[muir_redwoods]

I guess the Jews are the George W Bush of world history.

[Forward the Light Brigade]

Old Idea—when trouble exists—blame it on the Jews. Ancient idea, and one that still works so it seems.

[Cronos]

well, the root cause of this is from 3 sources -- in Western Europe from what happened in Spain when the Moors invaded and Jews continued to work as before under the Moslems. the second are the prejudices from Byzantium which remembered the Kitos revolts -- major revolts by diasporic Jews in north africa and cyprus in 170s, where there was a widespread slaughter of Roman citizens and others (200,000 in N Africa, 240,000 in Cyprus according to Cassius Dio) by the Jewish rebels.

The third, which tied in to the above two was in 1793 when Russia swallowed the eastern half of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Until that time there were few Jews in Russia, while 60% of the worlds Jews or more lived in Poland. The Russians didn't understand this new group and demonised it.

This had the effect of creating a vicious circle -- Jews were marginalized and brutalised (well, most of Russia was) and they eventually moved against this in the late 1800s being drawn to an idea of equality for all -- remember that some, SOME of the earliest socialist ideas are things we now take for granted as equality for all etc. This then influenced the stereotype of the Jew as the "other" and a vicious circle