Prior to the outbreak of World War II, as Germany was growing more anti-Semitic with each passing day, a group of young Nazi storm troopers accosted an elderly Jew on the streets of Berlin. Forming a circle they took turns shouting epithets at the old man, spitting in his face, and pushing him back and forth. Not satisfied with this they began to punch him in the face and knocked him to the ground. One of the Nazis shouted at him, "Tell us, Jew, who caused the last war?" Though bruised, with his front teeth knocked out and blood streaming down his face, the old Jew's spirit remained undaunted. "Who caused the last war?" he responded, "The Jews, and the bicycle riders." The Nazis were puzzled. "Why the bicycle riders?" one asked. "Why the Jews?" replied the little old man.

Yes, why the Jews? Why did they hate us? Why do they still hate us? We thought we were largely done with this kind of thing. Except for some ever-present verbiage and the acts of a few crazies, anti-Semitism had largely receded into the background for most of world Jewry. But then came 9/11 and the evil genie of Jew-hatred slithered out of the bottle once more. There have been beatings, the burning of Synagogues, riots, mass anti-Israel and anti-Jewish rallies.

Even the supposedly "civilized" nations of Europe jumped on the band-wagon. France has been a particular hotbed of anti-Semitism. Arab gangs, and others, attacked and beat Jews leaving synagogues, threw garbage at Rabbis in the street, ransacked Jewish cemeteries, set off bombs, and burned the synagogue in Marseille to the ground. All the while the French government did nothing beyond a few mealy-mouthed public statements. France was joined in this rank prejudice by the same countries that happily handed over their Jewish citizens to the Nazis for extermination.

When 9/11 made everyone insecure, it came as no surprise that so many people wanted to make it someone else's fault. Lo and behold, there was the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, cited by terrorist propaganda as a major cause of their dissatisfaction, and who was right in the middle of it? Those pesky Jews! Arab leaders did what despots have always done: they deflected the anger of their own oppressed people against an outside enemy: us. The nations of Europe, who bear so much guilt for what they did to our people over the last two thousand years that they would be consumed with self-hatred were they ever to face it squarely, took the easy way out and claimed the current turmoil was our fault.

Yes, it has started again, yet another chapter in a two thousand year history of hatred and persecution, It is a long and sordid tale:

We were booted out of England in 1290 and were prohibited from returning… for 365 years, until 1655.
In France, we were thrown out… three times during the 14th Century -- in 1306, 1322 and 1394.
In Germany, we were expelled… in 1348-1349. The Black Death was killing millions of people in Europe. Someone had to be blamed for that tragedy… Therefore, the Jews were blamed for the millions of deaths during that period of time.
In Spain, [in] 1492… Columbus was going out to discover other worlds; however, to the Jews, that year is remembered as the year that we were forced to leave that nation.
Lithuania did the same to the Jews in 1495, and Portugal followed suit in 1497.
In Russia, the 18th century spelled misery for the Jews. We were forced out of that country in 1727, 1739 and 1742. [Torah Fax, Rabbi Jack Siegel, November 5, 2000.]

It didn't start with the Arabs, or the Nazis, or even the Spanish Inquisition. There are derogatory references to Jews in Roman literature well before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. But it is only after the advent of Christianity that they really increase in volume and virulence. Early in the Common Era The Jewish historian Josephus reports the anti-Semitic rantings of the Roman Apion:

[During the Exodus from Egypt], after a six days' march [the Israelites] developed tumors in the groin, and that is why, after safely reaching the country now called Judea, they rested on the seventh day, and called that day sabbaton, preserving the Egyptian terminology; for disease of the groin in Egypt is called sabbo…

Within [their] sanctuary the Jews kept an ass's head, worshipping that animal and deeming it worthy of the deepest reverence.

[They have a] practice [that] was repeated annually at a fixed season: They would kidnap a Greek foreigner, fatten him up for a year, and then convey him to a wood, where they slew him, sacrificed his body with their customary ritual, ate his flesh and while burning [the rest]… swore an oath of hostility to the Greeks. The remains of their victim were then thrown into a pit. [Allan Gould, ed., "What Did They Think of the Jews," pp. 7-8.]

An early Father of the Church now known as Saint Gregory of Nyssa warned his flock that Jews are…

Slayers of the Lord, murderers of the prophets, adversaries of God, haters of God, men who show contempt for the law, foes of grace, enemies of their father's faith, advocates of the devil, brood of vipers, slanderers, scoffers, men whose minds are in darkness, leaven of the Pharisees, assembly of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners and haters of righteousness. [Ibid., pg. 24.]

The fuel for so much of this superstition and hatred, I'm sorry to say, comes from a volume that vast numbers of people consider to be their Holy Scripture. As philosopher of religion Daggobert Runes puts it:

…the Christian Bible, commonly referred to as the New Testament, contains 102 references to the Jews or the Hebrew people of [the] most degrading, malevolent, and libelous kind, thereby creating in the minds and hearts of Christian[s] ineradicable hatred towards the Jewish people.

This hatred has brought about during the last two thousand years the killing of almost ten million members of the Jewish [people.] [Daggobert Runes, "Let My People Live," a word to the reader.]

Ten million deaths! It is the sad, horrible truth that Christianity is directly responsible for most of them. For example:

The year Columbus discovered America… Ferdinand and Isabella expelled from Spain all Jews who would not convert… 200,000. Later, nine thousand Conversos or Marranos were slaughtered to the accompaniment of Holy Mass.

In the city of Madrid, day after day… Jewish men, women and children were tied hand and foot to metal stands and burned alive for allegedly desecrating the Catholic faith. These victims… were driven to madness and despair by torture with knife and torch until the final burning… [released them from their misery.]

Hundreds of Europeans, the rich, nobles and courtiers with their ladies, traveled from as far as Scandinavia… to watch the burning of the killers of Christ.

Special balconies were erected so the Christian ladies and children would not miss any part of the flaming circus… [Ibid., pp. 2-3.]

A triumphant Church made law after law to persecute, punish, and humiliate those the Christians routinely called "the perfidious Jews." Each of them has a direct counterpart in laws enacted centuries later in Nazi Germany, laws clearly based on earlier Christian ones, such as:

-Intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Christians and Jews is prohibited.
-Jews and Christians are not allowed to eat together.
-Jews are not allowed to hold public office.
-Jews are not allowed to employ Christian servants.
-Jews are not permitted to show themselves in the street during Passion Week (Easter week).
-The Talmud and other Jewish books are to be burned.
-Christians are not permitted to patronize Jewish doctors.
-Christians are not permitted to live in Jewish homes.
-Jews are obliged to pay taxes for the support of the Church.
-Jews are not permitted to be plaintiffs or witnesses against Christians in the courts.
-Jews have to wear special clothing such as badges or hats.
-Construction of new synagogues is prohibited.
-Christians are not allowed to attend Jewish ceremonies.
-Jews are to be placed in compulsory ghettos.
-Christians are not allowed to rent or sell real estate to Jews.
-Jews are not permitted to obtain academic degrees. [Op. cit., Gould, pp. 381-382.]

Although it was the Muslims who first referred to us as "the people of the Book," and although we tended to fare somewhat better in Muslim countries than in Christian ones, the Koran is as negative towards Jews as the Christian Bible:

… Muhammad… utters harsh denunciations of the Jews… And the Koran is in language and in function more harsh than the New Testament toward the Jews… In Muslim teaching, "the Jews" are cast aside by Allah because of their disobedience (Koran 2:88, 4:46, 52, 5:13, 60, 64, 78), and they will be punished by hell-fire (59:3). Muslim community (Umma) is the best that ever existed… and if the Jews and Christians had also believed… things would have gone much better for them (3:110). [Franklin Littell, "The Crucifixion of the Jews," pg. 31.]

Why? Why do they hate us? As Franklin Littell, certainly a righteous gentile if ever there was one, puts it:

The cornerstone of Christian anti-Semitism is the superseding or displacement myth… This is the myth that the mission of the Jewish people was finished with the coming of Jesus Christ. [Ibid., pg. 2.]

The cornerstone of Muslim anti-Semitism is the same, except Muslims believe that Muhammad's teaching superseded both an erroneous Judaism and an equally erroneous Christianity.

For reasons of their own, then, reasons that we Jews had nothing whatsoever to do with, the other two major Western faiths chose to be triumphalist. Even this might not have been enough to make others hate us, if we had just had the good sense to disappear. Make no mistake about it: the continued existence of Jews and Judaism is an ongoing affront to both Christianity and Islam. For how can their "triumphs" be real if the ones they supposedly triumphed over are still here? Clerics have jumped through theological hoops trying to explain away this annoying anomaly. Yet the problem remains as it was: if God truly wished Christianity or Islam to triumph, God should have seen to it that the Jews disappeared.

What God didn't do, our neighbors have often attempted to accomplish on their own. Because in our minority status we were such a convenient target, through the psychological mechanism of projection our neighbors heaped their evils and shortcomings upon us. Although we were usually as poor as the landless peasants around us, they envied what little we had, so we became in their eyes the rapacious ones, the rich, money-grubbing Jews. Their socially unacceptable sexual urges became the canard of Jewish lasciviousness, the charge that we defiled Christian maidens. The desire for power on the part of powerless masses of Christians and Muslims became fear of the Elders of Zion, the non-existent international Jewish conspiracy that supposedly ruled the world. Hatred of Jews stoked largely by their own clerics, coupled with the anger and bloodlust that lurks in every human soul, became the infamous Blood Libel, the atrocious lie that we killed Christian children and used their blood to bake our Passover matzah.

Why do they hate us? Because we exist! And we are damn well going to continue to exist! Not just because we have the same rights as all other human beings. We will also continue to exist because we Jews have a job to do, a job that is nowhere near done:

· To uphold and further the democratic values of our country, America, the only Christian country that has never killed a Jew because of his or her religion.

· To uphold and promote the values of our Judaism, the only non-triumphalist religion in the Western world, and the only one to teach that there are many other paths to the one God besides ours.

· To uphold and support all the good people of our world, the people who transcend hatred and truly learn to love their neighbors as themselves.

Such people do exist, and more often than most of us know, they do their job:

In Billings, Montana there was a group of skinheads and a group of Klansmen there, and they began to harass gays and Hispanics and blacks and Jews. They put up posters threatening and mocking each of these groups, and then they dared to topple tombstones in the Jewish cemetery and to put up swastikas on the local synagogue. And then the community said, "That's it! That's enough! Now they've gone over the line!"

So Rev. Keith Torney of the First Congregation Church decided to take action. He issued a call for every single church member in his church and in every other church in Billings to put a menorah in his window. He himself, together with a hundred members of his church, took up guard duty in front of the local synagogue, to make sure that it would be safe.

By their actions, they made it crystal clear to the bigots in the community that anti-Semitism would not be tolerated. [Rabbi Jack Riemer, "Counting Up Our Losses In The Shoah," Torah Fax, Vayikra, 5755]

There is also…

… Wolfgang Schmidt, son of SS officer Edmund Schmidt, who survived the war, [and] went [incredibly far] in his reaction against the deeds of his father.

Schmidt, born in 1940, converted to Judaism and became a Rabbi. Today he is known as Aharon Shear-Yashuv and teaches at Tel Aviv University. [Chaim Listfeld, "Three True 'Teshuvah' Stories," Torah Fax, Bamidbar, 5755]

Closer to home there are Muslims in our community, many of whom come from Pakistan where many Al Qaeda members are certainly hiding. They are willing to risk the condemnation of others in the Arab or Muslim community who hate Jews, by developing a close relationship with our congregation. They are even willing to demonstrate that relationship by getting up out of their seats at a community 9/11 observance last Thursday and publicly hugging a rabbi when I walked into the gathering. There is also Dave Billings, pastor of the Park Avenue Free Evangelical Church who risks the censure of his own denomination to sit with non-Evangelicals, including Jews, as a member of the Clarkstown Clergy Association. And there are others, many others, though not nearly enough to end the deadly scourge of anti-Semitism.

Will it never end? Not until the guilty look inward, face their guilt, and make amends to those they have so horribly wronged. Not until both Christianity and Islam give up their triumphalist claims and truly teach tolerance and multiple paths to the One God. Not until we Jews also root out the intolerant fanaticism that plagues many of our own people.

Will the curse of Jew-hatred ever end? Yes, if we frail humans can learn to be good enough, and kind enough, and tolerant enough. Yes, if we can end hunger and poverty and oppression, for which we already have the means but not yet the will. Yes, if the top priority of every nation becomes to create a world of peace. Then, and only then, will every one of us be able to sit under our vines and our fig trees, and no one will be afraid.