Why are Jews always the scapegoats?

[stui magpie]

Serious question.

Muslims seem to all hate Jews, it's ingrained in the religion apparently although I'm not 100% clear why.

Hitler decided to wipe out Jews and gypsies and didn't get a hell of a lot of pushback internally, people either supported it or went along with it.

Every time it seems there's been a depression or hard times in western society, the socialist cant seems to have always depicted the "boss" class as Jews to wind up the poor suffering working class. Evil money hungry Jewish bastards.

Anyone know what the root of this is? Or several roots if the case may be?

I'm curious.

To the best of my knowledge there weren't any jews where I grew up, there may have been but just weren't overt about it. I never grew up with any ingrained impression of Jews one way or the other, the closest thing to religious enmity was my Grandfathers dislike of Catholics.

I was aware of the holocaust, more from watching TV than from any instruction at school, but never had any context, it just was.

Is there one or more reasons why Jews seem to have been the whipping boys and scapegoats throughout history? Is it all based on religion and non acceptance of Jesus and Mohammad or does jealousy at the stereotype of the wealthy business owning Jew?

Learned scholars of the VPT, I seek your wisdom.

[Mugwump]

I'm no expert on this, but I think that, in Europe, it largely relates to the fact that they were barred - simply for reasons of religious and xenophobic prejudice - from all forms of public office, and many of the professions. Christians were also forbidden, technically, to lend money by the biblical (or at least Church) ban on usury, ie lending money at interest. As a result, many of the Jews went into business and especially banking.

If a thousand people go into business, a few will make serious money : especially those who went into banking. So you have a small number of very rich Jewish bankers and merchants, and banking is a business with some basic conflicts. Nobody likes paying you interest, and when times get tough, and your business fails, the bankers have the lousy task of selling you up to get the dosh back. That creates lots of resentment.

Another factor is that for many years the Jewish communities retained a strong tradition of intermarriage within the community. That reinforced their outsider status, but it had a further powerful effect. The traditional way for the aristocracy to share the wealth around was by intermarriage. The Jewish wealthy merchants and bankers would not play that game, and they recycled their assets heavily by intermarriage, sometimes within the family (the Rothschilds were notorious for this), so they became ever wealthier (and prone to dis[playing it) relative to their aristocratic peers, and that created jealousy at the top. There is a theory that nearly all prejudice starts somewhere at the top of society and filters down, especially prior to mass media. I suspect that played a role.

The holocaust had a lot to do with the collapse of the middle class in the 1923 hyperinflation, which resulted in a lot of people seething with resentment at financiers. Then the depression came and the bankers foreclosed on many businesses and leveraged stock-buyers. The toxic cocktail was stirred and served up, with the consequences we know.

I think the hatred of Jews in the ME by the Arabs is a more recent phenomenon, born of Israel's treatment - real and perceived - of the Palestinians since 1945. Prior to the 20th Century, I think the peoples of the ME managed a surprising level of religious tolerance, and certainly
more than was practised in much of Christendom. the fact that Israel has walloped the proud Arabs in successive wars in the latter half of the 20th Century has been a large factor as well.

That's what I've gleaned for various forms of reading over the years, but I've never read the subject specifically so if WPT or others have clearer views on the issue, I'll happily defer.

[stui magpie]

Cheers mate.

Everything you say makes logical sense but doesn't seem to justify the kind of enmity that's been apparent or Hitler's determination to destroy an entire culture, but then people are funny critters.

[David]

I think Mugwump provides a pretty succinct summary. Unwillingness to conform has certainly been a big part of it. I think an essential part of anti-Semitism is religious sectarianism and the persecution of heretics, which Jews obviously were in the context of Christendom and the Islamic world over the past millennium.

I'm not sure how recently the notion of the Jewish merchant/banker came into being (it was obviously well established by Shakespeare's time), but even in The Canterbury Tales you get Jews portrayed more or less as baby-eating Satan worshippers. It certainly does seem bizarrely ironic that a people who are so integral to the story of Christianity, and (to a lesser but still relevant extent) Islam, have been so hated by practitioners of both major faiths.

An interesting topic to explore might be how prevalent anti-semitism still is today. From an outside perspective, it's hard to see how much of so-called 'Anti-Zionist' rhetoric in the Islamic world is just bald anti-semitism and how much of it is, as Mugwump says, more antagonism towards the State of Israel (I suspect the two are, at ground level, fairly interchangeable). As for the West, it can be a shock to read the frequency and extent of anti-semitism in youtube comments, for instance. Makes me wonder if it's a relatively small group of very noisy trolls or a much more widespread problem.

[Wokko]

There was also the Jewish declaration of war against Germany in 1933.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Nazi_boycott_of_1933



It's hard to trace this issue because you've either got completely white washed sources or completely white supremacist sources. Emotionless, intellectual digging is at best difficult and tends to lead to vociferous protest against any criticism of Jews as being 'Anti-Semitic'.

There is also the issue of Jews hiring and promoting Jews above Gentiles, nepotism and 'in group' advantaging (See Hollywood/Media).

[Mugwump]

Oh, I think the other thing about Hitler was that the first time his journey as one of life's losers gained any meaning was when he fought in the First World War. He was apparently pretty brave, winning two iron crosses, iirc, and it was the first time he seemed to be good at anything or accepted by anything official after many rejections by art schools (a google images look at his paintings will make clear why this was so).

When Germany was defeated it was like a personal affront to him, and because the war ended in revolution in Germany, the standard narrative among the Germany army was that it had been "stabbed in the back" by strikers and Bolsheviks at home. The Bolsheviks did have a fairly strong Jewish contingent, and the man who signed the Treaty of Versailles was Jewish (his name was Erzberger, I think).

For many Germans "the stab in the back" myth was really a way of displacing their shame at having lost the war onto someone else. For Hitler, though, it was personal : the Germany army was the only thing he'd ever really been accepted by, and he believed that the Jews had betrayed it. I'm sure that played into it. But no-one can really explain the raging monstrosity that was Adolf Hitler clearly, I suspect.

[Tannin]

An excellent answer from Mugwamp.

I'll add a couple of extra points which go alongside his:

Jewish communities in Europe frequently developed powerful traditions of hard work, thrift, and strong family loyalty. Mugwamp pretty much covers the reasons for this, but also consider the unifying effect of even very mild persecution (if people don't like you, or even if you just think people don't like you much, you tend to work harder and take fewer risks).

Note that social groups of all kinds develop their own traditions and habits. Consider the Methodists as a very clear example particularly useful to us as nobody these days has strong feelings about Methodists, so we can look at their history in a dispassionate way. Methodism began as a Protestant sect in the UK. Nearly all early Methodists were poor people - not generally the destitute, mostly the working poor and the lowest reaches of the middle class - battling shopkeepers just barely making a living, for example.

Methodist teachings were very strong on hard work, thrift, education, and getting ahead. Starting around 1750 or so, the movement soon became established, especially in poorer communities. Over the next 150 years or so, many Methodist families grew more successful, little by little. By let's say around 1950, Methodism was no longer a poor man's religion: the sterotypical Methodist by this time was well educated and quite comfortably off, probably a skilled tradesman or in successfully business and a pillar of the community.

What happened? Did all the poor people stop going to that church and wealthier ones join instead? Mostly no - families seldom change their religions: Methodist families worked hard, spent little, made sacrifices for their children, and became materially successful. (And having become successful, from let's say 1950 onwards, raised children in better circumstances who promptly lost interest in religion and ceased to become Methodists. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The point here, of course, is that any recognisable social group has characteristics, and if the group is a lasting one, it is able to pass those characteristics on. If the group's characteristics tend to encourage success (any sort of success, it doesn't have to be material success, just anything that enough people reckon is a good thing), the group lasts and perhaps grows. This is how religions rise and fall. And political parties. And sports. Even nations. And all manner of other groups of course - any group that binds people together with some sort of shared ethic or behaviour or belief. This is how social evolution works: groups form and compete; some succeed, some fade away. As a rule, membership of an open group (one which anyone can join) increases where the group's shared teachings seem to lead to decent rewards.

As you will have grasped already if you have read this far, the social group called "European Jewry" was just another example of this eternal, ever-changing social dynamic, but one with several noticable characteristics:

(1) It was highly successful. Other people tend to dislike and be jealous of successful groups. Consider the severe persecution of the Chinese community in Australia during the Gold Rush days and in America at around the same time. Their crime wasn't that they were hard-working, nor that they were peaceful, nore that they were ambitious: above all it was because they were successful.

(2) Membership was (more-or-less) involuntary. Broadly speaking, you couldn't just decide to be a Jew (or decide not to be one), you were born in that group or outside it. This very often leads to conflict and bitterness. Compare with the otherwise similar case of Methodism - there was also a small amount of discrimination against and dislike of Methodists too, but vastly less because anyone could join and anyone could leave.

(3) As a consequence of persecution and discrimination over the centuries, only the strongest and most able survived. The children's children of a persecuted people tend to be tough as nails. They are good at surviving and finding ways to prosper - if they hadn't been, they wouldn't have survived at all. This feeds back into (1). * Note that it's not mainly a matter of genetics, let alone race, it's all about the evolution of skills and attitudes within a social group, which is able to pass these characteristics on from generation to generation. Evolution favours the most fit, as it always does.

(I won't repeat the points Mugwamp made already, just mention that I agree with them.)

* As an aside, it's a pretty fair bet that similar qualities marked the members of the early Christian Church. Draw your own conclusions about other prominent religions. Then think about the Industrial Revolution in this same way. Hint: technology was the least important of its three main causes, and in any case came along long after the other two were well established.

[stui magpie]

Thank you, all good info and detail and difficult to disagree with.

So boiled down, european enmity stems from jealousy at a particular tribe/group/sect/whatever general success

[Tannin]

[watt price tully]

[Wokko]

What did I say that was wrong? It's all on record and sourced. Favouring the in-group is hardly controversial (or disputed) and the boycott is well known as a spark that helped ignite the fire of hatred from the simmering anger and antipathy that already existed after the complete $�$%^%%$ of Germany in the 1920s.

FWIW Jews have been expelled over and over again from many different countries throughout history, so it's hard to pin down specifics.

http://danadler.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/JewishExpulsions.png

I swear you people just see that it's me writing something and jump on it.

[think positive]

Gees I really missed a lot at Sunday school. And school come to think of it, since my first primary school was actually a country church! In cotton end Bedford!

[Mugwump]

[Skids]

All I know about Jews is what Rodney Rude told me.....

Doctor: "What can I do for You?"
Me: "I've got a pain in my dick!"
The doctor feels around under my foreskin.
Doctor: "Whats this chewing gum doing here?"
Me: "I leave it there to keep it moist."
Doctor: "Has the pain gone?"
Me: "No."
The doctor feels around under my foreskin again.
Doctor: "Whats this other bit of chewing gum doing here?"
Me: ""That belongs to my Jewish mate Abraham Goldstein."

[Pi]

Interesting origin of the word scapegoat:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat

Perhaps this is a revenge of sorts by goats as they have been a common ritual sacrifice in that part of the world.

Where as in other parts of the world people worshiped goats.

http://www.invisibleoranges.com/2011/11/a-condensed-history-of-goat-worship/

These days people get scapegoated for unnatural relations with goats