text: seriously, why have the jews been hated by people for thousands of years now?  it seems rediculous.?   the word stranger is equivalent to enemy in many people's languages. the jew's have been a people who never melted into most nations that they lived. a large part of this was the religious fanaticism which held sway in europe during the dark ages and still holds sway in the middle east today.   as such jews in many nations were considered sub-citizens. they were often unable to own property. often had little legal recourse in the nations they lived. whenever a religious witch hunt started up the jews would be one of the first rounded up since they openly practiced a minority religion. likewise marrying a jew and for jewish culture to marry outsiders was taboo. as such few jews and non-jews married to soften the boundaries between jewish and non-jewish culture. only in the last 50 years in north american and european nations has this begun to finally happen. jewish neighborhoods in america are fast disappearing.   money lending was considered a lowly trade in the ancient world. it required owning no property and at times has even been banned. a perfect trade for a people unable to better themselves by any other means. so jews found themselves doing the things others in european and islamic nations did not want to do. jews were also frequent targets of crime and discrimination. so for a jew to survive they had to be carefull with each penny as who knew when the next time somebody would come to take everything away from them would be.   money lenders are not popular people. true people like to borrow money but who ever actually wants to pay it back. that a person needs to borrow money is a sign of financial distress in the first place. collecting debts from the unwilling will make a person even more unpopular. what has further hurt the jews is exactly what allowed them to survive in the first place. the penny pinching and expecting the worst to happen means that when economies collapsed in a nation the jews tended to survive such catastrophes in stride. after all daily life often held the risk of a catastrophe anyway. jews by taking up essential tasks assured that when all else failed they would have a living. the worse economics became around them the better off they appeared to be doing compared to non-jewish countrymen. germany during the pre-world war two days is one of many examples.   so these strangers who refused to convert to the faith pre-dominant in the nation, who did not intermarry, who did the work deemed unfit for most others were easy targets for prejudice and discrimination. jews are just one example, most other ethnic groups who tried to exist like the jews were either eventually assimilated or destroyed. the gypsies are another example of such an ethnic group which survived and also suffered a great deal of discrimination and prejudice. gypsies were yanked into nazi concentration camps almost as fast as the jews. gypsy like jew were murdered by stalin's death machine. before the 1900s gypsy and jew suffered similar fates at the hands of inquisitions, witch hunts and other various murder fests. so it is not hate directed at jews. it is hate directed at people who do not fit.   with this history israel was founded. mostly by survivors of world war ii europe but quite a few jews from around the world came to israel during this time. islamic nations still carry the convert by the sword and death to the infidel attitude. had it been quakers who took over land owned by muslims they'd gotten the same reaction. the hatred is not of jews but one of somebody other than a muslim owning what muslim's consider muslim lands. what aggravates this even more is that so many holy sites to the muslim faith exist in a land controlled by another faith. the same kind of sentiment which helped populate the crusader armies. the crusades themselves were mostly an attempt to end in-fighting between european nations. recovering the "holy lands" was what inspired so many europeans to take up the ban