Earlier genocide of Jews?

Yuelang

Banned
Holocaust level? I'd say impossible before late 19th century simply because there was no bureaucratic base and actual capacity to ship so many people in camps and kill them with such speed. (that's ignoring the fact that there was no Nazi equivalent who'd want to exterminate Jews as oppose to convert or expell them). Which is why pogroms ould never reach Holocaust levels, there simply was no capability to mold such violence on large, nation wide scale

Now, if you are talking about genocide in terms of removing the presence you had cases of countries giving Jews a choice of conversion or expulsion. But that's not genocide, it's ethnic cleansing and forced assimilation.

uh, the lost ten tribes from the kingdom of (Northern) Israel begs to disagree with that.

Virtually, all current day Jews descended from those who resides in the Kingdom of Judah, with some levites and even fewer coming from the ten tribes.

In fact, the survival of some of the Israelite refugees could be argued as almost single handedly as Judah's efforts, as those who escape outside are forced to abandon their identity and assimilated by their foster sovciety. Those who not escape are simply slaughtered to the last man.


And not only Israel Kingdom, there are many more victims of those Assyrians, proudly inscribed in their monuments and proven by archeologists.

Yeah, to slaughter in pure numbers terms, Nazi Germany still win, but in the terms of absolute percentage, even ancient method of stabbing them with spears could reach more staggering values...
 
If the object is to wipe out the ancient Hebrews as a people, Senacherib is probably the best bet. If things go only a little differently than OTL, the Kingdom of Judah is utterly crushed (as the Kingdom of Israel had been only a few years previously), with all the adult and teenage males the Assyrians can find killed, and all the women and small children distributed as slaves in the empire.

Pissing off Assyria at this point in history was not generally a good idea.
 
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Did the prejudice have its roots in Roman times where Judea was a hotbed of rebellion and stubborn Judaism or did the prejudices begin to manifest after the fall of the Roman Empire? OR did the Antisemitism start going after the Christianization of the Roman Empire?


It began when Judaism officially divorced Christianity from itself, leaving a bias against Judaism in Christian ideology which then carried on into governmental practice when it was formally adopted by the Roman Empire. Antisemitic laws then created by Rome such as edicts preventing Jews from serving in office, associating in public with Christians, etc, carried antisemitism into populations throughout the Roman Empire.
 
It began when Judaism officially divorced Christianity from itself, leaving a bias against Judaism in Christian ideology which then carried on into governmental practice when it was formally adopted by the Roman Empire. Antisemitic laws then created by Rome such as edicts preventing Jews from serving in office, associating in public with Christians, etc, carried antisemitism into populations throughout the Roman Empire.

I'm pretty sure it was the other way around. Jesus was executed by the Romans for sedition, as was standard at the time. Later, Paul was gathering converts for the Jesus movement without requiring the non-Jewish males to be circumcised. When the authorities in Jerusalem put their foot down about this and demanded that they be circumcised, which would doubtless mean that almost all of them would refuse (adult circumcision at the time being horribly dangerous with a high fatality rate) and would depart his flock, Paul broke with them and aligned himself with the Romans instead. This meant whitewashing the Roman involvement with the death of Jesus and transferring the blame to the non-Jesus-following Jews. Hence the claims of a Jewish vote to have Jesus executed (which was legally impossible, they did not have the authority to do so) and the claim that the Romans didn't really want to execute him (despite this being SOP in similar cases of sedition). And the blood-guilt falsehood stuck over the centuries.
 
There are way too many instances of "Jewish extermination" in history to even begin to put them here. Many countries simply expelled the Jews (England in the 13th century is one), some used a combination of expulsion and conversion or death (Spain/Portugal), and "local" massacres that killed most if not of all of the Jews in a given area (and any survivors tended to leave) and so forth. When the Jews were concentrated in Israel in ancient times you could have a combination extermination/conversion wiping out the religion. Once Jews began to spread out (during the Roman Empire for sure even before the destruction of the Temple/revolt) its hard to get a total wipeout, or even reduction of numbers so low they fade away.

When you get to the 20th century you have railroads and the industrial capability to wipe out all the Jews in an area "you" control, but unless you/your ideology controls the world you won't get them all.

As to why the Jews were persecuted, they were only seriously persecuted as a religion rather than as a social/political group after the advent of Christianity. Likewise in Islam. The basic reason for this was that both Christianity and Islam, building on concepts from Judaism but seeing themselves as the new or replacement prophecy and came down on the Jews as rejecting the new revelation. Specific charges about the "blood libel", spreading plague, etc simply built on this basic issue.

FWIW one of the reasons Jews tended to be bankers/moneylenders in Christian Europe was this was forbidden to Christians, and many professions were closed to Jews (via guild rules, nit allowed to own land, etc). Furthermore the rate of literacy amongst Jews was much, much higher than that in the lay Christian population - a requirement for letters of credit etc. Not only did this cause resentment (nobody likes the guy who forecloses or holds a loan) but expulsion, persecution was a great way to wipe out debts.
 
My best bet is with Titus or Hadrian with a more severe Siege of Jerusalen. Idk how much severe must be (1M slain and 97000 slaves IRL), but if there is a decisive event that marked the jews, it was this.

Assyrians didnt massacred the jews, only relocated to somewhere else.

After the Titus siege, the rest of the jews were displaced along the mediterranean and the rest of the Roman empires, so if this is prevented you can have the genocide.
 
One could argue that the massacres in Germany during the Crusades were attempted Genocide. The most likely scenario is the Chiemlniski revolt in Poland/Lithuania/Ukraine. Prior to the Shoah, those massacres of the Jewish population there was the standard to which Jewish historians compared all other atrocities.
 

Deleted member 1487

That was Babylonian captivity, they are arguably much more "civilized" than the utterly Brutal and bloodthirsty Assyrians. Assyrians, who deem slaughtering entire male population of a nation and raping and enslaving their women as a standard method to subjungate a rival kingdom...
Was that abnormal for the place and time though? According to the bible the ancient Hebrews did that to the Canaanites. Later the Mongols would slaughter entire civilizations.
 

Lateknight

Banned
Was that abnormal for the place and time though? According to the bible the ancient Hebrews did that to the Canaanites. Later the Mongols would slaughter entire civilizations.

The whole scale slaughter of populations was always expectional it usually didn't make sense to kill all those potential workers.
 

Deleted member 1487

The whole scale slaughter of populations was always expectional it usually didn't make sense to kill all those potential workers.
So 'civilization' then was dependent on being pragmatic enough to keep around forced labor?
 
Part of it is probably because people believed they killed Jesus. Of course it's silly, because Jesus was also a Jew.
 
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"Constantine's Sword" http://www.amazon.com/Constantines-Sword-Church-Jews-History/dp/B002WTCA1Y is a pretty solid history of how the Christian church, and Christianity at large, came to see Jews as The Enemy.

Bruce

(Jews and Judaism of course are two separate things: it's only with the Spanish "Limpieza De Sangre" nonsense that the notion of Jews being _inherently_ a threat even if they converted began to seep into official thinking, although something of the sort had no doubt long existed on the "Johann the Miller told me Jews have tails. And horns, under the hats they always wear" level. )
 
I'm pretty sure it was the other way around. Jesus was executed by the Romans for sedition, as was standard at the time. Later, Paul was gathering converts for the Jesus movement without requiring the non-Jewish males to be circumcised. When the authorities in Jerusalem put their foot down about this and demanded that they be circumcised, which would doubtless mean that almost all of them would refuse (adult circumcision at the time being horribly dangerous with a high fatality rate)

I am rather skeptical of that claim, since Muslims traditionally did the circumcision during adolescence. Reference?
 
State sanctioned pogroms in Europe were pretty typical the Middle Ages really up to the 19th century, especially in Eastern Europe.

That was how people were hearing and reading about the events in Europe in say 1944 and the word commonly used at the time for it. They really didn't use on mass the words in the modern lexicon like Holocaust, Final Solution or genocide until well after the war.

image033_w200.png~original


The difference is the scale of what happened given how spread out the European population of Jews were really was not possible until you had the technology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries at the earliest.

That being said during the Roman revolts the Jewish population was heavily concentrated in one relatively tiny area revolting. The number killed in the final revolt was quite horrific and of course the war included mass ethnic cleansing. The Romans were not beyond genocide if they got pissed off enough, though it was usually unruly tribes they would get angry enough to put to the sword.
 
"State sanctioned Pogroms" weren't a part of historical state policy before the 19th century, unless you count the Spanish Inquisition. Jews were useful to the ruling classes for various reasons and the Church considered it important for the Jews to survive until Judgement Day, when they would convert en masse. Massacres were usually popular things whipped up by the wilder-eyed sort of low level priests and monks in the wake of crusades, plagues, etc. Catholic church never officially supported pogroms, although for sake of peace with secular authority they did often turn a blind eye. There were mass _expulsions_, but that was a different sort of animal. Eastern Europe - more specifically Poland-Lithuania - was a _refuge_ for Jews until the Russian takeover.

Bruce
 
"State sanctioned Pogroms" weren't a part of historical state policy before the 19th century, unless you count the Spanish Inquisition.

I do count the Spanish Inquisition among others, a great many pogram's in European history I do believe were state backed to varying degrees. That includes officials of the various kings stirring the pot and causing anti-Jewish killings for a whole host of reasons.

Hell I even believe it of the Kielce Pogram in Poland in 1946 was in fact backed by state authorities. But, most records either never existed in terms of the pre-19th century pogroms or were destroyed by state officials as was the case of the Kielce Pogram.

Kielce pogrom

The Kielce Pogrom was an outbreak of violence against the Jewish community centre' gathering of refugees in the city of Kielce, Poland on 4 July 1946 in the presence of the Polish Communist armed forces (LWP, KBW) which resulted in the killing of 42 Jews. Polish Communist courts later tried and condemned nine people to death in connection with the incident. Numerous academic sources assert that the massacre was instigated by the Soviet-backed Communist security corps, possibly for propaganda purposes, attempting to discredit Poland's anti-Communist stance and to maintain totalitarian control over the country.

Because the top-secret case files were destroyed, the academic inquiry is ongoing with regard to possible secret coordination with the NKVD by the Polish authorities.[1][3] In 2001–04 the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) conducted an investigation into the pogrom and closed the case stating (without entering into details) that the events of 4 July 1946 were a result of a mishap. Another communiqué published by the IPN two years later confirmed only that four decades after the fact the remaining paper trail was still being destroyed by the pro-Soviet security police under Gen. Czesław Kiszczak.

As the deadliest pogrom against Polish Jews after the Second World War, the incident was a significant point in the post-war history of Jews in Poland. It took place only a year after the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust, shocking Jews in Poland, many Poles, and the international community. It has been considered a catalyst for the flight from Poland of most remaining Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce_pogrom
 
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There are way too many instances of "Jewish extermination" in history to even begin to put them here. Many countries simply expelled the Jews (England in the 13th century is one), some used a combination of expulsion and conversion or death (Spain/Portugal), and "local" massacres that killed most if not of all of the Jews in a given area (and any survivors tended to leave) and so forth. When the Jews were concentrated in Israel in ancient times you could have a combination extermination/conversion wiping out the religion. Once Jews began to spread out (during the Roman Empire for sure even before the destruction of the Temple/revolt) its hard to get a total wipeout, or even reduction of numbers so low they fade away.

When you get to the 20th century you have railroads and the industrial capability to wipe out all the Jews in an area "you" control, but unless you/your ideology controls the world you won't get them all.

As to why the Jews were persecuted, they were only seriously persecuted as a religion rather than as a social/political group after the advent of Christianity. Likewise in Islam. The basic reason for this was that both Christianity and Islam, building on concepts from Judaism but seeing themselves as the new or replacement prophecy and came down on the Jews as rejecting the new revelation. Specific charges about the "blood libel", spreading plague, etc simply built on this basic issue.

FWIW one of the reasons Jews tended to be bankers/moneylenders in Christian Europe was this was forbidden to Christians, and many professions were closed to Jews (via guild rules, nit allowed to own land, etc). Furthermore the rate of literacy amongst Jews was much, much higher than that in the lay Christian population - a requirement for letters of credit etc. Not only did this cause resentment (nobody likes the guy who forecloses or holds a loan) but expulsion, persecution was a great way to wipe out debts.

That's one of the cruel ironies. The whole antisemitic "jewish banker" trophe is literally a creation of antisemitism itself. Jews didn't want to be bankers, they were more or less forced to. Jews have the same issues with usury as Christians, after all it did come from their own religious text.

Blood libel was used as a convenient slander for bad things happening to children, and it furthered the animosity that Jews were secretly practicing a corrupted inversion of the Christian mass. Another irony is that this has become a virulent accusation in the Muslim world, yet they don't appreciate the hidden Christological concepts behind the myth.

It boils down to the fact that they're the "other", and the frictions between the origins of Christianity.
 
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