Jewish people have been persecuted for many different, often overlapping reasons, and none of them justify the hatred or violence they have faced. The core drivers have usually been religious intolerance, social and economic scapegoating, and racist or conspiratorial ideologies.
Religious difference
From antiquity, Jews were unusual in insisting on one God and rejecting the worship of local gods or deified rulers, which made them stand out and seem disloyal or “stubborn” to surrounding empires. Later, in Christian Europe, many church teachings blamed “the Jews” for the death of Jesus, turning a theological dispute into a lasting religious hostility that treated Jews as a permanent outsider group.
Scapegoats in crises
Jews often lived as small minorities without political power, which made them easy to blame when societies were stressed by war, disease, or economic collapse. During events like the Black Death in medieval Europe, rulers and mobs accused Jews of causing plagues or other disasters, which led to massacres and expulsions instead of dealing with the real causes.
Economic myths and envy
In many Christian societies, Jews were barred from owning land or joining guilds and were pushed into roles like moneylending or trade that were then stigmatized. Over time, resentment of some Jews’ visible success fed myths that “Jews control the money” or secretly run governments and banks, even though Jews themselves were often dependent and vulnerable to rulers’ whims.
Modern racism and conspiracy theories
In the 19th and 20th centuries, new “racial” theories recast Jews as an inferior or dangerous race, even for people who were not religious. This pseudo-scientific antisemitism culminated in Nazi ideology and the Holocaust, which murdered six million Jews and spread racist and conspiratorial stereotypes globally.
Why this keeps recurring
Because Jews have kept a distinct religious and cultural identity, antisemites often turn them into a symbol of whatever a society fears—modernity, capitalism, socialism, cosmopolitanism, or “foreign influence.” The pattern is not that there is something about Jews that causes persecution, but that antisemitism is a flexible form of prejudice that people use to explain complex problems by blaming a visible minority.
