DarkSteven
Posts: 28072
Joined: 5/2/2008 Status: offline
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Jaybeee, I like most of the other forum regulars, am from the US. You're from Britain, so I imagine that your everyday experiences may be different. I think that there are several distinct periods of anti-Semitism. 1. Spanish Inquisition. My take is that this a simple case of theft. Jews had resources, and the Church wanted them. The Jews had a choice between getting killed and the Church got their money then, or convert and tithe it over time. 2. Middle Ages. Jews were prohibited from holding land in some if not all European countries. So they, especially since they pushed literacy at a time when it was not that common, went into the trades in a big way. In other words, they were forced to become the capitalists of that age. Naturally, they accrued wealth, and it may have been especially noticeable since they could not buy property with it. 3. 1900s. I get the feeling that anti-Semitism then was pretty common. For example, I heard that Einstein's breakthrough Theory of Relativity did not snag him a Nobel because an anti-Semite on the Nobel committee blocked him - they had to wait till the bigot died, then gave him a Nobel on a comparatively minor discovery, the photoelectric effect. Nazi Germany accomplished two things with its anti-Semitism: they got to unify a badly off country with a common enemy, and they got to expropriate the Jews' assets. The Arab anti-Israel sentiment I do not consider anti-Semitism because it is aimed at the Jewish state itself rather than all Jews. I think of it as mostly envy from a group of failed states that squander their petrodollars on consumer luxuries for the upper class rather than building an infrastructure or serious industrial capacity. It's temptiong to think of this as a bunch of weak states being bullied by a strong one, until you realize that Israel has consistently developed its workforce and leads the world in patents per capita, while its enemies have deliberately chosen to not compete. I suppose that my theory is that attacking a class of people with resources has the advantage that you might get to expropriate them... quote:
ORIGINAL: Rule Conversely, populations that have for generations evolved in non-penis-mutilated conditions, never experience anti-semitism. Q.E.D. I don't think that Europeans ever adopted circumcision in a big way, and that is where most anti-Semitism seems to emanate...
< Message edited by DarkSteven -- 12/5/2010 12:06:05 PM >
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