I’m sorry, everybody, I need to keep sharing this.
A student: So you are saying that Jews were persecuted both in Medieval Spain and in Nazi Germany? Wow, that’s quite a coincidence! I mean, these were completely different cultures and completely different historic eras, yet they both chose the Jews to persecute? How weird.
This is progress, though, after those students who had never even heard the word “Jews.”
I know that Nazis used old times antisemitism with a racial twist, but it is strange that I don’t know other peoples, who were persecuted in this way through centuries: in Europe, in Arab countries, etc.
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Were there other peoples who dispersed completely and had no land of their own anywhere?
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Gypsies.
Hitler killed them too, but in day to day life in USSR & abroad I guess hatred to Jews seemed much stronger. Probably because Gypsies, as a rule, weren’t seen as economic competition.
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Gypsies were really persecuted in Spain. And in the USSR, do you remember what the attitude to them was? Almost nobody would have had a problem with their child marrying a Jew (even my mother-in-law got over it), but a Gypsy? Imagine that!
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Ironically Spain is the only country in Europe today in which gypsie is not a pejorative term. In fact, Spanish culture today is rather proud of its gitano heritage.
From the web: Spain was unusual among European countries of the Middle Ages in adopting a policy of enforced integration rather than exclusion (not that forced intergration is any better than exclusion).
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This isn’t something I know much about, but am I correct in thinking that to a limited extent, gypsies, the Rom, and Jews share a heritage? It might go some way to explain the consistency of prejudice across cultures.
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The gypsies were persecuted because of their nomadism that threatens the social structure.
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Well they’ve all been living for a very long time as a minority in other cultures and none have (until very recently) been the majority anywhere. So that does give them something in common, but more likely it’s just that in itself that has led to persecution
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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