…It is a fair bet that in every generation of this people’s history some Jewish families were ordered out of their homes and told to go live someplace else. That happens at the end of Fiddler on the Roof. For centuries, millennia, Jews everywhere in the world had no rights. They lived on sufferance and had no legal recourse when ordered to get out.

The Catholic clergy was the eternal enemy, constantly pressing the feudal powers to expel their Jews who were useful to the upper class merchants and landowners. When a landowner presided over serfs, they were commonly illiterate, vs. the Jews literate in not only their own languages but others. They knew business arithmetic and percentages. They kept records, and one cause of the constant pressure from the hateful Catholic priests was that people saw how nice the Jews were and how wise their way of life. They were not the monsters described in church sermons and the Catholic Church did not like that…