Sadly, October 7 was not unique in Jewish history

Peloni:  A must read book!

We NEVER learn and so history repeats itself.

Diane Bederman

I am sharing facts from the book: The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War against the Jews by Rafael Medoff. Buy it. Read it. Share it. I thought of myself as well educated in Jewish history. This book is mind-blowing. Mr. Medoff shares details from October 7 and then gives us a history of Jew hatred.

Excerpted with permission from The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews by Rafael Medoff (The Jewish Publication Society, 2025).

Over the centuries, the Jews have been attacked, mercilessly. No one, no country came to their rescue. Now we have Israel.

The book is 263 pages. I am sharing 1200 words. What happened on Oct. 7 was not an anomaly.

Beginning in 1095 CE: “The Crusaders’ attacks on local Jews rested on the conviction that since Jews killed Jesus and rejected Christianity ‘anyone who kills a Jews has his sins forgiven.’ Jews were pierced with spears  shot with arrows, killed like oxen, dragged through the streets…lay naked for the Crusaders had stripped them and left them naked. They “ripped open the bellies of our women with child.”

Jews were crushed in wine presses. Decapitated and burned. Accusations of desecrating the “Holy” wafers led to mass murder. Jews were locked in a house which was set on fire. Seems burning Jews is a common thread in history.

 

In 1421 massacres and expulsions took place in Vienna-another host accusation-many Jews , their wives and children in cribs were killed…drowned, burnt, beheaded, eviscerated…synagogues burnt to the ground. Christian religious sites were built on top of destroyed synagogues… The entire Jewish community of Basel, Switzerland were burned on an island in the Rhine River in a new house.

Estimates of the number of Jews tortured to death during the Inquisition in Spain range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.

 

In Ukraine in 1648: Jews were” skinned alive and their flesh was thrown to the dogs; some had their hands and limbs chopped off…others were buried alive. The Cossacks “slashed bellies of pregnant women, removed their infants and tossed them in their faces. Some women had their bellies torn open and live cats put in them. The bellies were then sewed up with the cats remaining within. They chopped off the hands of the victims so they would not be able to remove the cats from their bellies.”

 

Then there were the Russian pogroms of 1905 /06. “The killings were barbarous…Nails were driven into the heads of the people, their bones were broken in their hands and bodies and then they were clubbed to death with rifles.

In one pogrom in Sidice Jews were “confined in cellars for two or three days, no food or drink could be had.”

 

Ukraine 1917-1921: Between 150,000 and 200,000 Jews were slaughtered. “Much of what the Jews experienced in Ukraine was echoed in descriptions of October 7.

Jews “were hanged by their hands while their tormentors chopped off various limbs.” Some were “roasted alive over bonfires or had cigarettes applied to their wounds….tongues  were plucked out, their eyes gouged, and their noses cut off…Naked and half naked bodies lay where they had fallen.”

When they murdered families, the pogromists “first killed the children, torturing them insight of their parents , whom they slew afterward. “They ripped open the bellies of pregnant women” and beheaded and smashed infants or smashed them against stone walls.

There was a popular “game”…line up Jews and see how many could be killed with a single bullet(Six or seven was the record”).

In Tetiev, two thousand Jews took refuge in the town synagogue. It was burned down.

Ukraine, pogromists “utilized the systematic rape of Jewish women as a strategic weapon to convey they were superior and to dehumanize Jewish victims.” A Red Cross report on a pogrom referred to “three hundred and fifty cases of rape…neither children of 12 nor old women of 60 were spared. After they had been ravished, the little girls were thrown down the water closets.”

 

The Pogrom of 1921

Palestinian Arab rioters focused on Jews in Jaffa…mobs of Arabs undertook what a later British commission of inquiry characterized as a “general hunting of Jews”…invading Jewish shops and homes, and stabbed, beat and raped their occupants. Arab looters followed closely in their wake.

 

The Pogrom of 1929

In Hebron, the Muslims murdered the Rabbi and his wife then “entered another flat, that of a one-legged Jew, raped his daughter, mutilated her and butchered her to death, and poked out the father’s eyes in answer to his screams.” The mob “passed through the whole city, raping and butchering women, murdering men and mutilating and cutting the bodies to piece, looting the houses and burning them.” A British policeman reporting “an Arab cutting off a child’s head with a sword…behind him was a Jewish woman smothered in blood, with a man I recognized as an Arab police officer…standing over the woman with a dagger in his hand.”

Survivors of the Hebron attack tried to hide in the Hebron branch of the Anglo-Palestine Bank. The mob smashed through. “They cut off hands, they cut off fingers, they held heads over a stove, they gouged out eyes.” They scalped a rabbi. They made off with his brains. They “mutilated the men…they shoved thirteen year old girls, mothers and grandmothers into the blood and raped them in unison.”

In all, sixty seven Jews in Hebron were murdered, often with rapes, beheadings, eye gougings, castrations, and other forms of mutilation.”

 

Terror in 1948

In the aftermath of one Arab attack near Jerusalem: “The next day on sale everywhere in the Holy City were gruesome photographs of the battle: the burnt and mutilated bodies of the Haganah men…had been stripped of their clothing and photographed nude…Arabs carried them in their wallets and displayed them frequently…the mutilation of the Jewish dead” was “a common practice” among Arab forces.  Arabs tried to sell a severed head of a Jewish man for $10,000 as a trophy.

Jewish fighters from the Bir Tamila Outpost were found mutilated, their severed penises in their mouths and their eyes blinded by burning cigarettes.

In Kfar Etzion Jewish fighters were “mutilated” so badly, so savagely that Time reported they were “reminiscent of the terrible black and white mass of photographs that had illustrated (The Holocaust) and the (Nazi) war crimes trials.” “Chunks of mutilated flesh – testicles stuffed into eye sockets, penises in mouths – lay piled in the truck(of corpses) in a pool of blood.” At the village of Tulkarm, June 5, Israeli forces found the bodies of sixteen soldiers. “On most of them were signs of severe mutilation: stab wounds, some had their genitals cut off, some were missing ears. One body was cut into many bits with its genitalia stuffed in its mouth.”

 

Terror in 1967

In the 1967 war an Israeli unit came upon the bodies of “three Israelis guarding their stranded tank(who) had been attacked and murdered by Egyptian soldiers.” Their “mutilated bodies, the male organs cut off and placed in their mouths, we found beside the tank.”

 

Munich Olympics 1972

At the 1972 Munich Olympics, a terrorist who attacked Israeli athletes, castrated one of their victims.

There is much more, including details about the Nazis and present day Jew hatred, especially on college campuses. This article shares a small sample of the horror committed against Jews for the crime of being Jewish.

For those of you who feel I did a disservice by not starting this piece with a trigger warning…

These Jewish human beings were tortured and mutilated and raped and pillaged. The least we can do is bear witness.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: “Rabbi Tarfon used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it.”

Diane Weber Bederman