‘Jews have survived thousands of years of hatred. We’ll survive Pittsburgh, too.”
I’d be lying if I said that Saturday’s synagogue shooting didn’t stun me. But not for the reason you’d expect.
Let me be clear: I’m not scared for my people. We’ve been riding this wave of hatred and persecution since our inception as a nation, and we have experienced much worse.
What stuns me is our survival.
(Go ahead and scroll to the bottom when you lose steam. This abridged list of events is beyond comprehension anyway.)
We have survived:
- Attempted genocide in 475 BCE.
- Expulsion from Rome in 139 BCE.
- Pogroms in Alexandria in 38 and 37 BCE.
- The first recorded blood libel in 94 CE.
- The murder of more than 500,000 Jews during the Bar Kochvah revolt in 132-153 CE.
- Forced conversion in Italy, 224.
- Destruction of the Jewish community of Nehardea in 259.
- Forced conversation and slaughter in Menorca in 438.
- The murder of half of the Jewish population of Isfahan in 469.
- Forced baptism of all Jews in Merovingians in 582.
- Massacres of Jews all across the Byzantine Empire, 608-610.
- Forced baptism at the hands of the Byzantine Empire in 632 and then again in 874.
- Being burned at the stake in Toledo, Spain, 638.
- Expulsion when we were expelled from Arabia in 640.
- Abbassid
Caliph Harun al-Rashid’s order that all Jews in the Caliphate to wear a yellow belt, 807.
- French King Charles the Simple’s confiscation of Jewish-owned property in Narbonne, which he donated to the Catholic Church, 900-929.
- The pogrom against Sephardic Jews in Córdoba 1011.
- The First Crusade, a slaughter of 5,000 Jews across several regions in 1096.
- Forced conversion in Morocco, 1107.
- The arson that destroyed of Kiev’s Jewish Quarter, 1124.
- Expulsion from Spain, 1147.
- Mass forced conversions in Yemen, 1165.
- Expulsion from Bologna, 1171.
- Confiscation of Jewish property and annulment of all loans made to Jews, Paris, 1181.
- Slaughter of all the Jews of Norwich, England in 1190.
- Forced conversions and mass murder in Toledo, 1212.
- Being forced to wear identifying symbols by Pope Innocent III, 1215.
- Slaughter and forced baptism in the Jewish communities of Anjou and Poitou, 1236.
- Expulsion and property confiscation at the hands of King Louis IX, 1254.
- Being forced to wear “The Badge of Shame” in Italy, 1257.
- The massacre of Jews in London, 1260.
- Another blood libel in Mainz, 1283
- Expulsion from Gascony and Anjou, 1289.
- Forced conversion and expulsion from Italy, 1292.
- Forced conversion and the conversion of synagogues into mosques, Egypt, 1301.
- Seizure of all Jewish property and expulsion in France, 1305.
- Being required to wear yellow badge in Sicily, 1310.
- Expulsion from Breslau. 1312.
- Expulsion from Milan during a persecution of “heretics,” 1320.
- Being forced by King Henry II of Castile to wear yellow badges, 1321.
- Accusations that Jews in Central France ordered lepers to poison wells. After 5,000 Jews were massacred, King Philip V admitted they were innocent, 1321.
- Mass forced conversions in Baghdad, 1333.
- Being blamed for the plague in the Black Death persecutions. Jews were falsely charged with poisoning wells. Massacres spread throughout Spain, France, Germany and Austria. More than 200 Jewish communities were destroyed, 1348.
- The destruction of Speyer’s entire Jewish population. Jews fled, converted or were killed, 1349.
- After 600 Jews were burned at the stake and Zurich’s entire Jewish community was annihilated as a part of the Black Death Jewish persecutions, 1349.
- Expulsion from Hungary, 1376.
- The massacre of more than 400 Jews in Barcelona, 1391.
- Expulsion, property confiscation and forced conversion in Trier, Lyons, Vienna, Zurich, Iglau, Bern, Fribourg, Majorca, Speyer, Zurich again, Augsburg and Düsseldorf in succession from 1418 to 1438.
- After Sultan Qaitbay forced Jews of Cairo to pay 75,000 gold pieces or be expelled, 1468.
- The Spanish Inquisition, starting in 1481 — lasting until 1834.
- Expulsions, blood libels, forced conversions and ghettoization across France, Austria, Germany, Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Czech Republic and Morocco for decades in the mid-1400s through the 1600s.
- When 300 Jewish men, women and children were thrown into ice holes of Dvina river for not converting to the Russian Orthodox Church, 1563.
- When the Jewish Ghetto of Prague was destroyed by French troops, including 318 houses and 11 synagogues, 1689.
- Continuous expulsions, blood libels, public torture in Russia, Poland, Lithuania, during the mid 1700s.
- When Ali Burzi Pasha murdered hundreds of Libyan Jews in 1785.
- The destruction of most Jewish communities of Morocco. 1790-1792.
- The Black Sabbath massacre, 1805.
- The massacre of Baghdad’s Jewish community in 1828 and in Tabriz in 1830.
- The Damascus affair, 1840.
- Blood libels in Saratov and throughout Russia, 1853.
- When more than 500 Moroccan Jews were massacred, 1864.
- Synagogues destroyed, forced conversions and large-scale anti-Semitic incidents, including the Dreyfus affair, rounding out the end of the 1800s.
- The pogroms in Kishinev in 1903, in Kiev and Yekaterinoslav in 1905, and in Casablanca in 1907.
- When World War I prompted the expulsion of 250,000 Jews from Western Russia, 1915.
- The pogrom that killed 4,000 Jews in Tetiev, 1919.
- When all Jews in Mongolia were expelled, 1921.
- When Adolf Hitler published “Mein Kampf,” 1925.
I have been judicious, leaving out so many more incidents of violence and persecution against Jews. After a while the list loses its poignancy.
But each of these moments builds a shared experience among Jews of repeated trauma that we carry with us from generation to generation.
We say “never again” about the Holocaust, but let’s be real, it was just the most profound version of a story we’ve known for millennia. Every time a synagogue is desecrated or a Jew is targeted, a silent terror shakes our community as we wonder whether we’ve been too lucky for too long. Whether our neighbors who seem to welcome us will one day turn on us.
What stuns me is not the individual moments of hate. It is the full story of generations of hatred that our neighbors have tolerated.
What stuns me most is the sheer survival of the Jews. Our survival is uncanny, it is unbelievable, it is unfathomable. How we as a people have continued to build and rebuild and regain what we’ve lost; how we have continued in our traditions and contributed to the very countries that have threatened us repeatedly; how we have remained resolved in our commitment to strengthen the world around us.
That is what is so stunning.
Rebecca Fishman Lipsey is the founder and CEO of Radical Partners, an accelerator for social-impact ventures.