Because of the role that they believe that G_d obligated them to (as “his chosen people”), the Jews hold themselves to a higher intellectual standard than other peoples. Because they mustn’t give to G_d anything less than their best effort. So they always probably have been intellectually superior to the non-Jews around them. And since they were often forbidden from owning property, they were forced to make their living chiefly through intellectual pursuits, like lending money. And when they get bested by a Jew in a business deal, most people find it easier to console themesleves that they were cheated than that they were outsmarted.
But Jews didn’t have it nearly so bad until non-Jews got the idea that they were worshiping the Talmud. The Talmud is essentially a scholarly analysis of the Torah. It was written in part to provide clarity on the Torah’s instructions on how a proper Jew should live in the form of interpretations of the Torah written by learned men.
The problem with the Talmud is it was written by men. And Jews are so reverential to the Talmud that to non-Jews it is indistinguishable from worship. So long as they were seen as worshipers of the Torah, Christians and Muslims were more accepting of them because both their holy books derived from the Jewish holy book. If their holy book contained the word of G_d, then so must the Jewish holy book have contained the word of G_d. So they tended to cut the Jews more slack because they were fellow “people of the book.”
But the Talmud was the word of man. And if they worshiped a book written by man, they could no longer be considered fellow “people of the book.” If they worshiped the Talmud then they were as pagans and worthy of revile.
So Christians and Muslims misunderstanding of the role of the Talmud, which was a book that Jews wrote to help themselves learn how better to adhere to the words of G_d in the Torah, caused a fundamental rift between them and the Christians and Jews.
But it was easier to do because the Jews always were so bent on remaining separate from non-Jews. Which aroused suspicion among non-Jews. And the the less intellectual types could never grasp why the Jews were so successful, and preferred to attribute their superiority to cheating or witchcraft.
Obviously that should have been the Christians and the Muslims.