I am a very very lazy person. I like to pride myself on being in the running with Lebowski. And to me hate takes way way to much energy. Having even the simple idea of killing has to take some effort. Kind of seems like he just set out on a life not worth living IMO
Some 1900 years earlier, the Roman Empire was having problems with the inhabitants of one of their recently conquered territories resisting their authority and decided to make an example of them by expelling them from their territory. They ended up scattered all over the Empire and beyond, whilst maintaining their language, religion and customs. A few hundred years after that, Rome adopted a new religion, worshipping a guy they had put to death a few hundred years earlier in that particular territory, and had to find someone else to blame, and the people they expelled were the most expedient candidate. And so, we had a millennium or two of European Christianity very unsubtly stating that the Jews were the killers of Christ, which got embellished, as urban legends do, with a number of other equally lurid myths about them poisoning wells with the Plague and abducting Christian babies for their blood. People generally (with exceptions) stopped believing in those myths, but the underlying attitudes of suspicion remained ingrained in culture.
Don’t forget that for centuries Christianity considered lending with interest to be a sin and so delegated it to Jews so they came to dominate banking and finance. By the 1100’s Jews were considered the ‘property of the king of England’ and we’re granted special rights such as free travel and having their legal testimony given more weight than Christians because they represented the king in financial matters.
Elevate an already hated minority to wealth and privilege as special servants of feudal power? What could go wrong?
It’s a trick the English repeated centuries later by establishing minorities as administrative castes in their colonies (i.e. Indians in Uganda)