Antisemitism & Civilization: Blogger Eugene Volokh makes an interesting point about antisemitism:

The most powerful country in the world, America, is one of the ones that has been most open to Jews. Look at the most anti-Semitic countries in recent history: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Arab world. Right up there at the forefront of civilization and power, aren't they? Is it all the workings of The Conspiracy? Or is it just that the sorts of idiots who hate Jews do other idiotic things, too?

But there are other reasons why the most successful nations also tend to be the most open to the Jewish people in their midst. Tom Cahill does an excellent job of explaining the reasons in his book The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. Here's a short excerpt that focuses on how our western understanding of history as a story with a beginning, middle, and end (or telos) is in large part a Jewish invention given to the world via the Bible:

The Jews started it all—and by ‘it’ I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and gentile, believer and atheist, tick...For better or worse, the role of the West in humanity’s history is singular. Because of this, the role of the Jews, the inventors of Western culture, is also singular: there is simply no one else remotely like them; theirs is a unique vocation. Indeed, as we shall see, the very idea of vocation, of a personal destiny, is a Jewish idea....

The assumptions that early man made about the world were, in all their essentials, little different from the assumptions that later and more sophistocated societies, like Greece and India, would make in a more elaborate manner. As Henri-Charles Puech says of Greek thought...: ‘No event is unique, nothing is enacted but once...; every event has been enacted, is enacted, and will be enacted perpetually; the same individuals have appeared, appear, and will appear at every turn of the circle.’

The Jews were the first people to break out of this circle, to find a new way of thinking and experiencing, a new way of understanding and feeling the world, so much so that it may be said with some justice that theirs is the only new idea that human beings have ever had.