Will the Hatred Ever End?

“James W. von Brunn, an 88-year-old rifle-wielding white supremacist from Maryland (a known Holocaust denier who created an anti-Semitic website) entered Washington’s Holocaust museum on Wednesday afternoon, fatally shooting a security guard before being wounded himself by return fire from other guards, authorities said.” [1]

From the inception of the Jewish people as a nation, we have faced animosity, persecution and vicious slaughter. Most people immediately think of the Holocaust as the greatest example of this cruelty.

The sad reality is, however, that the Holocaust was only the latest in a series of murderous attempts at the genocide of the Jews.

This recent anti-Semitic attack of Mr. Brunn, an 88 year old man struck a deep cord in me. I mean for goodness sake, he’s 88 years old!!!! How much hatred can an old man have inside that he picks up a rifle and charges into a museum?

It has been said that Jews control the world, that they play with the financial resources like puppet masters pulling their strings; Hitler declared us the “moral consciousness” of humanity yet somehow made that seem a despicable thing.

How are we as Jews to react to hatred no matter what we do?

Do we preach peace as Gandhi did- and walk as lambs to the slaughter? Or do we pick up arms and fight? Both have occurred in our long suffering history.

In terms of the size of our population, the Torah states that there were about 3 million Jews were at Sinai. A more modern counting is that of James Carroll who writes that “Jews accounted for 10% of the total population of the Roman Empire. By that ratio, if other factors such as pogroms and conversions had not intervened, there would be 200 million Jews in the world today, instead of something like 13 million.” [4]

I have composed a timeline to show just a few (certainly not comprehensive) examples of acts of hatred toward Jews throughout the ages:

3rd century BCE: there are numerous examples of Greek rulers desecrating the Temple and banning Jewish religious practices, such as circumcision, Sabbath observance, study of Jewish religious books, etc. Statements exhibiting prejudice towards Jews and their religion can be found in the works of many pagan Greek and Roman writers. [3]

In 19 CE: Tiberius expelled the Jews from Rome. [ibid.]

38 CE: There were anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria; Philo of Alexandria described an attack on Jews in Alexandria in which thousands of Jews died. [ibid.]

132–136 CE: The Jerusalem Talmud relates that following Bar Kokhba’s revolt the Romans killed many Jews- “killing until their horses were submerged in blood to their nostrils.” [ibid.]

167 CE: The first accusation of murder against the Jewish people as a whole- in a sermon attributed to Melito of Sardis he stated that we were collectively responsible for the death of Jesus. The sermon was entitled Peri Pascha, “On the Passover.” [3],[5]

4th century: When Christianity became the state religion of Rome, Jews became objects of religious intolerance and political oppression. Christian literature began to display extreme hostility to Jews, and this occasionally resulted in attacks on Jews and the burning of synagogues. [3]

9th century CE: the Islamic world imposed dhimmi laws on both Christian and Jewish minorities. [ibid.]

The 11th century saw pogroms against Jews in Al-Andalus; in Cordoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066. Decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were enacted in the Middle Ages in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Jews were also forced to convert to Islam or face death in some parts of Yemen, Morocco and Baghdad at certain times. [ibid.]

1290: Jews are expelled from England by Edward I by the Statute of Jewry. Jews in Europe’s Middle-Ages faced full-scale persecution, including blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions and massacres. The general justification of prejudice against Jews in Europe was religious. Jews were frequently massacred and exiled from various European countries. The persecution hit its first peak during the Crusades. [ibid.]

1478: King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain institute the Spanish Inquisition. [6]

1493: Jews expelled from Sicily. As many as 137,000 exiled. [ibid.]

1496: Jews expelled from Portugal and from many German cities. [ibid.]

1648–1655: Ukrainian Cossack Bohdan Chmielnicki leads a massacre of Polish gentry and Jewry that leaves an estimated 65,000 Jews dead and a similar number of gentry. The total decrease in the number of Jews is estimated at 100,000. [ibid.]

1881–1884, 1903–1906, 1918–1920: Three major waves of pogroms kill tens of thousands of Jews in Russia and Ukraine. More than two million Russian Jews emigrate in the period 1881–1920. Many pogroms accompanied the Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing Russian Civil War: an estimated 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews were killed in the atrocities throughout the former Russian Empire; the number of Jewish orphans exceeded 300,000. [2]

1930 World Jewry: 15,000,000. Countries containing the most Jews include The US (4,000,000), Poland (3,500,000 11% of total), Soviet Union (2,700,000 2% of total), Romania (1,000,000 6% of total). Palestine 175,000 or 17% of total 1,036,000. [6]

1938 - Nazism began to arise as a political movement incorporating anti-Semitic ideas. These were expressed by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (German for ‘My Struggle’). The Nazi regime in Germany led eventually to the Holocaust and to the Second World War. [3]

1939 - Kristallnacht (”Crystal Night” or “The Night of Broken Glass”) - In a coordinated attack on Jewish people and their property, 91 Jews were murdered and 25,000 to 30,000 were arrested and deported to concentration camps. More than 200 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of homes and businesses were ransacked. Kristallnacht was followed by further economic and political persecutions and is viewed by many historians as the beginning of the Final Solution, leading towards the genocide of the Holocaust. [7]

1939 -1945: The Holocaust

For a more complete list of Jewish history, click here or here.

As you can see from the incomplete list above, the persecution of the Jewish people has been consistent throughout every imaginable place on this planet. And this is just a partial list.

The Torah predicted (Book of Devarim; 4:27) that we would be scattered “among the peoples [of the world] and you will be left few in number among the nations where Hashem will lead you.” That prediction has proven absolutely true.

When you think about how long we’ve been around and compare our numbers to, say, the Chinese nation- who has grown to billions in a similar time period- it’s interesting to see how we’ve maintained our culture but have not managed to expand in number. This can not be explained by natural means.

The hatred of the Jewish people is baseless, yet the nations of the world have and will continue to find reasons. The latest incarnation of this hatred is Anti-Zionism - the hatred for the modern State of Israel, the home of the majority of the Jewish people today. Anti-Zionism is a very loose translation for the same irrational hatred that we’ve always dealt with and is at its essence pure Anti-Semitism. In fact, in 1968, the state-organized anti-Semitic campaign in the People’s Republic of Poland under guise of “anti-Zionism” drove out most of remaining Jewish population. [8]

The only hope we have is the knowledge that just as silver is smelted in order to purify it and allow its precious value to be revealed, we, too, as a people go through the furnaces of history and somehow emerge intact and more determined than ever to hold onto our heritage and live as Jews in the world.

May we be blessed to have the strength to survive the torture and the hatred of those who do not understand and remember always that we are here with purpose- to be “lights unto the nations.”