Persecution of Jews
The persecution of Jews has been a major event in Jewish history prompting shifting waves of refugees and the formation of diaspora communities.
This led to another siege of the city in Nebuchadnezzar II's seventh year that culminated in the death of Jehoiakim and the exile to Babylonia of his successor Jeconiah, his court and many others.
As stated in the Boston College Guide to Passion Plays, "Over the course of time, Christians began to accept … that the Jewish people as a whole were responsible for killing Jesus.
According to this interpretation, both the Jews present at Jesus Christ's death and the Jewish people collectively and for all time, have committed the sin of deicide, or 'god-killing'.
"[8] During the High Middle Ages in Europe, there was full-scale persecution of Jews in many places, with blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions and massacres.
Although Pope Clement VI tried to protect them by papal bull on July 6, 1348 – with another following later in 1348 – several months afterwards, 900 Jews were burnt alive in Strasbourg, where the plague hadn't yet affected the city.
[10] One study finds that persecutions and expulsions of Jews increased with negative economic shocks and climatic variations in Europe during the period from 1100 to 1600.
[11] 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.
[16] When Amr ibn al-As conquered Tripoli in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their jizya.
This was also the chief motivation behind the 1066 Granada massacre, when "[m]ore than 1,500 Jewish families, numbering 4,000 persons, fell in one day",[22] and in Fez in 1033, when 6,000 Jews were killed.
[24] In 1354, Muslim mobs in Egypt "ran amok ... attacking Christians and Jews in the streets, and throwing them into bonfires if they refused to pronounce the shadādatayn.
[26] Maimonides, who had to flee from Almohad-controlled Iberia with his family, said "God has hurled us in the midst of this people, the Arabs, who have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us.
We bear the inhumane burden of their humiliation, lies and absurdities, being as the prophet said, 'like a deaf man who does not hear or a dumb man who does not open his mouth' ... Our sages disciplined us to bear Ishmael's lies and absurdities, listening in silence, and we have trained ourselves, old and young, to endure their humiliation, as Isaiah said, 'I have given my back to the smiters, and my cheek to the beard pullers.
[citation needed] Sultan Murad IV feared that the Ottoman decline was a punishment from Allah for being lax on the enforcement of the sharia.
Do not lose a minute in executing the order that I have proclaimed in this manner.When a fire devastated much of Constantinople in 1660, the Ottomans blamed the Jews and expelled them from the city.
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.
[23] In 1839, in the eastern Persian city of Meshed, a mob burst into the Jewish Quarter, burned the synagogue, and destroyed the Torah scrolls.
Tensions over the Western Wall in Jerusalem led to the 1929 Palestine riots,[34] whose main victims were the ancient Jewish community at Hebron.
In 1941, following Rashid Ali's pro-Axis coup, riots known as the Farhud broke out in Baghdad, during which approximately 180 Jews were killed, about 240 were wounded, 586 Jewish-owned businesses were looted, and 99 Jewish houses were destroyed.
[35] On March 2, 1974, the bodies of four Syrian Jewish women were discovered by border police in a cave in the Zabdani Mountains northwest of Damascus.
[38] Originally, the Nazis used death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, to conduct massive open-air killings of Jews who lived in the territories that they conquered.
[citation needed] Afterward, their bodies were often searched for any valuable or useful materials, such as gold fillings, women's hair was cut off, and then their remains were either buried in mass graves or burned.
"[43] During the 1930s, many Nationalist Party leaders and wide sections of the Afrikaner people strongly came under the influence of the Nazi movement that dominated Germany from 1933 to 1945.
[44] During the 1930s, the Nationalists found much in common with the 'South African Gentile National Socialist Movement', headed by Johannes von Strauss von Moltke, whose objective was to combat and destroy the alleged 'perversive influence of the Jews in economics, culture, religion, ethics and statecraft, and re-establish European Aryan control in South Africa for the welfare of the Christian peoples of South Africa'.
[44] For much of the 19th century, Imperial Russia, which included much of Poland, Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltic states, contained the world's largest Jewish population.
From Alexander III's reign until the end of Tsarist rule in Russia, many Jews were often restricted to the Jewish Pale of Settlement and they were also banned from many jobs and locations.
[citation needed] During this period a hoax document alleging a global Jewish conspiracy, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was published.
[46][47][48] After 1948, antisemitism reached new heights in the Soviet Union, especially during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, in which numerous Yiddish-writing poets, writers, painters and sculptors were arrested or killed.
[57] In the wake of the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, there was mass emigration of around 6,000 Lebanese Jews from Lebanon to Italy, Israel, Canada, United States, and some other Western countries.
[72] King Idris of Libya tried to evacuate the Jewish population, transporting 3,000 Jews into a former British military base in the Libyan Desert.
