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It's worth noting that 'not being an antisemite' is a historical anomaly. I'm not saying anything for or against the Jews here, just that there's clearly a lot of people they rub the wrong way.
This is a good point, but the things pointed out right now (like overrepresentation in Hollywood and Journalism) ...those are new? What the fuck were they doing other than not being Christian before? Or is it just that they survived when the Druids got wiped out or whatever.
Basically, yes. When Christianity took over as the state religion in early medieval states, it was not a very tolerant religion. They did not suffer a follower of Freyja or Jupiter to live. Or an atheist, for that matter. Jews were the only religious outgroup which Christians did not feel the need to kill wherever they encountered them (but only on special occasions or when feeling especially holy).
(I think the Druids specifically were already on the shitlist of the (somewhat more religiously tolerant) Romans, possibly due to human sacrifices. Or that might be Roman propaganda.)
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There's a chapter about Jewish legal traditions in David Friedman's Legal Systems Very Different From Ours. He describes how the Jews basically got stuck with full on Old Testament Tyrant God, plus a whole bunch of extra rules and laws that Christians have never heard of. And the Jewish response was to take these very specific, very strict, very brutal religious laws and nickel-and-dime them down into irrelevance with what basically amounts to bad faith sophistry. Just the exact polar opposite of a good faith effort to follow the spirit of the law. And I don't necessarily blame them, because the laws are kind of savage. "If your child is disobedient, publicly kill them" was the sample used.
When I finished that chapter, the thought that occurred to me was, more or less: "I suddenly get why all those medieval lords used to confiscate all the Jews property and kick them out. If I had contractual agreements and financial dealings with a group of people, and I learned that their religious/legal system was based around using cheap wording tricks to bamboozle their own fucking God, I certainly wouldn't trust them to keep faith with me. Better to fuck them over first and expell them before they hit me with some 'the contact specified you would be repaid in doll hairs!' level shit."
I already get why all those medieval lords used to confiscate all the Jews' property and kick them out. They really wanted the property.
I'm pretty sure that the last thing that medieval legal systems were based around is good faith following the spirit of the laws, unless "what the lord says, goes" counts as the spirit of the law.
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Medieval antisemitism included a number of tropes, some of them straight up falsehood('blood libel' literally was invented to describe the claim that the Jewish religion runs on the human sacrifice of Christian children) and some of them more or less true(Jews really did lend money at high interest rates, really were the main conduit for the trade in slaves out of the Christian world and into the Muslim one, etc).
Islamic antisemitism stems from, among other things, their end times prophecy.
You know, I'm kind of softening on the blood libel bits, WERE they actually sacrificing children.
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Wait, really? I've never heard that one. Kind of awkward if so.
The medieval mediterranean's main religious groups banned the sale of slaves of their group to other group. Do the math.
There was also a large slave trade from still pagan parts of Europe into the Muslim world mediated by Italian traders(particularly Venetians- this is part of the reason that Venetians have such a bad reputation in older literature), but this was legal. The sale of Christian indentured servants as slaves in the Muslim world was dwarfed by Muslim raiding but when it happened, the perpetrators were Jewish.
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They're not just any tribe that refused to convert. They're the tribe(s). They had the books first. Both Christians and Muslims appeal to the antiquity of Jewish religion to justify theirs (Muslims claim that Allah sends a prophet to all people and yet most all of the "canon" examples cited in the Qur'an are Jewish or draw from Jewish myth)
If you truly are God's chosen prophet/Messiah and you were spoken of in past Scriptures, why do the people who've held those scriptures for centuries reject you? The gentiles will ask.
It's simply a theological and political problem that requires an answer and the easiest answer is to discredit and attack the Jews themselves. As they themselves did to their less monotheistic/faithful brethren.
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It's actually "not being a religious bigot" that's a historical anomaly. Europeans were not historically more tolerant of Muslims or pagans or Hindus, etc. The reason antisemitism happened more is because there were more Jews around, not because Jews "did" something to make themselves more unlikeable.
Not to mention all the wars between Catholics and Protestants.
Which remember, only really ended in 1999.
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