The inexplicable, historic, violent and embedded hated of Jews.
Why? Why? Why?
Who has ever been persecuted for as long as Jews? Where in hell (quite literally) did all this hatred come from? How to explain loathing so deep and vicious that it motivates someone, face to face, to behead infants? Or to brutally murder six million.
I can’t begin to comprehend why. So, not being an historian, I have depended on the Internet to provide some answers.
The theme that seems to run through various explanations is that Jews, almost uniquely, have faithfully held on to their religious, cultural and political identity, dutifully remaining a separate group. Century after century of conquering kings and emperors, popes and inquisitors, Jews held fast and true. That’s quite admirable.
But it angered others who tried to impose their own culture and rules on the Jews. At heart, the explanation is that Jews are different—defiantly faithfully, even when they had to practice their faith in silence and in secret. Being the “chosen people” means you’re better. (Other explanations abound, which you’ll find searching for “the history of antisemitism.)
That history is so ancient that it boggles the mind that genocide of Jews has been a permanent fixture for millennia. .
It reaches back to Biblical times when Jews refused to worship pagan gods, steadfastly adhering to their God-given beliefs. Because they refused to bend, the Romans destroyed their Temple and chased Jews out of their homeland.
Christianity brought another set of predators. Jews were accused of crucifying Christ and refused to accept Him as the long-awaited Messiah. Although so many Christians blamed Jews for the crucification, that belief violates fundamental Christian theology that Christ died for our sins.
For century after century, Christians and then Muslims weren’t satisfied with, say, disliking Jews, but moved on to excluding, expelling and then killing them. Here’s a summary of some of it, as explained by Brittanica:
In much of Europe during the Middle Ages, Jews were denied citizenship and its rights, barred from holding posts in government and the military, and excluded from membership in guilds and the professions. To be sure, some European rulers and societies, particularly during the early Middle Ages, afforded Jews a degree of tolerance and acceptance, and it would be an error to conceive of Jews as facing an unchanging and unceasing manifestation of anti-Jewish oppression throughout this period.
In 1096, however, knights of the First Crusade unleashed a wave of anti-Semitic violence in France and the Holy Roman Empire, including massacres in Worms, Trier (both now in Germany), and Metz (now in France). Unfounded accusations of ritual murder and of host desecration and the blood libel—allegations of Jews’ sacrifice of Christian children at Passover to obtain blood for unleavened bread—appeared in the 12th century.
The most famous example of these accusations, that of the murder of William of Norwich, occurred in England, but these accusations were revived sporadically in eastern and central Europe throughout the medieval and modern periods. In the 1930s the blood libel became part of Nazi propaganda. Another instrument of 12th-century anti-Semitism, the compulsory yellow badge that identified the wearer as a Jew, was also revived by the Nazis. The practice of segregating the Jewish populations of towns and cities into ghettos dates from the Middle Ages and lasted until the 19th and early 20th centuries in much of Europe.
No need to go into more recent and well-known manifestations of the hatred. One such was President Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to respond to pleas of a Jewish delegation to intervene in the Nazi death camps..
And still, I remain puzzled by how such extreme hatred against one group can be so persistent throughout the ages. Some will argue, incredibly, that Jews haven’t changed, relying on ridiculous stereotypes about everything from appearance to secret conspiracies.
For some, the explanation lies in psychological analysis. One of the more popular analysis in the 1950s and ‘60s, when I was a college student, was a book called The Authoritarian Personality, by Theodore Adorno—a philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer. It supposedly identified the type of personality that would fall for Nazi propaganda. Turns out that the explanation is somewhat Freudian, having to do with sexuality.
I’m not persuaded.
It takes a lot of effort, resources and money to conduct eternal warfare against Jews or any people because of their race, ethnicity, religion and so forth. Why bother? Some deeply rooted psychosis or mental illness? Jealousy? The need for find a scapegoat for your own failures?
Or maybe evil is real, and the haters are just evil.
Perhaps it’s not necessary to understand its “root causes.” What’s necessary is to fight it whenever and wherever it exists.