The Unsinkable Hatred of the Jew

The killing of one and the wounding of three at the Chabad Synagogue in Poway, CA, the killing of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and anti-Semitic strikes having risen 57%  in the United States forces the embers of my anger to reverberate once again in my soul, to rise up again in my consciousness and to yet again decade after torturous decade prod me to ask why. 

Shakespeare writes of Shylock the Jew in The Merchant Of Venice Act 3, scene 1, 58–68 circa 1596:

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."
Shylock's questions are profound and yet the answers to his questions remain to this day illusive.  Why one Jew or why 6 million Jews killed beggars the imagination so we strive with dizzying thought to find rationality in the irrational.  How does a religion whose Son of God is a Jew, whose people were Jews, and whose religious practices were Jewish become the missile of world-wide vitriolic AntiSemitic hatred throws?

The answers incomplete as they are lie, of course, in two thousand years of text, bounced around over history's net in the spoken word from one generation to the next so that even utterly mendacious and insipid untruths appear as fact and are used in some ritual or another as a reason to torture and murder Jews at any time, at any place and for any reason.  Old canards are by the murder at Poway used to mix with even older accusations of deicide taken from some New Testament texts to aid in his rationale for murder.  Anti-Semitism evolves.   “You are not forgotten Simon of Trent, the horror that you and countless children have endured at the hands of the Jews will never be forgiven,” the killer wrote using the Internet as his servant.  "His thoughts reached millions around the world. But the hatred at its core could have been plucked directly from the 15th century" or even the second century to contemporary antisemitism that boasts "Jews will not replace us" as if Jews everywhere were looking to do just that. 

The longest hatred has albeit evolved over time so that it is able to neatly mix with the prevailing cultural milieu endeavoring to strike fear in the hearts of white Christian men and women everywhere that prompts them toward violence in service of it. Accusations against the Jew by white Nationalists as the polluter of whatever the white Christian race is serves up a fundamental ingredient of anti Semitism and a rationale for the murdering of all Jews. But, no, that is not enough.  Anti Semitism must rest on its initial accusation some two thousand years ago of God killer.  Who could argue with killing a people whose ancestors were guilty of committing that?  I could and you should -- all of you -- lest this Republic Franklin admonished us to keep will not be kept and this oldest of hatreds will become unsinkable.