I confess that in my first 20 years as a Jew, I vastly preferred books that blamed anti-Semitism 100% on the goyim.
As I have aged, however, I have come to see anti-Semitism as the natural result of conflicts of interest between groups.
I’m not a historian, but it seems to me that history suggests that the fortunes of Judaism and Christianity are usually inverse. For instance, Judaism was stronger than Judaism in the first two centuries of the Common Era, and then Christianity rose in strength and Judaism declined. The biggest discrepancy in power and influence between the two religions was probably the 17th Century in Europe.
Judaism has never dealt successfully with the Enlightenment. Christianity has had an easier time of it. Islam rejects the Enlightenment and has failed to produce a single country that is prosperous and free.
When there’s free competition, Jews (Ashkenazim have an average IQ around 110) always out-compete, out-earn and out-influence white Christians (average IQ of 100) who always out-do Muslims (average IQ around 85).
There is little question that Jewish anger and resentment were aggravated by Christian attacks, but…Jewish hatred and derision for Christians both predated and developed to an important degree independently of Christian persecution. The process was not essentially different from the way that Christian hatred for Jews developed according to its own logic and not only in reaction to Jewish provocation. Many of the most hate-filled Jewish texts date from the time when Christianity was still weak and hardly capable of mounting significant physical attacks on Jews.
When, by the high middle ages, Christians began to appreciate the extent to which, in the words of one historian, “that Jews had been mocking them for centuries” in the Talmud and other rabbinical works, they were outraged. Copies of the Talmud were burned on a number of occasions, just as copies of the Gospels had been earlier destroyed by Jewish authorities when they had the power to do so….
While a number of non-Jews spoke up for a fairer treatment of Europe’s Jews [during the Enlightenment] few had favorable comments about contemporary Judaism or about Jews in their present state. Even those who believed that legal discrimination against Jews should be abolished nonetheless considered most Jews to be of low moral character — cunning and dishonest — while Judaism was hidebound and itself bigoted. Indeed, even those Jews who spoke up to defend their people often did so in remarkable back-handed ways. They granted the Jewish population suffered from all too obvious defects, both moral and physical…
