Talk:Persecution of Jews

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There was an inner sense to the Nazi persecution and extermination of the Jews, for the progressive removal of Jews meant the conquering of time—of the present in 1933 through their exclusion from German society; of a moral past in 1938 through the elimination of Judaism and the Bible; and ultimately of history, and therefore of the future, in 1941 through the extermination from the face of the earth of the Jews as the source of all historical evil.
- Alon Confino: A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide, ch. 6, "Imagining a Genesis", p. 192. Yale University Press (2014). ISBN 978-0-300-18854-7.

The Nazis were meticulous in creating a legal framework for their persecution of the Jews. This was gradually built up from 1933 with increasing burdens laid on the Jews. Thus, the faithful citizen or member of the Volk had no good cause to question what was being done because there was valid legislation to justify every step.
- Agnes Grunwald-Spier: Who Betrayed the Jews? The Realities of Nazi Persecution in the Holocaust, "Introduction". The History Press (2016). ISBN 978-0-7509-5801-1.

Here's how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank's writing. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced.
- Dara Horn: People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, ch. 1, "Everyone's (Second) Favorite Dead Jew". W. W. Norton & Company (2021). ISBN 978-0-393-53157-2.

"You don't know what we've been through," she explained. "You think things are good. You think we're all safe. And that's when it happens."
"When what happens? Another Holocaust? Come on!"
She just shrugged.
- Douglas Rushkoff: Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, ch. 2, "How We Lost the Plot". Crown Publishers (2003). ISBN 978-1-4000-4956-1.

"I am a Jew." Those have been the words of the Jewish people for three millennia. Those were the words of the men, women and children of Masada. Those were the words of the followers of Bar Kokhba. Those were the words of Jews in Granada in 1066, and the Rhineland in 1096, and Khmelnytsky from 1648 to 1657, and Kishinev in 1903, in Hebron in 1929. Those were the words of Jews in Auschwitz and Treblinka. Those were the last words of Daniel Pearl. And those are my words, too.
- Ben Shapiro: "I Am a Jew" (2023-10-10). Excerpt from "The Face of Absolute Evil" (2023-10-09), about the 7 October attacks. Also published in Jewish World Review, Jewish Press and The Daily Times.

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What bothers me about say my own family or a lot of Jewish people I know who are really open-minded. People think that the persecution of Jewish people started with the Holocaust. 1991 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley Edited by Gerhard Bach & Blaine Hall (2013)

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Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews had no part in the culture of Christian countries, and were too severely persecuted to be able to make contributions to civilization, beyond supplying capital for the building of cathedrals and such enterprises. … Christians persecuted Jews, especially at times of religious excitement; the Crusades were associated with appalling pogroms. In Mohammedan countries, on the contrary, Jews at most times were not in any way ill treated. Especially in Moorish Spain, they contributed to learning; Maimonides (1135–1204), who was born at Cordova, is regarded by some as the source of much of Spinoza's philosophy.
- Bertrand Russell

We've come from the same history—2000 years of persecution—we've just expressed our sufferings differently. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complained, we just never thought of putting it to music.
- Jon Stewart

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The profoundly Jewish religion of Jesus and his followers became the viciously anti-Jewish religion of later times, leading to the horrific persecutions of the Middle Ages and the pogroms and attempted genocides that have plagued the world down to recent times. Anti-Semitism as it has come down to us today is the history of specifically Christian reactions to non-Christian Jews. It is one of the least savory inventions of the early church.
- Bart D. Ehrman: Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

The will to live is indestructible, particularly in the Jew; otherwise centuries of persecution and slaughter would long since have destroyed the race.
- Emma Goldman, My Further Disillusionment in Russia, Chapter I: Odessa (1924).

When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul … I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe.
- Christopher Hitchens: Hitch-22: A Memoir

Gentiles persecuted the Jews for thousands of years before the Nazis got efficient at it.
- Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz: "Some Notes on Jewish Lesbian Identity". In Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (1982).

The nature of the Jew is governed by the same laws as human nature in general … In England, France, Germany and in the rest of Europe (except Spain), in spite of the barbarous treatment and deadly persecution they suffered, they have lived and spread and outlived much of the poisonous rancor and prejudice against them, and Europe has been none the worse on their account.
- Ernestine Rose Letter to the "Boston Investigator," Feb. 10, 1864.

Thus, when Muslims crossed the straits of Gibraltar from North Africa in 711 CE and invaded the Iberian Peninsula, Jews welcomed them as liberators from Christian Persecution.
- Zion Zohar, Sephardic & Mizrahi Jewry, New York, 2005, pp. 8 – 9

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Persecution in general

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Main article: Persecution

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Sometime the witch hunting takes on atrocious dimensions—the Nazi persecution of Jews, the Salem witch trials, the Ku Klux Klan scapegoating of blacks. Notice, however, that in all such cases the persecutor hates the persecuted for precisely those traits that the persecutor displays with a glaringly uncivilized fury.
- Ken Wilber: No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth

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It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches—and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It's still going on.
- Philip Pullman

Book burning

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Alon Confino

When we consider the Holocaust as emerging from racial ideology and a state-run administrative process during a brutal war, it becomes difficult to place Kristallnacht and the burning of the Bible within this framework. … A world of meaning is lost when these views of racial ideology, the brutalization of war, and the state-run process of extermination dominate our understanding of the Holocaust because the question "Why did the Nazis and other Germans burn the Hebrew Bible?" demands a historical imagination that captures Germans' culture, sensibilities, and historical memories. … Burning the Bible was an intentional act: it happened all over Germany, in public for all to see, and both those who perpetrated the act and those who watched it perceived it as a transgression whether they supported or opposed the burning.
- Alon Confino: A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide, "Introduction: A Nazi Tale of Germans, Jews, and Time", pp. 4–5. Yale University Press (2014). ISBN 978-0-300-18854-7.

Did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible? … In history the sources govern. The Nazis did burn the Hebrew Bible, on November 9 and 10, 1938—not one copy, but thousands; not in one place, but in hundreds of communities across the Reich; and not only in metropolises such as Berlin, Stettin, Vienna, Dresden, Stuttgart, and Cologne, but also in small communities such as Sulzburg, a Protestant village in Baden with 1,070 inhabitants, 120 among them Jewish, where the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments were thrown from the roof and the Nazis marched mockingly up and down the main street with the Torah scrolls before destroying them. By fire and other means, the destruction of the Book of Books was at the center of Kristallnacht, when 1,400 synagogues were set on fire.
- Alon Confino: "Why Did the Nazis Burn the Hebrew Bible? Nazi Germany, Representations of the Past, and the Holocaust". The Journal of Modern History, vol. 84, no. 2, "The Jew in the Modern European Imaginary" (June 2012), pp. 369–400. The University of Chicago Press. doi:10.1086/664662.

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In Berlin, Germans burned the Torah scrolls in front of the Levetzow Street synagogue, while other Germans carried the scrolls from the Fasanen Street synagogue to Wittenberg Square and burned them there. In Pestalozzi Street, shredded Torah scrolls and prayer books as well as religious objects from the altar littered the area near the synagogue. Children marched mockingly on the shredded Torah with top hats on. In the Jewish quarter of Leopoldgasse in Vienna, the Arks and Torah scrolls from four synagogues were piled up in the street and set on fire.
- Alon Confino: "Why Did the Nazis Burn the Hebrew Bible? Nazi Germany, Representations of the Past, and the Holocaust". The Journal of Modern History, vol. 84, no. 2, "The Jew in the Modern European Imaginary" (June 2012), pp. 369–400. The University of Chicago Press. doi:10.1086/664662.

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Persecution of Jews