I thought everything was created in 4004BC? Oh, wait, I'm on the wrong thread...
No. This year is 5774 on the Hebrew calendar.
The problem the jews face is connected to maintaining their distinction in terms of race and creed. This creates distance to others, with human nature creating fear due to what they don't understand. This fear might require hostility as a self defense mechanism.
Indeed. The Jews were disliked long before their religion morphed into Christianity, Islam, Baha'i and Rasta. The ancient Egyptians didn't like the Jews, although contrary to legend they didn't really enslave them. They just needed some guest workers to build their monuments and when the work was over they went home.
It started before that, because they were a group of non-Christian living within Christian communities.
As noted, this goes back way beyond the founding of Christianity.
But as it was, they were just different enough to be the targets of hate, because that's what religion does.
In the Dark Ages, the hatred of the European Christians for the Jews was augmented by their apparent "good luck" at being largely spared by the Black Plague. The reason, of course, is that the Jews have always believed in cleanliness and bathed regularly. The Christians thought it was a sin to immerse the body in water, so they were walking petri dishes for every bacteria that came along. (This is why they "tried" suspected witches by throwing them in a lake. Only a real witch could swim to safety, where she would be executed, whereas the innocent girls drowned and went to Heaven.) So the Christians assumed that the Jews were in league with Satan; the only "logical" reason for their good fortune.
They also had another religion-based reason to hate Jews. The Christian priests had mis-translated a line in the Torah which prohibited
usury, a practice which today we call "predatory lending." The Christians thought it applied to
any lending of money for interest. Therefore the few rich Christians had no motivation to loan out their surplus cash, and the medieval economy stagnated. However, it was not a sin to
borrow money at interest, so they went to the Jews when they needed extra cash--people who read the Torah in the original language and knew what it said.
So guess what happened after a few centuries of this practice? The Jews became Europe's bankers! A new reason to hate them!
A recent survey found that America's Jews are the least religious demographic group in the country. The vast majority of them do not regard religion as an important part of their lives and never go to services except maybe on Yom Kippur and Pesach. The four attributes that the American Jewish community regards as most important are:
- Remembering the Holocaust
- Leading an ethical and moral life
- Working for justice and equality for all people, and
- Being intellectually curious.
And ya know, there are still a lot of places on Earth where these four attributes would get somebody in deep shit.
This is why America has half of the world's Jews: this is all okay with us.