Why does history hate jews




















What other nation would not ask for that? What other nation would be criticized for doing so? Jew-hatred is as old as the Judean Hills, predating even the rebellion of the Jewish nation against Roman imperialism and colonialism from 66 to 73 C. Among the punishments Rome inflicted: renaming the conquered Jewish territories.

Syria Palaestina, or Palestine for short, derives from Philistia, land of the Philistines, ancient enemies of the Israelites with Goliath the best-known. The Philistines were a seafaring people from islands in the Aegean who settled on Eastern Mediterranean shores in the 12th-century BCE. And no, those we now call Palestinians are not their descendants.

Jew-hatred has taken many forms over the subsequent centuries, including persecution and pogroms both in Europe and the Middle East. Jews have been despised based on religion and race, for their wealth and their poverty, as capitalists and communists. Jews have been disparaged as cosmopolitans and in Israel as nationalists.

Christian crusaders set off to free the Holy Land from the Muslims. On the way, they slaughtered thousands of Jews. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians persecuted Jews. Portrayed as alien, Jews were regarded as usurers. It was said Jews poisoned the wells of Europe, causing the Black Plague. Illustrations depicted Jews as the devil, with horns and cloven feet, and showed them using the blood of Christian children in ritual sacrifices.

These lies came to be taken as truth. But where they were needed, Jews were tolerated. When they were allowed to participate in the larger society, Jews thrived. In many places, secular and religious states forced Jews into segregated districts later called ghettos.

England, France, Spain, Portugal, and many German states expelled masses of Jews—most of whom migrated eastward taking with them their religious convictions and traditions. The young Luther hoped that tolerance would persuade Jews to convert. What then shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews?

Their synagogues. Their houses also should be razed and destroyed. All their prayer books. Some Enlightenment thinkers called for full rights for Jews, but only on the condition that they discard their religious customs. Others blamed Judaism as the source of irrational religious faith.

Later, proof of forgery confirmed his innocence, but Dreyfus remained the victim of a cover up to divert attention from army corruption. A century after the French Revolution proclaimed Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, giving Jews their freedom, frenzied mobs in the streets of Paris chanted Death to the Jews.

Nevertheless, freed from some restrictions, many Jews entered the Christian World and became prominent citizens. Then, around , a new lie was promoted: that Jews conspired to dominate the world using their money and intelligence to manipulate trusting Christians. Russian secret police forged a document to support the story of a take-over plot supposedly authored by a conference of Jewish leaders.

A proven forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was nevertheless translated into every major language and distributed worldwide. It is circulated even today despite indisputable proof that it is a fake. To divert popular discontent at appalling living conditions and autocratic control, Russian authorities encouraged antisemitic violence.

Jews were blamed for the assassination of Czar Alexander II in Pogroms, murderous rampages against Jews, erupted in Russia many times during the next three decades. The second half of the 19th century saw the emergence of yet another kind of antisemitism. Antisemites believed racial characteristics could not be overcome by assimilation or even conversion.

These ideas gained wide acceptance. The devastation of World War I, the demeaning peace of Versailles, the hyperinflation of the s, and the depression of fueled mass discontent. Enter: Adolf Hitler. As the Catholic theologian Rosemary Ruether observed:.

The mythical Jew, who is the eternal conspiratorial enemy of Christian faith, spirituality and redemption, was … shaped to serve as the scapegoat for [the ills of] secular industrial society. Some scholars would look to the pre-Christian world and see in the attitudes of ancient Greeks and Romans the origins of an enduring hostility.

Finding examples of hostility towards Jews in classical sources is not difficult. The Roman historian Tacitus , c. The Roman poet and satirist Juvenal , c. These few examples may point towards the existence of antisemitism in antiquity. Juvenal was every bit as rude about Greeks and other foreigners in Rome as he was about Jews. And yet what part of the dregs comes from Greece?

It is in the theology of early Christians that we find the clearest foundations of antisemitism. In his most celebrated work, Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, Justin strove to answer Trypho when he pointed to the contradictory position of Christians who claimed to accept Jewish scripture but refused to follow Torah the Jewish law.

Justin responded that the demands of Jewish law were meant only for Jews as a punishment from God. It was with his fellow Christians. At a time when the distinction between Judaism and Christianity was still blurred and rival sects competed for adherents, he was striving to prevent gentile converts to Christianity from observing the Torah, lest they go over wholly to Judaism.

It was an ugly charge, soon levelled again in the works of other Church Fathers, such as Tertullian c. The objective of using such invective was to settle internal debates within Christian congregations. The allegations did not reflect the actual behaviour or beliefs of Jews. When Tertullian attempted to refute the dualist teachings of the Christian heretic Marcion c. He achieved this by presenting the Jews as especially wicked and especially deserving of righteous anger; it was thus, Tertullian argued, that Jewish behaviours and Jewish sins explained the contrast between the Old and the New Testament.

To demonstrate this peculiar malevolence, Tertullian portrayed Jews as denying the prophets, rejecting Jesus, persecuting Christians and as rebels against God.



0コメント

  • 1000 / 1000