I study and teach Renaissance history.  Time and again, when terrible things are happening in a city, a citystate, a country, often the local minorities are blamed for the trouble.  Why are terrible things happening to Venice?  They house the Jews in the Ghetto.  Why does God now smile on Spain?  Because the inquisition killed and deported all the Jews in 1492.  Why has Weimar Germany failed and how must it rise again?  Germany’s problems are blamed on the Jews–so get rid of them.

No one should be surprised that people are willing to blame the Jewish FED or the consipiracy of Jews for problems in the US financial  system.  It’s a typical strategy that has united and bound majorities against minorities for thousands of years: blaming a small group of people for pandemic crises.  Such tactics bring the majority together in united hatred and commonly shared ideological principles and goals.   The small group of people, who typically have little to do with the emergence of such crises, are literally forced out of the country as in Spain, or are exterminated, as in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

The steps leading to such enormity begins by singling out such groups as responsible for catatrophies.  “Innocently” calling attention to imagined Jewish conspiracies and attributing to Jews huge power dynamics is the modern-day form of this.  In the Renaissance, losses in war or even horrible weather might be attributed to local Jews who were said to have burned effigies of Christian Saints, thus causing the disasters.  Back then, people could easily put two and two together: our losing the war means that Gods hates us…why?…because we allow Jews to live among us…and so we must destroy those who are out to destroy us!

Even back then, more enlightened people realized that history repeated itself in many forms, and such people believed it to be reprehensible to single out a group of human beings for something that they didn’t have any more to do with than anyone else.  Today, when similarly enlightened people see others singling out Jews and trying to spread ideas of a powerful Jewish conspiracy that has caused current problems, these enlightened people get very upset, because they know that such ideas have led in the past to expulsion or extermination of the Jews (and of many other minority groups).  So, these people clearly want to end such talk that blames the Jews for problems of the world or  extends to Jews tremendous powers over the world that they clearly do not have.