this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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europe imagines itself as the inheritor of roman and greek societies, and so it inherited/borrowed their fear and hatred of "the orient" (see greek self-myths about thermopylae and rome's obsession with carthage. or rome's own "troubles" with jews).
jews were the most visible "orientals" in europe until very recent times.
you can see this dynamic in play when for example they start a crusade to go kill muslims in the middle east, realize that they have jews much closer to home and so just do a big pogrom.
Yeah, you can actually notice a rise in Judeophobia after the failure of the Crusades. The inability of European leaders to successfully defeat, conquer, and colonize Muslim realms forced them to reorient their xenophobia toward Jews. Then they discovered the Americas whose civilizations were far behind in military technology and they just repeated the Crusades with greater success. Anti-Jewish sentiment somewhat dwindled thereafter until, sure enough, Europe ran out of places to colonize and so it ramped right back up again.
but it's also not like they had to rediscover antisemitism, they had that all along, inherited and gradually transformed, but alive and well.
i think the late 19th / early 20th century antisemitism (dreyfuss affair to holocaust) was at least partly caused by mid-to-late-19th century emancipation of jews, which a) made them legally equal and b) unleashed a tide of european jewish assimilation unlike anything before. this meant that by 1930, you had vast multitudes of europeans jews who didnt even look like jews.
to put it even more starkly (and i think this is relevant, given the "they're taking our women" shit white nationalists go on about in the US, the bastard child of european madness), european fathers could no longer be sure the very nice suitor their daughter brought home wasnt jewish. who knows, maybe he was.