Why the Jews?

lyonsy

Why was it that the jews were the target of the holocaust? Surely it wasn't due to hitlers views alone, there must have been a strong resentment already in existance among the german people before the nazis came to power that allowed it to go on. Does anyone know a specific reason for this? Some people have suggested to me that the Jews owned a lot of businesses, banks etc. in germany in the 30s at a time when the average german person had little leading to people resenting them, but i find this hard to believe. i'm also aware that massaccres of jews were carried out by polish and russians during WW2, so hatred of the Jews wasn't just confined to nazis... why did europe hate the jews??

mike65

Erm you'll find it goes back far earlier than Hitlers policies.

http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/HistoryJewishPersecution.htm

Mike.

McArmalite

mike65 wrote:

Erm you'll find it goes back far earlier than Hilters policies.

http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/HistoryJewishPersecution.htm

Mike.

Good link there Mike. Interesting that Ireland is not on that list. I think I remember one of the Briscoe family stating that ( apart from a lunatic of a priest who stirred up anti Jewish feelings in Limerick around 1904), that Ireland was the sole country in Europe that never discriminated or persecuted against the Jews. The main reason there has been sporadic attacks against Jewish community's down the centuries is that they have often been the scapegoat for a country's economic depression. A small minority in a country, an easy target. This has been quite often the case in Russia in particular.

lyonsy

Ya i'm aware that incidents of violence against jews happened outside of the holocaust, but the question i'm trying to ask is is there a specific reason why jews in particular were the target of this. The killing of jews in the 30s-40s happened on such a scale that it seems unlikely that that the dislike of jews by the nazis alone instigated it, why did the people of europe hate them then. (and if it was due solely to the nazis why did they hate jews so much?)

mikemac

Well, if you were a German solider and you and thousands of your comrades are ordered to kill Jews it hardly matters if you hate the Jews or not, you are simply followings orders.

silverharp

lyonsy wrote:

is there a specific reason why jews in particular were the target of this. The killing of jews in the 30s-40s happened on such a scale that it seems unlikely that that the dislike of jews by the nazis alone instigated it, why did the people of europe hate them then. (and if it was due solely to the nazis why did they hate jews so much?)

It can't be summed up in a couple of sentences but the Nazis tried to blame the jews for Germany losing the first world war by saying that the jewish banking families financed the British in WW1 and thus betrayed Germany.
Other then that it goes back to the bible and church history. If you look at Uganda or Indonesia you see similar examples of ethnic oppression used to further political ends scapegoating an apparently successful minority.

jmayo

lyonsy wrote:

Ya i'm aware that incidents of violence against jews happened outside of the holocaust, but the question i'm trying to ask is is there a specific reason why jews in particular were the target of this. The killing of jews in the 30s-40s happened on such a scale that it seems unlikely that that the dislike of jews by the nazis alone instigated it, why did the people of europe hate them then. (and if it was due solely to the nazis why did they hate jews so much?)

It wasn't just the Nazis or Germans that did the killing, remember a big chunk of Waffen SS were Austrian and of other nationalities. Check how many Ukrainians were tracked down later for war crimes.
Also the earlier massacres in the East were often perprated with the help of locals. I visited a museum in Talilinn few years ago, it was funny how they had section about when Soviets invaded during 1939and when they reinvaded in 1944. There was nothing about what was going on while the Germans were there?

The French, Poles, Estonias, Belorussians, etc were sometimes happy to get rid of the local Jews, after all some of them had wealth and property that their neighbours wanted.
Look at TV program where Stehpen Fry traced his routes to Slovakia, some of the old people that were alive during WWII still have opinion that the Jews were rich and so what.

Sometimes it was down to greed, sometimes it was settling old scores, just like in Yugoslavia in 1990s.
There has been a long history of pogroms and persecution of the Jews in Europe, after all they were seen as the ones that killed Jesus, at least in the eyes of the church. They were often a convienent scapegoat for whatever power that in charge.

The big difference was the Nazis took it to new levels. They invented gasing to make the system more humane, not for the poor people being exterminated, but for the ones doing the exterminating.
They thought it was bad for the soldiers having to shoot all those people so they thought gassing would be better for them.

The funny thing is how the Germans afterwards blamed it all on Hitler and the leading Nazis. For instance the idea of exterminating mentally handicapped and autistic children (Germans included) came from people in the medical arena, not some high ranking Nazi. Boorman et al just thought it was a good idea and went with it.

The "following orders excuse" was/is too convenient.
The German soliders committed too many atrocities in the East for it to be just following orders. They had a superior attitude to everyone else, particularly people in eastern Europe, they did see them as being sub-human.
Then when they lost, of course they were all following orders and they knew nothing of the death camps. Yeah right.

indough

jmayo wrote:

The big difference was the Nazis took it to new levels. They invented gasing to make the system more humane, not for the poor people being exterminated, but for the ones doing the exterminating.
They thought it was bad for the soldiers having to shoot all those people so they thought gassing would be better for them.

Actually I believe it was more down to efficiency than anything else. Not to sound too stereotypical but Germans typically pride themselves on their efficiency.

K8_moos

lyonsy wrote:

(...) i'm also aware that massaccres of jews were carried out by polish and russians during WW2, so hatred of the Jews wasn't just confined to nazis... why did europe hate the jews??

I am curious why You've used Polish and Russians as an example...just curious

Fratton Fred

Noticeable how all the countries that persecuted the Jews were also Catholic countries. Is it just a coincidence or did the Vatican have a hand in this as well?

Spyral

yes the vatican has a hand in everything from killing jews to raping sheep and putting cyanide into durex brand condoms.........

patto_chan

Not 100% sure but I believe the notion that all Jews bore a degree of responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was only officially repudiated by the Catholic Church around the time of Vatican 2. See the middle of article 4 in Nostra Aetate.
I'm not saying it was official policy before then but that sentiment was out there and could have been exploited to foster antisemitism throughout the ages. The Jews were always a minority in European countries and easy to scapegoat in times of trouble.
There's plenty of historical references out there.

TerrorFirmer

K8_moos wrote:

I am curious why You've used Polish and Russians as an example...just curious

Strong anti-jewish violence at regular intervals down through the years was common in both countries and on a much higher scale then in central europe prior to the Nazis rise to power. Persecution of Jews took place after the war on a fairly large scale in the Soviet Union also. as jmayo said the local population of Eastern Europe, particularly the Ukraine and Lithuania, actively participated in killing Jews.

They thought it was bad for the soldiers having to shoot all those people so they thought gassing would be better for them.

Mainly gassing was far more efficient. They couldn't indefinitely execute undesirables by shooting as it was a huge burden on ammunition and was a very slow process.

The German soliders committed too many atrocities in the East for it to be just following orders. They had a superior attitude to everyone else, particularly people in eastern Europe, they did see them as being sub-human.
Then when they lost, of course they were all following orders and they knew nothing of the death camps. Yeah right.

Regular german wehrmacht weren't, generally, guilty of the worst excesses. In fact initially even the Waffen SS was a respectable and honorable fighting force that was diluted heavily by/confused with/integrated with undesirables and other SS formations like the Deaths Head increasingly from June 1941 onwards. A few units tarnished the name of the entire organization.

The Red army was guilty of the same atrocities that the regular Wehrmacht was, without question, although due to the infamy of the Holocaust and subsequent focus on German brutality towards other undesirables, prisoners of war etc it's not a widely considered fact to the average person. It's easy to say that the just following orders excuse is a convenient one. For many German soldiers, it was follow orders or be sent to a punishment frontline formation or be executed yourself. A choice none of us can even begin to comprehend. There was a high rate of suicide among men of the Einsatzgruppen, in fact, the group that was responsible for killing Jews and other undesirables until the Final solution was integrated fully. Many regular German army units did not comply with the orders regarding the execution of Political officers and Jews.

jmayo

HavoK wrote:

Strong anti-jewish violence at regular intervals down through the years was common in both countries and on a much higher scale then in central europe prior to the Nazis rise to power. Persecution of Jews took place after the war on a fairly large scale in the Soviet Union also. as jmayo said the local population of Eastern Europe, particularly the Ukraine and Lithuania, actively participated in killing Jews.

Mainly gassing was far more efficient. They couldn't indefinitely execute undesirables by shooting as it was a huge burden on ammunition and was a very slow process.

Gassing originally came from the idea where they ran a car/truck engine exhaust into a building stuffed full of Jews and other undesirables. The leadership were worried about the toll that continued execution jobs were having on their men so they were tryingnew techniques. After the advent of cyclone B gas they really then turned it into a production line.
All Hess was interested in, was continually meeting deadlines and upping the numbers going through Auswitz.
That was where their efficiency really kicked in.

HavoK wrote:

Regular german wehrmacht weren't, generally, guilty of the worst excesses. In fact initially even the Waffen SS was a respectable and honorable fighting force that was diluted heavily by/confused with/integrated with undesirables and other SS formations like the Deaths Head increasingly from June 1941 onwards. A few units tarnished the name of the entire organization.

Regular german wehrmacht troops had to have been involved in the atrocities against the peoples in captured territories, including Yugoslavia where there were some real brtual reprisals against Tito's partisans.

The Waffen SS were without doubt one of the best fighting units of WWII but they were also one of the most ruthless. Were they not the ones that carried out the execution of GI prisoners in the Ardennes?

One of the few theatres of the war not to have seen the atrocities was North Africa and a lot of that was due to Rommel. Also there were no SS/Gestapo units knocking around.

You have to admit the Germans had a superiority complex, ok the younger ones had it drilled into them through the Hitler Youth mentallity.

The Red army was guilty of atrocities but remember what they were faced with as they recaptured their own territory.
You can not compare what the Germans did with anything the Soviets did in Eastern Europe. Once the Soviets captured Germany and Austria they did rape and pillage, but if I recall the Germans had set up organised rape camps for their soldiers to have their enjoyment with Eastern women long before that.

I still say the excuse offered by the average German, particularly soldiers after the war, that they did not know what was going on was cr**. They were either very gullible or else very stupid if they thought all the Jews disappearing were being repatriated to some location in the East. A lot of them just wanted to keep their heads down and did not want to know. I know there was the fear factor, the Gestapo and their spies.

Some time back, I managed to catch program where they interviewed a German SS soldier that had been working in one of the death camps, he claimed he was just involved in admin work. He actually quiet blatantly stated that he thought the Jews and others were subhuman. He did not see a problem with it. That was the mentallity.

Even though the wehrmacht chiefs of staff detested Hitler and saw him as a jumped up Austrian, they still did nothing about him until the war was turning against them. Then only some of them tried to remove him.
Sadly now those events carried out by some real German heroes are going to be featured in a movie staring Tom Cruise. :rolleyes:

philologos

To the OP: Unfortunately this is prone to happen with alien races and cultures inhabiting other lands. Many people held a view of suspicion towards the Jewish people, somewhat akin to what is happening in relation to Islamophobia at this time. Hitler merely stigmatised this suspicion, and people began to genuinely believe what he said because people didn't know what to make of the Jewish people at the time.

Mick86

The Nazis did not just try to exterminate the Jews.

Something like 80% of Russian POWs died in captivity due to maltreatment and executions. That's about 3 million people. They also exterminated an estimated 200,000 gypsies, probably 200,000 mentally of physically disabled Germans were murdered, between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexuals, between 80,000 and 200,000 Freemasons, 3,000 Jehovah's Witnesses, who knows how many communists and socialists. The list is probably endless.

Fratton Fred

Spyral wrote:

yes the vatican has a hand in everything from killing jews to raping sheep and putting cyanide into durex brand condoms.........

so that's a yes then;)

Snickers Man

Fratton Fred wrote:

Noticeable how all the countries that persecuted the Jews were also Catholic countries. Is it just a coincidence or did the Vatican have a hand in this as well?

Russians ain't Catholics, by and large. They're Orthodox.

McArmalite

Mick86 wrote:

The Nazis did not just try to exterminate the Jews.

Something like 80% of Russian POWs died in captivity due to maltreatment and executions. That's about 3 million people. They also exterminated an estimated 200,000 gypsies, probably 200,000 mentally of physically disabled Germans were murdered, between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexuals, between 80,000 and 200,000 Freemasons, 3,000 Jehovah's Witnesses, who knows how many communists and socialists. The list is probably endless.

Yes Mick, it's often left out/ignored that the Nazi's murdered millions of non Jews due to maltreatment and executions. I believe that something like half a million left wing Germans and Austrians were put into concentration camps and murdered - a fact that was generally ignored as it was considered expedient to portray all the Germans as guilty of inhuman attrocites against other national/ethnic groups, when sadly many of the attrocities were also carried out against their own people.

One of the astounding things that I have experienced when talking to people from Eastern Europe about the Nazi occupation etc, is that almost to a man or woman I have heard Poles, Czechs, Latvians etc say that Stalin was even WORSE than Hitler. Honest. I was in Prague a few years ago and ended up drinking with a bloke from the Isreali army and he told me his father was a Russian jew who had fought in the red army and even he said that Stalin was probably worse.

Fratton Fred wrote:

Noticeable how all the countries that persecuted the Jews were also Catholic countries. Is it just a coincidence or did the Vatican have a hand in this as well?

" how all the countries that persecuted the Jews were also Catholic countries."

Yes indeed Fred, your a genius. A good example of Catholic countries that persecuted the Jews.

1582 C.E. Netherlands Expulsion

1649 C.E. Ukraine Expulsion

1727 C.E. Russia Expulsion

1926 C.E. Uzbekistan Pogrom

Mick86

Snickers Man wrote:

Russians ain't Catholics, by and large. They're Orthodox.

Christian would be more accurate than Catholic. The Jews were blamed for killing Jesus until a few years ago. Whipping up hatred of the Jews was a popular entertainment in the Middle Ages particularly by Monarchs who were in debt to Jewish money-lenders and didn't really want to pay back the debt. The Nazi treatment of Jews was the modern manifestation of an ancient hatred. Anti-semitism probably accounts for the popularity of Israel today.

McArmalite

Mick86 wrote:

Anti-semitism probably accounts for the popularity of Israel today.

Interesting point Mick, though some would argue that their persecution has been exploited to further the Israeli state. There is a book by a writer called Norman Finkelstein whose mother and father survived the concentration camps - The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. In his own words he says " the purpose of this industry is, in my view, ethnic aggrandisement - in particular, to deflect criticism of the State of Israel and to deflect criticism of Jews generally ". I'm afraid I'd have to agree.

Fratton Fred

McArmalite wrote:

" how all the countries that persecuted the Jews were also Catholic countries."

Yes indeed Fred, your a genius. A good example of Catholic countries that persecuted the Jews.

1582 C.E. Netherlands Expulsion

1649 C.E. Ukraine Expulsion

1727 C.E. Russia Expulsion

1926 C.E. Uzbekistan Pogrom

Good morning McArmalite, hope you are well today, nice to hear from you again.

I'm not sure when Holland turned away from the catholic church, but sure Russia and I presume Ukraine would have been orthodox. Uzbekistan was part of the USSR at the time was it not?

No one has answered the question the OP has raised, we have worked out that not only Jews were gassed by the Nazis an the persecution of jews goes back beofre then, but not why the jews have been a common target for discrimination.

If I recall, the Vatican asked for the invasion of a small island off the north east coast of europe because they would not accept catholicism, There were the crusades and the Knights Templar, there was also the widespread persecution of the Huguenots and the Spanish inquisition. Today the Pope has decided that all Christian religions that aren't catholic aren't "Proper" religions, so the vatican does not have a particulalry good record of accepting other christian religions let alone non-christian.

Add that above to over zealous rulers of the time (The English and French monarchy, Hitler, Stalin blah blah blah) and those who would use religion to further their cause (getting rid of wealthy money lenders etc) and you may have an answer.

The flaw though, is the Orthodox counries and in particular Russia (or the soviet union), why a Socialist state would persecute jews has always puzzled me.

jmayo

Fratton Fred wrote:

Good morning McArmalite, hope you are well today, nice to hear from you again.

I'm not sure when Holland turned away from the catholic church, but sure Russia and I presume Ukraine would have been orthodox. Uzbekistan was part of the USSR at the time was it not?

No one has answered the question the OP has raised, we have worked out that not only Jews were gassed by the Nazis an the persecution of jews goes back beofre then, but not why the jews have been a common target for discrimination.

If I recall, the Vatican asked for the invasion of a small island off the north east coast of europe because they would not accept catholicism, There were the crusades and the Knights Templar, there was also the widespread persecution of the Huguenots and the Spanish inquisition. Today the Pope has decided that all Christian religions that aren't catholic aren't "Proper" religions, so the vatican does not have a particulalry good record of accepting other christian religions let alone non-christian.

Add that above to over zealous rulers of the time (The English and French monarchy, Hitler, Stalin blah blah blah) and those who would use religion to further their cause (getting rid of wealthy money lenders etc) and you may have an answer.

The flaw though, is the Orthodox counries and in particular Russia (or the soviet union), why a Socialist state would persecute jews has always puzzled me.

Maybe a communist state would view the Jews as putting their religion before the state and after all the state was all the mattered in their views ?
Also Jewish people within communists countries may have been seen as having allegiance to the state of Israel rather than their own home country.
I know the communists regimes targeted all religious institutions as well as those of the Jewish faith.


Historically the Jews were targeted in Europe because the church condoned it, nay incited it.
Also you could have various rulers that used them as scapegoats to divert their subjects attention when times got tricky.
Also if they had owed richer Jewish merchants/bankers money it killed two birds with one stone so to speak.

Also there was often a jealousy thing together with anitsemitism which probably operated at lower levels in the social system.
That definetly came into play in Europe during WWII.

All minorities, be they religious or racial, within countries/states provide convenient scapegoats for ruling regimes. It is a way of diverting attention.
Look how this has been played out in African countries.
Look how certain US churches are stating Gays are responsible for God punishing good Americans.

The difference was the Nazis took one person's cocked up thinking and made it a policy for a whole state, which then went onto make it a policy for their occupied states and Axis allies. The Nazis and also a fair chunk of the German people I venture, viewed the Eastern European Slavic peoples as being less human than themselves. That meant they could do what they liked with them.
The Nazis viewed anybody that did not fit certain physical and racial sterotypes as fair game for disposal. Categories that did not fit their ideal included people with mental illnesses, physical and mental handicaps, gays, various religions primarily Jewish, gypsies, etc.
Funny thing is half their leadership fell into one of these categories. Goering was probably gay, Hitler was probably schizo, Himmler was not exactly model material either.

Note I said Nazis not fascists because Mussoilin nor Franco were of a mind to exterminate all these people.

It should also be noted here that some countries tried to protect their Jewish population. Denmark being one of the most prominent. Say what you want about Mussolini he never signed up for the elimination of the Jews AFAIK.
Also there were lots of good people within the countries whose regimes help consign the Jews to the death camps. They did their best to help individuals Jews.

Mick86

McArmalite wrote:

Interesting point Mick, though some would argue that their persecution has been exploited to further the Israeli state. There is a book by a writer called Norman Finkelstein whose mother and father survived the concentration camps - The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. In his own words he says " the purpose of this industry is, in my view, ethnic aggrandisement - in particular, to deflect criticism of the State of Israel and to deflect criticism of Jews generally ". I'm afraid I'd have to agree.

I've no doubt there is an element of MOPEry alive and well in Israel. However there is an antipathy towards Israel that, in my opinion, has it's roots in a culture of anti-semitism that stretches back centuries.

missmatty

I've read alot about their history and they just can't win either way!

They have been hounded and discriminated against for centuries, thrown out of countries and their possessions taken (if they weren't killed). Moved on to other places where the same thing would eventually happen again.

It's not just a discrimination against a different religion, it's also a different culture. Even in Europe during the war there was a huge difference between assimilated professional jews and the peasant religious jews from the shtetls with their sidelocks etc.

It was this discrimination that eventually led to Zionism where the Jews envisaged a homeland that was 'traditionally' theirs where they could be finally free of persecution. Now I don't agree with the taking of the Palestinian land (although they actually bought alot of it and converted it to agricultural land from dry desert) and with alot of their ways of doing things in Israel. But if Europe hadn't pretty much driven them out and killed so many, Israel may have never come into being.

I mean what were they supposed to do? They had to go somewhere after the war and many western countries weren't exactly opening their doors wide. De Valera wouldn't even let in refugees during the war, except for a group of children i think. I could go on.......:D

Snickers Man

Jews have been persecuted for centuries off and on in a variety of countries both Christian, secular and Muslim because they offer to cynical purveyors of real-politik the vital attribute of being a distinguishable, definable and largely separate minority.

They tended not to intermarry with Gentiles and kept to themselves. maintaining often their own language (Yiddish in Eastern Europe) and customs. When the time came to look for a scapegoat, as it invariably did, they were the perfect match. Other divisions could be left aside in pursuit of the "common enemy".

Just imagine a scarier, real version of d'Unbelievables: "Get stuck into them lads. They're no relation."

None of this is to condone their persecution. Just a way of explaining how the unscupulous could use their "outsider" status to further their own ends.

Mick86

Snickers Man wrote:

None of this is to condone their persecution. Just a way of explaining how the unscupulous could use their "outsider" status to further their own ends.

It's strange that Germany, the country where Jews seemed most integrated into the general population, should be the place where the worst discrimination took place.





Two who were willing to integrate.

ejmaztec

I think that the Nazis hatred of the Jews stems from their hatred of the communists. Many high-ranking Soviet communists were either Jewish or had Jewish ancestry. It was the Russians that came up with the 6 million holocaust calculation, when other people calculated 2 or 3 million. I don't know how much arguing went on over the numbers, but it seems to have stuck at what the Russians suggested.

What I think is a little weird is that Lenin introduced a law making anti-semitism illegal. I'm wondering how this can be, given the communist stance of outlawing religion. It also seems odd that the 1926 Uzbekistan pogrom, mentioned in someone's earlier post, was actually allowed to take place.

I don't see that the communists supressed Judaism. When you count the numbers of the present oligarchs, the vast majority are Jewish e.g. Roman Abramov, the Chelsea owner.

The following article from 2005 goes into detail about Russia's "Anti-semitism?"
http://www.jamestown.org/edm/article.php?article_id=2369187

Mick86

ejmaztec wrote:

I think that the Nazis hatred of the Jews stems from their hatred of the communists. Many high-ranking Soviet communists were either Jewish or had Jewish ancestry.

It didn't make any difference what religion a Russian professed.

ejmaztec wrote:

It was the Russians that came up with the 6 million holocaust calculation, when other people calculated 2 or 3 million. I don't know how much arguing went on over the numbers, but it seems to have stuck at what the Russians suggested.

Murdering 2 or 3 million people doesn't sound all that bad. Some people have been known to say that the whole Holocaust is a Jewish invention and that it never happened at all.

brianthebard

McArmalite wrote:

Good link there Mike. Interesting that Ireland is not on that list. I think I remember one of the Briscoe family stating that ( apart from a lunatic of a priest who stirred up anti Jewish feelings in Limerick around 1904), that Ireland was the sole country in Europe that never discriminated or persecuted against the Jews.

Isn't that half a line from Ulysses? The second part is "Because we never let them in".

brianthebard

lyonsy wrote:

Why was it that the jews were the target of the holocaust? Surely it wasn't due to hitlers views alone, there must have been a strong resentment already in existance among the german people before the nazis came to power that allowed it to go on. Does anyone know a specific reason for this? Some people have suggested to me that the Jews owned a lot of businesses, banks etc. in germany in the 30s at a time when the average german person had little leading to people resenting them, but i find this hard to believe. i'm also aware that massaccres of jews were carried out by polish and russians during WW2, so hatred of the Jews wasn't just confined to nazis... why did europe hate the jews??

With the rise of nationalism there was a subsequent rise in suspicion, hatred, racism and bigotry directed at people who lived within a nation/state, but who were not tied to that nation. Each nation during the nineteenth century, be it France, Germany, Italy or whatever, sought to define what made each of them unique, special, better than the others, and worthy of being a nation. The Jewish diaspora were pretty much a fly in the ointment in that regard, since they did not belong solely to the nation they lived in, and since they were (generally) of a different ethnic group, they were in most cases superfluous to a nation's identity. They were in effect a reification of Freud's concept of the Other. In Germany this was especially true since the Romantic concepts of the Volksgemeinschaft was very strong throughout the nineteenth century and very popular among nationalists. This theory/concept/whatever, basically said that the volk, the people, were rooted in the countryside. The nature of the country helped to form the people. Consequently those who were not rooted, such as the Jew, the communist, the gypsy, the immigrant worker, were enemies of the Volk, preventing the rest of the german people from moving to a sort of higher mystical plane. These sentiments were repeated in other European countries, but by the twentieth century they were increasingly seen as too extreme, but in Germany they were seen as the last possible salvation of the German people. This is perhaps one of the main reasons why the holocaust started in Germany. But after Germany took power in other countries these sentiments started to come out. There were holocausts in East Europe by puppet governments set up by the Nazis. France sent over 100,000 men women and children to their deaths in concentration camps, even though the Nazis had asked them not to send children.

I think this will answer some of your questions.

Mick86

brianthebard wrote:

Isn't that half a line from Ulysses? The second part is "Because we never let them in".

The presence of the Briscoes and the Shatters would seem to give the lie to Joyce's statement.

McArmalite

brianthebard wrote:

Isn't that half a line from Ulysses? The second part is "Because we never let them in".

Dunno, Joyce was a writer and a personality I haven't the slightest interest in. Daniel O’Connell supported the repeal of discrimmatory legislation against Jewish people saying "Ireland has claims on your ancient race, it is the only country that I know of unsullied by any one act of persecution of the Jews".

Mick86 wrote:

The presence of the Briscoes and the Shatters would seem to give the lie to Joyce's statement.

Also Mervyn Taylor former Labour Party TD and Gerald Goldberg a former Lord Mayor of Cork. Apart from the disgraceful Limerick boycott in 1904, although a very small community but have been here many centruies, they seemed to suffer none of the biogtry as they encountered elsewhere.

Snickers Man

ejmaztec wrote:

I think that the Nazis hatred of the Jews stems from their hatred of the communists. Many high-ranking Soviet communists were either Jewish or had Jewish ancestry.

It is certainly the case that many of the leading Bolsheviks were Jewish. Eg Kamenev, Zinoviev and of course Trotsky himself.

No less than in Ireland, the intellectual paths that the Jewish people, typically in the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, took to achieve liberation from the oppression to which they were subjected included both Nationalist and Socialist options.

The Zionists believed that as Jews they would always be persecuted unless they had their own state, where their Jewishness would be irrelevant. Others took the socialist route arguing that Jewish and Christian workers and peasants were being divided and ruled by capitalists, or even feudalists in 19th century Russia and so they had to unite the working class in a socialist secular revolution.

Of course, each ideology influenced the other. So it is no coincidence that many leading Bolsheviks were Jewish and that many leading Zionists were socialist. The kibbutzim were the mainstay of Israel's elite until recent decades and I defy anyone to produce a picture of an Israeli Prime minister before the right winger Begin who regularly wore a tie. I think the only photo of Ben Gurion so attired was during the declaration of the State of Israel, which was considered a momentous enough event to put standard socialist dress sense to one side.

Whether that was the reason the Nazis took it out on the Jews I am not sure. I think they had a more simple and basic "unite the Volk against a common identifiable scapegoat for all its ills" motivation.

axer

lyonsy wrote:

Why was it that the jews were the target of the holocaust? Surely it wasn't due to hitlers views alone, there must have been a strong resentment already in existance among the german people before the nazis came to power that allowed it to go on. Does anyone know a specific reason for this? Some people have suggested to me that the Jews owned a lot of businesses, banks etc. in germany in the 30s at a time when the average german person had little leading to people resenting them, but i find this hard to believe. i'm also aware that massaccres of jews were carried out by polish and russians during WW2, so hatred of the Jews wasn't just confined to nazis... why did europe hate the jews??

Basically the Jews were good at looking after their money which meant they were generally more wealthy and owned many businesses as a result. The German people were going through a bad time and many were jealous of the Jews as they were not taking the brunt like the rest of the Germans. TBH I think the Jews are an easy group to target if you are that way inclined.

skelliser

its simple the jews are the chosen ones, gods chosen people,they have always got the short end of the stick from ancient egypt to today
and in relation to a mustly christian europe they helped/collabarated in crucifiying jesus christ. afterall jesus was a jew and was betrayed by his own kind so ppl would have been weary of them ever since

those are the seeds of doubt in peoples minds people in positions of power ie, church,kings etc need to find easy scapegoaths for there own domestic problems

brianthebard

I don't think that's accurate skelliser, Hitler never invoked God when trying to convince people to get rid of the Jews.

valen

Snickers Man wrote:

Jews have been persecuted for centuries off and on in a variety of countries both Christian, secular and Muslim because they offer to cynical purveyors of real-politik the vital attribute of being a distinguishable, definable and largely separate minority.

Finally, someone that actually understood what it was about.

In the earlier medieval period, usury (money-lending) was forbidden to Christians, so Jews filled the gap. It was a dangerous game; money was good, but at any time the upper class (who borrowed heavily) could decide not to pay the lender back & have them thrown out.

But by the 1700s, it was certainly nothing to do with money anymore...the big European banks were run by Christians like the Medici. Resentment was now fuelled by the fact that Jews actively refused to assimilate into their adopted countries. They stood out, just as rulers had better understanding of the power of whipping the mob up against external problems to avoid civil unrest at home.

Is it that impossible to imagine that if a handful of Jews could have Christ killed, the whole race wasn't able to curdle milk, use magic to get ahead in business, kidnap children, etc. etc. ?

John