Historically the issue started out of some religious matter, the negation of the divine nature of Jesus Christ. But this was very early in time, and muslims didnt exist yet. Out of this, jews tended to settle down in separated neighborhoods, and to deal with financial or legal stuffs for a living.Usury, if you lend money to a non Jew, is not a sin for their religion. And finally this one became the real (obvious) reason of all the hate and persecutions. The rest is recent history.
2006-07-16 15:28:46
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answer #3
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answered by yukasdog 3
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Ye gods, one could study the topic for years and not get a full answer. There are any number of reasons, some historical and some religious.
The crux of the issue (if you pardon the pun) with Jews and Christians, as said earlier, comes out of the origin of Christianity as a Jewish sect, and specifically a) the assertion by Christians that Yeshua bar Yesef of Galilee (Jesus) is the messiah ('Christos' in Greek), which most Jews no only reject by hold as blasphemous (in the Jewish view of the time, the Messiah was held to be the prophesied military leader who would overthrow foriegn rule and/or conquer the world in the name of YHWH); b) the rejection of both Jewish kosher law and the authority of then-existing Jewish priesthood; c) the evangelism to the Gentiles (Jewish religion largely being centered on the supposed descendants of Abraham being uniquely blessed by of their tribal god, YHWH), and most of all, d) the (supposed) role which the Sanhedrin (the ruling body of the Jewish priesthood) had in the crucifixion of Yeshua by the Roman authorities (which many modern Biblical authorities hold was a later interpolation, as an attack on the authority of the Sanhedrin, which were opposing the growth of 'heretical' sects such as the Christians, the Pharisees, the Zealots, the Essenes, etc.).
Regardless of the causes, the result was that as the Christian church rose to power in the Roman Empire, the Church used the Jews (who had been forced out of Judea by the Romans in 70AD after an uprising by another supposed Messiah) as scapegoats, blaming baleful Jewish influences for any catastrophe that struck. In much of Europe, Jews were either forbidden. However, because the usury laws forbidding Christians to lend money at interest did not apply to the Jews (though they had similar rules about doing so to other Jews), they were tolerated in many larger towns and cities, where they served as bankers as well as doing other work that most Christians considered untouchable. This tolerance was limited at best, and Jews were generally forced to live in walled-off sections of town (call a ghetto in Italian - this is the origin of the term) and wear a specific type of hat or a star of David when travelling out of that area. These rules were largely abandoned by the early 18th century in Western Europe, but persisted in parts of Eastern Europe into the early 20th century. Also, even as the formal persecution ended, informal anti-semitism continued to be widespread, and many of the conspiracy theories of the 19th and 20th centuries assumed the 'Jewish bankers' were behind... well, anything that the conspiracy theorist didn't like, such as communism or wars. This eventually culminated in the Nazi's attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.
The case regarding the Muslims is rather different, and while there are aspects of it going back to the origin of Islam as well, the main conflict is modern. Originally, most of Islam's policy of forced conversion was aimed at the polytheistic religions then in Arabia; Jews and Christians (the 'People of the Book') were considered to be a worshippers of the same god ('Allah' is the word for god in Arabic) and were exempted, so long as they paid a special tax (jizya) to the Muslim authorities. This theoretical tolerance was an uneasy one at best, however, and both Jews and Christians were often required to live in ghettos in Muslim-dominated nations.
The primary conflict today, however, stems from the Zionist movement of the early 20th century, wherein many Jews, trying to escape the continued persecution in Europe and the Americas, sought to re-establish themselves in the territory that had been ancient Judea. However, this land was now settled by a different group, the Palestininans, who were Muslims; furthermore, the area was under the control of the British Empire, who were opposed to both home rule by the Palestinians, and Zionist settlement of the area, because of their own political interests in the region. The Palestine Home Rule movement and the Zionist Movement both became militant, and throughout the 1930s and into WWII, terrorists fighting for both causes fought the British. After the war, when the Nazi genocidal program (the Holocaust or Shoah) was revealed to the world, thousands of survivors flooded into the already crowded Palestine, lending support to the Zionist militants. The British, weakened by the war, pulled out of Palestine, and the United Nations, as reparations for the Holocaust, stepped in, establishing the state of Israel in a part of what had been Palestine. Originally, there was to be a partitioning, where part of the region would remain a Palestinian home state, but when the other Muslim nations of the region went to war in opposition of the establishment of Israel, the Israelis responded by seizing Palestine as part of Israel. Those Palestinians who didn't submit to Israeli rule were forced out, into Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Egypt, where they have continued to support anti-Israeli uprisings in the Palestinian parts of Israel (which after 1998 were given partial autonomy as a new Palestinian state, until the recent elections which were the cause of the current war), and seeking aid from their fellow Muslims in a jihad (holy war) against the Israelis. This, in addition to various border conflicts, have permanently soured relations between the Arabic, Egyptian and Lebanese Muslims against Israel (though Jewish populations do exist in Egypt and Iraq who are generally treated the same as always, so long as they don't publicly support Israel).
2006-07-16 13:17:38
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answer #10
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answered by scholrlea2 1
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