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Monday, January 16, 2012

The Jews - lost in migrations and massacre


Jews, being minority in every country (except Israel) have experienced harassment throughout the history. A community that got doubled within the confines of the Roman Empire witnessed the social discrimination, assimilation, migration and massacre, persistently. 

Jews repeatedly have been expelled from their homeland and settled wherever they could practice their religion. Their harassment started under the Roman Empire, where Jews were driven from land to land followed by destruction of Solomon’s Temple by Babylonians. During Christian Roman era, they were officially announced second-class citizens. In the middle Ages in Europe, 16,000 Jews were expelled from England, 100,000 from France, 200,000 from Spain and 37,000 from Portugal. Many of these Jews settled in Poland where they unfortunately had to witness mass murder of six million of them, during Second World War (Known as The Holocaust).

After the founding of Israel, methodical persecution caused almost all of Jews to flee to Israel, Europe and North America in the 1950s. The Islamic Revolution of Iran caused many Iranian Jews to flee Iran to the US and Israel. When the Soviet Union collapsed, community got affected by wave of migration to Israel in the early 1990s, yet suffering from Israeli- Arab conflicts. Prior to this, around 227,258 immigrants arrived in Israel, back from Western Europe, Latin America, and the United States, between 1974 and 1979. 

best jewish movies
Posters of ' Schindler's List' and 'The Pianist' , Both movies depict measurable life of Jews, 
during 'The Holocaust' (WW - 2)

Their maltreatment reached to peak in Nazi Germany, slaughtering roughly 6 million Jews. The Holocaust — a systematic persecution of European Jews during World War II, led by Adolf Hitler remains the most horrible persecution of Jews. They were forced to be in Concentration camps where they were used as slave until they died of exhaustion or disease. They were transported hundreds of miles by freight train to be killed in gas chambers. Out of the nine million of them, approximately two-thirds perished since over one million Jewish children, two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men were killed during mass shootings. Jews accounted for 10% of the total population of the Roman Empire. By that ratio, if they were not murdered time by time, they would have been 200 million in numbers today, rather than 13 million (0.2 % of world population). 

Since the time of the Ancient Greeks, Jews were surrounded by wider non-Jewish society and either by choice or force, ceasing to practice Judaism and losing their Jewish identity. Throughout history, many rulers, empires and nations have oppressed their Jewish populations or sought to eliminate them entirely like the Kaifeng Jews of China, disappeared completely after continuous assimilation. 

A community that notably surprised the world with Physics invention with Albert Einstein and gave new dimensions to art of cinema through Adrian Brody and Winona rider has suffered the irresistible pain, over centuries. Hopefully in days to come, a Jews won’t have to face more inexplicable hatred since a woman (Jesus Christ's mother) who gave birth to Christianity was a Jew.

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