Antisemitism emerged in Europe soon after the Roman Empire turned Christian and continued through the Middle Ages, the Age of Reason and the European Colonial Nationalist Empires (French, British, Italian, German, Spanish, etc.). Throughout that long history, Jews lived sheltered within Arab, then Muslim societies and civilizations. Indeed, Arabs and Jews used to be sibling tribes coexisting all over the Arabian peninsula. There never was antisemitism in the Arab-Muslim world. The shining example of this historial kinship between Islam and Judaism was in Arab Spain between the 800s and late 1400s.
It was European Christians who in their darkest Middle Ages were as extremist in their religiosity as ISIS, Al-Qaeda or Daesh are in their Islamic religiosity. Persecutions, massacres, inquisitions, genocides, wars... were the modus operandi of the Church and its vassal European kingdoms against anyone who was not Catholic. After the Protestant Reformation, the "enlightened" Protestants became even more vicious and radical in their literal interpretations of the Christian doctrine. Both Protestants and Catholics massacred millions of native Amerindians as they conquered the Americas.
When Napoleon "discovered" Egypt in the early 1800s, Western academia was stunned at the magnitude of Egyptian civilization and its associated Jewish and Phoenician civilizations. But as it discovered that the origins of western civilization lie squarely in the Levant, Europe could not countenance that Egyptians, Phoenicians and Jews were the fountainhead of its own civilization. But Europe had Jews, not Phoenicians or Egyptians, living in ghettos across the continent. Thus, the academic rejection of a Levantine origin to Greek cutlure - known as hellenocentrism - translated itself in European politics and popular culture as an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the Levantines represented by the Jewish minorities living in Europe. Martin Bernal detailed and called out this phenomenon in his "Black Athena". In other words, Europeans hated all Levantines, but they only had the Jews within reach to persecute.
Therefore, antisemitism as defined as hatred of Jews was in fact a broader hatred of everything Near Eastern and by extension of everything non European, fed by the colonial stranglehold over native peoples all over the world. That the Catholic crusaders massacred entire cities of Greek Orthodox Christians as they made their way to Palestine is ample proof of Western Catholic hostility to other Levantine non-Catholic Christians as well as, of course, Muslims.
The so-called Judeo-Christian west is therefore a fallacy, principally because there never was a unity between white Europeans and their Jewish minorities; there was only hostility and hatred. Of course, Jews who lived in Europe - the Ashkenazis - are themselves eastern Europeans who converted to Judaism and thus became the object of persecution and pogroms by the Orthodox Christians of Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus etc. As a result, they fled to western Europe and formed the Ashkenazi Jewish tribe which invaded Palestine and became today's ruler of Israel. The Ashkenazi Israelis are known as "white" or "European" Israelis by their fellow Israelis of Sepharad (Spain) or Mizrahi (Egypt) origins who suffer racism and discrimination at the hands of the ruling "white" Israelis.
Contrary to what Zionist Hasbara propaganda says, the original Levantine Jews of Palestine did not leave Palestine after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 AD. They became Christians when the Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion (in the 300s), then became Muslims when the Arabs conquered Palestine in 738 AD. There is no evidence of a massive migration of Jews out of Roman Palestine, just as there never was a massive migration of Phoenician Lebanese right next door who too had to forego their Phoenician pagan religion and be coercively converted to Christianity. In short, today's Muslim and Christian Palestinians are the direct descendants of the original Jews of Palestine.
The only link that exists between Judaism and Christian Europe is the old testament. Some have even argued that the early Church made a strategic mistake in appending the torah to the new testament because it did not signal a complete break with the past. The reason is that the early church leaders and Christians were themselves secessionist (from their own tribe) and seditious (for Rome) Jews who broke away from maintsream Judaism but could not abandon their history all at once.
In sum, antisemitism is on the surface directed against Jews in both eastern and western Europe. But the Jews in Europe represented all the "other", the "alien", cultures next door of Egypt, Phoenicia and beyond. No wonder that besides the Jews, the Roma gypsies were next on the extermination list of the German, French, Italian, and other European Fascist and Nazi countries. Even the United States put a ceiling on Jewish immigration at exactly the same time that Jews were fleeing European hatred.
Why are the Zionists, who supposedly represent the victims of Fascism and Nazism, degrading the humanity of the Palestinians whom they have massacred, displaced and dispossessed? The answer is simply because they want to steal their land, but more fundamentally the brutalized and abused Jews of Europe could not imagine themselves peacefully migrating and humbly asking for shelter from the Palestinians: They had learned violent colonialism and racism from the Germans and other Europeans, and could not imagine but use violence against the peaceful, poorer and less sophisticated Palestinians. The abused becoming the abuser. The victim becoming the torturer.
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