In the excellent book, Confederates in the Attic, by Tony Horwitz the author tries to get at the roots and hold that the Civil War has on people in the south. Racism and anti-semitism comes up fairly naturally.
In one episode in the Carolinas Horwitz is having dinner with a reenactor and brings up the subject of racism and anti-semitism and is told that white people HAVE to be against the jews because the jewish race is naturally superior to whites. They’re smarter, faster, better with money and have a greater ability to think. Therefore it’s work against jews or be dominated.
It led to this great (paraphrased) exchance:
Horwitz: Have you ever met a jew?
Re-enactor: Once, several years ago.
Horwitz: Well, now it’s two.
In short, this is a man who wasn’t hating because of a sense of superiority but rather inferiority and self-defense. I can’t say that’s a prevailing argument but it stuck with me for being so different than the regular approach to anti-semitism that we see so often.
Jew bacame evil as soon as people needed a scapegoat.
Jews were almost built for the role. A relatively insular identifiable minority that is generally more prosperous than the general population, a despot really couldn’t ask for a better scapegoat, perhaps if they ate children or had horns…
Jews were an emasculated people with no way to protect themselves. They were in the ridiculous position of lending money but not being able to back it up with any kind of power. If you borrow money from the mob, you pay them back because you know they’ll kick your ass if you don’t. Borrow from a bank, and you pay them back because they’ll send burly men to repossess your things if you don’t (and the power of the police is on the side of the banks.) Ultimately there is physical force to back up these institutions. What did the Jews have to back them up? Absolutely nothing - but they still stayed in the usury business, which in my opinion is insane.
The Egyptians declared the Jews evil for never finishing that pyramid project. Then Philistines, Greeks, and everyone else in the Mediterranean joined in the fun. Then Jews left Palestine looking for greener pastures, and moved into the backyard of the people who hated them the most. Later, the ones who stayed in the middle east were considered evil by Moslems. The trouble is, they just refuse to drop their evil religion and join the good ones.
So once the Jews had demonsrated their evil quality by being considered evil by eveyone else, and new group in town is going to point at the obviously evil people in their midst as being a problem, not the popular folks.
A better question would be: When were Jews not considered evil?
became evil when cursed by the Hag. I even got a card saying “You are now evil” . Later, I drew an angel from the adventure deck and became good again. In the end, I beat out the Ghoul, the Prophetess and the rest and won the Crown Of Command.
There are some strains of white racist ideology which hold that the Jews are physically descended from a union between Eve and the serpent - that they are literally descended from Satan - and have thus always been evil.
This is not helped by John 8:44 in which Jesus tells “the Jews” that their father is the Devil.
I don’t think you can separate this question from the religious one. If any other group in Europe had resisted conversion, they would be considered evil also. Look at women who were suspected of maintaining the old traditions.and were thus considered evil witches.
Christians forced us into ghettos and blamed us for being insular. They exiled us from countries then blamed us for not having roots there. And I agree that once the hatred is there, pulling away the nominal religious nature of it changes little.
Probably they found ways to get paid enough of the time to make a profit overall. Jews in medieval Europe practiced moneylending because they could do it and nobody else could. The Church considered usury a sin, and any interest at all on a loan to be usury.
I always thought it was by the waters of Babylon, when we lay down, and where we wept when we remembered Zion? You know - where the wicked carried us away to captivity and required of us a song?
The Jewish money lenders were somewhat protected. It was a sin for a Christian to charge interest on a loan, so they didn’t loan money. Since the Jews were going to Hell anyway, it was no big deal for them to sin, and money was needed for the economy, so Jews could generally be assured of getting paid so they could stay in business.
OTOH, if business was not good, and there was no prospect for future loans, there would be no incentive to pay the debt. After all, the guy’s a Jew. He helped kill Jesus. Also, if you were just mad at some Christian, you could get in trouble for taking it out on him. Just pick some Jew at random, kill him, rape his wife, and steal his property. You’ll feel a lot better.
In modern times at least, anti-Semitism flared up in the nineteenth century when the Jews became associated with the social upheavals caused by industrialization replacing the older agricultural basis of society. A quote originally on Wiki’s article on the Protocols of Zion (but since edited out) summarizes this nicely:
Hmm…it’s common knowledge that Jews control Hollywood and the TV industry. When did they inflict The Matrix movies and reality TV on a defenseless public? That’s when they became evil.
On Martin Luther’s bias, and the current Lutheran hierarchy ‘backing off’ on his pronouncements;
doesn’t that almost rise to the level of a paradox?
After all, his name is on all the stationary. (I am not advocating the Lutherans re-adopt Luther’s bias) But by backing off on this ‘pronouncement’ of his, aren’t they opening the door for the rest of us to start speculating what else he was wrong about? Curious, his followers would ‘open the door’ to this line of inquiry. Of course, keeping his view on Judaism is odious too, but, keeping that view, to me, does not undermine Luther’s and the Lutheran hierarchies authority to present themselves as a religion.
For want of a better analogy, it would seem the current Lutheran administration is in violation of the franchise agreement. Perhaps a ‘rebranding’ (like the RLDS to Community of Christ) would have been a better way to ‘fix’ the problem and maintain the appearance of “whatever term they use to self describe their take on the Catholic concept of infallibilty”
I confess, a stronger appreciation for those of the Literal and Innerent biblical viewpoint, as it would seem at least that branch of religiosity would be immune to these little ‘gotchas’.
