re: #448 Aceofwhat?

Well, it’s not the concerted hate— Jews often have centuries of peace. It’s the slumbering nature of it, that breaks out every once in awhile.

I think it was a combination of three main things: Jews are highly literate, which, up until this era, really made them culturally stand out. This may seem like a small thing, but it’s like the ‘anti-elitist’ suspicion these days. Jews are communicative, with other Jews. Jews, throughout the diaspora, built up a long-range trading network. This is something that didn’t really endear them to the rulers of nations, except the enlightened ones.

Finally, Jews were not that exogamous— they didn’t tend to marry out. The main protections in the bad old days were from family relationships, and Jews lacked family relationships with anyone in power in most of the lands they lived in. There might be rare exceptions, but in general, they had only professional friendships, no co-religious people in government (except in the middle east, where, it should be noted, they had the longest eras of peace) and no family relations in government.

All of this made them the weakest targets, in some ways, or the least politically damaging targets, since they had the fewest allies. Even if they were actually valuable to the state— and they were— attacking them was a political win.

I think modern anti-semitism is totally different, and falls into two camps that resemble each other, but are rather different:

Islamic anti-semitism, which is built on a mistelling of history where the Jews always betray the Arabs and the foundation of Israel was a direct attack on Arabs, rather than the return of a prodigal brother. It’s a stance that’s cynically promoted by many governments in the Middle East, and earnestly promoted by the zealots of various Islamic sects.

White anti-Semitism, or European, whatever you want to call it, is based on a mistelling of the events of very recent history, where the Jews engineer the slaughter of Europeans over and over, while parasitically assuming real control of Europe. This is usually tied to fears of European culture disappearing. It’s interesting that while there’s obviously some highly Christian anti-Semites of this variety, the worst of these are the new ‘pagans’, who hold up racialism as a weapon. I’d say it’s safe to say that racism is more prevalent in European anti-semitism.