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Anti-Semitism: It's not rocket science
The familial relationship takes certain actions of the table and requires others, even when it's bad. You may at times despise a member of your family, think their ideas or values are terrible, have had awful experiences with them... but a bridge remains despite the gaps. You probably wouldn't want him imprisoned, hanged or shot, even under pretty hostile circumstances. On a more general note, there may be countless family members who are not awful people but are simply less capable than you. If they weren't family members, you might have little to do with them and might rarely even consider them in your plans. But because they are, you do. Ethnies are partly socially constructed, but largely racially constrained families, and they contained a weakened form of the same instinct of moral obligation towards the members of the ethny. Elites from the same ethny may see their peasants as retrograde, but they don't normally arrive at the belief that these should be mercilessly crushed, or that public policy should show no concern whatsoever for their wellbeing.
Now take an ethny with a dramatically higher average IQ (10 -15 points) than the members of the society they live in. You have at once, a guaranteed factory of new revolutionary ideas; and no instinctive limiting concern for the vast majority of people who will be affected by those ideas. Now sometimes ethnies merge and form new identities. Most British, Germans, Irish and even Italian Americans eventually came to see themselves as Americans first. But the gaps between your average German and Italian are not remotely similar to the gap between your average Jew and non-Jew. This is without mentioning the massive religious elephant in the room, or the thousands of years of hostility it involved. No one wants to merge with a family that has a comparatively large percentage of loosers to the one they came from. So the Jewish ethny remains separate, and as such it's members pursue their ideological goals without any concern for the damage these impose on the host society. Naturally, eventually people get tired of this and respond with anti-Jewish measures.
Note that this theory of Jewish gentile relations requires no belief in a unique Jewish malevolence in order to arrive at the conclusion that the relationship between Jews and non-Jews will always naturally develop into hostility.
I'm not at all convinced that ethnic subgroups can maintain their heterogeneity through brute force IQ gaps.
-there is some evidence for assortative mating based on IQ, but there's also plenty of confounders. (college professors are likely to marry within their profession, but inevitably share much more than above-average cognitive ability)
-in any case, it would be inadequate to maintain small minority groups of high IQ - if your people are only 1% of the population, ten IQ points on average is going to slightly increase the fraction of (your group) in the pool of intellectually attractive potential partners, but you'll still be massively outnumbered & swiftly assimilated into the majority population without other forms of cultural protectionism.
-if we're at the point of invoking cultural awareness of 'comparatively large percentage of losers', there's no need to involve IQ gaps on top. It's not really controversial to note that cultures that last tend to include beliefs & practices that encourage conversion & expansion, and discourage apostasy and assimilation. This sort of cultural perception doesn't even need to be accurate! (It's not like medieval Christians were lining up to marry off their daughters at the local synagogue) It can function just fine as pure unsupported protectionism.
Jewish communities in Europe also historically "pick lemons". Anyone not bookish enough for a bar mitzvah always had the option to convert to Christianity and leave the Jewish community.
We don't have any stats. But there were times when labour demand was high, and I imagine a lot of boys were tempted by the idea of spending their days outdoors taking care of horses.
No, but we have stories, and they show that Jews who converted were always rare, either sincere believers in Christ or totally desperate.
Yes, future of backbreaking labor outdoors for starvation wage, abuse and beatings 24/7 from your fellow Christian for killing Christ (In theory, Jewish convert was to be welcomed as beloved brother. In practice, attitude of Christians on the ground was somewhat different.) and, when the next plague comes, being burned at stake for poisoning the village well.
You might be tempted by this life, but few people would agree with you.
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What did happen with Jewish failsons and adventurous young men, then? In Christianity they were mostly absorbed by the church or military, but medieval Jews didn’t have that option.
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