A serious question about Jewish history

[Indofred]

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SERIOUS ANSWERS ONLY as this is in CLEAN DEBATE for exactly that reason.
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This is NOT a thread about Israel/Palestine nor a hate thread of any sort.
It isn't pro Muslim, anti Christian or anti Jewish.
I don't want rubbish about the Palestine/Israel conflict or any modern arguments of any type.

I'm looking for a real answer to a serious question.

Jewish Persecution | Timeline of Judaism | History of AntiSemitism

This link is to a Jewish site that lists various horrors that have been done to Jews over the last couple of thousand years.
They've been kicked out, enslaved, massacred, mutilated, burnt alive, forced to convert to Christianity and generally abused where ever they've settled.

All said and done, they've been given a pretty crap time of it.
So, my question is, what caused so much hate in all these places?

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Once again - SERIOUS ANSWERS ONLY as this is in CLEAN DEBATE for exactly that reason.
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[Lipush]

Jews have been hated for many reasons. Many times Jews have been willing to separate themselves out of rest of community, so hoping being harmed less. they were simply "different" from the others, which at times was viewed in not so nice ways.

 

[Indofred]

Jews have been hated for many reasons. Many times Jews have been willing to separate themselves out of rest of community, so hoping being harmed less. they were simply "different" from the others, which at times was viewed in not so nice ways.

An interesting thought but it doesn't really explain why the hate.

BBC News - Q&A: Jews in Britain

I'm trying to find unbiased sites in order to avoid stupid hate filled crap (that's not always easy) but this BBC article seems to go some way to explaining at least part of it.

BBC News - Q&A: Jews in Britain

The Jews who arrived with William the Conqueror were merchants and bankers - they became an integral part of the early Norman period because Christians (much like Muslims today) were forbidden from lending money at interest.

Money lenders and tax collectors are never the most popular groups in any society so I wonder if that was enough to start hate stories.

Resentment of their perceived wealth, exacerbated by the popular belief that they killed Jesus, grew in towns and cities, despite the fact that Jewish communities often lived in poor conditions.
By the 12th century, Jews were being accused of the ritual murder of Christian children, known as "blood libels". The earliest such story is that of the death of a 12-year-old boy, William of Norwich, in 1144.

Now, if that proves a reasonable explanation, did the same conditions apply in other places in other times.

As for separation, I believe that's always a negative to being understood.
In the UK, there are Muslim 'ghettos' and not even close to enough mixing of the populations. I believe that is why there is so much mistrust and misunderstanding there.
That in mind, did the Jews of the time live separately and, if that was the case, did that contribute to the problem?

 

[editec]

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SERIOUS ANSWERS ONLY as this is in CLEAN DEBATE for exactly that reason.
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This is NOT a thread about Israel/Palestine nor a hate thread of any sort.
It isn't pro Muslim, anti Christian or anti Jewish.
I don't want rubbish about the Palestine/Israel conflict or any modern arguments of any type.

I'm looking for a real answer to a serious question.

Jewish Persecution | Timeline of Judaism | History of AntiSemitism

This link is to a Jewish site that lists various horrors that have been done to Jews over the last couple of thousand years.
They've been kicked out, enslaved, massacred, mutilated, burnt alive, forced to convert to Christianity and generally abused where ever they've settled.

All said and done, they've been given a pretty crap time of it.
So, my question is, what caused so much hate in all these places?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once again - SERIOUS ANSWERS ONLY as this is in CLEAN DEBATE for exactly that reason.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

xenophobia  


xen·o·pho·bi·a [zen-uh-foh-bee-uh, zee-nuh-] Show IPA
noun
an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange.

YOu can look for specific reasons specific to Jews, of course, but the real answer is the above.

Peasants world-wide fear strangers.

And if those strangers move in and aren't planning on leaving?

Well, their fear inevitably becomes hatred.

And strangers in the midst of an alien culture become very useful scapegoats that the masters can use to foist off the blame when things do south.

 

[Lipush]

People tend to hate what they do not understand or can relate (to), or fear.

As for being marchants and bankers, well, that may has something to do with it.

Living separated from the others had many reasons. It is much easier to avoid hate of you AVOID hate by sticking together. It is much easier to stick together even without hate, because the man's nature is to like the ones similar to him and detach from those he see as different.

it's also survival mechanism. Being so few, Jews at times didn't want to "mix" always with others, fearing the nation might mix "too much" and disappear. That's also something that can very much trigger hatred.

Jews had different way of speech and different way of behaving at times. when you put all this together, well, the answer is clear.

 

[MHunterB]

In fact, our relative acceptance by the US as 'just folks' is the exception. The 'universal' hatefulness against Jews doesn't testify to anything about Jews but about humans in general: ANY excuse for attacking a minority who maintain their 'difference' is a good one.

Kashrut probably had a lot to do with it - after all, people the world 'round know that 'food is love'.

"And whaddya mean, you won't eat part of this roast pig ???? It's a neighborhood barbecue - aren't you part of the neighborhood?"

If people choose to feel insulted, they will then 'discover' a reason to justify that feeling. I say 'choose to', because mature individuals have the option of 'going with' a feeling, or pausing to assess 'where' that feeling is coming from......

The more habitual such 'justifying feelings' is, the more any prejudices become entrenched.

If one speaks to 'Vietnamese-Chinese' or other Han people who settled elsewhere in Asia, it's much the same. So if it's 'something about the Jews', it's 'something about the Chinese' as well......

 

[Lipush]

" ANY excuse for attacking a minority who maintain their 'difference' is a good one."

I totally agree with you on that one.

 

[Bill Angel]

One interesting aspect of this topic is relation between outbreaks of plague and persecution of the Jews.
See Black Death Jewish persecutions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's from the spread of the plague that the association between Jews and rats originated.

Rats are not simply animals, they are they frequently imagined as the incarnation of all uncleanness. They are also*‘vermin’*whose destruction most people would favour, and against whose designation as ‘pests’ even the most dedicated animal rights campaigners do not generally protest.. It ought not to be necessary to point out that the political party who perhaps had the greatest recourse to such imagery in modern history was the National Socialist Party in Germany.**

See Anti-semitism and propaganda:Streicher, Goebbels and rats

 

[martybegan]

Jews have been hated for many reasons. Many times Jews have been willing to separate themselves out of rest of community, so hoping being harmed less. they were simply "different" from the others, which at times was viewed in not so nice ways.

This ties into one of the other reasons, is that people in power used them as a blame mechanism for when they had to placate the peseants.

It allowed a convienent escape clause for the rulers at the time. "Dont be mad at ME, I'm trying to help, THEY are the cause of your problems."

 

[Circe]

I think it's because they are smarter. Bred that way for millennia, fully 17 points average IQ difference in America alone (actually, the American difference is highest -- probably reflecting the fact that the smartest immigrated, especially during the 1930s in Germany). (ref: "The Bell Curve," by Herrenstein and Murray.)

Being smarter results in a lot of problems for a society when Jews stop being restricted by law or common agreement in the culture.

Germany stopped the laws against Jewish employment in 1875, IIRC, and that resulted in a rapid replacement of native Germans in universities and medicine and corporations and the arts. And so Germany changed from highly tolerant in 1900 to the very angry "Jews Are the Enemy" attitude of the 1930s.

The same thing has happened here --- Jews dominate the higher intellectual ranks of all employment -- but we have so far been accepting of that.

117 IQ is a HUGE difference from average 100 in terms of how well a population does. Obviously 117 by itself is not enough to work at a high level: that requires upper 120s at the least. But the higher the average, the more people available in a population that have much higher IQs. That's what is going on. The proportion of people who have the IQ to become doctors is just much higher in Jews because they start at a higher population average IQ.

This causes envy; I suspect envy is at least equal to xenophobia in being a problem for outgroups in societies. Nobody envies the poor underclass, so there is less prejudice against blacks and Hispanics, overall. People are prejudiced against the crime and don't like them looking different, but there is no envy.

 

[Lipush]

True.

 

[martybegan]

I think it's because they are smarter. Bred that way for millennia, fully 17 points average IQ difference in America alone (actually, the American difference is highest -- probably reflecting the fact that the smartest immigrated, especially during the 1930s in Germany). (ref: "The Bell Curve," by Herrenstein and Murray.)

Being smarter results in a lot of problems for a society when Jews stop being restricted by law or common agreement in the culture.

Germany stopped the laws against Jewish employment in 1875, IIRC, and that resulted in a rapid replacement of native Germans in universities and medicine and corporations and the arts. And so Germany changed from highly tolerant in 1900 to the very angry "Jews Are the Enemy" attitude of the 1930s.

The same thing has happened here --- Jews dominate the higher intellectual ranks of all employment -- but we have so far been accepting of that.

117 IQ is a HUGE difference from average 100 in terms of how well a population does. Obviously 117 by itself is not enough to work at a high level: that requires upper 120s at the least. But the higher the average, the more people available in a population that have much higher IQs. That's what is going on. The proportion of people who have the IQ to become doctors is just much higher in Jews because they start at a higher population average IQ.

This causes envy; I suspect envy is at least equal to xenophobia in being a problem for outgroups in societies. Nobody envies the poor underclass, so there is less prejudice against blacks and Hispanics, overall. People are prejudiced against the crime and don't like them looking different, but there is no envy.

In most places they did not dominate the areas of higher education and higher level employment, they were merely over-represented based on population percentage.

You have to remember that jews were usually forbidden to own land during the medival period, and land was your source of poltiical power and livelyhood. Being forced into cities, and not having the ursury restriction you found from the church at the time, the only way they could make a living was a combination of moneylending, professions, and tinkering.

 

[CMike]

People need someone or people to blame their woes on, rather than take responsibility for their own situations.

 

[Circe]

You have to remember that jews were usually forbidden to own land during the medival period, and land was your source of poltiical power and livelyhood. Being forced into cities, and not having the ursury restriction you found from the church at the time, the only way they could make a living was a combination of moneylending, professions, and tinkering.

Needs must, when --- never mind.

However, that moneylending profession also became problematic, as Jews came to hold large mortgages on the land properties of a lot of nobles in England; and were expelled wholesale by Edward II. That was probably also in somewhat belated support of the Templar extinction by Philip the Fair, who asked for Edward's support --- same deal with the more-or-less Christian Templars as with the Jews, just too much money, always a huge temptation for the dominant population to simply ---- take. Now that is an efficient way to pay off debts: just get rid of the mortgage holders. Probably not a good idea for Jews to let that situation get so centralized in one community.

Isabella also expelled the Jews from Spain, in 1493, IIRC. I have several books on that which I haven't read yet, and am curious to see what were the issues there. Moneylending again? Or simply the heresy/non-Christian issues that agitated much of central Europe since about 1170, related to whether the Catholic Church would control Europe, or not. I don't think hardly anyone now realizes just how much of a problem Cathar and other heresies were to the Church at that time, and Jews inevitably got swept up in all that.

 

[iolo]

It seems to me that at times of social tension majorities always reaffirm their own solidarity by attacking any convenient minority - lots of groups come in for this. What makes it worse for the Jewsih people is that they have been a minority almost everywhere - and so almost always the victims of one lot of projection-merchants or another, that some of them were rich and worth robbing and, most of all, that they were a religious minority. People always seem get peculiarly self-righteous and wicked when they believe they are picking on the 'enemy' of their own imagined God, I think.

 

[hoosier88]

It seems to me that at times of social tension majorities always reaffirm their own solidarity by attacking any convenient minority - lots of groups come in for this. What makes it worse for the Jewsih people is that they have been a minority almost everywhere - and so almost always the victims of one lot of projection-merchants or another, that some of them were rich and worth robbing and, most of all, that they were a religious minority. People always seem get peculiarly self-righteous and wicked when they believe they are picking on the 'enemy' of their own imagined God, I think.

(My bold)

That's the point. It wasn't Christianity's God, it was the Jewish Yahweh, & it wasn't the Old Testament, it was the Jewish holy book. Jesus was Jewish, & he joined with the Holy Spirit in the triune God - once dead & risen for a few centuries. Once Jesus' followers gave up on converting all of Judaism to Christianity - & once Christianity began to prosper in Emperor Constantine's time - the usurpers were in a position to enforce their holy will upon the refuseniks.

Christianity in Medieval times was a savage religion, perfectly willing to deal with theological oppostion by assault & murder (they'd practiced on each other in the Levant & N. Africa, after all). Most of the theological justifications for the charge of Christ-murders ignores the commonality of Jewish culture with that of Jesus - & somehow the New Testament theology manages to tap-dance around the justification/identification of Jesus as the Messiah - even though the Jewish rabbis & sages refused to so identify Jesus.

So we picked & chose - & made the Jews (except for Jesus & his hand-picked chosen men, of course) stand-ins for the Devil. It's all v. complicated, easier to scream & froth "Christ killers!" that to examine v. murky definitions & theological concepts. Is it "of the essence", of homologous essence, or analgous essence? People used to die for such niceties. But never fear, those days are long gone ...

" ... & the home of the brave!" Play ball!

 

[arKangel]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SERIOUS ANSWERS ONLY as this is in CLEAN DEBATE for exactly that reason.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is NOT a thread about Israel/Palestine nor a hate thread of any sort.
It isn't pro Muslim, anti Christian or anti Jewish.
I don't want rubbish about the Palestine/Israel conflict or any modern arguments of any type.

I'm looking for a real answer to a serious question.

Jewish Persecution | Timeline of Judaism | History of AntiSemitism

This link is to a Jewish site that lists various horrors that have been done to Jews over the last couple of thousand years.
They've been kicked out, enslaved, massacred, mutilated, burnt alive, forced to convert to Christianity and generally abused where ever they've settled.

All said and done, they've been given a pretty crap time of it.
So, my question is, what caused so much hate in all these places?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once again - SERIOUS ANSWERS ONLY as this is in CLEAN DEBATE for exactly that reason.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

yeppers,
The jews are the chosen ones! They are beyond reproach and are the most perfect of all people ever to exist!

Why, anyone who doesn't accept the divine supremacy of the jews must be someone who *gasp* hates!

--

Sarcasm aside...

Hate?
What hate?

A better question should be:
Why is it when someone does not accept the divine supremacy of the jews (or any other group for the matter), it is called "hate"?


Historically speaking - strangers never have good intentions. Strangers invade to loot, rape, murder, and enslave. People throughout history have been absolutely justified in resistance to foreign invaders. Pretending otherwise is pure intellectual dishonesty.


By the way, comparing the acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior to "crap time" is quite an anti-Christian thing to say.

 

[sealadaigh]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SERIOUS ANSWERS ONLY as this is in CLEAN DEBATE for exactly that reason.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is NOT a thread about Israel/Palestine nor a hate thread of any sort.
It isn't pro Muslim, anti Christian or anti Jewish.
I don't want rubbish about the Palestine/Israel conflict or any modern arguments of any type.

I'm looking for a real answer to a serious question.

Jewish Persecution | Timeline of Judaism | History of AntiSemitism

This link is to a Jewish site that lists various horrors that have been done to Jews over the last couple of thousand years.
They've been kicked out, enslaved, massacred, mutilated, burnt alive, forced to convert to Christianity and generally abused where ever they've settled.

All said and done, they've been given a pretty crap time of it.
So, my question is, what caused so much hate in all these places?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once again - SERIOUS ANSWERS ONLY as this is in CLEAN DEBATE for exactly that reason.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

xenophobia  


xen·o·pho·bi·a [zen-uh-foh-bee-uh, zee-nuh-] Show IPA
noun
an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange.

YOu can look for specific reasons specific to Jews, of course, but the real answer is the above.

Peasants world-wide fear strangers.

And if those strangers move in and aren't planning on leaving?

Well, their fear inevitably becomes hatred.

And strangers in the midst of an alien culture become very useful scapegoats that the masters can use to foist off the blame when things do south.

most "strangers" eventually assimilate and become integral and working parts of the mainstream culture. jews are not particularly remakable in appearance or any other physical aspects that would make them stand out as strangers in many of the places they have been shunned.

i mean, look at the muslims in europe, theey are well on their way to becoming accepted after perhaps a generation but jews are still being discriminated against after over 2000 years, or so they claim.

could it be their culture? cultures inculcate certain behaviours and values among its members.

 

[sealadaigh]

True.

(lipush's response to a statement by circe that jews are smarter than gentiles.)

perhaps jews are disliked and chased ot of places because their culture teaches their children to colossally arrogant, resulting in the belief that they are smarter or in other ways superior.

and the post by circe also referred to "the bell curve" theory of intelligence. LOL...now, were i a black person reading that, i would probably not be too fond of jewish people. here they are complaining about bigotry and lending credence to the "bell curve".

 

[Lipush]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SERIOUS ANSWERS ONLY as this is in CLEAN DEBATE for exactly that reason.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is NOT a thread about Israel/Palestine nor a hate thread of any sort.
It isn't pro Muslim, anti Christian or anti Jewish.
I don't want rubbish about the Palestine/Israel conflict or any modern arguments of any type.

I'm looking for a real answer to a serious question.

Jewish Persecution | Timeline of Judaism | History of AntiSemitism

This link is to a Jewish site that lists various horrors that have been done to Jews over the last couple of thousand years.
They've been kicked out, enslaved, massacred, mutilated, burnt alive, forced to convert to Christianity and generally abused where ever they've settled.

All said and done, they've been given a pretty crap time of it.
So, my question is, what caused so much hate in all these places?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once again - SERIOUS ANSWERS ONLY as this is in CLEAN DEBATE for exactly that reason.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

yeppers,
The jews are the chosen ones! They are beyond reproach and are the most perfect of all people ever to exist!

Why, anyone who doesn't accept the divine supremacy of the jews must be someone who *gasp* hates!

--

Sarcasm aside...

Hate?
What hate?

A better question should be:
Why is it when someone does not accept the divine supremacy of the jews (or any other group for the matter), it is called "hate"?


Historically speaking - strangers never have good intentions. Strangers invade to loot, rape, murder, and enslave. People throughout history have been absolutely justified in resistance to foreign invaders. Pretending otherwise is pure intellectual dishonesty.


By the way, comparing the acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior to "crap time" is quite an anti-Christian thing to say.

Jews have tried to mix and blend in with the rest of the community in many states they were in, but they got the brush off.

Wanna say, you're not making any sense in your statement.