PA Republicans jeer, leave floor in protest of officers who defended Capitol

[Dill]

(06-16-2024, 05:31 PM)samhain Wrote: I am not super-versed in the roots of European anti-Semitism.  

My guess would be that 2 things contribute.  One would be the large number of guest workers brought in from predominantly Islamic nations after WWII.  I feel like Germany brought in a lot of Turks at some point.  Who'da thought that replacing Nazis with Muslims would foster an environment conducive to hating Jews?

Also, ultra-nationalism in any nation is bad for Jews in general.  They're often viewed as outsiders, even when they've been in a given nation for generations.  French nationalists are particularly bad.  From what I hear, however, they still hate Muslims a hell of a lot more than Jews.  Not good, but interesting: I've been told that the racist culture in France is (relatively) accepting of blacks, yet absolutely despises Arabs.

The roots go way back into Medieval Catholicism. 

"The Jews" killed Jesus they thought. The First Crusade started with a massacre of Jews in Germany.  In most European nations they were
ghettoized until the 19th-20th-century liberalization of governments. They were also excluded from many professions in the guild
economy of Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They thrived in banking, where they, unlike Christians and Muslims, could 
loan money at interest--fueling the stereotype of greedy, money-counting Jews, parasitic on other's wealth production.

In the 1960s, Germany invited guest workers from Greece and Turkey to fill labor shortages. They stayed and had children,
who could not be German by birth, producing lots of "German" Turks who didn't fit in Turkey and were not welcome in Germany.
People already antisemitic on grounds of German racial/cultural purity would be most unhappy at this influx of foreigners.

Contemporary hatred of Muslims proceeds from the same ground as anti-semitism--a belief in the ethnic/racial inferiority of 
"foreign" semitic culture and desire to preserve the "purity" of German culture and race.  Though Germans mostly welcomed refugees,
the latent xenophobia of some was greatly exacerbated by Merkel's decision to take in Syrian refugees from their civil war--almost a million over a few years. 

That is what's fueling the rise of far right parties in Germany, and not just Germany. The right won bigger than ever before
in the recent UN elections. https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-european-election-results-2024-swings-right-france/

The French were more anti-semitic than Germans in the 19th century. The Dreyfus Affair was one of the big motivators of Zionism.
But their "racism" is rather different from Germany's and is tied to their long history of Asian-African colonization, which had already
drawn many "foreigners" to France in the 19th century. Same for Britain. E.g., both countries fielded millions of African/Asian
soldiers in WWI, drawn from their colonies. Germans were not accustomed to seeing numbers of people of color living amongst them 
until the later 20th century.