sorekbekarmi-deactivated2022051:

sorekbekarmi-deactivated2022051:

mapalchemist:

sorekbekarmi-deactivated2022051:

My hand slipped

Have any of y’all even read the Old Testament? Anti-semitism is a lot older than Jesus.

I don’t think you understand what I’m saying

But I definitely don’t understand what you’re saying

@mapalchemist

You know what, I thought about it, and I decided I probably do know what you’re saying.

You think that the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Babylonian Empires’ treatment of ancient Judeans and Israelites is antisemitism.

It is not.

First of all, using the Tanakh (its ACTUAL name, leave your trashy supercecionist name at the door please) as a historical source is dicey. (Also, incredibly rude of you to condescend to a bunch of Jewish people about not having read your bad translation of our own holy books. Wow, man.) We know the Babylonian and Assyrian conquests are a historical reality from the archeological record. The Egyptian slavery and exodus, less so, although we do know the Egyptians exerted imperial control over the land where Israel and Judah are and the people living there.

Further, the Greek (Macedonian and then Selucid) Empire and the Roman Empire ALSO overthrew Judah and Israel and subjugated them, outlawing Jewish practices etc.

But, that is not antisemitism. Arguably, what occurred in the Greek and Roman periods is the beginning of anti-Judaism, an oppression of Jewish people for their culture and religion. Antisemitism, however, is an oppression of Jewish people for their ethnicity/physical existence, regardless of whether they assimilate into the oppressors’ culture and religion or not.

Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians didn’t hate Jewish people BECAUSE we were Jewish. They just wanted to impose political control over our strategic land. They did the same things to many other peoples. Egyptians didn’t care if you assimilated as long as you paid them, Assyrians successfully assimilated most of Israel (except the Samaritans), and Jews in Babylon did NOT assimilate and were later allowed by the Persians to return to Israel.

Greece and Rome started to resent Jewish people because they wouldn’t culturally and religiously assimilate, and honestly, mostly this had to do with taxes. Many taxes in the ancient world were religious payments. Paying taxes to Rome, for example, sometimes meant recognizing Caesar as a God, if it was a religious tax issues in Caesars own name.

Jewish religion at the time also focuses a lot on overthrowing the yoke of oppressors, because that had been a theme in Jewish history. The idea of a Messiah is originally part of that narrative, born from the Hashmonian period when Yehuda Maccabias successfully threw off Selucid occupiers and established a renewed independant Jewish state. Jews in Jesus’s supposed time were expecting the same thing: a hero with God’s blessing who would restore their homeland and freedom to them. Instead, they got Jesus, who supported Roman rule to the bitter end, and who’s followers conveniently blamed Jews for his death, despite the fact that he supposedly died via Roman capital punishment.

Christianity itself draws from some Jewish stories and cultural ideas, but it is mostly a Roman and Hellenistic affair, ideologically. Its all about conforming to political authority and pulling the teeth from Judaism, stripping it down to a few stories and ideas and then using it as a vehicle for Roman cultural assimilation.

Part of that process included demonizing Jews, literally. Check your Bible. I’ll wait. The authors of the NT constantly twist Jewish authority to appear evil and Roman authority to appear as Godly and innocent and representing stability and divine will. Jews are the synagogue of Satan, the Christ killers, the fruitless fig tree waiting to be cut down, the olive branches that are cut off, pruned to make way for Rome. The early Church and contemporary Jews were bitter enemies. Christians sold out Jewish rebels to Rome, outlawed Jewish practices, and adopted creeds and practices (use of images, eating pork) specifically designed to keep Jews out. All through Christian history, Jews have been specifically targeted for oppression - genocide, theft, taxation, expulsion, being made illegal, rape, not allowed education or access to jobs, not allowed to own land, you name it, SPECIFICALLY because they were descended from the Jewish people who Christians CLAIM “killed Christ.” All Western antisemitism, from religious antisemitism like blood libel to even “secular” antisemitism like the Dreyfus affair of the Elders of Zion, is the fruit of the poisoned tree: its roots are in the New Testament, and Church History is its trunk.

The fact is, if youre looking for the roots of when people began oppressing Jews on an ethnic basic regardless of what religion or culture they practice, you’re going to find that all roads lead you back to Christianity.