Across the world, we have seen numerous reports of verbal and physical abuse aimed at ethnic Chinese and an aversion to Chinese restaurants and other places associated with China.
Because some Jewish communities initially escaped the epidemic, Christians claimed they masterminded the outbreak. Lacking a germ theory of disease, they said Jews had poisoned the wells, or as one deranged mediaeval conspiracy theorist claimed, the Jews “wished to extinguish all of Christendom through their poisons of frogs and spiders mixed into oil and cheese”.
Typical was the spread of syphilis in the 15th century. Unlike the plague, syphilis killed its victims very slowly and did not spark the same panic that accompanied the plague. But as it spread throughout Europe, each population inevitably blamed other foreigners for the gruesome chancres, sores and eventual insanity that defined the disease. As one historian wryly observed: “The increased movement of people across national borders reinforced the need to protect social boundaries.
Something similar happened in the United States. Waves of immigration fundamentally transformed the country over the course of the 19th century. Inevitably, each ethnic group that arrived found its members accused of carrying some dread disease. Then, as now, people held them in contempt and tried to avoid them.
Other groups soon found themselves tarred by their association with disease. Jewish immigrants, scapegoated as carriers of the plague and typhus in Europe, were accused of carrying “consumption”, better known as tuberculosis, to the US. This was the “Jewish disease” or the “tailor’s disease”, so-called because so many Jews followed that occupation. Prominent anti-Semites happily peddled this belief, arguing that Jews were sickly, weak, and diseased – unlike strapping, native-born “Anglo-Saxons”.
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