Subject: Re: Hmmmm
Yes, and it makes little sense to me.

It's pretty straightforward to me. Humans have been persecuting minority groups since the dawn of time. It's even more understandable when you look at the relationship between the Jews and their social and political environment at the time.

The Jews were a diasporic community - driven from their place of origin - that retained their own language, culture, traditions, dress, social organization, and most importantly religion. So they were a discrete and insular subculture.

Meanwhile, during the Middle Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe was organizing into separate nations where the legitimacy and power of the king was being grounded on religious basis. The King ruled because he was chosen by the Christian G-d, backed by the Church, which based his power in large part on the religious fealty of his subjects. The Westminster model of secure nation-states which we live under today was centuries away - national borders were fluid, all the feudal lords under the King were potential rivals, and every Crown was insecure from both domestic and national threats.

Add into that the superstition and xenophobia that permeates any illiterate and ignorant society - leading people to fear and distrust all people different from them. Sprinkle in that the dominant interpretation of the holy text was that the Jews killed G-d. Combine that with the dominant cultural imperative to spread Christianity to all the non-believers of the world - the Spanish monarchs didn't just drive the Jews out of Spain, but the Moors as well - and that lands pretty hard. Mix in the constant persecution of heretics of any sort - the purification of Catholic Christianity during the pre-Middle Ages, the wars between Protestants and Catholics that divided the Continent (and the world). It's not like the Huguenots were having a lot of fun back then, either.

Finally, expelling the Jews was always a tempting way for any Crown to raise money in times of need. Drive out the Jews, and you get to seize all their property - then let them trickle back in, rebuild their communities, and drive them out again.

So - the Jews were a discrete religious minority that did not assimilate to local customs and did not acknowledge the religion upon which the legitimacy of the secular government was based, in a time when even the strongest Crowns had a somewhat tenuous grip on power and recurring need for funds, during a half-millennium where promoting the dominant religion was an important aim of the state, and when it was a widespread belief that Jews were responsible for the death of Christ. Usury ain't the half of it.