Mistreatment of the Jews

David Nirenberg, who is now at Hopkins, works on Muslim Christian and Jewish intereations in medieval Iberia,and has written extensively on the subject. Norman Cohn also has several relevant books on the subject. For the origins of Christian antipathy toward the Jews in late antiquity, try Peter Brown.

Circumstantial factors, they were persecuted early and were dispersed into places where this continued.

IMO, "Killing Jesus" has very little to do with it.

I think it has more to do with the early efforts to separate Pauline Christians, who appealed to a Hellenized, cosmopolitan, and therefore "Roman" audience, from Judaic (Jamesian) Christians, Who insisted on a continuation of dietary and persoanl hygeine proscriptions that were considederd odious by the Pauline group. As the Hellenists gained power, efforts to diminish Christianity's ties to Judaism would have made sense. The latest of the gospels (John), which was probably compsed late in the second century CE is clearly directed at a Hellenized, Roman audience, Compare, if you will, the underlying pro-Roman anti-Jewish sentiments in John with the earlier works and you will understand the points I have been making.
Dominus Vobiscum!

I don't see any point I would have disputed in your first post. It's a list of books I have not read.

Me either, as to having not read the texts, but I see food group routines continuing....

Sorry, I have a tendency to be pedantic. I wasn't arguing wiht anyone, just adding info.

or we with you.

just following here, interested.

I also think teh persecution has something to do with the staus the Jews aquired as a result of the expulsion from Jerusalem in the early 2d century. For a religion like Christianity that was trying to achieve "normalization," if you please, it behooved them to add to the scorn already placed on the poor Jews by the Roman government.

I think persecution of jews was quite useful for a lot of rutling types. Their presence might account for some losses in this or that quarter...

Sorry for double post back there.

The Jews were periodically useful to the Spanish, French, and English crowns, as well as to many of the small rulers in the Germanies as a source of income. In fact, in the period 800-(roughly)1350 in France, England and the Germanies, the Jews were considered the property of the crown. They were unable to own property,and therefore subject to regular "appropriations" of their belongings when the crown was short on funds.

Rutling types, I really meant ruling types.

Which doesn't contradict your pov or mine, which in this case is the same.

You have no idea how hard it was to avoid the obligatory "ruttles" joke!

Not only have I no idea,
i suffer so from loss of my shift button, leaving me
even more bereft of proper argument than usual.

More horrifying, I am sure, for you, is the matter of potator ruffles.

I wonder, too, if there is a tendency for identifiable "outgroups" to be scapegoated at any time - but especially so for those with a seeming propensity for economic success. A not dissimilar thing has happened, at times, to groups like the Chinese in, for example, Malaysia and Indonesia - and the Indians in Africa and Fiji - (though the conflict about land ownership in Fiji was a complicating factor...)

From a nationalist perspective, Jews were obvious targets of nationalistic purges, such as the re-conquest of Iberia by the Catholic kings and aristocracy from Islamic Moorish control. The Moors and Sephardim--the Iberian Jews, and the Jews who emigrated with the Moors--were closer culturally than either were with the Catholic, Latin/Visigothic, Iberians. When the Catholics re-took Iberia, the Sephardim were swept right along with the Islamic Moors. In Portugal, English and Flemish crusaders assisted in the campaigns. It didn't help that the Sephardim, like the Ashkenazim, were largely separatists living in cloisters under rabbinic ethnarchs in Iberia. Some Muslim and Sephardim converted and intermarried with Iberian Catholics. The Inquisition in Spain gained independence from the Roman in the late fifteenth century, and was taken on as Queen Isabel la Catolica, with King Ferdinand, were consolidating Castilian power, and were asserting Castilian nationalist supremacy over the other regions of Spain. The Inquisition there became directed specifically against converted Muslims (Moors) and Jews.

In the twentieth century, the Nazis' nationalism--which was a continuation in Germany of the nationalist movements in Europe of the nineteenth century (of which Zionism is a part)--was based on racist, eugenic ideology. Jews along with Gypsies, homosexuals, criminals and asocials, the mentally ill, the crippled were exterminated. Jehovah's Witnesses, political enemies, communists and socialist were also annihilated.

InfraBlue

A nice short summary. Thanks.

One of the best available internet collection of different dources isThe Internet Jewish History Sourcebook

The real question is why are people prejudiced. Why were folks of sub-Saharan heritage treated so badly by American's for so long? Why are the Japanese and Chinese so ethnocentric? Why do the Indians and Pakistanis hate one another so much? Why the continuing violence in Northern Ireland? Why do so many non-Americans dislike Americans? These are just a few examples that are known to almost everyone, there are many more examples hidden away in the dusty pages of history.

Like the previous posts to this thread, local explanations can often be found when the question is focused on a single prejudice, especially one so well publicized as anti-Semitism. Some prejudices are clearly religious or cultural, but not all. People who are left handed, and short people often feel that tall people and those who are right-handed discriminate against them. Perhaps they do.

Most of us do feel most comfortable when we are with "our own kind", however we define that term. The definition of "our own kind" tends to be parochial and narrow. The "wealthy" often resent the intrusion of the "poor" into their neighborhoods. The urban apartment dweller wants the streets cleared of the homeless, and the farmer's suspicion of city slickers is proverbial. Some prejudice may even be commendable. After all, what is wrong with prejudice against ignorance, wanton cruelty, and racial hatred?

What we deplore is the destructive nature of chauvinism. When prejudice results in Nazi death camps and the killing fields of Cambodia, it must be ended without delay. To harm a person solely because they are "different, is wrong. Justice demands that every individual be treated equally. Mass murder is such an outrageous affront to justice that it is clearly repugnant to most people. The negative effects of chauvinism are not so clearly defined in others situations. Are all exclusive clubs wrong, and should they all be abolished? What would happen if the VFW were forced to let pacifists who never served join? Disband MENSA? How do we know when our preference for being with "our own kind" is so offensive to others that it crosses the line and should be abandoned? Not all Southerners who went along with segregation were racists, but it took a lot of violence and the Civil Rights Movement to finally get rid of Jim Crow. Executive boardrooms were closed to women until recently, and some insist that a "glass ceiling" still exists. How should one feel about the current controversy over whether same sex marriages should be legal? Should animals have the same legal rights as humans?

Exactly how bad, or even evil, is chauvinism? The nature of chauvinism is buried as deep into our species as the propensity for violence, and for love. It probably existed before we invented tools, and will probably remain with us until we follow the Dodo into extinction.

BTW, I once was assigned to improve the design for field report that asked witnesses to a crime to describe the suspect. The old form had checkboxes for "White", "Black", "Mexican", "Japanese", etc., etc. How in the world could any witness be able to tell the nationality while emotionally traumatized by a crime? The answer is, of course, they cannot. Yet, witnesses do typically make assumptions and their descriptions are indeed useful to police in searching for the criminal. I redesigned the checkboxes using terms like, "European", "Black", "Hispanic/Indian", "Asian", and "Semetic". Within ten minutes of the time the draft form was circulated for comment among ranking police officers, a Jewish Lieutenant pushed his way into my office. Clearly excited, the Lieutenant began loudly berating me for my anti-Jewish prejudice. The Lieutenant, who was and remains a friend, had never stopped to think that the term Semitic is the anthropological description of those peoples whose origins are Western/Southwestern Asia.