Wetzelrad wrote: ↑Wed May 07, 2025 6:51 pm
For what it's worth, I think this thread is one of your most agreeable posts so far on the forum. We should above all be committed to truth, and many people in this sector fall short of that. The 109 meme is lazy and grug-headed. Serious scholarship on this topic is warranted.
Thank you. I appreciate your intellectual honesty.
That said, the facts cannot be ignored. Your "more accurate list" of twelve countries is a distortion. Any individual could compare your list with one of the much longer lists and wonder why you excluded places like the Netherlands and Brazil and Egypt.
That was what came up in a brief search. I don't know anything about expulsions from Brazil and the Netherlands. Egypt is a different story though and was due to the 1948 War of Independence / Nakbha in Palestine. I'm fine going through the actual historical details with you in an intelligent way to see what you guy are talking about.
Obviously exaggerating and twisting the truth, like what is done with the 109 expulsions meme, is extremely hard to engage with because it's incomprehensibly and simply false.
Your blaming the expulsions on false accusations is another distortion. When Edward I expelled Jews in 1790, he didn't have to invent crimes. Jews were discovered to have led a massive coin clipping operation and were well-known to engage in exploitative moneylending even after it was outlawed.
This is a concrete example that I can look into but I'm fairly positive that many Jews were expelled and scapegoated for false things across many instances. Assuming that you are right, if some Jews illegally engaged in coin clipping, is it right or fair to expel every single Jew from your state?
As far as I know, moneylending was not outlawed but Jews were discriminated against and prohibited from engaging in so many professions that they were somewhat forced into moneylending.
Blaming it on some sort of greed, to "seize assets or cancel debts", is another distortion. When Titus sacked Jerusalem, he wasn't driven by mere greed, he said to Jews "you made preparations for war against us with our own money... and, like merciless serpents, have thrown out your poison against those that treated you kindly."
That would not have been the case in all instances but it was the case in many as I understand it. Let me look into this more deeply and I will come back to you with concrete examples that can be discussed.
Blaming it on the killing of Jesus or theology generally is another distortion. When Jews were expelled from Spain, Isabella and Ferdinand didn't say "get out because you killed Jesus." They said Jews "have had means and ways they can to subvert and to steal faithful Christians from our holy Catholic faith and to separate them from it, and to draw them to themselves and subvert them to their own wicked belief and conviction, instructing them in the ceremonies and observances of their law". And when Manuel did the same four years later, he likewise held Jews responsible for the "many Christians [who] do depart from the true career, which is the Holy Catholic Faith".
Being blamed for the death of Jesus was definitely a rationalization for many pogroms and Jewish murders throughout history, but you are right that it didn't seem to be the primary motivation in Spain. Jews were expelled from Spain because the Crown was worried that Jews were a threat to the conversos (converted Jews) but it was just plain vanilla religious persecution. They didn't want to grant religious freedom to minority groups. You can blame the Jews for not becoming Christians, but I don't think that's fair at all to anybody. We believe in freedom of religion in the West, with certain guardrails.
The Crown's wanted to consolidate and centralize its power and religious unification was used as a tool to do so.
We can actually talk about these events and condemn their immoralities without having to lie by claiming that Jews are guiltless victims, or by minimizing the numbers and magnitude of these events, or by denying their occurrence as "false".
In very many cases, Jews were victimized and persecuted for literally no fault of their own. The fact that individual Jews may have offended in some way at some point throughout history, seems to be nitpicking to me. There is no society of humans anywhere at any point in history that has not done something wrong or harmful.