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I agree. Before the existence of Israel, Jews were collectively accused of spreading communism; spreading capitalism; spreading the bubonic plague; killing Christian babies to make matzo; oppressing people on behalf of the Czar; undermining support for the Czar; and probably a whole bunch of other things.
The basic rule is that whenever something is considered bad, it won't be long before the Jews are accused of it.
And even worse: things which were once considered bad when Jews did them may later come to be considered good, but new infractions will be discovered or invented to pin on Jews so that their perceived moral value among gentiles never improves.
For many centuries, Christians were forbidden to lend money, so if a Christian wanted to borrow money, he had to borrow from a Jewish moneylender (cue centuries of stereotypes about greedy Jews). Over time, Christian countries liberalised and secularised, and now there are just as many gentile moneylenders as Jewish ones, if not more so. But has this resulted in a rehabilitation of Jews in the gentile imagination, or an acknowledgement that it was wrong to stereotype Jews as greedy when in many cases they were completely shut out of many lines of work other than finance? Has it fuck. Gentiles are allowed to engage in the behaviours that resulted in the "greedy Jew" stereotype without incurring any of the associated negative status.
It's such transparently rigged, unfair bullshit.
What you're leaving out of the story is that Jews were also forbidden from lending money at interest (all Abrahamic faiths were, though the only ones trying to stick to it nowadays are the Muslims) they just weren't forbidden from lending money at interest to the goyim. This dynamic is at the root of a lot of the antipathy between the groups.
Right. But we're now at the point where Gentiles feel no qualms about lending money at interest either to each other or to people of differing faiths. Probably there are thousands if not millions of people who've chanted "from the river to the sea" who support themselves by lending money at interest.
Group A despises Group B. When asked to explain the reason behind their antipathy, Group A explains they hate Group B because Group B does Activity X to Group A. Subsequently, Group A decides that Activity X isn't such a bad activity after all, and starts doing it to Group B (among other groups) e.g. a Jewish family who takes out a mortgage with a Gentile-owned bank. However, Group A's antipathy towards Group B doesn't budge an inch.
Doesn't this strongly suggest that Group A's antipathy towards Group B really has nothing to do with Activity X, and it's just a convenient pretext to ostracise a group they wanted to harass for unrelated reasons?
You could say that activity X has nothing to do with it, but not in the way you wish to imply. The actual issue was the dynamic where an activity is seen as corrosive to society by both groups, so one of them bans it universally, and the other bans it only within the ingroup. I don't know how you can claim it's a "convenient pretext", one group is clearly defecting, and has no right to whine about their defection being recognized as such.
The activity being no longer recognized as harmful due to changing socio-economic circumstances does not change the fact that one of the groups was defecting. And even though that particular activity is no longer controversial, the defection dynamic causing the conflict is still observable today.
How are the Jews defecting now?
By majority-supporting progressive policies for other nations, while opposing them for their own communities.
For example? "Progressive policies" is a large set.
Keeping Israel as a necessarily majority-Jewish state, while promoting diversity in any state they're a minority in, for one.
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