1648-58 – New, gruesome tortures invented and employed against thousands of Jews as Eastern Orthodox Cossacks ravage Poland. Swedish invaders compound the terror. An estimated 100,000 to 500,000 Jews lost their lives, and some 700 of their communities destroyed.

Hamburg expels its Jews.

1744 – Jews expelled from Moravia.

1753 – 35,000 Jews expelled from Russia.

1768 – Russian territorial expansion brings many Jewish communities under Russian jurisdiction. The infamous “Pale of Settlement” established in the new western provinces to segregate the Jews and keep them from “contaminating” rest of Russian society.

1814-20 – Jews attacked and expelled from many German cities.

1821 – Anti-Jewish riots in Greece.

1851 – Constitutions of Prussia and Austria incorporate anti-Jew provisions.

1858 – Pope Pius IX kidnaps Edgardo Mortara, a 6-year-old Jewish boy who was allegedly baptized by a female servant. Fearing that such a “Christian” child cannot be entrusted to Jewish parents, Pius decides to raise the boy himself.

1878 – 100,000 Jews flee Romania for the U.S. to escape oppression.

1881 – A petition demanding that severe restrictions be re-imposed on the Jews is signed by over 200,000 people and presented to the first chancellor of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck.

Czar Alexander III and his advisers mark Easter by launching major pogroms against the Jews as the Russians embark upon a policy intended to evict a third, kill a third, and convert a third of the Jews within Russia.

“In Russia the conflict of the Jews and the Orthodox Church released the most open and virulent manisfestation of religious anti-Semitism. To the church, the Jews were the enemy seeking to undermine Russian Orthodoxy and the tsar, the very foundations of Russian tradition. The church and the tsarist authorities went so far as to condone, and even encourage, the violent progroms that were perpetuated against the Jews in 1881-82 and again in 1905…. From Russian Orthodox circles, too, arose the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent documentation of an alleged international Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world by subverting the social order through Liberalism, Freemasonry, and other modern movements….” – The Encyclopedia Britannica, “History of Judaism”

1890+ – Four million Jews flee to America from Eastern Europe to avoid persecution.

1894 – French Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus falsely accused of treason. Bitterly anti-Semitic press delays his vindication and sparks anti-Jewish riots. Tensions from “The Dreyfus Affair” will roil French politics for more than a generation.

1900-10 – Hundreds of anti-Jewish pogroms launched by Russian Czar Nicholas II.

1915 – Grand Duke Sergei, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian armies, orders the relocation of all Jews from the Pale for fear they will side with the Germans during WWI. Out of 600,000 forcibly transported to the interior of Russia, about 100,000 of them die from exposure and starvation.

1918-20 – Some 200,000 Jews slaughtered during the Russian Civil War (mainly by those who thought them Communists even though the Communists tended to attack them as capitalists).

1920s – Ku Klux Klan revived in the U.S.; many restrictions placed on people of “Hebrew descent.” Immigration rules tightened to keep Jews and other “undesirables” out.

1926-1933 – Pogroms against Jews in Russia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Greece, and Mexico.

1934 – Anti-Jewish groups formed across Canada. Anti-Semitism widespread in Canadian newspapers and magazines.

*

Just a few things to keep in mind the next time someone mentions the approximately 2500 Christians executed by the evil Romans, suggests that the beliefs and actions of Hitler and the Nazis were utterly unique or “un-Christian,” or claims atheists are the ones incapable of acting morally.

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