The World's Oldest Hate Metastasizes

Thanks Nachum.

Some Europeans pay lip service to hating Israel, but also oppose anti-Semitism. But when you treat the one majority-Jewish state in the world differently than you treat all others and use the most vicious language at your disposal to condemn Israel, then you are singling it out not for its behavior, but for the makeup of its population.

Okay, I’ll bite. Why would Romans a couple of thousand years ago not have been Europeans as much as inhabitants of Africa or Asia were Africans or Asians,as presumably was the case, at that time?

And I thought you were going to say Christ.

Consider my comment a matter of semantics rather than geography.

An attempt to clarify:

1. The term 'Europeans' as it is used today is generally understood to include (short of 'consist of') north-of-the-Alps Europe where a Jewish population simply was not present thousands of years ago. Conversely, when we think of ancient Greece and Rome, we usually do not refer to those societies as European, but rather as ancient Rome or Greece. The modern designation 'European' does not date back to thousands of years ago (to quote wikipedia: A cultural definition of Europe as the lands of Latin Christendom coalesced in the 8th century, signifying the new cultural condominium created through the confluence of Germanic traditions and Christian-Latin culture, defined partly in contrast with Byzantium and Islam, and limited to northern Iberia, the British Isles, France, Christianized western Germany, the Alpine regions and northern and central Italy.[14] The concept is one of the lasting legacies of the Carolingian Renaissance: "Europa" often figures in the letters of Charlemagne's court scholar, Alcuin.[15] This division—as much cultural as geographical—was used until the Late Middle Ages, when it was challenged by the Age of Discovery.[16][17][why?] The problem of redefining Europe was finally resolved in 1730 when, instead of waterways, the Swedish geographer and cartographer von Strahlenberg proposed the Ural Mountains as the most significant eastern boundary, a suggestion that found favour in Russia and throughout Europe.[18]).

2. Have Jews in Europe been persecuted in the course of history due to their ethnicity or their religion? I had always thought that early persecution of the Jewish people was a matter of religion, not ethnicity. Forced conversion to the prevalent religion (Christianity or islam) seemed to be the main thrust back in the days of the Holy Inquisition, or the islamic conquest of Spain (which, again, was not *thousands* of years ago). Ethnic Jews that converted were pretty much tolerated. Which leads me to question the use of the ethnicity-focused term 'anti-semitic' rather than a religious 'anti-Jewish'. Jews were not persecuted for their ethnicity until very recently, relatively speaking.

To summarize, the combination of *thousands* of years ago plus 'anti-semitism' plus 'Europeans' struck me as somewhat incongruent as regards modern understanding.