Thank you for this! Whenever people talk about anti-Semitism as some supernatural force, it drives me nuts. But more specifically, how on earth can you refer to Jews as the most persecuted people on earth when they are literally the most successful people on earth, if only because no other Ancient ethnic groups even survived? The rest of them are all dead or assimilated out of existence! I'm not historian, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that there is basically no other Ancient group of peoples from as far back in history as the Jews, who still exist as a distinct group. And since history is full of brutality and genocide, of course the Jews have been through more because they've been around way longer and in more places.
To the extent there is still anti-Semitism today in the US at least, other than a bunch of conspiracy theorists and people who desire some grandeur in their boring lives and have barely even met an actual Jewish person, Ive always just assumed it's purely envy.
There are, but the the irony is, they are hated too. Like "Never trust a Jew, but trust a Jew before you trust a Greek, and trust a Greek before you trust an Armenian."
There are other ancient groups, albeit all (?) are incredibly marginal. In Iran, for instance, there's still an estimated couple tens of thousands of Zoroastrians.
What makes Jews so prominent, I'd argue, is a combination of the following components:
1. The dramatic population growth among Ashkenazi Jews as part of Europe's wider demographic explosion just prior to and throughout the Industrial Revolution.
2. The Haskalah and Jewish emancipation in Europe, which opened up opportunities for Jews to integrate and advance socially within their host countries.
3. High average Jewish (at least, Ashkenazi) IQ which, well, helps to succeed in general. When combined with the first (demographic weight) and second (social prominence among the leading states of the era) components, it explains their disproportionate influence over the 19th - 21st centuries... As well as why a movement as long-shot as Zionism succeeded.
This is somewhat controversial take: but the original “Jews”; the Israelites certainly have assimilated into the general population. Modern day Jews make up a different but related gene pool. Second, Jews have only been this successful as a group in the modern era,before the enlightenment yes there were wealthy jews but the vast majority were peasantry
My impression is that contemporary Jews are of Israelite ancestry mixed in with host populations, i.e. significant Italian ancestry for Ashkenazim, etc.
I think the idea of the "ordinariness" of historical antisemitism is a bit half-baked. You acknowledge "Christian (and Jewish) antagonism" but isn't there a bit more to it? Jews are a key element of the foundational Christian text, essentially a negative one. And negative in an intergenerational, eternal way. "His blood be upon us and our children" and all that. You can't compare the character of The Jews within the Christian narrative to the character of Joan of Arc in the English one. And from this outsized role in Christianity, Jews have been mythologized into a kind of cosmic force. This isn't to deny the ordinariness of the other factors you mention (or downplay how causal they may have been), but this is a kind of unifying and amplifying special sauce that does seem unique. I mean the Albigensians weren't kept around as a permanent but wretched testament to the truth of Christianity. They were simply dispatched. Antisemitism is special because Christians consider Jews special.
Thankyou for the thoughtful response. My argument isn't that medieval anti-Judaism isn't weird. It was definitely weird, but then a lot of stuff about Judaism in medieval Europe was weird. Aaron of Lincoln was the richest man in England - that's pretty weird. Bishop Rudiger invited Jews to live in Speyer to 'increase its glory a thousand fold', that's pretty weird. In general, medieval Europe was a really strange place, and this comes down largely, I think, to its unique position on the ruins of a great civilization that hadn't quite been ruined, but also because Europeans have genetic personality quirks, on average.
We can characterise the treatment of Jews as one of both unusual indulgence *and* unusual virulence. It's true that Augustine came up with this concept of keeping the Jews around as a wretched testament, but he wasn't actually in charge of public policy (though he could influence it) and, to a certain extent, was engaged in cope.
With all that said, I actually don't think it's unreasonable to expand the concept of antisemitism to include anti-Jewish thought/action in the Middle ages and, definitely, modern antisemitism grew out of that. How much continuity vs. contrast one identifies there is a legitimate academic dispute. It's just that's where it has to end. Antisemitism is maybe 2 things, but definitely not more than that.
If I had written this as an academic article, I would have put all that in, but then no-one would have read it. 🤷
You say: "It is true that some things exist long before there is a word for them, like gravity, the planet Mars, or stalactites. Other things, however, come into existence at the same time as the label, or relatively shortly beforehand, like Monster Munch, monophytism, or socialism."
Also:
"Augustine ... was engaged in cope."
Is it truly possible that Augustine was engaged in cope? Did "cope" even exist prior to the internet?
I know this isn't the point of your article ... but as a former theology scholar and an amateur theorist of language, I really need to think this through.
I think Augustine would have understood the concept of a theologian writing a theological justification of a policy that was actually a product of non-theological motives, even if he would not follow the barbarous internet slang I used to describe it.
Anti-Semitism exists mostly where Jews take over or are invited to take over important positions in society, and then ruthlessly exploit those below them (Jew vs. Goy attitude), leading eventually to a reaction that often was curtailed by the Christian nobility or clergy.
Christianity and Islam essentially protect and enable Jews, whereas they struggled to assert any kind of dominance in non-Abrahamic regions like India or China (equally skilled and high assabiyah merchant groups).
The USSR is a great example of Jewish activism and leadership in a society, and the 1965 Immigration Act, as well as U.S. involvement in both the Great Wars were closely connected to High Jewish Finance.
Neoliberalism Feudalism did a great writeup on how Jewish oligarchy uses the unique psychology of Judaism to rile up and exploit the less powerful Jews as a kind of sword and shield.
Good post. It seems like if you want to find the causes of something it's important to analyze what is happening when and where it's not present. Even those who truly believe in the transcendence of Jew hate admit such times exist.
This argument completely bypassed the concept of bechira. I don’t have the sources at hand, but I’m sure you are familiar with the concept that the messengers sent to oppress the Jews at various times in history overdid it (see the elaborate discussions regarding how the mitzriim were punished, etc). It’s all very well to say “well, we are all being punished for our sins”, and another to confront the glee in someone’s face when they murder an entire family. Yes, Hashem is sending the punishment through them, but they are also *choosing* to do it. The concept of antisemitism comes into play to try to explain that choice, and try as we might, we cannot explain it.
That’s the whole thing—it’s the attempt to explain the unexplainable. People can understand hating others in an abstract sense, but the depth and consistency of the hate, especially when it comes down to details, is awful to the point of it being unbelievable. You can’t find a rational reason why a people would do such a thing, so you revert to “they just hate us.”
I’ll also note that it’s only frum Jews who rely on it—lots of non-frum and straight up atheist Jews rely on it too. You can’t explain a supernatural phenomenon with God if you don’t believe in Him.
This might come off condescending, but I feel you just think that because you haven't read enough history of different groups killing other groups. There's a lot of it, and all of it is incomprehensible for someone with little experience of violence. None of the persecutions of Jews are historically unusual. What is unusual is the total number of them and the diversity of places it happened. But my argument is that this is function of the unusual persistence of the Jews in a wide variety of places.
I think that you are so focused on the data trends here that you are missing the human reaction to them.
Sure, you can point at various factors and say that actually, antisemitism is only unique in the sense that Jews are still around, and you are sorry of right. It’s the same thing as economists saying “well, ACTUALLY, this is the greatest economy of all time because of xyz” when people still feel like everything sucks. Two things can be true at the same time.
Jews have always tried (and failed) to understand why people they live alongside can view them as subhuman despite the obvious fact that we’re all the same (and yes I saw your race science comments in other posts, we’re just going to leave that aside for now because I honestly don’t even know how to address that). How can you wrap your mind around the fact that a neighbor you saw every day and had perfectly good relationships with is happy to machine gun you into a ditch? How can you explain the person you saw at cafe for years murdering your children? How do you explain happy families cheerfully moving into a murdered family’s home? You can’t, and so you fall back on irrationality, aka antisemitism. Saying something like “well, we were really annoying by running a town bakery monopoly” doesn’t really cut it.
I am certain that other persecuted groups come to an explanation like this as well, but we don’t really get to see it develop because they generally disappear. We, for some reason, haven’t, and antisemitism is the way we explain (or perhaps fail to explain) why we suffer such things every few generations.
I don't think this is what really happened. Where do you see a pre-modern Jewish source that talks about something analogous to anti-semitism?
What I think happened is that people took the modern ideology of antisemitism and then retrojected it back into the Middle Ages, which was not totally crazy because there is a historical connection and then lost the plot and started projecting it throughout Jewish history thus generating a nonsense anti-concept.
I think Jews, historically, viewed the awful things they experienced as a message from God *overall*, but were still bewildered by the people who chose to inflict it. This is a somewhat awkward metaphor, but I think you can compare it to a child getting punished by a dispassionate parent, and a child getting punished by a parent who clearly enjoys hurting them. The first child will be upset about the punishment, naturally, but they won't take it personally in the way the second child will.
I think the way you see commentators delving into how punishments for various oppressors were middah k'negged middah is an example of Jews trying to understand what we would call antisemitism. The first example that comes to mind is the extensive discussion regarding how the degree of torture the mitzriyim suffered at the yam suf was commensurate to the amount of suffering they inflicted (google says the Vilna Gaon, but I'm not so sure).
Finally, this is the line that ticked me off: "One - I think sufficient - reason is that the term antisemitism in its meaningless sense is omnipresent in Jewish discourse and always a tool not to think, not to analyse, not to make sense of reality so as to manipulate it with prudence. If you can’t stop talking none-sense for yourself, then maybe do it for me." I'm with you on the way that people can antisemitism as a way to deflect criticism, but I can't sign on to the idea that Jews just magically accepted what was done to them pre-1879 was just God punishing them and nothing else. The narrative of antisemitism *is* what Jews use to try to understand it! The issue is is that *you can never understand* what drives normal, regular people to do awful things like push entire families into crematoriums, so you just end up with ad nauseam discussions of it instead.
What I meant by that is that Jews don't just use the concept of antisemitism to understand persecution, but as basic category in how they think the world works, and thus how to act. There are literally tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of DLs who think that it is pointless to do *any* actions to get better relations with our neighbours because they will just hate us anyway because antisemitism. That would be a joke except they are in the government. With Charedim, a similar problem crops up that they think the entire concept of מפני איבה just doesn't apply because antisemitism makes it pointless.
This is great and illustrative. I do wish, as you know I always say, that you would dig into the roots of antisemitism in the Islamic Middle East. That is a powerful force that has influenced the west historically (the Moors rule southern Europe for a few centuries), contemporaneously and is spreading to non MENA Islamic countries like Indonesia and Malaysia. We ignore this force at our own peril and your writings could illuminate us.
I've read your thoughtful article. You make good points, but frankly I think you are dismissing how profoundly weird and unusual antisemitism really is.
You make a comparison with the "anti-Englishness" of Joan of Arc, Louis XIV, Vinayak Savarker, Leopoldo Galtieri, Braveheart. But all those figures lived in countries that were at war with England, or under English occupation. Of course they would hate England, that's how the world works!
Antisemitism seems to me quite unique in the way that it brings together people from all kinds of different backgrounds who have never actually clashed with Jews as a group, and very often have never even met a Jew in person. We currently have extreme right-wingers in the US chanting "the Jews will not replace us", Hungarian nationalists convinced that globalisation and mass immigration are a plot by George Soros (who just so happens to be Jewish), millions of people throughout the Muslim world (and further afield) convinced that there were no Jews in the World Trade Center on 9/11 because they had been warned, Maduro in Venezuela blaming "international Zionism" for the protests sweeping his country, etc, etc, etc....
It sometimes feels like any set of extremists that has a problem with liberal democracy will at some point zero in on the Jews as the ultimate problem. This just cannot be explained by anything Jews have actually done, or any power they might actually have. The are all kinds of historical explanations one could give (envy, Christian anti-Jewish theology, Jewish success etc..) but to me nothing really seems to justify the hatred Jews get. The best explanation I can give is that the image of Jews as scheming, very powerful, out to harm the gentiles and all in all just evil has taken very profound root in Western civilisation (and from there, it now radiates to the rest of the world). That's unless one wants to find explanations rooted in Jewish theology.
1) Various scrapes and conflicts that Jews have been involved in that have nothing in particular in common except that Jews were involved, and which therefore need no unifying concept.
2) An ideology dating from the 19th century which posits that Jews are the chief problem in the world, and that the way to improve the world is to fight Jews. This ideology is properly known as antisemitism.
Of the examples you give, 2 are simple examples of what I believe should accurately be called antisemitism. Strictly speaking Arab opposition to Israel needn’t be based on antisemitism, but in practice what has happened is Arab opinion formers imported antisemitism, so that is also an example. I don’t know about Maduro. Is this a big thing of his, or is he just adding it to the ‘capitalist, imperialist, American’ list because it’s topical?
As regards how normal or weird antisemitism is, I don’t address that in this article. The next two articles are partly about that though.
P.S. I think you are being unfair to Orban and his anti-Soros campaign, but it’s a side issue.
I am pretty sure that Soros becoming the target of so many conspiracy theories is not unconnected to him being Jewish, just like it wasn't with the Rothschilds. I don't know much about Orban, I'll admit
As for Venezuela, one only needs to look at the openly antisemitic attacks that were directed by the state press a decade ago against Hugo Chavez's opponent Henrique Capriles, who was Catholic but had a Jewish mother. But really, there is no point in wondering whether a dictator who blames his domestic problems on something called "international Zionism" is antisemitic or not. Back in the 1930s it was the "international Jewish banking cabal", now it's "international Zionism". When Zionism becomes synonymous for a shadowy global conspiracy that doesn't exist, it's antisemitism.
I agree with your general point that antisemitism as we know it today was born in 19th century Europe, although it was still influenced by older Christian tropes.
In general, focussing on Soros as opposed to Leftist NGOs in particular is likely a tell, but in Hungary the fact is that he was behind like 90% of it and by cutting him off they semi-permanently defeated leftism in Hungary. You can critique the political order Fidesz has put in place in various of ways, but the bottom line is not having mass 3rd world immigration makes it all worth it. Not the least important result of this is that Hungary is now the safest European country for Jews.
As someone growing up in a society where Anti-Semitism was kind of normalized (1990's Hungary), I always had the feeling that it is not about real flesh and blood Jews, but they are used as the symbol for something else.
One thing one noticed that there was much more fear from assimilated Jews (because yes, all hatred is fear), and the Orthodox with their black hats were treated with much more respect and tolerance.
I am not sure I entirely understood the symbolism, but it is something like this: the secret agent, someone who pretends to be something else than what they are, someone who is succesful at camouflage and misdirection. The Orthodox were in their eyes not trying to “hide” their Jewishness, their otherness, outsideness, strangeness.
Notice how it how it works completely the opposite from every other kind of racism, that sees Thomas Sowell way more positively than the “ghetto” Blacks. Assimilation is almost always taken well, because all other kinds of racism are about actual people, and the issue of the racist is that they are too different.
Not for Anti-Semitism, which sees the invisible, perfectly assimilated Jew as the most dangerous secret agent or conspirator.
Also, lol, the uses of authoritarianism. This went on in Hungary until Orbán visited Netanjahu, liked the guy and the whole Israeli nationalism project, decided that they are perfect role models, and at home told everybody to shut up about Jews.
The irony. It turned out authoritarians have a good side as well: when the boss tells them to stop some shit, they do.
I like this article and don’t disagree with it. But I have to say that I’m still very struck by the extent to which elements of the Old Testament seem to prefigure modern pop anti-semitism. The story of Esther/Purim feels highly familiar. From the standard of anti-Semitic stereotypes, so does the story arc in Egypt - Joseph comes as a poor immigrant, works his way into the confidence of the Pharoah, then uses inside information to corner the grain market as a financial middleman and get fantastically rich. There are some social patterns that don’t feel so much like the wrath of God as characteristic social tensions created by highly successful and bureaucratically skilled minority groups. This is all pre-Christian too. (I’m Jewish btw)
I appreciate this comment because I think this is a common mistake that also needs correction. Let's first take the case of the Joseph story. First, it's important to note that Jews were not stereotypically employed in such professions until the early Middle Ages, so, therefore, if the story is to be interpreted in the sense of מעשה אבות סימן לבנים, it had to wait 2,500 years for this to be realised. Bearing this in mind, if we return to the story, we see that it's not true that Joseph becomes rich through being a financial middleman (it happens the other way round), and it's not true that this created tensions with the Egyptians (the story says the precise opposite, the tensions started when a new Pharoah literally forgot about Joseph). The funeral of both Jacob and Joseph indicate they were very popular figures in Egypt. By the time tensions arise, the text gives no indication Jews are working as middlemen, the most likely interpretation is that they are shepherds.
Biblical narrative, as a rule, is written in a sparse style with very light editorial voice, which allows for a wide variety of interpretations to be read in, hence the Midrashic tradition. Sometimes, a particular (neo-)midrashic interpretation has become so prevalent that everyone assumes it's just there in the text, but really it isn't at all. In this case, the first place I am aware of where an interpretation of the Joseph and other stories of the Avot as prefiguring modern antisemitism appears is in the writings of Rav Hirsch, who, for obvious reasons, spent a lot of time ruminating on the matter.
The Megilah story, I admit, at first seems to indicate something more like antisemitism, but again there is the interesting fact that this does not seem to have been at all present in Jewish exegesis until the modern era. While the archetypes of Esau and Yishmael are used extensively to refer to the Christian and Muslims worlds respectively, I am not aware of Haman being used as an archetype this way. I think the connection actually came about via a totally different route. Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet towards the end of his life called 'The Jews and Their Lies' which is the most antisemitism-like premodern text there is. Interestingly, the Lutheran church largely downplayed the pamphlet on the not unreasonable grounds that it made their founder look like something of a maniac (and, as a matter of fact, he may well have been suffering from some kind of early-stage dementia) but the pamphlet was revived in the 1800s and became a foundational text of antisemitism. In this pamphlet - and in stark contrast to the entire catholic Christian tradition - Luther advances the radical thesis that the Book of Esther is a bad Jewish book that shouldn't really be part of the Bible and demonstrates the Jewish spirit of bloodlust and ethnocentrism. Thus, I think the Haman-like nature of modern antisemitism actually comes from early antisemites literally taking Haman as a model. But this is something I need to research more, and this isn't supposed to be an antisemitism blog!
I've already responded to this, so I'll just copy and paste:
This is a mistake. The correct girsa in Sifrei (found in all MSS without exception) is והלא בידוע עשו שונא את יעקוב not והלכא בידוע עשו שונא את יעקוב. It isn't telling you anything about gentiles in general. It's saying that even though Esav hated Yaakov (and for good reason), Yakov successfully won him over (in the opinion of Rabi Shimon). In as much as there is a general message here, it's the opposite to the one commonly claimed.
I have to be somewhat delicate about this, but, apart from being a diyyuk on a fake girsa, I think this is an incredibly unhealthy and poisonous mindset to hold and is responsible for a lot of the problems in orthodox Judaism.
Almost exclusively anti-whitism or, if you want to put it in a less inflammatory way, generic leftism. In fact, it is pretty clear that reticence to overlap into antisemitism has meant Israel gets lighter treatment than a non-Jewish country in the same situation would.
This is confused a bit because there are parts of the Left that are willing to tolerate Muslims who are genuinely antisemitic (antisemitism in the precise historical sense was extensively transmitted to the Arabic world) on the grounds that brown people can do no wrong, but mostly its because Jews prefer to think that Leftist criticism of Israel is antisemitic than having to grapple with it on its own terms.
I am a bit confused about your thesis. The unflattering comparison to Brad the Jerk honestly sounds exactly like what John Exum said? Maybe we really are just nasty people? My own thesis is that people see us as selfish, because maybe from a certain (warped and distorted) perspective, we are. I wrote about this in my review of Jud Süß here. https://irrationalistmodoxism.substack.com/p/a-review-of-jud-su-veit-harlan-1940
My claim is a version of the second interpretation. Jews have been through a lot in a lot of different places, but that is just because they have been around for a lot in a lot of different places. Each individual instance can be explained historically without recourse to the metaphysical concept of antisemitism.
Conversely, from around 1820-1945, and to a much more limited extent afterwards, there is an actual ideology called antisemitism that we can also see historically and people acted on it, like they act on other ideologies.
Up until Napeloeon's Jewish emancipation the image we have of a secular jew didn't exist, only the ultra religious Jew. The type of jew that agrees with Ben Gvir that spitting on christians is a Jewish tradition. The extraordinarily anti gentile behaviours prescribed in the talmud, made Jews the enforcers of the most brutal serfdoms in eastern europe.
The overwhelming majority of jewish pogroms were actually bottom up peasant revolts rather than elite consensus over theology.
As to why secular jews still face anti semitism, I'm not able to get as complete of a thesis but I'd still say jewish behaviour does play a strong part. The fact that jews have decided to stay "jewish" and not simply assimilate into their broader european countries tells you alot.
Ben Gvir is the one who brung this up, but a clear example of this incredibly anti christian vitriol was the jewish tradition commanding them to burn the New Testament, something that continues to this day. Heres a CNN article from 2008 of hundreds of New Testaments being burned
Are there examples of Jews burning the New Testament in the middle ages recorded in Christian sources? You do know how the concept of linear time works right?
This is somewhat off-topic, but about the New Testament, what do you think motivated many people to accept Jesus's Resurrection story if it wasn't true? With some of them even allegedly paying for this with their own lives afterwards? And with some of these martyrs allegedly being personal witnesses to Jesus's alleged Resurrection?
A Ukrainian Christian commenter on the Unz Review called AP uses this as an argument in favor of Christianity and argues that people back 2,000 years ago really were extremely shocked to see (the son of) God get physically revived, but what do you think? I know that there were early Christians who believed in a spiritual and not literal Resurrection for Jesus; they were called the Gnostics. Why couldn't they be persuaded, unless the Resurrection story really wasn't true to begin with? But then why were so many other people persuaded by it, including some people who were allegedly personal witnesses to Jesus's alleged Resurrection and who allegedly got themselves martyred afterwards?
FWIW, I'm personally extremely skeptical on the Jesus resurrection story. I'm just curious as to how exactly huge numbers of people came to actually believe in it, as well as about what exactly happened to Jesus's body after his death. Was the empty tomb story made up after the fact to give Christianity a stronger footing? Paul doesn't appear to mention any empty tomb, after all.
I think that one response might be “Why wasn’t everyone persuaded, either among the Christians (Gnostics) or Jews?” AP argues that the Jews had a lot to lose from accepting Jesus’s message, and while that might be true, surely if they believed that his message was actually the right one, many more of them would have accepted it, no? If God is telling you something that you don’t want to hear but you become convinced that it’s indeed God speaking to you, at least some people might want to reconsider their political priors. Yet to my knowledge, in general, the Jewish skeptics of Jesus did not get personal appearances from him like the various apostles did. Why not? Surely Jesus would have wanted to win them over to his cause, no? Unless he truly was permanently dead for good. Or was simply content to let his own native people forever wallow in their own ignorance (but, if so, then why?).
This is very slimey and disingenous, instead of just accepting that the Jewish hostility to Christianity exists as a continuation up until modern times, you try and pretend it was just some random modern invention? But here I'll do you even better: Ritual massacres of Christians by Jews: This is from Jewish scholar Israel Shahaks, "Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel":
"Rabin Rosen (A Haaretz journalist) answered his own question:
A check of main facts of the [Jewish] historiography of the last
1500 years shows that the picture is different from the one
previously shown to us. It includes massacres of Christians [by
Jews]; mock repetitions of the crucifixion of Jesus that usually
took place on Purim.
Rosen included in his long article many well-documented cases of
massacres of Christians and mock repetitions of the crucifixion of
Jesus on Purim, most of which occurred either in the late ancient
period or in the Middle Ages. (Some isolated cases occurred in
sixteenth-century Poland.) "
If you want even more resources: Jews enslaved Spaniards, forced them to convert, be circumcised and even raped their women.
Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe (Minnesota Archive Editions), written by Acclaimed Jewish Author Bernard Bachrach.
It is a shame that even a assumedly secular jews in whats meant to be a critical substack on zionism still has that extraodinarly ethnocentric view that makes you defend one of the most dogmatic and extreme religions.
I literally wrote in the post the Jewish hostility towards Christianity was a causal factor in Christian persecution of Jews during the Middle Ages. I don't think that the history of the Middle Ages is illuminated very much by taking anecdotes from the 21st century and then spitballing about what Jews might have done in the Middle Ages, but that's because I'm a historian, not extraordinarily ethnocentric. I'll take a look at Bernard Bachrach.
Wow, it’s fun to be on the other side of this for once (I mean that sincerely). While works with an apologetic stance toward Judaism do tend IME to engage in special pleading to exculpate Jews (but not *panowie* or peasants - themselves no angels) of any wrongdoing, they don’t deserve to bear all the guilt for the system. The second serfdom happened everywhere in northeastern Europe - do you believe Russian peasants were substantively better off than those on Commonwealth latifundia? Why?
But plenty of Secular American Jews eat bacon and work on Saturday if they need to. They may learn Hebrew as kids and nominally belong to a synagogue, but in basically all respects they are generic upper middle class Americans.
Many tried to integrate. Theodor Herzl himself and many intellectual Jews believed assimilation was the key to overcome antisemitism. But then the Affair Dreyfuss came and while some Jews kept believing in assimilation, others like Herzl finally said: “Well, you know what? Fuck off, we are going back to the Holy Land”
Thank you for this! Whenever people talk about anti-Semitism as some supernatural force, it drives me nuts. But more specifically, how on earth can you refer to Jews as the most persecuted people on earth when they are literally the most successful people on earth, if only because no other Ancient ethnic groups even survived? The rest of them are all dead or assimilated out of existence! I'm not historian, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that there is basically no other Ancient group of peoples from as far back in history as the Jews, who still exist as a distinct group. And since history is full of brutality and genocide, of course the Jews have been through more because they've been around way longer and in more places.
To the extent there is still anti-Semitism today in the US at least, other than a bunch of conspiracy theorists and people who desire some grandeur in their boring lives and have barely even met an actual Jewish person, Ive always just assumed it's purely envy.
There are, but the the irony is, they are hated too. Like "Never trust a Jew, but trust a Jew before you trust a Greek, and trust a Greek before you trust an Armenian."
There are other ancient groups, albeit all (?) are incredibly marginal. In Iran, for instance, there's still an estimated couple tens of thousands of Zoroastrians.
What makes Jews so prominent, I'd argue, is a combination of the following components:
1. The dramatic population growth among Ashkenazi Jews as part of Europe's wider demographic explosion just prior to and throughout the Industrial Revolution.
2. The Haskalah and Jewish emancipation in Europe, which opened up opportunities for Jews to integrate and advance socially within their host countries.
3. High average Jewish (at least, Ashkenazi) IQ which, well, helps to succeed in general. When combined with the first (demographic weight) and second (social prominence among the leading states of the era) components, it explains their disproportionate influence over the 19th - 21st centuries... As well as why a movement as long-shot as Zionism succeeded.
This is somewhat controversial take: but the original “Jews”; the Israelites certainly have assimilated into the general population. Modern day Jews make up a different but related gene pool. Second, Jews have only been this successful as a group in the modern era,before the enlightenment yes there were wealthy jews but the vast majority were peasantry
My impression is that contemporary Jews are of Israelite ancestry mixed in with host populations, i.e. significant Italian ancestry for Ashkenazim, etc.
Good stuff
I think the idea of the "ordinariness" of historical antisemitism is a bit half-baked. You acknowledge "Christian (and Jewish) antagonism" but isn't there a bit more to it? Jews are a key element of the foundational Christian text, essentially a negative one. And negative in an intergenerational, eternal way. "His blood be upon us and our children" and all that. You can't compare the character of The Jews within the Christian narrative to the character of Joan of Arc in the English one. And from this outsized role in Christianity, Jews have been mythologized into a kind of cosmic force. This isn't to deny the ordinariness of the other factors you mention (or downplay how causal they may have been), but this is a kind of unifying and amplifying special sauce that does seem unique. I mean the Albigensians weren't kept around as a permanent but wretched testament to the truth of Christianity. They were simply dispatched. Antisemitism is special because Christians consider Jews special.
Thankyou for the thoughtful response. My argument isn't that medieval anti-Judaism isn't weird. It was definitely weird, but then a lot of stuff about Judaism in medieval Europe was weird. Aaron of Lincoln was the richest man in England - that's pretty weird. Bishop Rudiger invited Jews to live in Speyer to 'increase its glory a thousand fold', that's pretty weird. In general, medieval Europe was a really strange place, and this comes down largely, I think, to its unique position on the ruins of a great civilization that hadn't quite been ruined, but also because Europeans have genetic personality quirks, on average.
We can characterise the treatment of Jews as one of both unusual indulgence *and* unusual virulence. It's true that Augustine came up with this concept of keeping the Jews around as a wretched testament, but he wasn't actually in charge of public policy (though he could influence it) and, to a certain extent, was engaged in cope.
With all that said, I actually don't think it's unreasonable to expand the concept of antisemitism to include anti-Jewish thought/action in the Middle ages and, definitely, modern antisemitism grew out of that. How much continuity vs. contrast one identifies there is a legitimate academic dispute. It's just that's where it has to end. Antisemitism is maybe 2 things, but definitely not more than that.
If I had written this as an academic article, I would have put all that in, but then no-one would have read it. 🤷
You say: "It is true that some things exist long before there is a word for them, like gravity, the planet Mars, or stalactites. Other things, however, come into existence at the same time as the label, or relatively shortly beforehand, like Monster Munch, monophytism, or socialism."
Also:
"Augustine ... was engaged in cope."
Is it truly possible that Augustine was engaged in cope? Did "cope" even exist prior to the internet?
I know this isn't the point of your article ... but as a former theology scholar and an amateur theorist of language, I really need to think this through.
An excellent, excellent article, by the way.
I think Augustine would have understood the concept of a theologian writing a theological justification of a policy that was actually a product of non-theological motives, even if he would not follow the barbarous internet slang I used to describe it.
Anti-Semitism exists mostly where Jews take over or are invited to take over important positions in society, and then ruthlessly exploit those below them (Jew vs. Goy attitude), leading eventually to a reaction that often was curtailed by the Christian nobility or clergy.
Christianity and Islam essentially protect and enable Jews, whereas they struggled to assert any kind of dominance in non-Abrahamic regions like India or China (equally skilled and high assabiyah merchant groups).
The USSR is a great example of Jewish activism and leadership in a society, and the 1965 Immigration Act, as well as U.S. involvement in both the Great Wars were closely connected to High Jewish Finance.
Neoliberalism Feudalism did a great writeup on how Jewish oligarchy uses the unique psychology of Judaism to rile up and exploit the less powerful Jews as a kind of sword and shield.
Unfortunate for everyone.
Good post. It seems like if you want to find the causes of something it's important to analyze what is happening when and where it's not present. Even those who truly believe in the transcendence of Jew hate admit such times exist.
This argument completely bypassed the concept of bechira. I don’t have the sources at hand, but I’m sure you are familiar with the concept that the messengers sent to oppress the Jews at various times in history overdid it (see the elaborate discussions regarding how the mitzriim were punished, etc). It’s all very well to say “well, we are all being punished for our sins”, and another to confront the glee in someone’s face when they murder an entire family. Yes, Hashem is sending the punishment through them, but they are also *choosing* to do it. The concept of antisemitism comes into play to try to explain that choice, and try as we might, we cannot explain it.
How does antisemitism explain it?
That’s the whole thing—it’s the attempt to explain the unexplainable. People can understand hating others in an abstract sense, but the depth and consistency of the hate, especially when it comes down to details, is awful to the point of it being unbelievable. You can’t find a rational reason why a people would do such a thing, so you revert to “they just hate us.”
I’ll also note that it’s only frum Jews who rely on it—lots of non-frum and straight up atheist Jews rely on it too. You can’t explain a supernatural phenomenon with God if you don’t believe in Him.
This might come off condescending, but I feel you just think that because you haven't read enough history of different groups killing other groups. There's a lot of it, and all of it is incomprehensible for someone with little experience of violence. None of the persecutions of Jews are historically unusual. What is unusual is the total number of them and the diversity of places it happened. But my argument is that this is function of the unusual persistence of the Jews in a wide variety of places.
I think that you are so focused on the data trends here that you are missing the human reaction to them.
Sure, you can point at various factors and say that actually, antisemitism is only unique in the sense that Jews are still around, and you are sorry of right. It’s the same thing as economists saying “well, ACTUALLY, this is the greatest economy of all time because of xyz” when people still feel like everything sucks. Two things can be true at the same time.
Jews have always tried (and failed) to understand why people they live alongside can view them as subhuman despite the obvious fact that we’re all the same (and yes I saw your race science comments in other posts, we’re just going to leave that aside for now because I honestly don’t even know how to address that). How can you wrap your mind around the fact that a neighbor you saw every day and had perfectly good relationships with is happy to machine gun you into a ditch? How can you explain the person you saw at cafe for years murdering your children? How do you explain happy families cheerfully moving into a murdered family’s home? You can’t, and so you fall back on irrationality, aka antisemitism. Saying something like “well, we were really annoying by running a town bakery monopoly” doesn’t really cut it.
I am certain that other persecuted groups come to an explanation like this as well, but we don’t really get to see it develop because they generally disappear. We, for some reason, haven’t, and antisemitism is the way we explain (or perhaps fail to explain) why we suffer such things every few generations.
I don't think this is what really happened. Where do you see a pre-modern Jewish source that talks about something analogous to anti-semitism?
What I think happened is that people took the modern ideology of antisemitism and then retrojected it back into the Middle Ages, which was not totally crazy because there is a historical connection and then lost the plot and started projecting it throughout Jewish history thus generating a nonsense anti-concept.
I think Jews, historically, viewed the awful things they experienced as a message from God *overall*, but were still bewildered by the people who chose to inflict it. This is a somewhat awkward metaphor, but I think you can compare it to a child getting punished by a dispassionate parent, and a child getting punished by a parent who clearly enjoys hurting them. The first child will be upset about the punishment, naturally, but they won't take it personally in the way the second child will.
I think the way you see commentators delving into how punishments for various oppressors were middah k'negged middah is an example of Jews trying to understand what we would call antisemitism. The first example that comes to mind is the extensive discussion regarding how the degree of torture the mitzriyim suffered at the yam suf was commensurate to the amount of suffering they inflicted (google says the Vilna Gaon, but I'm not so sure).
Finally, this is the line that ticked me off: "One - I think sufficient - reason is that the term antisemitism in its meaningless sense is omnipresent in Jewish discourse and always a tool not to think, not to analyse, not to make sense of reality so as to manipulate it with prudence. If you can’t stop talking none-sense for yourself, then maybe do it for me." I'm with you on the way that people can antisemitism as a way to deflect criticism, but I can't sign on to the idea that Jews just magically accepted what was done to them pre-1879 was just God punishing them and nothing else. The narrative of antisemitism *is* what Jews use to try to understand it! The issue is is that *you can never understand* what drives normal, regular people to do awful things like push entire families into crematoriums, so you just end up with ad nauseam discussions of it instead.
What I meant by that is that Jews don't just use the concept of antisemitism to understand persecution, but as basic category in how they think the world works, and thus how to act. There are literally tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of DLs who think that it is pointless to do *any* actions to get better relations with our neighbours because they will just hate us anyway because antisemitism. That would be a joke except they are in the government. With Charedim, a similar problem crops up that they think the entire concept of מפני איבה just doesn't apply because antisemitism makes it pointless.
This is great and illustrative. I do wish, as you know I always say, that you would dig into the roots of antisemitism in the Islamic Middle East. That is a powerful force that has influenced the west historically (the Moors rule southern Europe for a few centuries), contemporaneously and is spreading to non MENA Islamic countries like Indonesia and Malaysia. We ignore this force at our own peril and your writings could illuminate us.
I've read your thoughtful article. You make good points, but frankly I think you are dismissing how profoundly weird and unusual antisemitism really is.
You make a comparison with the "anti-Englishness" of Joan of Arc, Louis XIV, Vinayak Savarker, Leopoldo Galtieri, Braveheart. But all those figures lived in countries that were at war with England, or under English occupation. Of course they would hate England, that's how the world works!
Antisemitism seems to me quite unique in the way that it brings together people from all kinds of different backgrounds who have never actually clashed with Jews as a group, and very often have never even met a Jew in person. We currently have extreme right-wingers in the US chanting "the Jews will not replace us", Hungarian nationalists convinced that globalisation and mass immigration are a plot by George Soros (who just so happens to be Jewish), millions of people throughout the Muslim world (and further afield) convinced that there were no Jews in the World Trade Center on 9/11 because they had been warned, Maduro in Venezuela blaming "international Zionism" for the protests sweeping his country, etc, etc, etc....
It sometimes feels like any set of extremists that has a problem with liberal democracy will at some point zero in on the Jews as the ultimate problem. This just cannot be explained by anything Jews have actually done, or any power they might actually have. The are all kinds of historical explanations one could give (envy, Christian anti-Jewish theology, Jewish success etc..) but to me nothing really seems to justify the hatred Jews get. The best explanation I can give is that the image of Jews as scheming, very powerful, out to harm the gentiles and all in all just evil has taken very profound root in Western civilisation (and from there, it now radiates to the rest of the world). That's unless one wants to find explanations rooted in Jewish theology.
My claim is that there are two separate things:
1) Various scrapes and conflicts that Jews have been involved in that have nothing in particular in common except that Jews were involved, and which therefore need no unifying concept.
2) An ideology dating from the 19th century which posits that Jews are the chief problem in the world, and that the way to improve the world is to fight Jews. This ideology is properly known as antisemitism.
Of the examples you give, 2 are simple examples of what I believe should accurately be called antisemitism. Strictly speaking Arab opposition to Israel needn’t be based on antisemitism, but in practice what has happened is Arab opinion formers imported antisemitism, so that is also an example. I don’t know about Maduro. Is this a big thing of his, or is he just adding it to the ‘capitalist, imperialist, American’ list because it’s topical?
As regards how normal or weird antisemitism is, I don’t address that in this article. The next two articles are partly about that though.
P.S. I think you are being unfair to Orban and his anti-Soros campaign, but it’s a side issue.
I am pretty sure that Soros becoming the target of so many conspiracy theories is not unconnected to him being Jewish, just like it wasn't with the Rothschilds. I don't know much about Orban, I'll admit
As for Venezuela, one only needs to look at the openly antisemitic attacks that were directed by the state press a decade ago against Hugo Chavez's opponent Henrique Capriles, who was Catholic but had a Jewish mother. But really, there is no point in wondering whether a dictator who blames his domestic problems on something called "international Zionism" is antisemitic or not. Back in the 1930s it was the "international Jewish banking cabal", now it's "international Zionism". When Zionism becomes synonymous for a shadowy global conspiracy that doesn't exist, it's antisemitism.
I agree with your general point that antisemitism as we know it today was born in 19th century Europe, although it was still influenced by older Christian tropes.
In general, focussing on Soros as opposed to Leftist NGOs in particular is likely a tell, but in Hungary the fact is that he was behind like 90% of it and by cutting him off they semi-permanently defeated leftism in Hungary. You can critique the political order Fidesz has put in place in various of ways, but the bottom line is not having mass 3rd world immigration makes it all worth it. Not the least important result of this is that Hungary is now the safest European country for Jews.
As someone growing up in a society where Anti-Semitism was kind of normalized (1990's Hungary), I always had the feeling that it is not about real flesh and blood Jews, but they are used as the symbol for something else.
One thing one noticed that there was much more fear from assimilated Jews (because yes, all hatred is fear), and the Orthodox with their black hats were treated with much more respect and tolerance.
I am not sure I entirely understood the symbolism, but it is something like this: the secret agent, someone who pretends to be something else than what they are, someone who is succesful at camouflage and misdirection. The Orthodox were in their eyes not trying to “hide” their Jewishness, their otherness, outsideness, strangeness.
Notice how it how it works completely the opposite from every other kind of racism, that sees Thomas Sowell way more positively than the “ghetto” Blacks. Assimilation is almost always taken well, because all other kinds of racism are about actual people, and the issue of the racist is that they are too different.
Not for Anti-Semitism, which sees the invisible, perfectly assimilated Jew as the most dangerous secret agent or conspirator.
Also, lol, the uses of authoritarianism. This went on in Hungary until Orbán visited Netanjahu, liked the guy and the whole Israeli nationalism project, decided that they are perfect role models, and at home told everybody to shut up about Jews.
The irony. It turned out authoritarians have a good side as well: when the boss tells them to stop some shit, they do.
I like this article and don’t disagree with it. But I have to say that I’m still very struck by the extent to which elements of the Old Testament seem to prefigure modern pop anti-semitism. The story of Esther/Purim feels highly familiar. From the standard of anti-Semitic stereotypes, so does the story arc in Egypt - Joseph comes as a poor immigrant, works his way into the confidence of the Pharoah, then uses inside information to corner the grain market as a financial middleman and get fantastically rich. There are some social patterns that don’t feel so much like the wrath of God as characteristic social tensions created by highly successful and bureaucratically skilled minority groups. This is all pre-Christian too. (I’m Jewish btw)
I appreciate this comment because I think this is a common mistake that also needs correction. Let's first take the case of the Joseph story. First, it's important to note that Jews were not stereotypically employed in such professions until the early Middle Ages, so, therefore, if the story is to be interpreted in the sense of מעשה אבות סימן לבנים, it had to wait 2,500 years for this to be realised. Bearing this in mind, if we return to the story, we see that it's not true that Joseph becomes rich through being a financial middleman (it happens the other way round), and it's not true that this created tensions with the Egyptians (the story says the precise opposite, the tensions started when a new Pharoah literally forgot about Joseph). The funeral of both Jacob and Joseph indicate they were very popular figures in Egypt. By the time tensions arise, the text gives no indication Jews are working as middlemen, the most likely interpretation is that they are shepherds.
Biblical narrative, as a rule, is written in a sparse style with very light editorial voice, which allows for a wide variety of interpretations to be read in, hence the Midrashic tradition. Sometimes, a particular (neo-)midrashic interpretation has become so prevalent that everyone assumes it's just there in the text, but really it isn't at all. In this case, the first place I am aware of where an interpretation of the Joseph and other stories of the Avot as prefiguring modern antisemitism appears is in the writings of Rav Hirsch, who, for obvious reasons, spent a lot of time ruminating on the matter.
The Megilah story, I admit, at first seems to indicate something more like antisemitism, but again there is the interesting fact that this does not seem to have been at all present in Jewish exegesis until the modern era. While the archetypes of Esau and Yishmael are used extensively to refer to the Christian and Muslims worlds respectively, I am not aware of Haman being used as an archetype this way. I think the connection actually came about via a totally different route. Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet towards the end of his life called 'The Jews and Their Lies' which is the most antisemitism-like premodern text there is. Interestingly, the Lutheran church largely downplayed the pamphlet on the not unreasonable grounds that it made their founder look like something of a maniac (and, as a matter of fact, he may well have been suffering from some kind of early-stage dementia) but the pamphlet was revived in the 1800s and became a foundational text of antisemitism. In this pamphlet - and in stark contrast to the entire catholic Christian tradition - Luther advances the radical thesis that the Book of Esther is a bad Jewish book that shouldn't really be part of the Bible and demonstrates the Jewish spirit of bloodlust and ethnocentrism. Thus, I think the Haman-like nature of modern antisemitism actually comes from early antisemites literally taking Haman as a model. But this is something I need to research more, and this isn't supposed to be an antisemitism blog!
As for weather or not "timeless antisemitism" is a traditional belief, see this article: https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A2%D7%A9%D7%95_%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%90_%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%A2%D7%A7%D7%91
I've already responded to this, so I'll just copy and paste:
This is a mistake. The correct girsa in Sifrei (found in all MSS without exception) is והלא בידוע עשו שונא את יעקוב not והלכא בידוע עשו שונא את יעקוב. It isn't telling you anything about gentiles in general. It's saying that even though Esav hated Yaakov (and for good reason), Yakov successfully won him over (in the opinion of Rabi Shimon). In as much as there is a general message here, it's the opposite to the one commonly claimed.
I have to be somewhat delicate about this, but, apart from being a diyyuk on a fake girsa, I think this is an incredibly unhealthy and poisonous mindset to hold and is responsible for a lot of the problems in orthodox Judaism.
I like your writing—keep it up!
What the heck did they have against Department Stores?
They put small shop owners out of business and were disproportionately owned by Jews.
Ha, so the same gripe as the complaints about Wal-Mart, except Sam and his progeny aren’t Jews.
Is the creep of pro Palestine views in the youth anti semetism or anti whiteism?
Almost exclusively anti-whitism or, if you want to put it in a less inflammatory way, generic leftism. In fact, it is pretty clear that reticence to overlap into antisemitism has meant Israel gets lighter treatment than a non-Jewish country in the same situation would.
This is confused a bit because there are parts of the Left that are willing to tolerate Muslims who are genuinely antisemitic (antisemitism in the precise historical sense was extensively transmitted to the Arabic world) on the grounds that brown people can do no wrong, but mostly its because Jews prefer to think that Leftist criticism of Israel is antisemitic than having to grapple with it on its own terms.
I am a bit confused about your thesis. The unflattering comparison to Brad the Jerk honestly sounds exactly like what John Exum said? Maybe we really are just nasty people? My own thesis is that people see us as selfish, because maybe from a certain (warped and distorted) perspective, we are. I wrote about this in my review of Jud Süß here. https://irrationalistmodoxism.substack.com/p/a-review-of-jud-su-veit-harlan-1940
My claim is a version of the second interpretation. Jews have been through a lot in a lot of different places, but that is just because they have been around for a lot in a lot of different places. Each individual instance can be explained historically without recourse to the metaphysical concept of antisemitism.
Conversely, from around 1820-1945, and to a much more limited extent afterwards, there is an actual ideology called antisemitism that we can also see historically and people acted on it, like they act on other ideologies.
Yes. You really are just nasty peoples
You only say that because you haven't tasted my wife's cholent. Come for a Shabbos meal and you'll be singing a different tune.
I have no idea what “cholent” even is.
I was migiyur by Satmar. I earnestly like most of you as individuals.
Also, I’m more of a chamin guy 😜
Up until Napeloeon's Jewish emancipation the image we have of a secular jew didn't exist, only the ultra religious Jew. The type of jew that agrees with Ben Gvir that spitting on christians is a Jewish tradition. The extraordinarily anti gentile behaviours prescribed in the talmud, made Jews the enforcers of the most brutal serfdoms in eastern europe.
The overwhelming majority of jewish pogroms were actually bottom up peasant revolts rather than elite consensus over theology.
As to why secular jews still face anti semitism, I'm not able to get as complete of a thesis but I'd still say jewish behaviour does play a strong part. The fact that jews have decided to stay "jewish" and not simply assimilate into their broader european countries tells you alot.
Is Jews spitting at Christians prominent in medieval accounts of Jews?
Ben Gvir is the one who brung this up, but a clear example of this incredibly anti christian vitriol was the jewish tradition commanding them to burn the New Testament, something that continues to this day. Heres a CNN article from 2008 of hundreds of New Testaments being burned
https://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/05/28/bible.burning/
Are there examples of Jews burning the New Testament in the middle ages recorded in Christian sources? You do know how the concept of linear time works right?
The Eternal Jew bends the laws of linear time.
This is somewhat off-topic, but about the New Testament, what do you think motivated many people to accept Jesus's Resurrection story if it wasn't true? With some of them even allegedly paying for this with their own lives afterwards? And with some of these martyrs allegedly being personal witnesses to Jesus's alleged Resurrection?
A Ukrainian Christian commenter on the Unz Review called AP uses this as an argument in favor of Christianity and argues that people back 2,000 years ago really were extremely shocked to see (the son of) God get physically revived, but what do you think? I know that there were early Christians who believed in a spiritual and not literal Resurrection for Jesus; they were called the Gnostics. Why couldn't they be persuaded, unless the Resurrection story really wasn't true to begin with? But then why were so many other people persuaded by it, including some people who were allegedly personal witnesses to Jesus's alleged Resurrection and who allegedly got themselves martyred afterwards?
FWIW, I'm personally extremely skeptical on the Jesus resurrection story. I'm just curious as to how exactly huge numbers of people came to actually believe in it, as well as about what exactly happened to Jesus's body after his death. Was the empty tomb story made up after the fact to give Christianity a stronger footing? Paul doesn't appear to mention any empty tomb, after all.
This is indeed off topic, but this is a common and probably the best apologetic argument for Christianity.
I think that one response might be “Why wasn’t everyone persuaded, either among the Christians (Gnostics) or Jews?” AP argues that the Jews had a lot to lose from accepting Jesus’s message, and while that might be true, surely if they believed that his message was actually the right one, many more of them would have accepted it, no? If God is telling you something that you don’t want to hear but you become convinced that it’s indeed God speaking to you, at least some people might want to reconsider their political priors. Yet to my knowledge, in general, the Jewish skeptics of Jesus did not get personal appearances from him like the various apostles did. Why not? Surely Jesus would have wanted to win them over to his cause, no? Unless he truly was permanently dead for good. Or was simply content to let his own native people forever wallow in their own ignorance (but, if so, then why?).
How would you respond to it/rebuke it?
This is very slimey and disingenous, instead of just accepting that the Jewish hostility to Christianity exists as a continuation up until modern times, you try and pretend it was just some random modern invention? But here I'll do you even better: Ritual massacres of Christians by Jews: This is from Jewish scholar Israel Shahaks, "Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel":
"Rabin Rosen (A Haaretz journalist) answered his own question:
A check of main facts of the [Jewish] historiography of the last
1500 years shows that the picture is different from the one
previously shown to us. It includes massacres of Christians [by
Jews]; mock repetitions of the crucifixion of Jesus that usually
took place on Purim.
Rosen included in his long article many well-documented cases of
massacres of Christians and mock repetitions of the crucifixion of
Jesus on Purim, most of which occurred either in the late ancient
period or in the Middle Ages. (Some isolated cases occurred in
sixteenth-century Poland.) "
If you want even more resources: Jews enslaved Spaniards, forced them to convert, be circumcised and even raped their women.
Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe (Minnesota Archive Editions), written by Acclaimed Jewish Author Bernard Bachrach.
It is a shame that even a assumedly secular jews in whats meant to be a critical substack on zionism still has that extraodinarly ethnocentric view that makes you defend one of the most dogmatic and extreme religions.
I literally wrote in the post the Jewish hostility towards Christianity was a causal factor in Christian persecution of Jews during the Middle Ages. I don't think that the history of the Middle Ages is illuminated very much by taking anecdotes from the 21st century and then spitballing about what Jews might have done in the Middle Ages, but that's because I'm a historian, not extraordinarily ethnocentric. I'll take a look at Bernard Bachrach.
Wow, it’s fun to be on the other side of this for once (I mean that sincerely). While works with an apologetic stance toward Judaism do tend IME to engage in special pleading to exculpate Jews (but not *panowie* or peasants - themselves no angels) of any wrongdoing, they don’t deserve to bear all the guilt for the system. The second serfdom happened everywhere in northeastern Europe - do you believe Russian peasants were substantively better off than those on Commonwealth latifundia? Why?
Someone should really write a proper book about it one day. Maybe find a Korean or someone who can look at it dispassionately.
A Korean learning Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, and probably German and English - I’d feel guilty for making their TFR even worse than it is.
But plenty of Secular American Jews eat bacon and work on Saturday if they need to. They may learn Hebrew as kids and nominally belong to a synagogue, but in basically all respects they are generic upper middle class Americans.
Many tried to integrate. Theodor Herzl himself and many intellectual Jews believed assimilation was the key to overcome antisemitism. But then the Affair Dreyfuss came and while some Jews kept believing in assimilation, others like Herzl finally said: “Well, you know what? Fuck off, we are going back to the Holy Land”