Why they hate us

I had an email conversation recently with my father.  He had been wondering about the origins of anti-Semitism, and I offered him my two cents’ worth about it:

As for anti-Semitism, I think it stems primarily from religion (Christianity and Islam) and the rest is commentary.  When the majority of the Jews refused to convert to Christianity, Christians had a fit.  The Gospel of Matthew is particularly irascible with respect to the Jews.  Later, Martin Luther thought that if he reformed the Church, Jews would come flocking.  When they didn’t, he had a fit and his writings against the Jews are scary.  It was Luther, and not Hitler, who invented the idea of concentration camps for Jews.  And Mohammed thought for sure HE had something that would appeal to Jews and invite widespread conversion, but he too was disappointed, and called on Muslims to persecute Jews in response.  All the stuff that has happened since then–the scapegoating, the racial theories and laws, the accusations of world domination and control of the world’s finances are merely offshoots.  Even secular anti-Semitism of the kind embraced by the Nazis was employed in a culture well primed by over a thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism and persecution.  If you want to get intellectual (and most people don’t know or believe anything about the Jews except that they killed the Christian God), Jews don’t blame the Devil for evil in the world; they hold people responsible for their own actions.  They say people have to take care of each other, they have to follow the same basic rules without favoritism for either the rich or the poor, that everyone has a portion in the world to come (not just Jews), and that people CAN make themselves better people if they try hard enough.  This dispenses with the Christian adages of, “The Devil made me do it,” “The poor are always with us,” and the principles of droit du seigneur, executive privilege, and acceptance of evil as inevitable in the world.  In a Catholic world where only the priests were allowed to read the Bible (which continues in the mass even today, where only an ordained priest can read the Gospel reading; lay people can only read from the letters of Paul during the service), Jews advocated universal literacy for boys and constant Torah study.  (This made Christians look like ignoramuses.)  The only people Jews are told they have to kill is Amalek, the people who attacked the weak traveling in the rear flank when the Israelites made their way through the desert.  (Haman in the Purim story was said to be a descendent of Amalek, which helps explain why he and his 10 sons were hoisted on their own petard at the end.)  We don’t have it in for anyone else.  That seems to make us special in the world.

I don’t believe it’s fear.  When the Japanese were told we control the world’s finances, they were keen to meet some Jews to find out how they do it.  No one else whom the Jews have lived among has had the same problems with them as the Christians and Muslims.  It might be envy, when the Jews have been more successful than their non-Jewish neighbors, despite the limitations placed on them (exclusion from professional guilds, prohibition against owning land, quotas in higher education).   They were a convenient source of cash when governments who had already borrowed more than they could pay back would expel them and confiscate all their possessions.  They (and Israel in general) are a wonderful thing for Arab despots who need someone to blame for their own failure to rule fairly and competently, and the Arab people, who have limited (and severely restricted) access to the world outside and see anything Western and non-Muslim as “other,” who are only too willing to believe them.  But I believe  it always goes back to the original source in religion.

I’ve weighed the possibilities of the origins lying in envy, fear, distrust of the unknown–but I always come back to religion.  The two most obvious antagonists of the Jews have been anti-Semitic since their founding, and while progress has been made by some in both religions to overcome that, I still believe that the basis of Western anti-Semitism (i.e. nearly ALL anti-Semitism) has its origins in religion.

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