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For John, BLUF:  As Americans we should be welcoming to all and supportive of all, helping them succeed, because their success helps the rest of us to succeed.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Should’ve Kept Those Jews

Here is the sub-headline:

Troubling FBI statistics and recent anti-Semitic incidents should remind the U.S. that other countries have lost their Jewish populations—to their own detriment.

From City Jouornal, by Historian Tevi Troy, Summer 2021.

Here is the lede plus two:

According to just-released FBI statistics, hate crimes in 2020 reached their highest level in 12 years.  Of religion-based hate crimes, 57.5 percent of them were targeted at Jews, who only make up 2 percent of the U.S. population.  These figures, along with disturbing attacks this summer on Jews by anti-Semitic thugs in New York, Florida, California, and other places, have rattled many American Jews.  Though American Jews have long been comfortable in America, the sad history of world Jewry suggests that no home for the Jews can be considered permanent.  Yet, as the countries that have expelled Jews or encouraged them to leave have learned, things usually got worse, not better, after Jewish populations departed.

Anti-Semitism has a long, ugly history, going back thousands of years. In the fifth through seventh centuries, for example, the Visigoths in Iberia mistreated Jews in various ways, including enslavement and restrictions against intermarriage.  These restrictions redounded negatively upon the restrictionists.  As Violet Moller writes in The Map of Knowledge, “an increasingly oppressive attitude to their subjects (especially Iberia’s large Jewish community) resulted in stagnation in almost all areas of life.  Trade reduced dramatically, there was widespread urban depopulation, and culture shrank to such an extent that some historians have nicknamed them the Invisigoths.”

As Jews moved across Europe in the Middle Ages, expulsion became a repeated occurrence, with a multi-century discharge of Jews from England starting in 1290 and France driving out Jews in several waves in the 1300s.  The most famous exodus in Christian Europe happened in Spain in 1492, under the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella.  Spanish Jews until then had been a flourishing community, producing poets, philosophers, and physicians.  All that ended, to the eventual regret of both Christian Europe and Spain.  Many of the expelled Jews moved to the Ottoman Empire, which, at the time, took a more welcoming attitude toward Jews.

And the article goes on, worth the reading.

We, as Americans, need to show care for all of our minorities.  It would appear all of us are immigrants, be it yesterday, a hundred years ago or several thousand years ago.  No one should be excluded from the community because of religion or nation or origin or race.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff