It depends on which group of antisemites you mean. Traditional intellectual Christian antisemitism claims that Jews were not evil and sinful until the death of Jesus, whereupon God cursed us to suffer for his death. Jesus might have been born to Jews, but he wasn't a Jew, so the logic goes, because he purified the Jewish faith. the Jewish faith is only wrong and bad because post Jesus Judaism refuses to accept the obvious truth of Jesus. And since Jews and Judaism were right there when Jesus was preaching, and since many Jews of that time did convert, Jews who remain Jewish are somehow more perverse than any other non Christian faith.
Medieval antisemitism was based primarily in ignorance. How many people really knew Jesus was Jewish given the lack of educational opportunities? Jews were different, and therefore an easy target for blame when things went wrong. This was ramped up in times of great social pressure, such as the Plague, and also during the Crusades, when many soldiers wondered why they were traveling to the Holy Land to kill infidels when there were so many Jewish infidels close to home.
Also, Jews were restricted by the Church and by various secular authorities to a limited number of professions, most prominently, money lending. Nobody likes the person making them pay back their debts. Many kings found it useful to whip up antisemitic fervor when their debts came due to keep their creditors from being able to exact payment. Also, in Poland, the king made Jewish people his tax collectors, a situation which persisted for several hundred years. Unsurprisingly, Poland was a hotbed of antisemitism well into the modern age. Jewish people are still prominently associated with banks and banking in people's minds, and several Occupy groups had to deal with some nasty liberal antisemitism because of this.
Post Reconquista Spanish antisemitism said that it wasn't being Jewish that was the problem, as much as it was not being Catholic. After the Reconquista, Ferdinand and Isabella wanted to create a religious national unity in Spain under Catholicism, in contrast to Spain under Muslim rule. This was difficult, because under Muslim rule, Jews, non-Catholic Christians, and of course Muslims had flourished, and therefore, there were a whole lot of them. They had to be gotten rid of in a fairly drastic fashion. Further, since the justification for the rule of Catholic monarchs was that they were divinely granted power by a Catholic God, and the church and state were irrevocably linked, non-Catholics were seen as potential traitors, prone to infidelity to their country, infidels. This prejudice traveled to the Americas, where many Spanish Jews fled to escape the long reach of the Inquisition. As the Inquisition spred into each new Spanish possession in the Americas, Spanish Jews traveled to stay ahead of it. Many of them settled in modern day New Mexico, and a substantial percentage of the Latin@ population of New Mexico is of Sephardi Jewish descent.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2013-07-31 02:43 pm (UTC)Medieval antisemitism was based primarily in ignorance. How many people really knew Jesus was Jewish given the lack of educational opportunities? Jews were different, and therefore an easy target for blame when things went wrong. This was ramped up in times of great social pressure, such as the Plague, and also during the Crusades, when many soldiers wondered why they were traveling to the Holy Land to kill infidels when there were so many Jewish infidels close to home.
Also, Jews were restricted by the Church and by various secular authorities to a limited number of professions, most prominently, money lending. Nobody likes the person making them pay back their debts. Many kings found it useful to whip up antisemitic fervor when their debts came due to keep their creditors from being able to exact payment. Also, in Poland, the king made Jewish people his tax collectors, a situation which persisted for several hundred years. Unsurprisingly, Poland was a hotbed of antisemitism well into the modern age. Jewish people are still prominently associated with banks and banking in people's minds, and several Occupy groups had to deal with some nasty liberal antisemitism because of this.
Post Reconquista Spanish antisemitism said that it wasn't being Jewish that was the problem, as much as it was not being Catholic. After the Reconquista, Ferdinand and Isabella wanted to create a religious national unity in Spain under Catholicism, in contrast to Spain under Muslim rule. This was difficult, because under Muslim rule, Jews, non-Catholic Christians, and of course Muslims had flourished, and therefore, there were a whole lot of them. They had to be gotten rid of in a fairly drastic fashion. Further, since the justification for the rule of Catholic monarchs was that they were divinely granted power by a Catholic God, and the church and state were irrevocably linked, non-Catholics were seen as potential traitors, prone to infidelity to their country, infidels. This prejudice traveled to the Americas, where many Spanish Jews fled to escape the long reach of the Inquisition. As the Inquisition spred into each new Spanish possession in the Americas, Spanish Jews traveled to stay ahead of it. Many of them settled in modern day New Mexico, and a substantial percentage of the Latin@ population of New Mexico is of Sephardi Jewish descent.
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