Pandemics have always incited anti-Semitism. Here's the history you need to know.

[Behind the Aegis]

Every pandemic begins with a terrifying moment in which it seems impossible to explain what is happening.

Often, whoever is considered the “other” in society is blamed, a scapegoating we see happening here and now.

President Trump’s administration has drawn criticism for periodically insisting on calling the coronavirus “the Chinese virus,” a move many see as racist. In the first weeks of the American crisis over coronavirus, white nationalists tried to deliberately spread the coronavirus to Jews, as detailed in a recent FBI alert. Earlier this week, protesters in front of the Ohio Statehouse carried signs directly blaming Jews for plague, depicting Jews as rats — drawing condemnation from Governor Mike DeWine. They’re not alone: as Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, noted in remarks on anti-Semitism this week, “Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant rise in accusations that Jews, as individuals and as a collective, are behind the spread of the virus or are directly profiting from it.”

Meanwhile, some lawmakers have compared coronavirus restrictions to Nazi laws: Idaho State Representative Heather Scott, for instance, compared coronavirus lockdowns to Nazi Germany and the state governor to “Little Hitler.” “I mean that’s no different than the Nazi Germany, where you had government telling people, you are an essential worker or non-essential worker and the non-essential workers got put on a train,” she said.

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Just in time for Jewish American History Month.

[TexasTowelie]

1. K&R! nt

[appalachiablue]

2. Is it the 1920s, 1820s or 1320s? I wonder at times, K/R

(excerpts from the article)

..THE BLACK DEATH AND THE BURNING OF THE JEWS

Note the word burning.

“These persecutions were the burning of Jews between 1348 and 1351, when in anticipation of, or shortly after, outbreaks of plague Jews were accused of poisoning food, wells and streams, tortured into confessions, rounded up in city squares or their synagogues, and exterminated en masse,” Cohn wrote.

The major Jewish communities of Europe, in the Rhineland, were destroyed.

Thousands of Jews in at least 200 towns and hamlets were “butchered and burned,” according to Fordham University’s Jewish history sourcebook.

Historians say it was the bloodiest moment in European Jewish history until the Holocaust, for which the Black Death persecutions are often viewed as a precursor.

“The massacres of the Jews during the Black Death were unprecedented in their extent and ferocity until the twentieth century,” the late historian Michael W. Dols wrote in “The Comparative Communal Response to the Black Death in Christian and Muslim Societies” (1974).

-> But while Jews suffered a particularly brutal fate in the plague years, they weren’t the only targets. “Lepers, gravediggers and other social outcasts, Muslims in Spain, or any foreigners were liable to attack,” wrote Dols, a specialist in the history of medicine in medieval Islam.

That broad scapegoating and the particular persecution of Jews during the plague was an extension, Dols wrote, of “the image of the Jew as ‘Anti-Christ’ which was commonplace in Europe during the later Middle Ages. ”That image, Dols noted, “was fostered by the Catholic Church and gained considerable momentum from the time of the First Crusade.”

[Harry Walpurgisnacht]

3. Kick for Exposure

The last thing this country needs is more fucking bigotry!