Why persecution of jews

One study finds that Jewish persecutions and expulsions increased with negative economic shocks and climactic variations in Europe over the period The authors of the study argue that this stems from people blaming Jews for misfortunes and weak rulers going after Jewish wealth in times of fiscal crisis.

The authors propose several explanations for why Jewish persecutions significantly declined after In the Papal States, which existed until , Jews were required to live only in specified neighborhoods called ghettos. Until the s, they were required to regularly attend sermons urging their conversion to Christianity.

Only Jews were taxed to support state boarding schools for Jewish converts to Christianity. It was illegal to convert from Christianity to Judaism. Sometimes Jews were baptized involuntarily, and, even when such baptisms were illegal, forced to practice the Christian religion. In many such cases, the state separated them from their families, of which the Edgardo Mortara account is one of the most widely publicized instances of acrimony between Catholics and Jews in the Papal States in the second half of the 19th century.

The massacre of the Jewish Banu Qurayza in Arabia. According to Mark R. Cohen, during the rise of Islam, the first encounters between Muslims and Jews resulted in friendship when the Jews of Medina gave Muhammad refuge. Conflict arose when Muhammad expelled certain Jewish tribes after they refused to swear their allegiance to him and aided the Meccan Pagans. He adds that this encounter was an exception rather than a rule.

Traditionally, Jews living in Muslim lands, known as dhimmis, were allowed to practice their religion and administer their internal affairs but were subjects to certain conditions. They had to pay the jizya a per capita tax imposed on free adult non-Muslim males to Muslims. Dhimmis had an inferior status under Islamic rule. They had several social and legal disabilities such as prohibitions against bearing arms or giving testimony in courts in cases involving Muslims.

Obadiah the Proselyte reported in AD, that the Caliph had created this rule himself. Resentment toward Jews perceived as having attained too lofty a position in Islamic society also fueled antisemitism and massacres. There were further massacres in Fez in and In the Zaydi imamate of Yemen, Jews were also singled out for discrimination in the 17th century, which culminated in the general expulsion of all Jews from places in Yemen to the arid coastal plain of Tihamah and which became known as the Mawza Exile.

The Damascus affair occurred in when a French monk and his servant disappeared in Damascus. Immediately following, a charge of ritual murder was brought against a large number of Jews in the city including children who were tortured.

The consuls of the United Kingdom, France and Germany as well as Ottoman authorities, Christians, Muslims and Jews all played a great role in this affair. There was a massacre of Jews in Baghdad in There was another massacre in Barfurush in In , in the eastern Persian city of Meshed, a mob burst into the Jewish Quarter, burned the synagogue, and destroyed the Torah scrolls.

This is known as the Allahdad incident. It was only by forcible conversion that a massacre was averted. In Palestine there were riots and pogroms against Jews in and Tensions over the Western Wall in Jerusalem led to the Palestine riots, whose main victims were the ancient Jewish community at Hebron which came to an end. During the Holocaust, the Middle East was in turmoil. Britain prohibited Jewish immigration to the British Mandate of Palestine. While the Allies and the Axis were fighting for the oil-rich region, the Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husayni staged a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq and organized the Farhud pogrom which marked the turning point for about , Iraqi Jews who, following this event and the hostilities generated by the war with Israel in , were targeted for violence, persecution, boycotts, confiscations, and near complete expulsion in The coup failed and the mufti fled to Berlin, where he actively supported Hitler.

In the French Vichy territories of Algeria and Syria, plans were drawn up for the liquidation of their Jewish populations if the Axis powers were triumphant. The tensions which were caused by the Arab—Israeli conflict were also a factor in the rise of animosity towards the Jewish people all over the Middle East, as hundreds of thousands of Jews fled as refugees, the main waves fleeing soon after the and wars.

He stated that diseases cannot be controlled unless you destroy their causes. The influence of the Jews would never disappear without removing its cause, the Jew, from our midst, he said.

These radical ideas paved the way for the mass murder of the Jews in the s. Hitler blamed the Jews for everything that was wrong with the world. Germany was weak and in decline due to the 'Jewish influence'. According to Hitler, the Jews were after world dominance. And they would not hesitate to use all possible means, including capitalism. In this way, Hitler took advantage of the existing prejudice that linked the Jews to monetary power and financial gain.

Hitler was not bothered by the apparent contradictions in his thinking. He held that communism was a Jewish conspiracy, too, as the larger part of the communist leaders were Jewish. Nevertheless, only a small proportion of the Jews were communists. This idea of 'Jewish communism' was to have awful repercussions in the war with the Soviet Union that started in The population and prisoners-of-war were treated brutally by the Germans.

Hitler viewed the world as an arena for the permanent struggle between peoples. He divided the world population into high and low races. The Germans belonged to the high peoples and the Jews to the low ones. He also had specific notions about other peoples. The Slavic people, for instance, were cast as inferior, predestined to be dominated.

Hitler felt that the German people could only be strong if they were 'pure'. As a consequence, people with hereditary diseases were considered harmful. These included people with physical or mental disabilities, as well as alcoholics and 'incorrigible' criminals. Once the Nazis had come to power, these ideas led to the forced sterilisation and killing of human beings.

The ideas that Hitler developed in the s remained more or less the same until his death in What did change is that in , he was handed the power to start realising them.

During the s, he did everything he could to expel the Jews from German society. Once the war had started, the Nazis resorted to mass murder. Nearly six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. Antisemitism: an age-old phenomenon Hitler did not invent the hatred of Jews. Hitler is introduced to antisemitism The origin of Hitler's hatred of Jews is not clear. Gampel Avi Garelick Stephen P. Subscribe to Torah from JTS. Our regular commentaries and videos are a great way to stay intellectually and spiritually engaged with Jewish thought and wisdom.

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