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The logic in this claim seems completely wrong. You're comparing the number of times, say, England and France declared war on each other, to the times they declared war on Jews. Only, the jews are living in England and France; when an invading English army sweeps through the French countryside, they don't carefully avoid the Jewish settlements. So the jews get hit with the same attacks as everyone else in their country, and they get hit with specifically targeted attacks against jews also. That's a lot more threat, not a lot less.
Jews did not primarily live in the countryside during European history outside of Russia, iirc. They would live in close proximity to the King with whom they had a unique economic partnership. There were no agricultural Jews in Northern, Southern, or Central Europe, unless I am mistaken.
Could they even own or rent land? Or be serfs?
They had their own quarters of a city with nearly full self-rule and a religious freedom that no one else in Europe had. This was clearly desirable to them which is why they traveled great lengths to live in Europe. Humans don’t really value whether they “own land” (after all, in America it’s not yours if you don’t pay taxes), they care whether they have a place of their own with self-rule. They were given their own unique quarters of European cities where they were free of all the pains of the typical serf or peasant and were protected by the personal interest of the King. In practice, is that ownership? In the cases where they loaned money, they held the value of many properties, but as non-agricultural people, they had no interest in owning and living in farm lands in Western Europe. In fact, the Talmud has passages about how farming is a disreputable profession, which is one of the reasons Ashkenazi didn’t farm much.
Do you have any evidence for this?
More generally, any sources that whether people historically want to live in the countryside is independent of whether they could earn a living, either on their own land or someone else's, in the jobs that exist in the countryside?
It seems that legal restrictions on what Jews could do is a sufficient explanation of why they lived in cities, sometimes with segregation to Jewish quarters. When they could work in the countryside, as in parts of Eastern Europe, it seems they did, like everyone else in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
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