Europe's Jews paid the highest price for all this

Submitted by Anne Julienne (Australia), Dec 4, 2020 at 01:40

When I was reading Léon Poliakov on anti-semitism (vol 1 & 2, covering the period you deal with here), I was struck again and again by the way the Christian persecution of Jews seemed to be fueled and inflamed by their dread of the surrounding Islamic hordes. That sense of being challenged at a religious level is also, as you point out, a critical factor.

The Jews would have been seen as impure elements in the Christian world, elements weakening Christian pride and righteousness. Judaism, like Islam, is a strictly unitarian theology and this would also have made it easy to identify Jews with Muslims. It was Europe's Jews who, as a group, paid the highest price for this antagonism and rivalry between these two offspring of the Abrahamic faith.

Today, I see the story developing a reverse pattern where the Christian world made huge scientific advances leading ultimately to the atomic bomb and, being the first to deploy these, they have a huge status, leaving Islam to seem forlorn, to seem like losers after all. And again, it is the Jew that pays for this.

How long will we continue in this folly? Can't we just let the poor Jew alone?

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