17 Spring 2023 This helps us understand modern antisemitism. Premodern anti-Jewishness rose since that small ethnic group dispersed among the various ethnicities in the Roman and Persian (and Parthian) empires, for political reasons. This dispersion started in 586 B.C.E. with the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem because of the war of the Judean King against the overwhelming might of the Babylonians. The result was the creation of the first diaspora of Jewish elites exiled to Mesopotamia. Then, with the opening of trade routes in the Roman Empire, Judeans settled in different places within the Empire. This was accelerated after the Judeans rebelled against Rome, and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. It is probably the case that between 25 and 35 thousand Judeans were sold into slavery, and many others fled. Most of the Jews, however, stayed in their small country, and their supposed mass exile by the Romans is only a legend. There was a Jewish majority in what is now Israel for hundreds of years following the destruction of the Temple, but a growing number of Jews were now minorities living in different countries. The difference in culture and religion made itself felt, increasingly, with the rise of Christianity and later with the spread of Islam. When crises arose in the host countries, occasionally the small and defenseless Jewish minority was attacked as a substitute for dealing with the real causes for the crises, or as a ploy to redirect attention from the failings of the rulers, or to confiscate Jewish property to pay for wars, and so on. This, though, was not always the case and most of the time and in most places the Jews were not persecuted. Antisemitism became a part of European self-understanding, and was supported by the Catholic church, and after the Lutheran revolution, by most Protestants. The change in Christian attitudes toward the Jews came after the Holocaust because it became obvious that Christian churches were either indifferent to the fate of the Jews during the war, or actively collaborated with the Nazis and their allies. After the dimensions of the genocide of the Jews became known, in general terms at least, Christian soul-searching, first and foremost by the Vatican, as well as a result of the establishment of Israel in 1948 (which contradicted the Christian theology that said that because the Jews denied the divinity of Jesus, God punished them by permanently denying their hope of returning to their ancient homeland), led to radical change. Beginning with Pope John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli), and continued by Pope Paul VI (Giovanni Montini), the Catholic church redefined its attitude toward the Jews in the 1965 Second Vatican Concilium, publishing the Nostra Aetate, which denied the responsibility of the Jews as a people for the death of Jesus. Contrary to many Catholic theologians, the Church's policy toward the Jews had not simply been theological anti-Judaism, but active antisemitism. By changing its theological explanation and explicitly condemning antisemitism, the Vatican (not necessarily all adherents of Catholicism) became an ally of the fight against Jew-hatred, with the Jesuits, formerly implacable enemies of Jews and Judaism, in many ways leading the fight against anti-Jewishness. The story of the relationship between Jews and Islam is different. Islamic enmity to Jews and Judaism has a historical basis in the relationship between the Prophet Muhammad and the Jewish tribes that lived in the relatively fertile areas of the Hijjaz, mainly in the area of Yathrib (the later Medina). To secure his hold over Medina, the prophet had to eliminate the power of three strong Jewish tribes that were part of the city's population. One of the tribes was forced into conversion, a second was murdered, and the third was exiled, and later exterminated. It was after this that the prophet defeated his opponents in Mecca and turned it into his capital. The birth of Islam was therefore tied to a Jewish defeat, and the theology that developed into Islam constantly returns to and relates to these events, so that Moslem sermons deal with them as if they were current, especially, of course, the radical ones. At the same time, though, the fact that Islam is based on biblical texts and worships the same God is not only not denied, but indeed emphasized, as is Judaism's development into Christianity. Jews, Christians (and Zoroastrians in Persia) are viewed as People of the Book, who are represented by Moses and Jesus as prophets sent by God, but superseded by God's sending the Prophet Muhammad as his final intervention in the history of mankind. As long, therefore, as the Jews (and the Christians) accept Moslem superiority and their own relegation to a lowly social status, and refrain from arming themselves and trying to convert others to their faiths, they are protected in body and property. Today, radical Islam aims at converting the whole world to its belief system, mainly by force (“Jihad”) but the Jews remain the traditional ultimate enemy, and there are very many cases of radical clerics (Imams) demanding their extermination. There is doubtlessly an influence of Nazi ideology there, and the language and argumentation are familiar to anyone acquainted with Nazi texts. Contrary to Nazi ideology, though, the role of the liberal or relatively liberal West is emphasized, as, for example, when the Shi'ite dictatorship in Iran talks about the West as the Big Satan and of the Jews as the Little Satan – but in many radical texts the West is under Jewish rule, thus uniting
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