Dennis Prager made the claim on the Hugh Hewitt show today that throughout history those nations or institutions which hated the Jews most intensely were also the nations which were responsible for inflicting the greatest evil upon the world.
I don't know enough history to judge the accuracy of this statement before the twentieth century, but it certainly would seem to be true of the last seventy five years. Beginning with the Nazis in the 1930s and early forties, the Stalinists from the forties to the seventies, and the Islamists for the past thirty years, most of the world's most evil regimes seem to have been rabidly anti-semitic. The exceptions would be, perhaps, those regimes which had little contact with Jews either geographically as neighbors or as citizens within their boundaries.
But for those nations which have had Jewish populations in their midst or resided in proximity to Israel, the degree of evil they perpetrate does indeed seem roughly proportional to the degree of their hatred of the Jews. It is such a bizarre nexus, in fact, that one wonders if there is not some supernatural, some demonic, reason for it based on God's election of the Jews as His chosen people.
Dafydd, who is a secularist balks at this conclusion, but is nevertheless struck by the connection.
Dafydd paraphrases Prager as saying that "The curse of the Jews is to be hated by the most evil men of every generation. The Jews are a barometer of hatred, canaries in a coal mine: to find the greatest evil, find the greatest haters of Jews."
This seems to be a very important insight. As Dafydd suggests, it would be interesting to have some historian check to see if it is borne out in centuries before the twentieth.