Jews were not allowed to own land or engage in trades. What they did have was an ethnic/family presence across national boundaries, which placed a few of them in a unique position to negotiate on behalf of their lords and kings. This led to a condition where a small fraction of Jews became essential to European diplomacy, and subsequently became movers of money. That plus the Christian ban on moneylending and the need for liquidity nonetheless.
Those wealthy "court Jews" largely converted to Christianity and assimilated, leaving their poorer brethren to die in pogroms and the Holocaust, while serving as the proof of blame for Jewish conspiracy at the same time.
I only learned recently about usury and the relationship with Jewish groups and their own history. The interplay between local powers needing money at different periods... It was all very fascinating. Especially how simple moral principles (lending for interests) could ripple so far.
Funnily enough it's not even that hard to 'become aware'. Start with the Wikipedia page on the Second World War, for instance, for a blockbuster entry to the topic.
The single most marginalised group of people in the West since antiquity have been the Jews (with the Romani a close second). Pretty much every European power has evicted, massacred, initiated pogroms, or otherwise persecuted Jews. The trend continues today.
Anyone who says 'anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism' is antisemitic, because that's denying a group of people their homeland or Urheimat. That is classic genocide, by the way.
> The single most marginalised group of people in the West since antiquity have been the Jews
Jewish people have generally been treated abominably for the last 2000 years, but surely he most marginalised groups don't even exist any more, because they were wiped out entirely.
> because that's denying a group of people their homeland
History is full of peoples who left or were kicked out of some original homeland. Jewish people are not special in that regard. My ancestors left Saxony about 1500 years ago to conquer an island, and kicked the inhabitants out to the periphery. That's more recent than the expulsion of the Jews 2000 years ago.
I think Israel should exist in the sense that it already exists so let's favour the status quo. But clearly we've learned that it's a completely stupid way to found new countries. Let's not make more ethnostates in other random parts of the world where people already live. We tried it, it turned out that it makes a mess.
Your last sentence makes no sense. Not every Jew identifies as Israeli and by claiming that Israel represents all Jews on this planet you are taking away their agency.
Think about how stupid what you wrote is in the context of a hypothetical second Jewish country that also claims to represent all Jews.
It is as crackpot as saying Switzerland, Austria and Germany all represent all Germans.
They didn't say that one country represents all Jews, they said Jews have a right to their homeland. You made the point that Germans have 3 homelands, and really I suppose you could add Alsace and the Sudetenland and Gdansk and some bits of Denmark if you were ambitious about creating more living space. Does the existence of any of those take away from the agency of people who identify as German?
Perhaps you mean that Germany and Austria have no right to exist, because Germanic tribes are just recent migrants there in the last 2000 years who came from the Urals or something? But wouldn't that be denying agency and stripping identity from the people who actually live there now?
The Germanic Urheimat is in North Germany / Southern Scandinavia, not the Urals, and separated from proto-Indo-European on the order of 4000 years ago, not 2000 years ago.
> But wouldn't that be denying agency and stripping identity from the people who actually live there now?
Indeed, that's why the founding of Israel was so problematic. Living somewhere 2000 years ago does not trump the rights of the people who lived there for the last 2000+ years. If we are to be consistent, Berlin must be returned to the West Slavs, London to the Celts, and so on... it's nonsense.
In the West we have (at least) started to acknowledge the crimes of colonialism and the various wars of conquest over the centuries. For us it is not existential, to acknowledge that what the British did during the slave trade is not existential. But for Israel it is, so many Israelis have to just pretend that the founding of Israel was perfectly just and fair, when it so obviously was an act of total lunacy when looked at through today's eyes. Please note, I do support the continued existence of Israel, because I favour the status quo, but its founding was an act of monumental stupidity.
That is not what I said; this is a strawman. I said, 'Jewish people deserve sovereignty over their ancestral homeland' (i.e. Zionism). This is completely orthogonal to 'Israel represents all Jewish people'.
That being said...
> It is as crackpot as saying Switzerland, Austria and Germany all represent all Germans.
I don't think that's crackpot at all. What's wrong with an ethnic state representing its people's and diaspora's interests? Why do you think countries today issue their citizens with passports? Why do some countries give even non-citizens a fast-track path to citizenship or at least an indefinite multiple-entry visa, provided they're of a certain ethnicity?
A plurality of countries today are ethnic states, by the way, including essentially every European state. I am very happy to say that the German-speaking part of Switzerland, Austria, and Germany absolutely represent Germans as a whole.
As an addendum: printed on the inside front cover of my A1 German textbook was a map of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Make of that what you will.
So many people would have "rights to their ancestral homeland" then.... History is full of conquest and expulsions and genocide. Arabs and Celts were both driven out of what is now my country, at points over a millennium ago. Shall their descendents be entitled to claim part of it as an ethnostate for themselves? Of course not, for that would be ridiculous.
Having colonial powers create an state in a place where people already lived, and which did not consent to its creation, was a terrible terrible idea that led to tremendous suffering a loss of life over the past 75 years. Acknowledging this is not antisemitic.
a (French) collective of Jews who oppose Zionism on anti-colonial grounds. I don't personally agree with them (my own views are more accurately summed up here:
https://arielche.net/Lydie.html
)
but I do think that it is possible to have a logically coherent worldview that says "Jews are to be respected and treated like any other human, but the state of Israel should not exist".
Personally, I don't believe that, I believe the state of Israel should exists, although I believe that bombing your neighbors is actually a piss-poor approach to national security, and honestly buying off the Palestinians by building them schools and hospitals is a lot cheaper in the long run than killing them with expensive jet fighters, but I don't go around accusing every anti-Zionist of anti-semitism.
I know some anti-Zionists personally, and they're what I'd call humanist, who believe the basic idea that, to quote Jefferson, "all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,... life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
Those wealthy "court Jews" largely converted to Christianity and assimilated, leaving their poorer brethren to die in pogroms and the Holocaust, while serving as the proof of blame for Jewish conspiracy at the same time.