Does anyone understand why, in times of strife and turmoil, the Jews are eventually always targeted? I don't understand it. Historically, it's always the Jews as the scapegoat when one is required.
And that idiot lunatic of a "preacher": 'if the Jews had ovens, they'd put palestinians in them'! The guy feels perfectly safe saying this out loud on a public street when he needs a punch in the head.
My theory (based upon a little history):
The reason for the Jews always being a ready target for pogroms is simple, really. Jews, as a rule, always lived in their own enclaves, ghettos/shtetls/etc. They lived together in settlements/towns as do many American Jews live together in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn or Spring Valley and Kiryas Joel in Rockland County, outside New York City. Jewish life is about community, no different than the Amish, but in making such living arrangements, they make themselves into 'the other', and it is easy to get worked up over and attack 'the other'. It just needs the right match.
Now that said, being gathered into their own little hamlets of hovels, they made an easily accessable target for any ruler looking for a diversion from their own inadequacies (free public entertainment to keep the masses happy, not unlike the public execution displays today in Sowdi Arabia or Iran).
On top of that, you have the whole Jewish-Christian issue in old Europe, where many in the Church blamed the Jews for killing Christ. So the rulers had a ready supply of aggrieved and outraged Catholics (then later Protestants) ready to go at the Jews on a moment's notice.
There is one more aspect, an economic one. If you read Sir Walter Scott's
Ivanhoe today, you'll be surprised at how much Jew hatred is in that book. But the novel does explain in a roundabout way why these pogroms happened. Now this is not a neo-Nazi conspiracy theory, but it all comes down to money. Loans, actually. Loans made to rulers to fight wars, etc. Usury was a sin in Christianity, but making a little interest wasn't a religious crime to Jews. So the wealthier became the bankers to kings and royalty all over Europe, loaning them money as needed. Now once these kings and royalty owed back the money, they didn't want to repay the 'dirty Jew'; such repayments might affect their kingdoms/duchies/whatever with austerity measures/increased taxation possibly enraging their non-Jewish population to revolt, and a revolt was never a good thing. So they decided on a solution to their monetary problems: Start pogroms, trumping up some charge or charges. By doing so, monies owed might never have to be repaid as the original lender might be dead. Of course, the majority of the Jews killed or injured in such pogroms were not wealthy, but sterotypes are hard to break, as the faux reverends Jackson and Sharpton exemplify every time they open their bigoted 'Hymietown/Jewish interlopers' mouths. (Muslims also do not believe in charging interest so they, too, had/have a reason to hate those interest-grubbing money-lending Jews, above and beyond 'religious' reasons.)
