Here’s a hint:
Any explanation that starts out with Alexander the Great issuing orders that Romans cheerfully accept as their own should probably be accepted only with great caution.
One of the successors to Alexander was the Antiochus who demanded that the Jews honor him as a god, leading to the Maccabean rebellions. It was the appeal to Rome by the Jewish nation in their ongoning struggles against Greek hegemony that allowed the Romans to get a toe-hold in that region to begin with.
The Jews and the Romans were always a bit tense over the issue of Caesar=God. During the period of Nero, Jews and Christians were alike persecuted for not worshipping Nero in Rome. (That persecution did not extend much outside the city of Rome where Nero exercised direct control–he was not actually as interested in the empire as in garnering personal accolades that he could see.) In the 90s, Domitian proclaimed an empire-wide cult of the emperor and, again, Jews were persecuted along with Christians. There were, in fact, rather few Roman emperors who actually promulgated the cult of the emperor very strongly.
A point on usury: one reading of Scriptures prohibits the Jews from charging “use” on other Jews but not on Gentiles. The Christians used the same logic to prohibit use charges between Christians while permitting those charges on Jews (or Muslims). Each group lent money to the other. The issue became one of contention basically because there was a much larger customer base for the Jews (the Christian majority) and a much smaller customer base for the Christians (the Jewish minority). Eventually, any wealth to be had by charging interest tended to accumulate in the Jewish community–leading to jealousy and charges of unfairness. In fact, both groups were playing by the same rules, initially. When people bring up the issue of usury, they need to realize two things: 1) it was initially practiced by everyone (who had money to lend) and 2) that the word, in those days, simply meant charging interest. We use the word, now, to mean something like loan sharking, (and the continued reference to Jews engaging in that bad old usury (as opposed to noting that they charged interest) is probably an example of using the language to perpetuate bad feelings). This is not new information, in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Shylock notes the irony of being reviled for usury while the bishops loan money at “interest”–the Christians simply changed the name of the game to allow them to practice the same thing among themselves without feeling that they had violated Scripture.
I also find it interesting that some posters have somehow found that defending the Jews gives them a warrant to attack other groups through innuendo and errors. It should be noted that while there were a few anti-Jewish statement from the Black Panthers, the Panthers were not a resolutely anti-Jewish group. To find a black group that is hostile to Jews, one needs to look at the Nation of Islam–and fringe group, that is not truly associated with Islam, that spreads hate about all others groups, with Farrakhan singling out Jews to excoriate for his own purposes.
I suspect that the reason that Jews have so frequently been subject to persecution has simply been their insistence on practicing their faith. Jews have traditionally thrived in pluralistic societies: Mesopotamia in the years following the fall of Babylon, the pagan Roman empire in those (long) periods when the cult of the emperor was not being pushed, Moorish Spain, Renaissance Netherlands, early Medieval Europe, etc. Jews have traditionally been persecuted when some other (usually religion-based) culture has demanded uniformity: Persia when the Zoroastrians demanded strict adherence, pagan Rome on the few occasions when the cult of the emperor was a principle of the state, late Medieval Europe at the time of the Crusades, re-Christianized Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, etc.
Note that persecution of Jews in the U.S. has steadily diminished as this society has become more truly pluralistic.
