The Jewish Diaspora and Judeophobia (Anti-Semitism)
Anti-Semitism has always been associated with the Jewish Diaspora; as long as Jews did not live outside the Land of Israel there was no hatred of Jews, except, of course, in the current Islam world where Judeophobia spilled over also to Jews who live in their homeland.
Going back in history we have classical Judeophobia – the fear of Jews in ancient Egypt where Pharaoh was worried about the loyalty of his Jewish subjects “…they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.”(Exodus 1:10) and consequently the Egyptian enslaved the Jews under strict Egyptian supervision: ”So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor”(Exodus 1:11)
Next we have the story told in the Book of Esther about Judeophobia in Persia during the fourth Century BC. In that story we have many of the classical elements of anti-Semitism: The Jews are described as separating themselves from the rest of the population while being quite successfully integrated in the royal administration.
There is a certain people dispersed and scattered among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom whose customs are different from those of all other people and who do not obey the king's laws; it is not in the king's best interest to tolerate them. (Esther 3:8)
The latter success breeds envy. This envy to one particular Jew is projected on the Jewish people. The Judeophobic Hamman wishes to kill all Jews, men, women and children just for being Jews. “…kill and annihilate all the Jews-young and old, women and little children-on a single day” (Esther 3:13) Moreover, Jews are distinct by being dispersed throughout the empire – a small minority unlike most other nationals. Finally, assimilation does not help a Jew to escape the consequences of Jew-hatred “Do not think that because you are in the king's house you alone of all the Jews will escape.” (Esther 4:13) The happy ending of this story should not detract from its poignancy.
The first Jewish diasporas in Mesopotamia and Egypt were forced by the Assyrians and Babylonians as part of their policy. However, Jews have been unique in two aspects: The kept their cultural identity and were outstandingly ingenious and productive wherever they went. There is hardly any other nation like the Jews in this respect. Fifty years after the first exile to Babylon the Jews were permitted by King Cyrus to return to their homeland. However, only a relatively a small number of people returned, while the majority continued to live in exile spreading all over Mesopotamia and Persia (see the following two maps) and reached high positions in the Persian court, as we can see in the books of Nehemiah and Esther. The Babylonian diaspora was politically strong enough to revolt against Persian rule (359 BC), and was later affluent enough to provide substantial material support to the Hashmonean Kingdom of Judea. The Jewish military colonies in Southern Egypt played a major role in the history of that country, as we shall see below.
The third well-documented pre-Christian episodes of Jew-hatred were manifested in Hellenistic Egypt during the 2nd and 1st Centuries BC. Like in Persia also this Judeophobia was probably prompted by the prominence of the Jews in the Hellenistic society, compared to the native Egyptians. Jewish mercenaries were more reliable protectors of the Ptolemaic regime than native Egyptians, and even the Commander in Chief of the Egyptian armed forces was occasionally Jewish.
Also the Romans relied on the loyal Jewish minority in Alexandria and appointed a Jew from a prominent Jewish family the Procurator (Governor, the highest administrative position in Roman imperial bureaucracy) of Egypt, probably the most important province of the Roman Empire. Egyptian Judeophobia invented a distorted defamatory Jewish history – the Jews are descendents of lepers, they are therefore sub-human. The Jews are thieves, cheaters, etc. Dehumanizing and demonizing Jews is, therefore, another old feature of anti-Semitism. Furthermore, the first historically documented pogrom against a Jewish community in the Diaspora took place in Alexandria in the second half of the 1st Century BC, as a result of the Judeophobic incitements described above. It may not be coincidental that Egypt is today the major source of anti-Jewish propaganda in the Islamic world.
Jews lived in Egypt since the period of the First Temple and the Jewish community in Egypt gave shelter to the refugees from Jerusalem in 589, including the Prophet Jeremiah, who was an old man by that time:
They also led away all the men, women and children and the king's daughters whom Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard had left with Gedaliah son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, and Jeremiah the prophet and Baruch son of Neriah. So they entered Egypt in disobedience to the LORD and went as far as Tahpanhes. ((Jeremiah 43:6-7)
By the beginning of the 1st Century Jews spread voluntarily from Judea and Egypt, as merchants, craftsmen and mercenaries throughout the entire Roman Empire, there were hundreds of Jewish communities and synagogues all over, and many of these helped to spread Christianity, as we can read in the New Testament. (See the following two maps).
It is noteworthy that unlike many of the later expressions of Christian anti-Semitism, these three anti-Semitic manifestations in antiquity were targeting the Jews and not their religion. The religious persecution of Judaism by the Syrian Hellenistic despot, which resulted in the Maccabean revolt, was politically rather than theologically motivated. The Syrian Hellenists wanted to integrate Judea, with its unique Jewish culture, into their mini-empire.
The same may be true of the motivation of the Roman Emperor, Hadrian who prohibited Jewish Rabbinic religious rituals after the Bar Kokhba revolt. Hadrian was worried about the rebellious Jews not about the difference between monotheistic Judaism and Roman pagan polytheistic theology that was declining in those days. Unlike Christianity in Byzantium and Rome, the classical Greco-Roman culture was not theology driven, even when its officials formally paid lip service to the Gods of the Olympus or of the Capitol.
The relationship between Judaism and early Christianity was very different. At the beginning Christianity was considered by the Rabbinical Jews as a Messianic Jewish sect. Later, when Paul converted pagans to Christianity without requiring fulfillment of the ritual commandments of the Torah, a split evolved between the new Christians and the Jewish Christians as well with Rabbinic Judaism. Still the two theologies were maintained side by side with a certain level of mutual despise but without hatred.
The Gospels were written with an anti-Rabbinic bias for two reasons – first the early Christians wanted to differentiate themselves from the notoriously rebellious Jews (remember the Jewish anti-Roman revolts of 68 and 132 AD, and we know from Josephus that there were many small rebellions before the “Great Rebellion”) claiming political neutrality, although Jesus was most probably executed by the Romans because they considered him as a political (not theological) threat: “and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand and knelt in front of him and mocked him. "Hail, king of the Jews!" they said.” (Matthew 27:29).
The Romans were worried about the return of a genuine Jewish King like Herod the Great. There is no reason that the oppressed Jews who accepted Jesus as a spiritual and possible as a potential political leader, who were happy to greet him coming to Jerusalem, (“A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted, "Hosanna to the Son of David!"[Matthew 21:8-9]) would be antagonistic to him.
Notwithstanding these plain historical facts, based on eyewitness testimonials, the writers of the Gospels, who disassociated themselves from Rabbinical Judaism to adopt a “politically correct” peace loving political posture, implicated the infamously mutinous Jews as accomplices in the death of Jesus. They tried to tell the Roman “We are not like those rebellious Jews! They were the ones who rebelled and caused the death of our Messiah. They are the bad guys.”
This politically motivated implication of the Jews developed between the 2nd and the 4th Century into an indictment of the Jews as having caused the death of Jesus, and eventually making the Jews guilty of deicide. At that stage Christian started hating Jews and often became aggressively revengeful. This was the birth of Christian Misojudaism. (Miso-Judaism = Gr. hatred of Judaism; I “Misojudaism” is a more precise term than “Judeophobia” = fear of Jews, and obviously “anti-Semitism” which is a racist, meaningless obsolete term, however to avoid confusing the reader with this new term, we will continue to use those old, more familiar terms).
Christian Jew-Hatred grew with time and made-up later other absurd libels such as the blood libel that Jews use blood of Christian children for ritual purposes. This libel is especially repugnant and utterly fictitious in view of the explicit Biblical commandment to avoid any consumption of blood: “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it.” (Genesis 9:4) And wherever you live, you must not eat the blood of any bird or animal.(Leviticus 7:26) “Therefore I say to the Israelites, "None of you may eat blood, nor may an alien living among you eat blood."(Leviticus 17:12) “If anyone eats blood, that person must be cut off from his people.” (Leviticus 7:27), i.e., consumption of blood by a Jewish person is a transgression that invoked unconditional excommunication, the most severe punishment in Judaism.
In the medieval period Christians associated Jews with the devil and accused them of causing catastrophes such as pestilence or other natural disasters. These outrageous accusations often resulted in massacres of whole Jewish communities. The following map shows the devastation of Jewish communities by local pogroms as the “black plague” was spreading. Jewish isolated communities were less infected probably because of better hygiene.
In medieval Europe Jews were not only slaughtered but also often expelled so that the Christian rulers could confiscate their assets. The next map shows these numerous expulsions.
The crusades were another religion motivated Christian phenomenon associated with massacres of Jewish communities on route:
Anti Jewish riot spread from a single locus all over the countryside raising
havoc to Jewish communities. As shown in the following example in Spain.
Anti-Semitism seems to propagate 
like
wildfire.
To keep separate from the non-Jewish communities, maintaining some legal autonomy and the ability to protect themselves from bloodthirsty Christian crowds, Jews voluntarily lived in Ghettos – Jewish quarters that were often walled.
While Jews in Western Europe enjoyed emancipation (see map), Religion-induced anti Jewish riots did persist in Eastern Europe through the 19th Century, prompting immigration to the Jewish homeland.
The refugees of those pogrom settled in their homeland which was at that time under Ottoman rule. Jewish settlements in Israel before WWI are shown in the following map:
(to continue)