Why do Jews make such good scapegoats?

Gentiles misinterpret that "chosen people" thing. What it means to the Jews is that God is giving them extra special attention and therefore expects more from them. They regard everything that's happened to them as a people--from the exile in Egypt to all the individual and group devastations of the Old Testament to the destruction of the Temple more than once to the Roman conquest to the Diaspora to a thousand years of European antisemitism to the Holocaust and to whatever the next century has in store for them--as God's punishment for not having lived up to his expectations. They can't imagine that anyone would want to trade places with them or even join their community and assume that burden, and they hate it when one of their sons assimilates to the Gentile world because he's giving up on his obligation to have more Jewish children to help them continue to try to get it right. (Jewish women have Jewish children no matter who the father is; Jewish men do not.)

Judaica is more than Judaism the religion. It's a whole culture, and more than that it's a philosophy, an attitude about dealing with the universe. While many Jewish customs and traditions are specific to their history and/or faith, many encompass universal truths which they share with us whenever we bother to listen. (Judaism is not an evangelical religion and that carries over into the rest of the culture. They simply don't go around telling us all to follow their rules, particularly since they don't think they've done an especially good job of living up to them themselves.) On this the second day of Passover it's sobering to realize that Passover is all about defending freedom even when hope is lost and Jews think that should apply to all human beings. This is perhaps the primary cause of the growing schism between the Jews who chose to become modern Israelis and the ones who chose not to "come home" from the Diaspora: many Jews who don't live in Israel see the Palestinians as just one more people who only want their freedom but ended up on the wrong end of history.

Well, that speaks to a very specific issue in the history of Jewish-Christian relations. Medieval Christians interpreted the biblical word that we translate as "usury" to apply to any loan of money for interest. This of course runs counter to one of the fundamental principles of civilization, which is the investment of surplus wealth or "capital" as a way of kick-starting the multiplier effect that increases prosperity. Christians were not permitted to charge interest on their own money, and no one is motivated to take the risk of lending money if he's not being compensated for the risk. The Jews, who have always been better linguists and better economists, understood that the word meant not "usury" but "exploitation," and they were happy to finance the projects of the Christian communities with their money, whch naturally began to grow mightily since they were literally the only bankers around.

Christians never want to admit that there's anything wrong with the Stone Age wisdom in the Bible--not even the haphazardly translated versions they were hearing secondhand from their priests since most of them were illiterate in those days. So if there was a problem in Europe, with the Jews having all the money, it must have been due to the Jews being evil, rather than their choosing an interpretation of the Bible that was never meant for the Iron Age.

To us outsiders, all the Abrahamist communities are "different" and they even have noticeable differences from each other. It's been argued that the key difference among them, which informs their cultures and politics, is their attitude about this natural universe in which we all live.

The Muslims concentrate on an imaginary "afterlife" and believe that nothing that happens here is important except insofar as it will get them into Heaven. After all, what's the problem with people suffering, even grievously, if they're all going to Heaven shortly where they will live in bliss for eternity? The Christians believe in the afterlife too, but they also believe that they are commanded to be good stewards of the natural universe and in particular must be nice to other people, even those who are not Christians.

The Jews, on the other hand, give only fleeting thought to life after death since they believe that they're going to stay dead for a long time, perhaps billions of years, before God finally decides to wake them up. For Jews, what happens here is pretty much all there is. If you're bad, everyone will know you're bad and your poor friends, family, and community will have to deal with the fallout, probably for several generations before you're finally forgotten and even then your bad deeds might still be in effect.

Remember that Jews believe that God punishes you while you're still here! He doesn't wait until you're in some mystical afterlife where no one can hear you scream. He sends you off to be slaves in Egypt, lets your country be overrun by every other country in the vicinity, turns your wife to salt, and on a really angry day he might flood your entire planet because you've been so bad! Eventually he lets a guy make a really good start on exterminating all of you. And then for comic relief he guides the people in power into resettling your refugees in the middle of the homeland of some Muslim people!

Jews have a different outlook on life from Christians, and especially from Muslims.

But Bush is the direct superior of the people who are committing those acts. He could stop them if he chose. In fact in many cases, such as the destruction of the only secular pro-Western Arab country, he has ordered those people to commit those acts. He is not a hapless victim of circumstances. He is a truly evil man, the kind who fortunately only gets power about once in a generation... if we're lucky.

Somebody asked for a nice long-winded response. Always glad to oblige.

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Well hey, I defer to your authority. You obviously know more about Muslims than I do. You seem to have also known a lot of Christians, although I'm not sure about Jews. Anyway, why don't you go ahead and tell us what you think is the essence of the difference between Muslims and either or both of the other varieties of Abrahamism?

We're told that even today many Islamic fundamentalists make the same Stone Age interpretation of "usury" that Christians applied to all money-lending for interest. Were Jews historically the bankers to Muslims as well as to Christians, and did the Muslims then also make them scapegoats for being the ones who "mysteriously" acquired the surplus wealth?