Origins and History of Hatred of Jews

[doubtingt]

If you go around saying your God is the only God and that you are his favorite people, combined with being relatively successful financially, then you're going to attract some negative attention. This is especially if your group is a small minority within a larger society (its easier for bigoted ideologies to ferment and grow when they can be openly expressed because they are about a small minority).
Then throw in the fact that what defines your group is a worldview that is itself rooted in intolerance, bigotry, and violence toward the outgroup and you've got yourself a recipe for a self-fulling prophecy of persecution.

 

[Sabine Grant]

My wife and I were watching a documentary on The History Channel called No Place On Earth. It was about a group of Ukrainian Jews that hid from the holocaust during WW2 in caves for over 500 days. My wife asked, why do people hate Jews so much? I thought about it for a few seconds and had to admit I really don't know why. Any of you history buffs care to explain. I'll learn something and I'll pass the info along to my wife too. Thanks.

Maybe to start with from Alpha History :

http://alphahistory.com/holocaust/medieval-anti-semitism/

Anti-Semitism spiked markedly after the Roman Empire under Constantine accepted Christianity in the early 300s. Laws were passed restricting or removing the Jews from many elements of public life. They were forbidden from holding public office; from employing Christian servants; from doing business; from eating or having sex with Christians. In many regions it was even illegal for Jews to be seen in public during Holy Week (the week leading up to Easter, the commemoration of Christ’s death). From the 11th century, as European Christians embarked on the Crusades, Jewish communities along the way were used as target practice for the Crusaders. Massacres of Jewish communities occurred from 1096 onward, with entire villages of men, women and children slaughtered.

Below another link to an excellent article connecting Martin Luther's antisemitism to modern antisemitism and its influence on the Third Reich :

http://www.nobeliefs.com/luther.htm

As you scroll down, you will gain some insight into Luther's virulent diatribes targeting Jews.(Excerpts from " On the Jews and their lies").

 

[Samhain]

I think it is ridiculous to claim that Jews weren't specially singled out. Just because other groups were ALSO persecuted, this does not mean that extra effort didn't go into persecuting the Jews. A simple glance at the rhetoric of the time (and beforehand, for that matter) will indicate that people focused on the Jews. The fact is that Jews were prioritized for destruction. Other groups would have had their turn if the plans had reached fruition.

Forgetting the other victims is wrong, but I reject the idea that there is some kind of agenda to do so. That the other groups don't have spokespeople as vociferous as the surviving Jews does not indicate that there's some kind of conspiracy to silence them. No one denies that Roma, Gays, Slavs and other groups were also targeted.

I believe that the Jews were especially persecuted, and that this came about because of convenience of scapegoating, competition between monotheistic factions and the general scatteredness and defencelessness of their communities. I refuse to blame the victims by saying that their behavior contributed. Dreyfus was pretty much an assimilated Jew, and that didn't help him very much.

I would say that I agree that special effort did go into persecuting Jews during the Holocaust with one caveat. The point is that they accounted for merely half of the genocidal focus of the Nazis though and the current Jewish rhetoric focuses more on 6 million Jews rather than 12 million people killed. The other point is that it is used to justify the idea that Jews are more persecuted than anyone else in history. Perhaps this is true by a per capita basis, but it diminishes the other racial, ethnic, religious and cultural persecutions that have gone on throughout history. It may be unfair to characterize Jews as no more persecuted than anyone else, but it's all relative to time and place. The Tutsi's could easily meet the challenge of a per capita genocide that was worse than the Jews for the Holocaust for example. Though this becomes less pronounced merely because the total numbers were less and because it happened in Rwanda.

 

[SLD]

Ok, a late reply here but a different tack. I would argue that it goes back much earlier than Christianity. The Jews and the Romans had problems long before Christianity. The revolts in Judea were a severe sore point for the empire. They caused a lot of problems with the diaspora. Jews in the Roman Empire were not required to perform military service. That probably aroused enmity against them. Plus being different and cliquish in a pagan world just created problems. When christianity came onto the scene, antisemitism was alive and well already. That's partly the reason the christians seem almost desperate to distinguish themselves from the Jews. They emphasize their romanness in a lot of ways. They aren't like those revolting jews. Then once they get in power, they put their enmity into practice in an even worse way than the pagan roman emperors.

What amazes me is that the Jewish people could survive for so long under such conditions. Throughout the middle ages and through to the modern ones, they were constantly being persecuted and subject to pogroms, forced baptisms and various explusions from their lands. The church and secular authorities in the dark ages were vicious.

SLD

 

[credoconsolans]

This is all very Western Christiano/Islam -centric.

The other several billion people on the planet - Asians and eastern Asians who are not Muslims or Christians couldn't care less about Jews one way or the other.

 

[J842P]

This is all very Western Christiano/Islam -centric.

The other several billion people on the planet - Asians and eastern Asians who are not Muslims or Christians couldn't care less about Jews one way or the other.

Sure. But that seems to go without saying. Does there have to be an all-encompassing global view about everything? If one were to discuss the conquest of the Americas by the Spanish, does it really add anything to the discussion to note that Asians and eastern Asians couldn't care less about indigenous Americans and their interactions with the Spanish?

 

[Minimalist]

I was in college and studying my Roman History text when I learned that the first documented anti-semitic trouble happened in Alexandria in 40 AD. The Greco-Roman citizens of the city objected to the special treatment that the jews had gotten from Augustus and Tiberius. Mr prof...never a guy to miss an opportunity for research...wrote out a citation and sent me to the library. The book was right and it occurred to me that the whole story of the "jews" needing a redeemer in the first 1/3 of the first century was total bullshit. They actually had it pretty good.

 

[OLDMAN]

I think it has to do with the separation from all other cultures. If we look at Gypsies or the early Mormon church we see the same reactions. It is one thing to be excluded from mainstream culture, it is viewed suspicious to exclude yourself.

 

[credoconsolans]

This is all very Western Christiano/Islam -centric.

The other several billion people on the planet - Asians and eastern Asians who are not Muslims or Christians couldn't care less about Jews one way or the other.

Sure. But that seems to go without saying. Does there have to be an all-encompassing global view about everything? If one were to discuss the conquest of the Americas by the Spanish, does it really add anything to the discussion to note that Asians and eastern Asians couldn't care less about indigenous Americans and their interactions with the Spanish?

Because the question was all encompassing. The OP's question from his wife was "Why do people hate Jews so much?"

Stepping back and getting some perspective, the fact actually is, most people on the planet don't. It's just a Western culture-centric-bias that we're forced to care so much or hear so much about a nondescript people in the Middle East that it appears to be a world-wide thing, when it isn't.