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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.

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14y ago

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