Persecution of Jews
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- Related articles: Antisemitism; History of antisemitism; New antisemitism
Persecution of Jews includes various persecutions that the Jewish people and Judaism have experienced throughout Jewish history.
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[edit] Christian
Christianity, which has its roots in Jewish teachings about a messiah, has often had a contentious relationship with Judaism, giving rise to antisemitism. Some Christians have opposed the Jews' claim to being God's chosen people. Other Christians considered Jews to be instrumental in the biblical betrayal of Jesus, whom Christians consider to be the Messiah. Another historical source of Christian antagonism towards Jews is rooted in their rejection of the divinity of Jesus. In Judaism, the divinity of Jesus is regarded as a serious heresy that negates the absolute unity, non-corporality and invisibility of God according to the Torah.
In medieval Europe, many persecutions of Jews in the name of Christianity occurred, notably during the Crusades—when Jews all over Germany were massacred—and a series of expulsions from England, Germany, France, and, in the largest expulsion of all, Spain. Jews were frequently tried and put to death for a variety of imagined religious offenses against Christianity. On many occasions, Jews were accused of a blood libel, the supposed drinking of the blood of Christian children in mockery of the Christian Eucharist. Jews were also falsely accused of torturing consecrated host wafers in a reenactment of the Crucifixion; this was known as host desecration.
Jews in India were persecuted by Christian missionaries during the Goa Inquisition from the year 1552 [1]. Portuguese invaders in the South India committed massive atrocities on South Indian Jewry in the 17th Century[2].
In the Papal States, which existed until 1870, Jews were required to live only in specified neighborhoods called ghettos. Until the 1840s, they were required to regularly attend sermons urging their conversion to Christianity. Only Jews were taxed to support state boarding schools for Jewish converts to Christianity. It was illegal to convert from Christianity to Judaism. Sometimes Jews were baptized involuntarily, and, even when such baptisms were illegal, forced to practice the Christian religion. In many such cases the state separated them from their families. See Edgardo Mortara for an account of one of the most widely publicized instances of acrimony between Catholics and Jews in the Papal States in the second half of the 19th century.
In the 19th and (before the end of the second World War) 20th centuries, the Roman Catholic church adhered to a distinction between "good anti-Semitism" and "bad anti-Semitism". The "bad" kind promoted hatred of Jews because of their descent. This was considered un-Christian because the Christian message was intended for all of humanity regardless of ethnicity; anyone could become a Christian. The "good" kind criticized alleged Jewish conspiracies to control newspapers, banks, and other institutions, to care only about accumulation of wealth, etc. Many Catholic bishops wrote articles criticizing Jews on such grounds, and, when accused of promoting hatred of Jews, would remind people that they condemned the "bad" kind of anti-Semitism. A detailed account is found in historian David Kertzer's book The Popes Against the Jews.
[edit] Arab and Islamic
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Islam and Judaism have a complex relationship. Jews were allowed to live as dhimmis under Islam; yet the political conflict between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina in the 7th century left ample ideological fuel for Islam and anti-Semitism through the centuries.
During the Middle Ages, Jews typically had a better status in the Muslim world than in Christendom, though still short of full equality with Muslims. As the Muslim empire expanded during the centuries, the status of the non-Muslim communities was at times precarious, and they were generally subject to dhimmi laws. These laws freed them from military service and paying zakah, but placed additional jizyah and land taxes on them. While the dhimmi status in theory protected the rights of non-Muslim minorities, in practice its application varied. Restrictions regarding identifying clothing, building houses of worship, holding public offices, riding on horses and camels, and others were at times enforced. Over the centuries Jewish communities in some Muslim countries prospered, while others were subject to persecution.
The period between about 900 and 1200, known as the "Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain", when the Arab and Jewish intellectual worlds amalgamated, marked the revival of Jewish culture and science in Europe. It declined with the invasion of the Almohades, and ended utterly after the Christian reconquest and the mass expulsion of the Jews by Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.
When Jews were perceived as having achieved too comfortable a position in Islamic society, antisemitism would surface, often with devastating results: On December 30, 1066, Joseph HaNagid, the Jewish vizier of Granada, Spain, was crucified by an Arab mob that proceeded to raze the Jewish quarter of the city and slaughter its 5,000 inhabitants. The riot was incited by Muslim preachers who had angrily objected to what they saw as inordinate Jewish political power.
Similarly, in 1465, Arab mobs in Fez slaughtered thousands of Jews, leaving only 11 alive, after a Jewish deputy vizier treated a Muslim woman in "an offensive manner." The killings touched off a wave of similar massacres throughout Morocco.(6)
Other mass murders of Jews in Arab lands occurred in Morocco in the 8th century, where whole communities were wiped out by Muslim ruler Idris I; North Africa in the 12th century, where the Almohads either forcibly converted or decimated several communities; Libya in 1785, where Ali Burzi Pasha murdered hundreds of Jews; Algiers, where Jews were massacred in 1805, 1815 and 1830 and Marrakesh, Morocco, where more than 300 hundred Jews were murdered between 1864 and 1880.(7)
Decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were enacted in Egypt and Syria (1014, 1293-4, 1301-2), Iraq (854-859, 1344) and Yemen (1676). Despite the Koran's prohibition, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death in Yemen (1165 and 1678), Morocco (1275, 1465 and 1790-92) and Baghdad (1333 and 1344).(
During the Holocaust, the Middle East was in turmoil. Britain prohibited Jewish immigration to the British Mandate of Palestine. In Cairo the Jewish Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang) assassinated Lord Moyne in 1944 fighting as part of its campaign against British closure of Palestine to Jewish immigration, complicating British-Arab-Jewish relations. While the Allies and the Axis were fighting for the oil-rich region, the Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husayni staged a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq and organized the Farhud pogrom which marked the turning point for about 150,000 Iraqi Jews who, following this event and the hostilities generated by the war with Israel in 1948, were targeted for violence, persecution, boycotts, confiscations, and near complete expulsion in 1951. The coup failed and the mufti fled to Berlin, where he actively supported Hitler. In Egypt, with a Jewish population of about 75,000, young Anwar Sadat was imprisoned for conspiring with the Nazis and promised them that "no British soldier would leave Egypt alive" (see Military history of Egypt during World War II) leaving the Jews of that region defenseless. In the French Vichy territories of Algeria and Syria plans were drawn up for the liquidation of their Jewish populations were the Axis powers to triumph.
The tensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict were also a factor in the rise of animosity to Jews all over the Middle East, as hundreds of thousands of Jews fled as refugees, the main waves being soon after the 1948 and 1956 wars. In reaction to the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Egyptian government expelled almost 25,000 Egyptian Jews and confiscated their property, and sent approximately 1,000 more Jews to prisons and detention camps. The population of Jewish communities of Muslim Middle East and North Africa was reduced from about 900,000 in 1948 to less than 8,000 today.
[edit] Nazism
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Persecution of the Jews reached its peak under the Third Reich (1933-1945). As encapsulated in Hitler's book Mein Kampf (1925) Nazism had obsessive and racist beliefs about Jews as "racial enemies". Jews were subjected to arbitrary arrest, internment, torture and murder. The German Nazis thought of themselves as an Aryan "Master Race" of Übermenschen. To them the Jews, as well as "Negros" and the Slavic peoples, were "inferior" subhuman Untermenschen. These racist beliefs and ideologies were embodied in the Nuremberg Laws (1935-1939) specifically designed to discriminate against Jews, legalizing and enforcing racial segregation and discrimination.
Following the Nazi party's take-over of Germany (1933) and Austria (1938), the new Nazi Germany went to war against Poland (1939), France (1940), and Russia (1941), and took over Hungary (1944). These countries had a combined population of over 11 million Jews, the majority of Europe's Jews. They became the victims of a vast undertaking to "exterminate" them via planned genocide. From shortly after they took power in Germany in 1933, the Nazis had constructed concentration camps to incarcerate (and later, often to kill) their opponents and those they saw as "undesirables". Many Jews became victims of this policy. After the Nazi conquest of the European mainland, plans for the "Final Solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question" (1941) were put into full motion, and formalized at the Wannsee Conference (1942). Hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen, wandering death squads, and six major extermination camps were built in Poland by Nazi Germany and its allies for the express purpose of genocide against Jews, even for those who had long assimilated and had been baptized into Christianity, as well as for other minority groups deemed enemies of the Nazi regime.
The bulk of the Jewish prisoners were mass-executed in gas chambers at Treblinka, Sobibór, Majdanek, Chełmno, Bełżec, Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau, or Oświęcim-Brzezinka) and their bodies disposed in crematoria. This was the first full-scale genocide using the innovations of modern science and engineering. Approximately six million Jews perished under these policies during the Holocaust.
After the 1945 defeat of the Axis Powers by the Allied Nations, many high German officials were punished by the Nuremberg Trials (1945-1949) and Germany paid reparations to Holocaust survivors world-wide and to the new Jewish State of Israel after it arose in 1948.
In recent years a rise in historical revisionism about the Holocaust has resulted in Holocaust denial. See also Nizkor Project and examination of Holocaust denial.
[edit] Russia and the Soviet Union
[edit] In Tsarist Russia
For much of the 19th century, Imperial Russia, which included much of Poland, contained the world's largest Jewish population. From Alexander III's reign until the end of Tsarist rule in Russia, Jews were restricted to the Jewish Pale of Settlement, and banned from many jobs and locations. They were subject to racist laws, like the May Laws, and were targeted in hundreds of violent anti-Jewish riots, called pogroms, that had unofficial state support.
[edit] In the Soviet Union
Even though many of the Old Bolsheviks were ethnically Jewish, they sought to uproot Judaism and Zionism and established the Yevsektsiya to achieve this goal. By the end of the 1940s the Communist leadership of the former USSR had liquidated almost all Jewish organizations, with the exception of a few token synagogues. These synagogues were then placed under police surveillance, both openly and through the use of informants.
The antisemitic campaign of 1948-1953 against so-called "rootless cosmopolitans," the fabrication of the "Doctors' plot," the rise of "Zionology" and subsequent activities of official organizations such as the Anti-Zionist committee of the Soviet public were officially carried out under the banner of "anti-Zionism," but the use of this term could not obscure the antisemitic content of these campaigns, and by the mid-1950s the state persecution of Soviet Jews emerged as a major human rights issue in the West and domestically.
