What is the name of the largest Jewish cemetery in the world? It is Europe.
As one pagan people after another in the European continent were converted to Christianity, an infection of anti-Jewish bigotry and hatred was also tragically spawned.
From the late Fourth and Fifth centuries, the all-powerful Church, with few exceptions, turned upon the stateless and hapless Jewish communities throughout the European landmass.
As the great British and Catholic writer, Paul Johnson, writes in his epic work, The History of the Jews:
“The policy of the Church was to allow small Jewish communities to survive in conditions of degradation and impotence.”
But as Paul Johnson continued:
“However, the leading Greek theologian, John Chrysostom (354-407) delivered eight hostile sermons against the Jews at Antioch and these became the subsequent pattern for increasingly anti-Jewish Christian tirades and persecution, making the fullest possible use (and misuse) of key passages in the gospels of St. Matthew and John.”
No longer were masters in their biblical and ancestral homeland of Judea, the Jews scattered and stateless without an army to defend themselves or with alliances with friendly nation states.
In Europe, they were constantly at the mercy of temporal and ecclesiastical powers, which dispensed ruthless discrimination, persecution, blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions and the pitiless onslaught of ravening mobs of peasants urged on to commit murderous extremes by malicious and malevolent friars and priests.