Am I an idiot to feel that a tiny percentage of Jews felt such extreme animosity toward Rabbi Yeshua - Jesus that they essentially decided that the enemy of my enemy.... must be my friend? Eight thousand five hundred wealtiest of the wealthy is only about one person in a million, [a tiny fraction of all humanity].
I don't bother with a lot of the details, but mainly with the historical record. Jews were as much as 10% of the entire Roman empire, so it's clear it was the Babylonian cult itself that alienated and essentially ran off the vast majority of Jews over the centuries.
They were extremely reclusive and self-segregating, and eventually all that were left were the tradesmen and urban elites left, all the 'unwashed and inferior Jews having no stake in the game, as it were, the shepherds, farmers, teamsters, and other 'unclean' trades eventually assimilated elsewhere, into to what became the dominant Jewish sect, Christianity, where they were welcome and not regarded as inferior.
It was the wealthier urban Jews who demanded their own 'ghettos', they didn't want to be 'tainted' by the filthy sib-human gentiles. Nowadays the term 'ghetto' has a negative meaning, and it gets spun as those evul xians forcing the poor hapless Jews to live in slums n stuff because they were so mean and bigoted. It's a result of their own bigotry.
Many 'outsiders' had their own 'ghettos' in foreign towns, from the Hansa and Lombards to the Swedish metal traders in London and all the other major trading cities. these latter became crowded over the centuries, and after the Arab conquests, many of them supported by Jewish soldiers and Jewish collaborators in the Spanish cities, most kingdoms and principalities rightly distrusted them and decided it was best to keep them all in one place. Bit only Jews matter to Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox cultists, so naturally they ignored everybody else's history and only care about their own.
Do you have a copy of Joachim Jeremia's excellent economic and social study []bJerusalem In The Time Of Jesus[/b]? If not you should get one.
It makes a lot of what is going on in Jewish culture at the time, the different social classes, 'despised trades', categories of slaves, etc. and a wide assortment of fact about Jewish culture and the divisions therein.
Scan the table of contents and see if any of it interests you. Part IV goes into detail on the 'Racial Purity' laws imposed by the Babylonians when Cyrus set them up as th rulers of the region. They excluded most other Jews from any role other than giving the Babylonians money and food. These 'rules' were a result of Ezra's changing the genealogies to trace Jewishness' through the mother, as many of the Jews that weren't exiled had married non-Jewish women, and these 'rules' effectively excluded them from govt,. and Temple offices to could only go to Babylonians. Needless to say there were probably a lot of forged fakes for those who could afford one.
