Why were people for hundreds of years prejudiced towards the Jews?

Answer 1

It began with the idea that the Jews killed Jesus (the charge of Deicide). The fact that they were subjects of the Romans, and couldn't order a tea without Roman permission, let alone a crucifixion, was ignored as inconvenient. After all, the Pope was Roman. As revenge for the deicide Jews were killed all across Europe. People soon realised that it was a reasonably flimsy pretext to kill innocent people, and began to feel guilty for having killed so many. Rather than face the guilt, though, they decided to find new reasons to justify the killings, and further ones. After all, the alternative was to criticise their ancestors, monarchs, and the church.

This is when the "Blood Libel" was born. The Blood Libel is the idea that Jews sacrifice non-Jewish children in religious ceremonies. The fact that human sacrifice appears nowhere in the Torah was not allowed to get in the way of a good story. More Jews were killed, and there were no two reasons to hate Jews. You may laugh at this one, but Iranian TV, for example, regularly broadcasts claims of Jewish human sacrfice in the modern era.

Nevertheless, this too soon became apparent as a fallacy, and new justification was required, for the same reason as before. Someone dredged up a pamphlet, written in the 19th Century by Maurice Joly, attacking Napoleon III. They plagiarised large parts of it, creating a document called, "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion". This document purported to outline a Jewish plan to take over the world. As demonstrated by the enormous number of Jews today (14 million out of 6.7 billion people in the world) the plan is going very well. Those with a desire to hate Jews latched onto the Protocols as justification for their anti-semitism, and the Protocols also provided much of the foundation for Nazi propoganda.

Essentially, though, anti-semitism is something that is handed down from generation to generation without any real need for justification. I am Jewish, but have a few anti-semitic friends (they're decent people apart from it), who have absolutely no justification for their anti-semitism when confronted, but it becomes clear on further questioning that "my dad said" this, or "my grandad" said that. Find an anti-semite, ask them what a Jew did to them to make them dislike all Jews, and see what they say. Chances are it won't be convincing.

Answer 2

Because Jews did not believe that Jesus was the son of God and the Romans crucified Christ on the cross.

Answer 2

And how does this explain anti-Semitism before Jesus? As in ancient Greece, Egypt, and elsewhere? And of course the New Testament itself warns against anti-Jewish behaviour (read all about it in Romans). So those who decided to to be haughty and anti-Jewish were also very much against the ancient Israeli Jew named Jesus and what he represented.

Answer 3

The way you asked your question, it is unclear whether you are talking about the period from 1050-1100 or the 19th and 20th centuries. I will attempt to answer both in a general sense.

1) 1050-1100: There was not much increase in Anti-Semitism in Europe during this period, that is to say that people's hatred of Jews did not rise in any discernible way nor were new Anti-Semitic ideologies perpetuated. However, there were many more peasants running around with swords during this period as a result of the Crusades. Combine that with the fact that Anti-Semitism was a very acceptable Church teaching at the time, resulted in many massacres of Jews in Europe and the Middle East.

2) 1800-2000: There were a variety of reasons that prejudice increased throughout this period and most were derived from the sense that ethnic nationalism precluded the Jew from proper citizenry. If the Jew remained a citizen in an ethnically defined nation, he was doing so by way of stealth and cunning, which were seen as strongly negative. If the Jew was a migrant, he was clearly a different ethnicity than the one to which the nationalism is ascribed and is thus the type of person who does not really belong. (I.e. an Italian Jew is really just a Jew who lives in Italy and not a real Italian in an ethnic-nationalistic sense, but he pretends to be a real Italian and steals jobs, property, and food that belong to proper Italians.) Rather than face their own economic and political situations, many saw it easier to scapegoat the Jew for their problems than to really deal with them. (This is the same attitude that many in the United States have towards Hispanics.)

Answer 4

There are certainly a minority of Jews who are prejudiced because they believe that they have a special covenant, but the overwhelming majority of Jews are not prejudiced individuals.