Pagan writers rarely singled out Jews for unique hostility

Evidence

The Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Gallery in London, opened in the summer of 2000, provides a now commonly held but rather simplistic and misleading interpretation in which to contextualize and explain the Nazis’ “Final Solution”: “Antisemitism - ‘the longest hatred’ - developed over nearly two thousand years, as Europe found ways to blame the Jews for more and more of society’s ills.” There are some who would go back even earlier, exploring what they see as evidence of pagan antisemitism in the pre- Christian era. The evidence for such hostility, however, is limited, and needs to be set alongside positive comments about Jews and Judaism by Greek and other pagan writers. Equally importantly, Jews were rarely if ever singled out for particular animosity - Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and the Jews themselves tended to view all other groups as culturally inferior. Moreover, Jews were not an insignificant force in the ancient world, and some conflict between Jews and non-Jews was based on real tension over political and other power (Gager, 1983). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 495

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s method: treating moral panics as class/political signaling rather than continuous hatred.