target for tsars, barons and emirs all over the place. If, say, a Russian tsar tried to blame the Turks living in the Donbas, the Ottoman Empire might get miffed and cut trade.
I mean, it’s the KEY part of the whole thing. That’s the roots of European anti-semitism, that the Jews were actively put into the crosshairs by the Church and by monarchs. You can see an uptick in violence against Jewish communities when rhetoric heats up. This was even true in the relatively more tolerant Iberian peninsula under Islamic rule. When they Jews were not being targeted, people tended to get along far better. When the rulers decided they needed a scapegoat, and they focused on the Jewish community, you get a very strong uptick in violence. That tended to happen less in Islamic empires than in Christian ones.
Definitely a christian things, didn’t most (if not all) the crusades open with the crusaders getting practice in on the Jewish populations along the way to Jerusalem?
There are days when I think a humanity ending plague (ala 12 monkeys) might not be a the worst possible thing for the planet… then I remember that most times, it’s not most humans doing and encouraging this, just a small, nasty minority.
Alternatively, the Israelis have done what the Ukrainian anarchists did, and declared a truce with them for the duration of the war. It doesn’t mean that they like each other, just that there are bigger problems right now.
Azov are ideological fascists and need to be handled carefully, as are Stepan Bandera’s ideological followers, but they are nowhere close to representing the Ukrainian government or people. I’d be more worried about the 100,000s of Russian troops than a few thousand Ukrainian fascists, even if they are both dangerous. That does not make me, or anyone else, a fascist.
Russia loves to point to their country’s tradition of fighting Nazis (at least, ever since Hitler and Stalin had that falling out) but Russia has an even longer tradition of waging pogroms against Jewish people.
Indeed. One of the key documents in the rise of modern antisemitism came from Russia (the Protocols). Of course, the west wasn’t free from antisemitism, either, but the lack of pogroms made it more tolerable, at least.
Yeah even during the most overtly racist parts of our history you really didn’t see a lot of Jewish people fleeing the United States to go live in Eastern Europe.
True enough. I guess some left to go live in Israel postwar… but if I’m not mistaken, we still have the largest population of Jewish folks outside of Israel?
