h Gentile peasant's attitude toward Jews appears to have been very much shared by Western European Gentiles as well:
[T]he strange, Oriental people of Israel, denying Christ and repudiating the Holy Ghost, practicing bizarre and mysteri ous rites, praying in a terrifying gibberish undoubtedly a code of the Devil--what could they be but cursed anti-Christs incarnate? . . . The less one had to do with these denizens of darkness, the safer one was from contamination (Sachar 11-12).
Sachar makes the point that Jewish self-government was no less oppressive, on the whole, than feudal and royal government throughout Europe. Indeed, the nation-state and feudal wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found literate and self-sufficient Jewish communities better able to cope with dislocation than their Christian peasant counterparts. But this fact redounded to the detriment of the Jews of the East, as the conditions for and oppression of (Christian) serfs deteriorated. During the eighteenth century, the Jews, much more numerous in Eastern than West
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