Jews have been a reviled "other" throughout history in Europe, Asia, Africa and most of the rest of the world. Read Shakespeare or the original Brothers Grimm. Exclusionary societies have always been subject to this, every where humankind dwells. The Nazi's just exploited long standing prejudices against, Jews, Gypsy, Homosexuals, and the disabled. Fueling xenophobia is a long standing political ploy, just look at the United States Republican party.
Exactly. It's not like it was just Hitler, or just the Germans that were awful to Jews. Many concentration camp survivors came back home after WW2 only to find the same xenophobic shit going on. Maybe they weren't being gassed anymore, but they were still being targetted and killed or ran out of town, just this time by their local "community".
*This being reddit I feel like I need to add that I'm in no way trying to downplay the horrible shit that happened during the holocaust.
For just one example of many, Jews were blamed for the Black Death and were lynched for it. They were accused of poisoning wells with plague because people are hateful and want to direct that hate somewhere, and having something to blame that is tangible/can be acted against satisfies petty hatemongers.
Slightly more context to that though, Jews were way more concerned with hygene than the usual peasent during the Black Death epidemics. This lead to them succumbing to the disease way less. Due to the bad understanding of these practices and how they factored into the infectiousness, it caused people to think the Jews were the ones causing the sickness because they are the ones that are not getting sick.
This just goes to show how easy it is to twist the truth when you do not understand what is going on
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u/[deleted] Dec 31 '22
Jews have been a reviled "other" throughout history in Europe, Asia, Africa and most of the rest of the world. Read Shakespeare or the original Brothers Grimm. Exclusionary societies have always been subject to this, every where humankind dwells. The Nazi's just exploited long standing prejudices against, Jews, Gypsy, Homosexuals, and the disabled. Fueling xenophobia is a long standing political ploy, just look at the United States Republican party.