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Notes -
In 1900, would anyone have thought the Shoah would have been started by Germany?
If you brought someone forward from that era, told them that there would be a persecution and mass murder of Jews on an un-precedented scale, and asked them to guess what country it would come from, I suspect most people' first guess would be Russia, possibly followed by France.
I would’ve guessed Russia or the Ottoman Empire was fairly likely to do mass killings of Jews in 1900 and that Jews living in the pale of settlement would be at risk due to a continental war between Russia and Germany, which is predicting that Jewish genocide might be a thing. I wouldn’t have guessed ‘camps run by Germany’ but it’s kind of irrelevant whether totenkopf or Cossack does the mass murder; the point is ‘Jews in Eastern Europe having near to mid term future genocide risk’ was foreseeable at the time.
On the contrary, there is not a major jewish population with a foreseeable near or mid future genocide risk today(you can, I’m sure, name one that not-delusionally-histrionic-about-antisemitism people can agree is in danger or genocide or ethnic cleansing if you disagree).
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