Serious question.... why do so many people hate Jews?

[drlmg]

I know why Muslims hate Jews (they hate everyone, even themselves), but what about all the others? It is almost easier (shorter list) to name those who DON'T hate Jews vs. those who do. I know some people have notions that Jews orchestrate all kinds of schemes to fleece the populace of their wealth and control them through various clandestine means..... but are there any serious grievances or legitimate claims (by serious and legitimate I don't mean justified or correct, simply IF the accusation could be feasibly possible and if so, would it even have any relevance) like "palestinians" (purposeful quotations and lower case p) who claim their land was stolen, etc.

Is it jealousy since many Jews are successful and hard working? Maybe because the Jewish religion is exclusive and for Jews? Maybe because many Jewish people associate with (although not exclusively) mainly other Jews?


Please don't misunderstand my question, I am seriously confused. And please forgive if this is a stupid question or if some of my comments are taken offensively as gross generalizations. Some are my observations and some are what I perceive as observations of others and what they seem to think.

[muman613]

You are asking why there is antisemitism in the world?

There is no REASON, only excuses.

For every reason given, there is an opposite reason which also exists.

Non-Jews hate Jews for the following reasons:

1) They are too rich
2) They are poor
3) They have too much power
4) They are sheep
5) They are insular and do not assimilate
6) They intermarry with the pure 'whatever' blood


So every reason is not really a reason, but an expression of the hatred of G-ds people according to His Torah.

Then there are the religious reasons to hate Jews. Many churches taught for many centuries that the Jews were despised by G-d, foresaken and doomed to wander the world without a home. Many leaders were able to get mobs of Christians to rise up and kill Jews because they were Satans congregation. The Christians were responsible for many pogroms, Crusades, and Inquisitions against the Jewish people. According to their gospel, we killed their god.

Like Christianity, Islam needed to supercede the Jewish peoples special connection to G-d. This is known as 'replacement theology'.


Many conspiracies exist today, as they did in the past. That the Jews secretly are controlling the world and want to make all gentiles into mindless slaves is often discussed openly in some chat rooms and forums. The 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' was a forgery from the 18th century which purported to be a book on how Jews actually planned how to control the world. Jews are accused of all kinds of things which are supernatural, such as we are responsible for storms and earthquakes, and we are responsible for wild animals...

Why do they hate us? Because they hate G-d. They want to have their own god made in their image, which they can hang pictures of on the wall. They think that it is too hard to follow the laws of G-d, and that the Jewish religion is archaic, and those who practice it are irrelevant.

It is said that Jew hatred is one of the longest lasting hatreds. Even the Torah relates how the Egyptians grew to hate the Jews.

Here is what Pharoah said:

Parasha Shemot 1:8-10

8. A new king arose over Egypt, who did not know about Joseph.
9. He said to his people, "Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more numerous and stronger than we are.
10. Get ready, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they increase, and a war befall us, and they join our enemies and depart from the land."

[muman613]

I got some of this from Aish site on antisemitism:


http://www.aish.com/sem/wtj/82875542.html


Causes vs. Excuses


Can we determine whether a possible reason is a valid cause or is it just an excuse?

The Chosen People Theory

Knowledge of Jewish "choseness" is undeniably widespread. Several years ago, the University of California conducted a study of anti-Semitism. Non-Jewish Americans were presented with 18 unfavorable statements about Jews, and asked whether they believed any of them. By far the most widely-held belief among those surveyed (59%) was that "Jews consider themselves to be G-d's chosen people."

Let's test whether this belief is indeed a legitimate cause of anti-Semitism - or whether it is merely another excuse. If Jewish "choseness" is in fact the cause of anti-Semitism, then hatred against the Jews should disappear when Jews drop the claim that they are chosen.

Late in the 19th century, the Jews living in Germany and Austria collectively rejected their "choseness" and were assimilated by their host nation. In fact, they believed that the non-Jews among whom they lived were the true chosen people. "Berlin is our Jerusalem!" they loudly proclaimed. Gentile society was their social environment of choice, and Germany their beloved motherland.

Did anti-Semitism disappear? We all know the tragic answer to that question. The Jews in Germany and Austria experienced the most vicious outpouring of anti-Semitic hatred in history. Precisely when Jews rejected their claim to "chosenness," they suffered the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism.

Clearly, the Chosen People Theory does not pass this litmus test.

Other "Chosen" Peoples

Another test of the Chosen People Theory is to see how humanity responds to other peoples who claim to be "chosen." If the claim that Jews are chosen gives rise to anti-Semitism, then all groups who make similar claims of having been "chosen" should also become targets of persecution and hatred.

Christianity and Islam represent two other major religious groups that claim to have been chosen. Christian theology accepts that G-d gave the Bible to the Jews and made the Jews His special messengers. However, it is the Christian belief that once the Jews rejected Jesus, the Christians became G-d's new chosen people.

Muslims likewise believe that the Jewish Bible is the word of G-d. However, Muslim theology claims that when Mohammad appeared on the scene, G-d made the Muslims His chosen people.

If Christians and Muslims both claim that they are chosen, then why hasn't this historically generated hatred against them?

Indeed, nearly every nation on earth has at one time or another claimed to be chosen. Americans claimed Manifest Destiny - that their actions were divinely willed - when they annexed Texas and Alaska, against the wishes of the inhabitants of those areas. The Chinese chose to name their country China because the word means "center of the universe." The name Japan means "source of the sun." For Native Americans, the same word means both "human being" and "Indian" - implying that every non-Indian belongs to some subspecies.

These nations are not hated for having claimed superiority. A claim that one is chosen does not in and of itself cause hatred. If it did, then so many other nations would be the targets of the intense, universal hatred that is in fact unique to the Jews.

The Scapegoat Theory

The Scapegoat Theory is cited frequently as a cause of anti-Semitism. Some historians use it to account for the emergence of German anti-Semitism in the late 1930s.

Their reasoning is as follows:

Hitler, like many totalitarian dictators before him, needed to divert blame for his nation's problems by ascribing them to an innocent victim. He randomly selected the Jews as his scapegoat and launched a massive defamatory campaign to alienate them from mainstream German society. He succeeded in his efforts, and as a result, the overwhelming majority of Germans came to hate Jews.

The Scapegoat Theory gives rise to a time-worn question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In other words, does a group become hated as a consequence of being singled out as a scapegoat, or is it selected as a scapegoat because it is hated?

The first prerequisite for a prospective scapegoat is someone that the citizens of the country are willing to hate from the start. If we would attempt to divert attention from our own shortcomings by blaming a group that is not already hated by society, the people would not accept it. A fair portion of the population will demand to see evidence of the group's guilt and refuse to let us off the hook.

Imagine what would have happened if Adolf Hitler would have stood before one of those huge crowds in Nuremberg National Coliseum and declared:

My fellow Germans, there is a group among us that is the scourge of humanity! They are dominating the German people and destroying our motherland! If Germany is to regain its esteemed status, these people must be persecuted and ultimately eliminated. Who are these people? They are the midgets among us!
Because there is no preexisting hatred against midgets, people with freckles, or bicycle-riders, governments don't try to scapegoat them.

The Jews are chosen consistently as scapegoats because it is so easy to rile hatred against them. Jews are a people that everyone is more than happy to persecute.

Therefore, the Scapegoat Theory is not the cause of anti-Semitism. Rather, anti-Semitism is what makes the Jews a convenient scapegoat target. If anything, the Scapegoat Theory is simply a barometer indicating the level of hatred that already exists against Jews in any given society. It reveals how much anti-Semitism is already present, waiting to be stirred up.

The Scapegoat is obviously an excuse, not a reason.

Deicide: The Killers-of-Jesus Theory

Christians have long claimed that the Jews killed Jesus, and that is why they hate Jews.

Is this the real cause for hatred? If it is, why were Christians not angry at Jews 2,000 years ago, at the time the Jews supposedly killed Jesus?

Christian anti-Semitism did not begin until long after the death of Jesus. It was not until several centuries later that the Church fathers decided that Jews as a group should be persecuted because they "killed Jesus." Bernard Blumenkranz, author of Jews and Christians in the Western World, documents that the intense and ongoing Christian persecution of the Jews did not truly begin until the advent of the Crusades - over 1,000 years after Jesus' death!

Furthermore, once Christian hatred for Jews got under way, it became worse with the passage of time. Logically, time should have eased the strong feelings, as all of us can attest to the fact that anger gradually decreases with time. Time has a way of healing all wounds.

For example, in 1866, following the Civil War in America, a Northerner would have felt much tension if he had visited the South. Today, a visit to the Southern United States arouses no such emotions. Have you ever heard of a resident of New York feeling apprehensive about vacationing in Florida?

The farther away one is from an event, the less rage one feels - provided the event is the actual cause of the rage!

Therefore, if Christians hate Jews because they killed Jesus, that rage should have climaxed following Jesus' death, and petered out during the two millennia since then. History indicates the very opposite pattern - there were no recorded incidents of anti-Semitism immediately after Jesus' death, yet there were thousands of such incidents many centuries later. From this we see that Jesus' death is not the cause of Christian anti-Semitism.

Who Killed Jesus?

According to the New Testament, it was only the Romans who killed Jesus. While Jews are mentioned as accomplices, the Gospels of Matthew, John and Mark all specifically state that the Romans killed Jesus.

If the killing of Jesus is the cause of Christian hatred, why have only the Jewish accomplices been categorically persecuted? Christians should hate Romans at least as much as they hate Jews!

Obviously, Jesus' death is an excuse, not the reason for anti-Semitism.

Read the next installment of “Why the Jews?” – an exploration of more theories of anti-Semitism.

This article can also be read at: http://www.aish.com/sem/wtj/82875542.html

[muman613]

   http://www.aish.com/sem/wtj/82878122.html


The Big Six


Examining more frequently offered reasons for anti-Semitism.

Maybe Jews are hated simply because they are different. Traditionally, Jews were characterized by different dress, different laws and sometimes, even a different language. Certainly this discrimination is what the Chinese experienced in early America, and what the Frenchman experienced in England. Sociologists refer to this phenomenon as "the dislike of the unlike."

This theory sounds like a sensible cause for anti-Semitism: Jews have been hated because they were different. Throughout history, Jews kept to themselves. Their ethical, cultural and social systems were different from those of their neighbors. Most pointedly, the Jews' fondest dream was always their return to Zion. They were law-abiding citizens who contributed to their host nations and even took to the battlefield to defend it, but their hearts always pointed in the direction of the Promised Land. It is undeniably true that throughout history, Jews were the ultimate "outsiders."

But what happens when Jews shed their cultural differences and become genuine "insiders"? If the Outsider Theory is correct, then the solution to anti-Semitism should be assimilation. Anti-Semitism should decrease in ratio to the Jews' ability to integrate into their host societies. Is this really what happens?

In the 18th century, the Enlightenment reached Europe, giving equal rights to all people, regardless of religion.

In December 1789, during a discussion in the French National Assembly in which French Jews were granted equal rights, Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnere declared: "To the Jews as individuals, everything. To the Jews as a nation, nothing."

The Jews of Europe jumped at the opportunity to attain equality, hoping at long last to rid themselves of the "dislike of the unlike" phenomenon. They shed their foreign dress, shaved off their beards, and attended universities and theaters. They adopted the language, culture and styles of their non-Jewish neighbors, and intermarried with them. They purged their prayers of any mention of the return to Zion. In short, they became more French than the French.

Napoleon was quick to capitalize on this development of Jews adapting to French culture. In 1807, he convened a kangaroo court to pressure the Jews to shed any lingering commitment to Jewish nationhood, forcing the Jews to declare their exclusive loyalty to France.

Jewish acceptance of this attitude widened. In Germany, Reform Jews declared, "Berlin is our Jerusalem; Germany is our Fatherland." Having endured centuries of hatred, the Jews of Europe anticipated a warm welcome from their gentile neighbors.

But they were sorely disappointed. The Dreyfuss affair, in which falsified charges of treason were brought against a Jewish French officer, was contrived to show that Jews could never be loyal citizens of their host countries.

Shortly thereafter, Hitler's rise to power once again pulled the rug out from under the Jews' sense of security in their assimilationist approach. Nazism sent a strong message to Jews: We hate you, not because you're different, but because you're trying to become like us! We cannot allow you to infect the Aryan race with your inferior genes.

So long as Jews remained outsiders, the Outsider Theory reflected some degree of logic. Once the Jews attempted to become insiders, the Outsider Theory was dashed to pieces ― because it never had been the real cause of the hatred.

The Racial Theory

This gave rise to a new excuse: the inferiority of the Jewish race. You can shed the external trappings of your life, shave your beard, get rid of your yarmulke, even change your religion. But you can never change your race.

The overriding problem with this theory is that it is self-contradictory: Jews are not a race. Anyone can become a Jew ― and members of every race, creed and color in the world have done so at one time or another.



There is no distinguishing racial physical feature common only to Jews. Even the idea of a "Jewish nose" is a myth. Anti-Semites don't hate only those Jews who have distinctively Jewish physical features; they hate all Jews. They hate Eastern European Jews; they hate Israeli, Russian and Yemenite Jews; they hate blond, blue-eyed Dutch Jews, as well as dark-skinned, Mediterranean Jews. Any Jew will do.

Anti-Semitism cannot be explained as racism for the very simple reason that Jews are a nation, not a race.

Unique Hatred

We have touched on the six most common explanations for the phenomenon of anti-Semitism. None of these standard reasons holds up as the core reason for anti-Semitism. Under scrutiny, they prove to be mere excuses. We must look afresh at this hatred to find a true root cause.

Of all discriminatory forms for hatred, anti-Semitism is unique in four ways:

1) Longevity ― anti-Semitism has been going on for an exceptionally long time. One of the most authoritative books on anti-Semitism is The Anguish of the Jews: A History of Anti-Semitism, authored by a Catholic priest Edward Flannery. He writes:

As a historian of anti-Semitism looks back over the millennia of horrors he has recorded, an inescapable conclusion emerges. Anti-Semitism is different because of its longevity and consistency.
2) Universality ― anti-Semitism is found worldwide. Throughout history, in every region where Jews have lived, they have been hated. No matter where they settle, no matter whom their host, anti-Semitism eventually rears its ugly head.

Between the years 250 C.E. and 1948 ― a period of 1,700 years ― Jews in Europe experienced an average of one expulsion every 21 years. Jews were expelled from England, France, Austria, Germany, Lithuania, Spain, Portugal, Bohemia, Moravia and 71 other countries.

3) Intensity ― hatred against the Jews is vented in a particularly virulent way. A group that is hated usually becomes the butt of ethnic jokes, and is subject to discrimination. Jews, on the other hand, are subject to attempts at genocide. The Chmelnicki pogroms, the Holocaust, and Iran's nuclear threats are attempts to exterminate a people that represent just a tiny minority of the world's population.

4) Confusion ― there is surprisingly little agreement on exactly what anti-Semites hate! When one group hates another, that hatred can be traced to a few simple, well-defined reasons. In Bosnia, people are persecuted over territory and religion; in Ireland, it's national independence and religion. Blacks are hated by some for racial reasons. But no one has yet offered a single, universally-accepted reason to explain why people hate the Jews.

If you will ask an anti-Semite to state his reasons, those reasons are often self-contradictory. Consider this paradox:

• Jews are hated for being a lazy and inferior race ― but also for dominating the economy and taking over the world.
• Jews are hated for stubbornly maintaining their separateness ― and, when they do assimilate ― for posing a threat to racial purity through intermarriages.

• Jews are seen as pacifists and as warmongers; as capitalist exploiters and as revolutionary communists; possessed of a Chosen-People mentality, as well as of an inferiority complex.

Too Many Reasons Mean No Real Reason

The "Six Reasons" don't hold water ― they are excuses!

Hatred for Jews over the past 2,000 years has been continuous, universal and vicious, but the explanation for that hatred constantly changes. This fact alone alerts us to the need to look for what lies at the core of those explanations.

Picture yourself at a job interview. The interviewer tells you outright that you cannot be considered for the job because you lack computer skills. You enroll in a computer course, and in a month you have gained the necessary skills.

You return to the company, and the interviewer says he tells you he still cannot hire you, because you lack training in finance and management. You study diligently, and within a short time you have mastered the subject.

When you return to the company a third time, you are told that the real reason they cannot hire you is your hairstyle; you simply do not reflect the image the company wishes to represent to the public.

This fiasco sends you a very clear message: The reasons the company had been feeding you all along were nothing but excuses. The interviewer only used excuses to cover up some deeper reason for his refusal to hire you.

This situation is much like the common explanations for anti-Semitism: Even when the reasons are no longer applicable, the anti-Semitism remains.

This does not mean we should totally discount these reasons. Even though they may be excuses and not the source of the hatred, they do influence the masses to hate Jews. They may exacerbate the hatred, but they certainly don't explain it.

The problem is that each of the explanations focuses on issues external to the Jew. They have nothing to do with the essence of the Jew.

What then is The Reason?


Click here to read the next installment of "Why the Jews?" ― an exploration of the specific Jewish aspect to Hitler's anti-Semitism.

This article can also be read at: http://www.aish.com/sem/wtj/82878122.html

[muman613]

   http://www.aish.com/sem/wtj/84683857.html


Hitler and the Nazis


The best way to see what anti-Semites really hate is to examine their own rhetoric.

Removing the Jewish Element from Anti-Semitism

Almost without exception, the reasons for anti-Semitism offered by different scholars have nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Jews are Jewish (e.g. Jews are rich or they're different).

These reasons effectively "de-Judaize" anti-Semitism by equating it with any other common type of hatred. According to this attitude, the Holocaust ― the most systematic attempt to exterminate a people in the history of humanity ― had nothing to do with "Jewish" reasons. Jews simply happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In his book Why the Jews?, Dennis Prager cites a glaring example of an attempt to sell the public on the idea that there is nothing Jewish about anti-Semitism. On April 11, 1944, demonstrating an uncanny wisdom that far surpassed her age, Anne Frank wrote in her diary:

Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly until now? It is G-d Who has made us as we are, but it will be G-d, too, Who will raise us up again.

Who knows ― it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason alone do we now suffer. We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or representatives of any other country for that matter. We will always remain Jews.

Anne Frank made a point of stressing that Jews have something of special value to give to the world, and that is precisely what the world has resented in persecuting the Jews. Anne Frank identified anti-Semitism as a hatred of Jewishness, a loathing altogether different from the bigotry or racism that other peoples experience.

Amazingly, when Anne Frank's story was reconstructed by Lillian Hellman into a Broadway play, her words were completely changed. "Why are Jews hated?" asks Anne. "Well, one day it's one group, and the next day another..."

On Broadway, audiences were made to believe that Jews have been hated just as any other people has been hated. In other words, there is nothing Jewish about anti-Semitism.

But what do anti-Semites themselves say about this topic?

Hitler's Straightforward Approach

Scholars have made consistent attempts to prove that there is nothing uniquely Jewish that engenders Anti-Semitism. Let us see if comments from known Jew-haters reveal what they find so objectionable.

One individual who had no use for the multitude of whitewashed explanations offered by scholars was Adolf Hitler, the man responsible for the most devastating scourge of anti-Semitism in the history of mankind.

Hitler openly acknowledged the uniqueness of the Jews as a people. Hitler realized that Jews can never be successfully integrated with the rest of humanity, and he made it his objective to ensure that they never would be.

Hitler's form of anti-Semitism was not a means to an end; it was a goal in and of itself. The Nuremberg Laws, established in 1935, effectively disenfranchised and dismantled the Jewish community of Germany ― but this was not enough to satisfy Hitler.

In the late 1930s, Germany was rebuilt and its morale restored, but Hitler's eye remained trained on the Jews. Seven years after the Nuremberg Laws mangled and mutilated the Jews in body and spirit, the Final Solution was launched in the Wansee Conference of 1942. Hitler saw the Jews as something far more menacing than mere scapegoats; the Jewish nation was his mortal enemy, and so became his target for absolute destruction.

Hitler viewed National Socialism as a new world order, a way to create mankind anew.

How is this renewal of mankind to take place? Hitler declared:

The struggle for world domination will be fought entirely between us ― between Germans and Jews. All else is facade and illusion. Behind England stands Israel, and behind France, and behind the United States. Even when we have driven the Jew out of Germany, he remains our world enemy.

Why Did Hitler Target the Jews?

Eliminating the Jews was the key to Hitler's utopia. His driving ambition was to free the world from the shackles of conscience and morality; to turn the world away from monotheism. He fashioned his own brand of religion out of a philosophy based on indulging all of man's basest desires. The "Hitler Youth" sang this song:

We have no need for Christian virtue.
Our leader is our savior.
The pope and rabbi shall be gone.
We shall be pagans once again.

Hitler's picture of the perfect world was a return to a state of jungle-type existence, where "might makes right." He said:

In a natural order, the classes are peoples superimposed on one another in strata, instead of living as neighbors. To this order we shall return as soon as the after-effects of liberalism have been removed.

The only serious obstacle standing in Hitler's way was the Jews. Hitler knew that it was the Jews who carried the message of one G-d ― of all men created equal; of love your neighbor; of helping the poor and the infirm.

Hitler hated the message of the Jews because it was diametrically opposed his vision of what the world should be. He said:

They refer to me as an uneducated barbarian," Hitler said. "Yes we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians; it is an honored title to us. We shall rejuvenate the world. This world is near its end.

Hitler told his people:

Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge, from the dirty and degrading self-mortifications of a false vision known as conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and personal independence which only a very few can bear.

In Every Jew's Soul

Hitler's only real target was the Jews, because they were all that stood between him and success. So long as the Jews survived, Hitler could never triumph. The Jewishly-rooted concepts of G-d and morality had taken hold in the world, and Hitler knew that either his own ideologies or those of the Jews would prevail. The world would not abide both.
Hitler said:

The Ten Commandments have lost their vitality. Conscience is a Jewish invention; it is a blemish, like circumcision.

Furthermore, Hitler knew that the Jewish threat to his ideals is embodied in every single Jew. He said:

If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If one little Jewish boy survives without any Jewish education, with no synagogue and no Hebrew school, it [Judaism] is in his soul.

The Jewish spirit, Hitler explained, is the product of the Jewish person. Destroying their holy places alone would not be enough. In Hitler's words:

Even had there never existed a synagogue or a Jewish school or the Tanach, the Jewish spirit would still exist and would exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning, and there is no Jew ― not a single one ― who does not personify it.

The evil of Hitler lay not in his understanding of who the Jewish people are. His evil grew from his reactions to that understanding. Ironically, Hitler had a clearer understanding of who the Jewish people are, and what they have accomplished, than many Jews have today.

Click here to read the next installment of "Why the Jews?" ― an exploration of the Jewish view of anti-Semitism.

This article can also be read at: http://www.aish.com/sem/wtj/84683857.html

[drlmg]

Thank you for the response... I learned a lot from the posts and the links.... actually I have bookmarked aish.com and plan on reading more.

I respectfully disagree to a certain extent with the allegation of Jew hatred by Christians. The statements regarding such do so in a manner that implies a significant number of Christians hate or dislike Jews (at least that was the impression I got). I am not denying that some Christians hate or dislike Jews. However, I have not experienced nor have I witnessed hostility of any sort from any of the numerous (genuine) Christians that I know. I have not seen or heard anything negative from Christians I don't know, including those in the media. I realize my experiences and observations cannot possibly be representative of worldwide Christian vs. Jew relations, however I imagine if Christian anti-semetism were prevalent I would at least have noticed it occasionally in my life. Maybe I am naive.

The article _{Removing the Jewish Element from Anti-Semitism} was especially informative to me. To me, it gives a new perspective as to why anti-Semetism exists even today....

Thank you again, your posts are very helpful to understanding the various forms of, and reasons for, anti-Semetism.

P.S. By disagreeing (as above) I am not saying you or the author is wrong, only that I don't see it that way but am very aware that I could be wrong.

[~Hanna~]

Muman is so wise.

Yes, basically people who hate G-d.... will hate His people.