The thing is a bit complicated. First the Jews invented God. There are also Egyptian and Mesopotamian claims, but Jews know better.
(It has been said that many Jews do not believe in God, but believe that God has chosen the Jews.)
Jews learn at a very tender age that they are God's chosen people. Unconsciously, this knowledge remains anchored in their "soul" throughout their life, even though many of them become total atheists. True, many peoples on earth believe that they are better than other peoples. But they don't have a Bible to prove it.
I am sure that many Jews are not even aware that they believe this, or why. The Jewish soul just knows it. We are special.
The language reflects this. There are Jews and there are the others. The Hebrew for all the others is "goyim." In ancient Hebrew, "Goyim" just means peoples in general, including the ancient Israelite people. But over the centuries a new definition has come into being: there are the Jews and there are all the others, the Gentiles, the Goyim.
According to legend, the Jews were a normal people living in their land, the Land of Israel, when the evil Romans conquered them and dispersed them throughout the world. In reality, the Jewish religion was a proselytizing religion and expanded quickly throughout the empire. The Jews in Palestine were already a minority among the adherents of Jehovah, when the Romans evicted many of them (but far from all) from the country.
Soon they had to compete with Christianity, an offshoot of Judaism, which also started to wildly gain adherents. Christianity was built around a great human story, the story of Jesus, and was therefore more apt to convert the masses of slaves and proletarians throughout the empire.
The New Testament also includes the story of the crucifixion -- an unforgettable picture of "the Jews" demanding the execution of the gentle Jesus.
I doubt if a person who heard this story in their early childhood ever really loses the scene in their unconscious mind. The result is some kind of anti-Semitism, conscious or unconscious.
This was not the only reason for hating the Jews. The very fact that they were dispersed throughout the world was a huge advantage but also a huge curse.
A Jewish merchant in Hamburg could connect with a Jewish merchant in Thessaloniki, who was corresponding with a Jewish merchant in Cairo. Few Christians had such an opportunity. But the competition exposed Jews to innumerable pogroms. In one European country after another Jews were attacked, killed, raped, and finally expelled.
In the Jewish soul all this created two conflicting trends: the conviction that Jews were special and superior and the conviction that Jews were in eternal danger of being persecuted and exterminated.
IN THE meantime, another offshoot of Judaism -- Islam -- came into being and conquered a large part of the world. Lacking a Jesus story, it was not anti-Jewish. Muhammad had his quarrels with Jewish tribes in the Arabian desert, but for long stretches of time, Muslims and Jews worked closely together. Moses Maimonides, one of the greatest Jewish thinkers, was the personal physician of one of the greatest Muslim heroes, Salah ad-Din (Saladin). Until Zionism arose.
Jews did not change. While other European nations changed their forms of social structure -- tribes, multi-tribal kingdoms, empires, modern nations etc. -- Jews stuck to their ethnic-religious diaspora. This made them different, leading to pogroms and finally to the Holocaust.
Zionism was an attempt to turn the Jews into a modern European nation. The early Zionists were cursed by orthodox Rabbis in the most savage terms, but refused to be drawn into a culture war. They created the fiction that in Judaism, religion and nation are the same.
Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, was a European colonialist through and through. He tried to win a European colonial power for his enterprise -- first the German Kaiser, then the British imperialists. The Kaiser said to his aides "It's a great idea, but you can't do it with Jews." The British realized the potential and issued the Balfour Declaration.
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