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by seabass-labrax 794 days ago
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.

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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.

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.