Blood libels and pogroms...

The rationale for the Jewish state:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-city-of-slaughter/?singlepage=true

Quote:

....The rampage in Kishinev, however, has assumed a kind of emblematic status owing to a celebrated poem, “The City of Slaughter,” by Israel’s national laureate, Chaim Nachman Bialik, who visited the town to prepare a report on the massacre. Few read the report today but the poem, over 400 lines long and filled with macabre detail and vehement denunciation, has become part of the Jewish archive, and is said to have contributed to strengthening the Zionist project and to the eventual formation of the paramilitary Hagannah in Mandate Palestine. Interested readers might be moved to consult Simon Dubnow’s History of the Jews in Russia and Poland and the essay collection Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History.....

I assume Tsar Peter would have had had the people responsible for Kishinev flogged to death. I mean, you'd assume that somebody doing pogroms as late as 1903 would be motivated by some outrage of the Rothschildes or something involving communism and not because they actually believed that Jews were cooking Christian children into matzas but, then, you read that the last person hanged for witchcraft in Ireland was around 1880 or thereabouts and you still have people like formerman here claiming to believe in evolutionism; ignorance apparently dies hard...

My point is that just below the surface (of society) there can be some strong emotions waiting to boil over.