Ask any non-Jewish American what his or her personal link is to the Roman era, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and other epics of human history and he will tell you: nothing. He knows nothing about it. And he doesn't care. For such a late twentieth century American to reflect on his own roots back to, say, medievalism, is to look with the naked eye for Mars: it is a vague dot, reputed by others to exist, in the remotest distance. Indistinct. Unfathomable. Something eternally elusive, lost forever.

      Few Americans can trace their family history more than a few generations, if that. Throughout anyone's own ancestral lineage, however, going back deeply into time, there obviously exists their own share of participants -- as both perpetrators and victims -- in great and minor wars, massacres, invasions, famines, epidemics, and other disasters of every kind. Presuming five procreative generations per century, exponentially, any human being alive today can theoretically claim direct genetic lineage to over a thousand ancestors back to 1800, over 37,000 people to 1700, over a million back to the year 1600, and over a staggering billion human beings back to 1400 (thirty generations). Whatever the mathematically realistic number, (and Jewish history claims 4,000 years) the deeper we go back into history, the more we must consider the veritable Milky Way of humanity that preceded us in direct ancestral lineage; people of every imaginable sort, and they all knew well the melancholic chords of human suffering, sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally. Every single one of them.

       Today's Americans of French, British, Italian or other European descent find themselves today lumped together in the generic "white" American community. Their respective ancestries are stirred together, gone. Their European origins mean little to them; they are homogenized in the New World, their identities now expressed -- for better or worse -- in the icons of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Billy the Kid, Babe Ruth, the hallowed Constitution, even McDonald's hamburgers, or other superficial national icons that ancestrally have nothing directly to do with them.

     The typical American's alienation, disinterest, and lack of connection to distant history is not characteristic of modern Jews. On the contrary. A stone thrown in spite through a Jewish window in Italy in the fourteenth century is a stone thrown into Jewish hearts today. The actions against Jews by desperate thugs in Poland in the eighteenth century are dumped on Gentile doorsteps in our time by Jews who are still grieving, still embittered, still seeking redress. And when we turn, in more recent history, to the bestial deeds of Adolf Hitler to conquer the world, we find that Jews have pulled tightly in a circle to proclaim that everything sinister in the whole world malevolently labors against them, and them only.

         Ultimately, it is a central article of modern Jewish faith -- reflecting both secular and religious attitudes, formed and hardened over the ages -- that to be Jewish is to be always maltreated for innocence by others.  Or, perhaps more correctly to Jewish eyes, as part of this innocence, being Jewish is to be a victim for the crime of being superior to their persecutors. This claim to superiority was originally religiously based, as God's "Chosen People" of Old Testament tradition. And this Jewish preoccupation -- as being victims of their self-presumed superiority -- has been passed down, religiously, over the ages (traditionally epitomized in Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem's Wailing Wall to bemoan their communal fate, manifest also in the likes of the volume Sefer Yosifon, anonymously compiled in the tenth century as a litany of Jewish complaints and miseries). In the aftermath of Hitler's atrocities against Jews during World War II, this world-view has come to define, more tightly than any other aspect of Jewish tradition -- and now highly politicized -- modern Jewish self-identity.

      But is this true? From the evidence we have already seen, are Jews correctly depicted as history's consummate, incomparable, and innocent victims? Have Jews pre-eminently and collectively suffered more than all other human beings, "victims of centuries of persecution and bigotry?" [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 378] And for no reason?

      Here's a typical view of the Eastern European Jewish past, by Judith Arcana, who discusses the roots of Jewish American poet Grace Paley's family to the Jews of Russia:

      "One of Isaac's brothers, Russya, was killed in a workers demonstration
      in 1905 ... In the wake of that death, probably spurred by the retaliatory
      wave of pogroms, the family decided to leave Russia. Knowing the       unpredictability of royal whim, Natasha Gutseit, Isaac's widowed
      mother, sent the young couple to America before the czar could change
      his mind and snatch them back again." [ARCANA, J., 1993, p. 10]

     Here Arcana, who omits the relevance of Jewish socialist agitation in Russia as a factor in their "persecution" [Elsewhere she notes that even both Paley's parents were socialists, enemies of the Tsarist regime -- p. 9], speculates that the Russian czar would have interest in "snatching" Jews back to Russia.

      In the American context, "one commonly finds a sentence like this in many [Jewish] books or articles," says Joshua Rothenberg, "... 'Jews came to the shores of this country from the ghettos of the shtetlekh [Eastern European Jewish villages] as a result of the pogroms.' Each phrase in this sentence is untrue or oversimplified to the point of untruth. There were no ghettos in 19th century Eastern Europe (except in the metaphysical sense) ... And the pogroms were not the principal reason for emigration: proportionately more Jews came to the United States from Austrian-ruled Galicia -- where there were no pogroms -- than from Tsarist Russia." [ROTHENBERG, p. 3]

      "It has been discovered," says Henry Feingold, "that religious persecution, even its physical manifestations of pogroms, rarely furnishes sufficient impetus for Jews to uproot themselves. Moreover, it cannot account for the thousands of Jews who chose to leave areas relatively free of religious persecution ... [FEINGOLD, p. 60] ... Historians have taken a closer look at the early acculturation process and have discovered that the highly touted ability of the Jewish family to withstand the stresses of transplantation have been overstated. New studies on Jewish vice and crime and criminality and the discovery of a relatively high divorce and desertion rate among immigrant Jews present a picture of a community paying a dear price for establishing itself." [FEINGOLD, p. 61]

     "The lachrymorose recollection of the shtetl, which are still with us," says Daniel Bell, "fail to recall its narrowness of mind, its cruelty, especially to schoolchildren (to whom a whole series of memoirs, such as Solomon Ben Maimon's, testify), and its invidious stratification." [BELL, Reflections, p. 318] Little remembered is this oppression of Jews by Jews. "Prior to World War I," adds Rothenburg, "the Kehilah  [Jewish governing bodies] were ruled, in most cases, by an oligarchy of the rich and the [Jewish] clergy. Their excesses, especially in the area of indirect taxation (kosher meat, etc.) and the silencing of the protesting voices of the poor, are well-known and documented. The Kehilahs remained a source of bitter complaint for the majority of the Jewish population, which had no say in the conduct of their own community affairs." [ROTHENBURG, p. 5]

    American Jews today hold dear many nostalgic "Fiddler on the Roof"-type myths about their Eastern European ancestors. As, however, Jewish author Ivan Kalmar notes

    "A stalwart Jewish peasant, with a native wit and a naive religiosity,

    ever sturdy in the face of unending adversity, he is the epitome of

    Jewish nostalgia ... The Fiddler is so much part of the way we

    think of our Jewish background ... The Fiddler image has some

    basis in reality, but it is also very much part of a nostalgic

    reconstruction of our past, an example of what anthropologists

    call 'invention of tradition' ... Jewish authors [like Sholem

    Aleichem, creator of Fiddler on the Roof] tried to create

    stereotypes of the Jews that would identity them with less

    wealthy groups who were looked at more favourably by the

    greater society. Sholom Aleichem's Tevye [hero of Fiddler

    on the Roof] is very much a Ukrainian peasant. To counter

    the idea of the Jew as a 'parasite,' Sholom Aleichem presents

    Tevye as a dairy farmer, who sells not the Gentile peasant's

    products but his own. North American Jews have

    enthusiastically accepted the validity of Sholom Aleichem's

    Tevye as a metaphor for the Eastern European Jew of old ...

    Where finally Tevye finally shows unique character, he

    turns out to be a modern Jew. Where he is being a 'typical,'

    folksy, traditional East European Jew, he resembles the

    romanticized Ukrainian peasant ... Of course, there were

    in reality Jewish peasants like Tevye, but compared to the

    Slavs, the percentage of Jews who farmed was miniscule."

    [KALMER, I., quoted by PRYTULAK, L., UKRAINIAN

    ARCHIVES]

     "Having ... turned their backs on Poland," notes Jewish scholar Victor Seidler about modern Jewish perceptions of Eastern European heritage, "it can be difficult for the second generation [of Jews in America] to recognize just how Polish their parents were. Things we learned to think of as 'Jewish' turn out to be Polish." [SEIDLER, V.J., 2000, p. 74]  "Indeed," notes George Mosse, "when the first German-Jewish painter, Mortiz Oppenheim, painted scenes from the ghetto shortly after emancipation, it was transformed, as we have seen, into a community permeated with German middle-class values." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 80]

     Jewish author Howard Jacobson notes Jewish historic myth-making at an exhibition of photographs of Eastern European Jews at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Particularly troubling to him was the depiction of the stereotypically "studious Jew":

     "Something is wrong with this exhibition. Something is wrong with

     the way we modern Jews idealize a past we wouldn't touch with a

     barge-pole if it were offered us again ... Why is Jewish study always

     made to look so soulful in these sorts of photographs, so unrelieved,

     so unvarious, so fucking miserable and desolating? What is it about

     Jewish books that make absorption in them such an invariably

     heart-rendering business? What a sell! How have the Jews done it,

     how have we persuaded ourselves, but gentiles as well, that anguish

     and lamentation and self-abnegation and bodilessness and pathos

     attach inalterably and exclusively to our studies? You don't see

     [St. Thomas] Aquinas looking into a book like that." [JACOBSON, H.,

     1995, p. 192-193]

      The distinguished Jewish historian, Salo Baron, of Columbia University, whose twelve-volume Social and Religious History of the Jews is the most extensive Jewish history by a single author in existence, argued a view that, post-Holocaust, has been swept to the wayside by modern Jewish discourse. His view was that Jewish suffering in the European Middle Ages, and throughout history, has been exaggerated. That is, that the Jews of Europe, as a group, in comparison to their Christian neighbors, actually had a better life in the Middle Ages, to the 20th century.  For all the claims of massacres and pogroms, according to surviving documents, the Jewish population actually grew more rapidly than the Gentiles around them. [LIBERLES, p. 42]  This accelerated in later centuries.  "The two and a half centuries from 1660 to 1914," says Baron, "the Jewish population grew numerically some fifteen times ... while mankind at-large increased by only 250 per cent, Europe by 350 per cent ..." [BARON, H and J.H., p. 50] This thesis, addressing later years, is supported by a non-Jewish scholar of the Ukraine, Orest Subtleny:

           "Throughout the nineteenth century, especially in its latter part, the

           Jews experienced a tremendous population rise. Between 1820 and

           1880, while the general population of the [Russian] empire rose by

           87%, the number of Jews increased by 150%. On the Right Bank,

           this rise was even more dramatic:  between 1844 and 1913 the number

           of its inhabitants rose by 265% while the Jewish population increased

           by 844%! Religious sanctions of large families, less exposure to

           famines, war, and epidemics, and a low mortality rate because of

           communal self-help and the availability of doctors largely accounted

           for this extraordinary increase." [SUBTLENY, p. 276]

       Salo Baron argued that his people, the Jews, were so privileged, relative to non-Jews throughout the European Middle Ages, that with the coming of the Enlightenment era "emancipation" and "equality" amounted to "a net loss [to Jews] in status and lifestyle." [SCHORSCH, p. 383]  Elsewhere, he wrote that "it is likely ... that even the average medieval Jew, compared to his average Christian contemporary ... was the less unhappy and destitute creature -- less unhappy and destitute not only by his own consciousness, but even if measured by such objective criteria as standards of living, cultural amenities, and protection against individual starvation and disease." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 11]

      "Throughout the Middle Ages," notes David Biale, "the Jews enjoyed considerable influence in many of the lands in which they lived  ... In addition to their interest Court politics, these Jews participated in political life in defense of Jewish interests." [BIALE, POWER p. 69] "The situation of the Jews in the first half of the Middle Ages," says Abram Leon, "was ... extremely favorable. The Jews were considered as being a part of the upper classes in society and their juridicial position was not perceptibly different from that of the nobility." [LEON, p. 128]  "At least some of the Jewish dress of the Middle Ages," adds Biale, "such as the Jewish hat, originated out of choice rather than compulsion ... The yellow patch [worn by Jews] ... was not originally intended as an instrument for segregating and humiliating the Jews ... but to proclaim publicly that its wearer enjoyed official protection." [BIALE, POWER, p. 67]

      One of the privileges Jews enjoyed throughout Europe until relatively modern history was that they didn't have to serve in the local military organizations. "During the continuous wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries," wrote Baron, " ... the Jews were neutral and suffered few losses. If they had been combatants they might have lost more than in all the pogroms." [LIBERLES, p. 42] Yet Medieval Jews were allowed the extremely significant privilege of carrying weapons, a privilege equal to knights and one to which all commoners (the overwhelming majority of the population) were forbidden. [GOLDBERG, p. 123]  Baron also noted that, while there were certainly Jews who suffered poverty, the surrounding Christian population was worse off. And if the Jewish ghettos were, as widely claimed, abject holes of enforced degradation, "is it not remarkable that the most typical Ghetto in the world, the Frankfurt Judengasse, produced in the pre-Emancipation period the greatest banking house in history?" [LIBERLES p. 45]

     "The Jews," says Israel Shahak,

     "in spite of all the persecution to which they were subjected, formed

     an integral part of the privileged classes ... Jewish historiography,

     especially in English, is misleading on this point inasmuch as it tends

     to focus on Jewish poverty and anti-Jewish discrimination ... The

     poorest Jewish craftsman, peddlar, landlord's steward, or petty cleric

     was immeasurably better off than a serf [most of the non-Jewish

     population]. This was especially true in those European countries

     where serfdom persisted until the nineteenth century, whether in a

     partial or extreme form: Prussia, Austria (including Hungary), Poland,

     and the Polan lands taken by Russia. And it is not without significance

     that, prior to the beginning of the great Jewish migration of modern

     times (around 1889), a large majority of all Jews were living in those

     areas and that their most important social function there was to

     mediate the oppression of peasants on behalf of the nobility and

     the Crown." [SHAHAK, p. 52-53]

     Jews in Eastern Europe understood the people around them as, categorically, persecutors. And "the Jews saw their persecutors as an inferior race," noted World Zionist Organization President Nahum Goldmann,  "Most of my [physician] grandfather's patients [in Lithuania] were peasants. Every Jew felt ten or a hundred times the superior of these lowly tillers of the soil; he was cultured, learned Hebrew, knew the Bible, studied the Talmud -- in other words he knew that he stood head and shoulders above these illiterates." [GOLDMANN, 1978, p. 13]

      "It would never have occurred to us," said one Jewish immigrant to the United States, "that the Gentile world [in Eastern Europe] was happier ... On the contrary, we considered our world happier and finer." "We thought they were unfortunate," says another, "We were above them, this was the feeling [towards peasants]." [MORAWSKA, p. 17] In the face of the commonly cherished belief among modern Jews that their brethren of Eastern Europe were terribly and uniformly impoverished, it is a fact that Jews were doing so well (relative to the non-Jews around them) that non-Jewish servants in Jewish households were common.

      Apart from racist folk tales, Zborowski and Herzog note that most Jewish children in Eastern Europe learned fragments of the surrounding non-Jewish culture via the Gentile servants in their homes. "These impressions [of non-Jewish life]," the scholars write, "[were] available not only to the children of the rich, for [Jewish] women of modest circumstances who worked in a store or at the market often had the help of a [non-Jewish] peasant girl in the house." [ZBOROWSKI, p. 155] "[Jewish life] was certainly better than the life of the Russian peasant," remarks Howard Sachar. [SACHAR, p. 215]

"We were luckier than most of our fellow-Jews in being able to afford 'servants,' if that is the real name for them," declares Chaim Weizmann, an immigrant from the "Pale" of Russia, an agitator for how bad Jews had it in his place of birth, and the first president of modern Israel, "... [My second servant] who outlived the first and was with us for something like thirty-five years, was a lovable peasant by the name of Yakim ... He had learned to sing, after a fashion, the Jewish national anthem, Hatikvah; and in moments of enthusiasm would cry out: 'Come, little ones, let us sing Tikvah!'" [WEIZMAN, C., 1949, p. 22]

    Elsewhere, Weizman adds:

"The teachers and governing authorities of the schools within the Pale [an area of Russia] were typical Russian officials, and as such, not free from corruption. So the rich Jew would use his gold to pave the way for his boy to enter the school ... There were occasions when a rich Jew would hire ten non-Jewish candidates (at times rather oddly selected) to sit for the entrance examination at the local school, and thus make room for one Jewish pupil -- needless to say his own son or a protege." [WEIZMAN, C., 1949, p. 31]

     "Even when the Jewish common people were known to be desperately poor," adds Albert Lindemann, "as in Austrian Galicia or parts of the Jewish Pale of Settlement in tsarist Russia, their overall per capita wealth still seems to have been greater than that of non-Jews, mostly peasants, among whom they lived." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 21] "On the whole," says sociologist Stephen Steinberg, "Eastern European Jews [prior to immigration to America in the late nineteenth century] were unquestionably poor, though decidedly better off than the surrounding peasant population." [STEINBERG, p. 97]

     What, one wonders, is to be read between this relativity of being "poor?"  How poor could Jews have really been if they were "decidedly better off" than the non-Jewish peasants (who were most of the Eastern European population), even hiring Polish servants for their homes?

       Another part of Jewish popular mythology is that the Jews were forced against their will into ghettos in Europe. The widely-believed accusation that Jews were forcibly segregated, particularly into ghettos, is a distortion of historical fact. In the Middle Ages most Christian towns themselves had walls, gates, and locks for protection from outsiders. The enclosed Jewish ghetto was, in origin, a Jewish construction, conceived for both protection and self-segregation from the taint of non-Jewish ways.

     "In the thirteenth century," writes Max Weinrich, "segregated living quarters for Jews were made compulsory. The fact of the matter is that separate Jewish streets had existed all along ... If the Jews lived together long before segregated living quarters were imposed upon them, then their segregation must have been voluntary. It was. Living apart, no matter how bizarre it may appear in the light of present day concepts and attitudes, was part of the 'privileges' accorded to the Jews in conforming with their own wishes." [WEINRICH, p. 105]

    As president Nachum Goldmann of the World Zionist Organization notes:

     "It is wrong to say that the goyim forced the Jews to separate themselves

     themselves from other societies. When the Christians defined the

     ghetto limits, Jews lived there already." [GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 66]

      For centuries Jews isolated themselves from their surrounding non-Jewish neighbors except, of course, for the necessities of commerce. "Had the Jews not possessed a deep-rooted conviction of the truth of their religion," says Jacob Katz, "and had they not actively sought to maintain their separate identity, the tendencies inherent in medieval conditions would inevitably have ended by breaking down the social barrier erected by Jewish ritual." [KATZ, Ex, p. 40]  "In Orthodox Judaism," wrote anthropologist Maurice Fishberg in 1911, "a Jew must not eat at the same table with a Gentile, nor any food prepared by the latter; must not eat or drink from dishes, with spoons, forks, knives, etc. which have been used by a Gentile; must not drink wine with the container of which has been touched by a Christian, Mohammadan, or heathen ... I know Jews to feel nauseated and even vomit when told that the food they have consumed was not kosher. ... It was the intense tribal spirit engendered by his religion which kept the Jew from intimate contact with the Gentiles, more than the laws promulgated by Christian states for the purpose."  [FISHBERG, p. 536]

     "We [Jews] formed the ghetto ourselves," wrote the Zionist leader Vladamir Zabotinsky, " ... voluntarily, for the same reason for which Europeans in Shanghai established their separate quarter, to be able to live their own way." [KORBANSKI, p. 8] "The Ghetto was rather a privilege than a disability," notes J. O. Hertzler, "and sometimes was claimed by the Jews as a right when its demolition was threatened." [HERTZLER, p. 73] Boas Evron cites the work of fellow Israeli scholar, Yehezkel Kaufmann, in noting that

       "the popular assumption that external anti-Jewish pressures forced

       group identify and exclusivity on the Jews is unconvincing, since

       historical evidence shows that Jewish exclusivity and aloofness

       preceded outside hostility and were thus its cause, not its result ...

       Jewish communities were always borne by host societies ... They

       never shared in political, military, administrative, or technological

       responsibilities." [EVRON, p. 53]

     In articles in 1928 and 1932, Cecil Roth, one of the foremost Jewish scholars of his day, set out to debunk the Jewish myths of incessant persecution by non-Jews through the ages. "In the first place," wrote Roth, ".... the Jew has always tended to regard as a martyr all persons who died at Gentile hands ... even if he died in a drunken brawl ... All those [Jews] who met a violent end, no matter under what circumstances, were included under the head of martyrs in the Jewish popular consciousness and recollection." [ROTH, Most, p. 136-137]

     This martyr tradition and schema has even been outrageously used, quite the same, with the identical religious base, in Orthodox Jewish messianic political quarters in our own day. Baruch Goldberg, the American-born Orthodox Israeli doctor who murdered 29 Arabs with an automatic weapon this decade as they prayed in a Hebron mosque, and who was subsequently beaten to death, was proclaimed by some Jews to be kadosh. (This word is commonly translated as meaning "holy;" it also has connotations meaning "separate" or "apart.") "A Jew who is killed because he is a Jew," wrote Dov Leor (a rabbi for the messianic Gush Emunim organization) about Goldberg's violent death, "must certainly be called ... a holy martyr ... without investigating their previous conduct." [LEOR, p. 61] "Baruch Goldstein was the greatest Jew alive," declared a Jerusalem teacher, Samuel Hacohen, "not in one way, but in every way ... There are no innocent Arabs here, and thank God that one Jewish hero reminded us that it had become almost legal to kill Jews in the street. He is the only one who could do it, the only one who was 100 percent perfect. He was no crazy ... Killing isn't nice, but sometimes it is very necessary." Rabbi Yaacov Perin also announced at Goldberg's funeral that "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." [BROWNFELD, A., 3-99, p. 85]

     A 1908 pamphlet, notes Cecil Roth, was widely circulated in the Jewish community under the title, Jews Hanged or Burned Alive in Rome.... Because They Refused to Change Their Faith. Of the hanged Jews listed, all but one were in fact executed for specific crimes, a harshness rendered no differently to any other people of past eras.  "This instance," says Roth, "... is symptomatic of the attitude which Jewish historiography has consistently adopted. Any popular attack or any governmental persecution in which Jews were victims is set down outright as an expression of anti-Semitic sentiment."

      In another example, in 1278, on charges of money clipping [skimming gold or silver content from coinage], 267 Jews were hanged in London. This punishment was not merited out to Jews as Jews, but to those who were disproportiontely "in possession of the greater amount of ready money." Those who accumulated money in the Jewish money-lending and usury era happened to be overwhelmingly Jews, but also included a lesser number of Christian goldsmiths and such who were similarly arrested and executed. "What seems at first blush," says Roth, "[to be] an act of sheer persecution appears in a closer examination one of primitively sharp justice." [ROTH, p. 137]

     In the early years of Christianity, in Alexandria (of today's Egypt), attacks upon Jews rendered in Jewish historical consciousness as acts of anti-Semitism were really what Roth says today would be called "an interracial riot." [ROTH, p. 138]

     Roth underscored the precarious existence of all peoples' lives in the Middle Ages:

      "The modern reader frequently fails to realize that, generally speaking,

       life in the Middle Ages was not secure. For every section of the

       population the probabilities of meeting a violent death were high, even

       in times of comparative peace. Country people were continually subject

       to the onslaught of bandits or of lawless barons, as well as the

       marchings and counter marchings of armed forces. [Even] city dwellers

       ... [ran] the risk of sack and wholesale murder. The whole of medieval,

       and a great part of modern, history is studded with instance of the sort:

       the devastation of Attila, the Scourge of God; the ravaging of the Vexin

       by William the Conqueror; the sack of a score of German cities during

       the Thirty Years War. There were frequently cases when only a minority

       of the population survived, the vast majority being piteously massacred.

       These events and their like should be borne in mind when one considers

       the vicissitudes of any particular racial or religious minority. The scarlet

       of Jewish persecution does not stand out on a ground of virginal white.

       [ROTH, p. 138]

     In medieval Poland, says Bernard Weinyrb, "In an epoch and a country where most of the time people were in danger of attacks by Tatars and Turks, of wars, soldiers, and robber gangs on the roads, insecurity became the normal way of life for people who had never known anything different." [WEINRYB, p. 159]

     The miseries caused by the sack of Rome in 1527, Christian crusades against Muslim-controlled Jerusalem in 1096, Leon in 1197, Malaga in 1487, Naples in 1494, Padua in 1509, Tunis in 1535, or "a hundred other occasions" were at least equivalent tragedies to Jewish descriptions of "Jewish martyrdom." [ROTH, p. 138]

       "It is probably the fact," says Roth, "that in the course of the medieval wars and disorders, the Jews normally suffered more than any other section of the population. This was not necessarily, however, because they were Jews, but simply because they belonged to the more opulent class ... on the capture of a town (by an army), the first objective of the assailants would naturally be the streets of the goldsmiths and the street of the Jews." [ROTH, p. 139]

     Likewise, Jews  -- perceived as affluent and exploitive outsiders to native populaces --suffered the same way at the hands of mobs as did Italian traders in London in 1439 and 1455, and at the "Hansa Steelyard" in 1494. Jews were also subject to random "acts of rapine," like any Christian -- or other community -- of the Middle Ages, as happened in the Jewish part of Asolo, in northern Italy, in 1547. Perpetrators in that case were punished by the central government.

     While Jews were sometimes required to wear special badges of identification in the European Middle Ages, it was a norm of discrimination for the era. Muslims also had to wear such marks of "outsider" distinction in Christian societies. Conversely, in the Muslim world, Christian communities were also faced with such laws and legislation of discrimination, sometimes even in clothing. And of course Jewish law itself has various nomenclature and attendant rules for treatment of various categories of non-Jews as second-class, or worse, people. (Even in modern Israel, Arabs are discriminatorily noted as such on national identity cards).

     "Some current histories," said Roth in 1932, "appear to assume the Jews were sole victims of the Spanish Inquisition ...  Strictly, this is so far from the truth that a precisian might retort that [the Jews] never came under the [Inquisition's] scope, save in exceptional cases, since the activities were essentially confined to [Christian] apostates and renegades." [ROTH, p. 141] Those "Jews" who risked trouble were those among the Marranos/Conversos, who disingenuously represented themselves as Christians and were thereby subject to the same scrutinization for religious conformance as that directed upon any other Christian. Widely targeted were Christian