Corrosive Racism: The Jews

 The history of racism, prejudice and oppression of certain ethnic groups is long and brutal as is the list of ethnic groups.  They include such people as Asians, Hispanics, Blacks, Armenians, Southern Europeans like Italians and Irish, just to name a few.  The Jews, however, have the first position on racism, oppression, and genocide against them, such as the holocaust of World War II.

 

For this piece I will concentrate on Jewish racism and oppression.  From the time of Jesus Christ, the Jews have been persecuted; no, lets back up, they were persecuted even before Jesus, by the Greeks and Romans, for instance.  After the crucifixion of Jesus, the Jews were accused of killing Jesus.  Even the Christian Church, and by that, I mean most of Christianity, oppressed the Jews because they accused them of killing Jesus.  Here is the biggest problem:  Accusing the Jews of killing Jesus totally misunderstands and misrepresents what the crucifixion was all about.  No, the Jews did not kill Jesus:  we did by our sins; you and me.  This is what is called redemption. That is why Jesus was crucified, to pay for our sins.  The Jews no more killed Jesus than we did.  The Romans killed Jesus.  The Jews condemned Him to death, but the Romans could have declined to kill him. This misunderstanding of the crucifixion goes on today among Christians.  In my piece about Pope Pius IX posted in January of 2020 on this blog, titled Pope Pius IX, Pope, King and Tyrant, I made this statement about how Pius IX treated Jews in Rome in the mid 19^th Century: “In Rome, the Jewish population was kept in a ghetto by law.  Jews could not own property, they could only work in some professions, but not others; they could not testify in court.  The Jews even had to pay a large sum each year to support the House of the Catechumens, the church organization dedicated to their conversion.”  On top of that Jews had a curfew.  Anyone not inside the ghetto by a specified time had to sleep in the streets outside of the ghetto.  Suffice it to say, the church was one of the worst offenders against the Jews.

 

After the Hamas massacre of Israelis of October 7, 2023, many Jews all over the world, and especially in the United States were attacked randomly.  Harvard University as well as most of academia, refused to condemn the persecution of Jews.  This is akin to persecuting all blacks because two blacks committed a crime in your city. Stupid is as stupid does as the philosopher, Forrest Gump would say. 

 

In World War II, Hitler rounded up all Jews and sent them to the gas chamber to be murdered simply for being Jewish.  During the Spanish Inquisition, Jews were forcibly expelled from their own country.  I’m from a small Sicilian town of around 3,000 residents in the Madonie Mountains of north central Sicily.  My town had about 53 Jewish households that were expelled during the Spanish Inquisition (Sicily was a Spanish colony at the time).  These people lost their home, their property and everything they had.  The people and governments that expelled these good people ended up suffering for the loss of these good citizens which is immeasurable.  For Jews, in general, are self-reliant, industrious and some of the most productive people on earth.  Some of the best minds in history were Jews:  Einstein and Niels Bohr in science, for instance, and Gustav Mahler and George Gershwin in music, just to name some.  What country would not want to have such people?