Why not? How, if the situation was as described by skeptichaggis, were there any Jews around after a few decades? If every unwelcome act of nature or international politics in the Middle Ages resulted in the killing of Jews there would soon be none left.
The question has been put: what elements of the history of persecution suffered by the Jews at the hands of the Church do you believe to have been exaggerated? And to what extent? Can you respond specifically?
The exaggeration I'm referring to is evident in skeptichaggis's fulminations.
You have made a whole series of bizarre statements. So what elements in the description of the degree of oppression are false or exaggerated? That is a travesty. Here is the text from the relevant regulation, the Bull
Cum nimis absurdum, 14 July 1555.
...
§ 9. Moreover, these Jews are to be limited to the trade of rag-picking, or "cencinariae" (as it is said in the vernacular), and they cannot trade in grain, barley or any other commodity essential to human welfare.
That's an odd formulation, where "cencinariae" is vernacular while "rag-picking" isn't but I suppose when one's habitual language is a dead one "vernacular" has a peculiar sense.
Of course "rag-picking" isn't the term used, it's somebody's chosen translation of the term used. The sense it's meant to convey, I suspect, is the practice of unpicking fabric for fibres to be used in cordage and paper, an employment at the very bottom end of the labour market. Usually engaged in by women and children it served as a supplementary income but couldn't support a family, and so couldn't support a community.
I stress: these measures were enacted in practice.
Communities did survive, which suggests either that the measures were circumvented somehow or that the term the Pope used has a different sense to that described above. A sense, for instance, of the second-hand clothing trade - which was a traditional trade of Jews in Western Europe. In support of that, the Pope goes on to say "and they cannot trade in grain, barley or any other commodity ...";
rag-picking, in the above defined sense, is an occupation not a trade. Juxtaposing these things only makes sense in relation to the second-hand clothing trade.
Not quite the picture suggested by your "rag trade" as practiced on the eve of the introduction of nylon, which you seek to evoke. And I have already explained why Christians eschewed this occupation.
Presumably you mean :
... rag picking (a very dangerous occupation, as old clothes were one of the main vectors of infectious disease).
which brings in the bizarre notion that late Medieval Christians had a germ theory of disease, simply so that the Vatican can be accused of using it against the Jews. I think that reasonably counts as an exaggeration.
So they could be money lenders too, under certain restrictions.
And if they had money to lend. Which some did.
Christians avoided that occupation also, because it was a sin, as perilous to the soul as the "rag trade" was to the bodytr. That was how the Jews managed to survive.
It was
a way. There were Jews involved in trade at all levels, in goldsmithing and, famously, gemstones. Also peddling trinkets (not the necessities of life, note) from village to village.
You have sought to cast doubt on these accounts, more by innuendo than by reason or specific factual argument. But the evidence is overwhelming. See for example
this work. Not only were most Jews poor, as indeed were the lower classes of Christians, as you rightly note; but they were also humiliated, restricted and oppressed in ways not suffered by these other plebeians, confined at night behind locked gates, made to wear distinctive garments, excluded from most professions and from the company of most other people, and denied the full protection of civil and criminal law, and the exercise of public office.
Of course, and it's reprehensible. Much of human behaviour is.
That they were capable of fulfilling the latter in Rome is amply demonstrated by the post-1870 career of this person,
Mayor Ernesto Nathan
That really doesn't need saying.
The tendency of Jews to live in particular areas of choice is nothing like Ghetto life. Half of Scottish Jews live by choice
here: But at the last census only 2.6% of the population of the area recorded themselves Jews (defined by religion). This is
in no way like the confinement and isolation of Jews in Rome and elsewhere.
Renfrew really doesn't do justice to traditional Jewish quarters in European cities, which were often highly segregated - with the active encouragement of their community leaders. They didn't like the idea that people might wander off. This is not like restraint imposed from outside, of course, but it's an aspect of the ghetto which is sadly neglected, I think.
I find that quite obnoxious. The issue is not "victimhood" (an anti-PC "snarl word") but real oppression suffered by that community. "Victimhood" again makes it sound like the fault of the sufferers, rather than of the perpetrators.
I may not be PC but "victimhood" was not a snarl; I said there's more than that, which is not to beliittle it. Yes there was oppression, yes there were victims, but there is also exaggeration and
that tends to drown out the full rounded story.
Finally, the objectionable use to which this may be put by Zionist propagandists has no bearing on the reality or otherwise of the oppression related in the historical record. And the words "gets to be a pain" are absurdly trivialising in this context. The expression is simply ludicrous.
Perhaps you haven't ever been lectured by a visiting Israeli on how awful and dangerous your life is here, you just don't realise it, despite everybody trying to change the subject all night.
It's quite troubling how people in Israel are being brought up to be terrified of the outside world. Somehing which serves their community leaders, such as Netenyahu, very well, of course.
