In the Hebrew Bible, Haman in the Book of Esther appears as the prototype of Jew-hatred. Since then, the Jewish people have repeatedly been subjected to genocide, expulsion, and persecution throughout history.
Haman was an official at the court of the Persian Empire during the reign of King Ahasuerus, around 400 BC. His attempt at genocide of the Jews in the Persian Empire was thwarted by the Jewish queen Esther, who pleaded with Ahasuerus to spare her people. This ended with Haman being executed.
Daniel and his Jewish friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego were subjected to similar persecution during their captivity in Babylon 2,500 years ago, due to their colleagues’ envy and religious intolerance. At that time, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar’s official, Nebuzaradan, had already burned down the temple in Jerusalem and a few centuries later, the Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes desecrated the temple there and dedicated it to the Greek god Zeus, to insult the Jews and their God.
At the destruction of Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago, the temple was destroyed again when the Roman Empire expelled the Jews from the area. Emperor Hadrian then erected a temple to the Greek god Jupiter – the Roman counterpart to Zeus – on the Temple Mount. During the First Jewish-Roman War, according to the historian Josephus, 1.1 million Jews were killed. During the Bar Kokhba revolt a few decades later, according to the historian Cassius Dio, about 580,000 Jews were killed.
Impact on history
The Jewish-Roman wars had a significant impact on historical development. To avoid being associated with the Roman-Jewish conflict, Christians distanced themselves from their Jewish roots.
Anti-Jewish arguments formulated in the early years of the church would fully bloom in their terrifying fullness once Jews became a minority in Christian societies. Theological arguments shaped by the church’s alliance with power would justify persecution of Jews during the Inquisition, the Crusades, pogroms in Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust.
In the 12th century, the Church carried out crusades, massacres, and persecution of Jews, accusing them of being Christ-killers. They were blamed for ritual murders, for poisoning wells, and were charged with using the blood of Christian children in their Passover rituals. During the First Crusade 12,000 Jews were murdered along the way and when the Crusaders reached Jerusalem, the Jewish community was exterminated by being burned alive in their synagogue.
At this time, Jews were not allowed to own land in England; many were arrested or executed, and in 1290 all Jews were expelled from the country. In France, Jews were plundered of their property, synagogues were converted into churches and Jews were expelled in waves. Around 300,000 Jews were forced to flee or convert, or were murdered during the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal from the late 15th century.
Russian pogroms
Antisemitism in the Russian Empire led to many pogroms during the 19th century. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881, widespread anti-Jewish pogroms broke out. Jews were officially blamed for the Tsar’s death, and Russian media engaged in unrestrained antisemitic propaganda. The pogroms resulted in a mass emigration of Jews to Western Europe and to the USA, with an estimated 2.5 million Jews leaving Russia.
The Russian Revolution officially ended centuries of antisemitism in the Russian Empire, but as early as August 1919, Jewish property and synagogues were confiscated by the Soviet government, and many Jewish communities were dissolved.
Between 1918 and 1921, over 100,000 Jews were killed in more than 1,100 pogroms in a region that is part of present-day Ukraine, according to Professor Jeffrey Veidlinger in The Times of Israel in December 2021.
The Holocaust, one of the most terrifying events in history, was the Nazis’ systematic, state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of about six million Jews during World War II, motivated by a Nazi ideology centered on antisemitism.
The Holocaust differs from other genocides in history because of the systematic, industrial, and state-organized machinery of death, justified by the Nazis’ racial ideology that viewed the Germanic “Aryan race” as a master race.
Threat of a Holocaust
Jew-hatred, incitement to terror attacks against Jews, and calls for the destruction of the Jewish state have, since 1948, been common in TV, newspapers, websites, social media, schoolbooks, mosques, and political speeches in the Middle East. Many Nazi war criminals from the Holocaust found refuge in Arab countries like Syria and Egypt after World War II.
This hateful and relentless rhetoric led to the ethnic cleansing of 800,000 Jews in the Arab world, followed by a series of wars against Israel — most recently by the terror alliance of Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, with support from repressive countries like Turkey, Qatar, and Russia.
Before the Six-Day War, PLO’s first leader Ahmad Shukeiri said in an interview with the Lebanese newspaper al-Yawm:
“We will strive to help [the Jews] and facilitate their departure by sea to their countries of origin.”
Regarding Israeli-born Jews, he said:
“Those who survive will remain in Filastin, but in my view, no one will survive.”
Iran’s Supreme Leader – Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – threatened as early as twelve years ago to annihilate Israel if his country is attacked. On Palestine Square in Tehran, there is a clock counting down to Israel’s annihilation, set for September 9, 2040. The clock is based on a prediction made by Ali Khamenei in 2015 and was installed in 2017 as a state-sanctioned threat.
In an interview with the Lebanese TV channel LBCI, Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad stated that they would repeat the massacre of October 7, 2023:
“We must teach Israel a lesson and will do the same thing again and again… there will be a second, third, and fourth time… Israel is a country that has no place here. We must remove that country. We are not afraid to say this openly,” he said.
