Traditionally Jewishness was a religion not a race.
The hostility towards Jews came from the Orthodox tradition of social isolation, chosen people myth, and usury (also kosher slaughter practices). See Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.
There is a claim that jews were hated because they killed Christ but that is highly dubious.
HG Wells wrote an excellent article on the dangers of Orthodox Judaism in the Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939) and The New World Order (1940).
"From the very beginning, there must have been men of vision among the Jews who realised and rebelled against the moral isolation to which they were being condemned, there must have been a continual seeping-away of individuals to the larger opportunities of the outer world, but the uncompromising tradition carried by the old Bible and the associated writings which grew into the Talmud has been sufficient to hold together a core of inassimilable and aggressive orthodoxy to this day clinging obstinately to every detail of ritual, behaviour and avoidance that emphasised the central legend of a Chosen People."
"The whole question turns upon the Chosen People idea, which this remnant cherishes and sustains, which it is the "mission" of this remnant to cherish and sustain. It is difficult not to regard that idea as a conspiracy against the rest of the world. It is essentially a bad tradition, and the fact that for two thousand years the Jews on the whole have been very roughly treated by the rest of mankind does not make it any the less bad. Almost every community with which the orthodox Jews have come into contact has sooner or later developed and acted upon that conspiracy idea. A careful reading of the Bible does nothing to correct it; there indeed you have the conspiracy plain and clear. It is not simply the defensive conspiracy of a nice harmless people anxious to keep up their dear, quaint old customs that we are dealing with. It is an aggressive and vindictive conspiracy. People are apt to catch up and repeat phrases about the nobility of the Book of Isaiah on the strength of a few chance quotations torn from their context. But let the reader take that book and read it for himself straightforwardly, and note the setting of these fragments. Much of it is ferocious; extraordinarily like the rantings of some Nazi propagandist. The best the poor Gentile can expect is to play the part of a Gibeonite a hewer of wood and a drawer of water for the restored elect. It is upon that and the like matter that the children of the orthodox have been fed. It is undeniable. There are the books for everyone to read. It is not tolerance but stupidity to shut our eyes to their quality.
Every sort of man is disposed to get together with his own sort of people and prefer them to strangers. That is the natural disposition of our species, fair-play to the outsider is one of the last and least assured triumphs of civilisation, but the indictment against the Jewish community is that their religion of a Chosen People takes this universal human vice, justifies it and stimulates it to the form of a persistent organised attitude of self-exclusion from the common fellowship of the world....
Everywhere the same reaction occurs and everywhere the Jew expresses his astonishment.
... It is this Chosen People tradition, and still more the habit of mind which betrays itself in those who have come under its influence, which is the ever-recurrent cause of the trouble. It seems to me beside the mark to look for any other."
"..To-day, when the whole world is being subtly pervaded with anti-Jewish feeling, and when the restraints upon the predatory and persecuting impulses in the human animal are being rapidly weakened, these implacable nationalists are still conspicuously seeking suitable regions where they can go on being a people by themselves, where, pursuing an ancient and irrational ritual so far as it suits them, they can sustain a solidarity foreign and uncongenial to all the people about them.
No country wants them on such conditions. Why should any country want these inassimilable aliens bent on preserving their distinctness? Palestine is an object lesson. Until they are prepared to assimilate and abandon the Chosen People idea altogether, their troubles are bound to intensify. No one can help them while even a die-hard minority—a minority that the general body of them does not disavow, a nucleus about which habit and association and sentiment gather very readily and to which it is easy for lost sheep to return—prefers these exasperating pretensions of a special right and claim to becoming frankly and of their own accord common citizens of the world."
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