[paganel]

Anti-semitism wasn't a major factor in European history until the (second-ish part) of the 19th century, for the simple reason that the European Jewish population wasn't that big of a presence for hundreds of years. Once the Enlightenment and French Revolution happened and once the Jewish population started to get some rights (which gets us into the 19th century) then things changed.

Yes, I do know about the very unfortunate anti-semitic acts carried out in German cities as part of the First Crusade, but that kind of proves my point, starting with the 1200s-1300s the Jewish population throughout (what would later be called Western) Europe stopped being a thing.

[reissbaker]

Jews not "being a thing" in Europe from the 1200s until the 1800s is so preposterously wrong it's hard to know where to start. The Spanish expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, with the subsequent very famous Spanish Inquisition, might be a decent place to start reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain

Spain is about as West as you can go and still be in Europe...

And where do you think the Jews in the 1800s in Europe came from? Of course, they'd been there all along, except in the countries that actively ethnically cleansed them like Spain.

[paganel]

I didn't count the current territory of Spain up until the late 1400s as "proper" Western European, in fact most of the histories of Spain do not dwell on the history of Al-Andalus in the 14th century for too long, if at all.

> Spain is about as West as you can go and still be in Europe...

Geographically, of course, but in this type of historical discourse geography isn't the ultimate decider. Notice how Northern countries like Norway, Sweden and even Finland are considered as part of "Western Europe", even though there's only about a 3-hour drive between Sankt Petersburg and the Russian-Finnish border.

[reissbaker]

This is once again so wrong it's incredible. History of Spain not including 1492, the year Columbus set sail? Really? The beginning of European colonialism of the Americas is ignored by "most of the histories" of Europe and Spain?

By the way, historians refer to 1400s as the 15th century, not the 14th century. FYI. That's how century counting works.

And there was no Al Andalus at that point, either; the last trace of Muslim rule, the Emirate of Granada, had lost nearly all of its territory before surrendering their final fragment in January of 1492.

[paganel]

Yes, at the end of the 1400s Spain and Portugal were regarded as the "periphery" of Western Europe, they had just gotten "in" more or less as a result of La Reconquista and of the Aragon kings having started doing their thing in the Southern part of Italian peninsula in the 1400s (especially Napoli) but nothing more than that.

And I was referring to the 14th century not in connection to 1492 (because, as a fact, I do know that 1492 was in the 15th century, even though I do like the Italians calling it "il Quattrocento", but I digress), but to the Spanish 14th century being outside the civilization of Western Europe, which it was, because in the 14th century most of Spain was still civilizational Arab in the parts that counted. During that time Granada was the 3rd largest city in geographical Europe, while Cordoba was 9th largest (going by wikipedia [1]), and yet you don't see that many mentions of them when it comes to the history of the European Middle Ages. Which is to say that back in the Spanish 1300s, when the Jewish presence was still of importance in Spain, the then territory of Spain was not civilizational European.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_citie....)

[reissbaker]

I'm not sure why you keep trying to talk about 1300s Spain when the expulsion of the Jews from Spain happened in 1492, which is in the 15th century and very nearly in the 16th. Jews were clearly a thing in Spain in the 15th century, and Spain was a part of Europe.

And they weren't just in Spain; there were large Jewish communities in the Holy Roman Empire throughout most of the period you're claiming they weren't a thing in Europe — in fact, Yiddish is famously a fusion of Hebrew and High German — and Louis XIV issued letters of patent to the Jewish community in Alsace in the 1600s. Many of the Jews expelled from Spain were initially welcomed by the Papal States, who already had existing Jewish populations — until they were expelled from the Papal States by Pius V in the 16th century. Venice oppressed their Jewish population brutally and confined them to ghettoes, but of course, they existed — otherwise there would be no ghettoes. Not to mention the massive Jewish presence in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was one of the largest European states in the 1500s, although given your backtracking to "Western Europe" perhaps you don't consider the Grand Duchy to be "civilizational European." And in the 1600s, Denmark began explicitly encouraging Jewish immigration from the rest of Europe, due to the Danish fiscal crisis from the Thirty Years War, with hundreds of thousands of Jews moving.

You are simply wrong.

Honestly, given the level of Israel/Palestine conspiracy takes on Jews never having existed in the Middle East, or having no presence there until the 20th century (also wrong), I'm somehow shocked to find someone with a theory that Jews didn't exist in Europe prior to the 19th century.

[chuckadams]

I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.

[arp242]

There have always been Jews in Europe. Martin Luther famously spent quite some time ranting about them.

All I said is that the shape of antisemitism was different before the 19th century, and that this distinction matters. Not that persecution of Jews didn't exist before that time, and certainly not that there were not Jews in Europe.

Whether it's a major factor in European history is somewhat subjective. It's certainly a major factor in Jewish history.

[seabass-labrax]

I wouldn't agree with the assertion that it wasn't a major factor. The repeated violence against Jews and their expulsion from various areas is not a singular event, but forms a significant common thread across European history. It has happened so many times that the idea of persecuting Jews became a part of European culture, and thus gave the Nazis their inspiration for the Holocaust.

The massacre at York in 1190 took the lives of about a hundred Jews, whilst the population of York at that time was somewhere around 7000. As a proportion of the population, that makes it as bloody, possibly considerably more so, than the Holocaust within their respective scopes. I would posit therefore that antisemitism was a very major factor, but the decentralised, often pastoral political geography of pre-industrial Europe makes it harder to see the extent of that antisemitism.

[paganel]

I did include the caveat "starting with the 1200-1300s", and I did have the expulsion of the Jewish population from England in mind when writing that down.

After that I wouldn't say that there were"repeated" violences against Jews (when it comes to Western Europe) for the simple reason that there were almost no Jews around against whom to have that violence anymore. All that changed starting with the 19th century.

[seabass-labrax]

For the scope of England, I think you are probably right. However, Wikipedia lists a number of events that occurred in western Europe well after the crusades, including one in Spain (referencing the Jewish Encyclopedia):

> https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10442-martinez-f...: The great massacre occurred at Seville June 6, 1391, when several thousand Jews were killed and many forced to accept baptism.

If an estimate of Seville's population at that time at around 90,000 is to be believed, that would make the relative brutality equivalent again to the York incident.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1021985/thirty-largest-c...

This is rapidly exceeding my own background knowledge on the topic, but it looks to me as if re-settlement by Jews (and then subsequent violence against them) was a pattern all through the middle ages.

[WolfCop]

Yes, “very unfortunate”.