>The massacre began, as it is reported, in the São Domingos de Lisboa Convent on Sunday, 19 April 1506. The faithful were praying for the end of the drought and plague that swept the country when someone swore they had seen the illuminated face of Jesus on the altar — a phenomenon that could only be explained by the Catholics present as a message from the Messiah, a miracle.
>A New Christian, one of the converted Jews, thought otherwise, and voiced his opinion that it had been only the reflection of a candle on the crucifix. The men gathered for Mass, hearing this, grabbed the man by his hair and brought him outside the church where he was beaten to death by the crowd and his body was burnt in Rossio Square, one of the main squares of central Lisbon.
>From that point the New Christians, who were already not trusted by the population, became the scapegoats for the drought, famine and plague. Dominican friars promised absolution for sins committed over the previous 100 days to those who killed the "heretics", and a crowd of more than 500 people (many of them sailors from Holland, Zeeland and the Kingdom of Germany) gathered and killed all the New Christians they could find on the streets, burning their bodies by the Tagus or in Rossio. That Sunday, more than 500 people were violently sent to their deaths.
>The Court and the King had earlier left Lisbon for Abrantes in order to escape the plague, and were absent when the massacre began. King Manuel I was in Avis when he was informed of the event in Lisbon, and dispatched magistrates to try to put an end to the bloodbath. Meanwhile, in Lisbon, the small group of authorities present were unable to intervene, as the crowd grew and the violence spread.
>By Monday, 20 April, more locals had joined the crowd, which carried on the massacre with even more violence. The New Christians, no longer found on the streets, were dragged from their houses and from churches and, along with their wives, sons and daughters, were burnt in the public squares alive or dead. Not even infants were spared, as the crowd ripped them to pieces or threw them against the walls. The crowd proceeded to loot the houses, stealing all the gold, silver and linens they could find. More than 1000 people were killed on the second day. There is also record that more than Jews were killed that day. Some accused their neighbours of heresy, and these unfortunates met the same fate as the New Christians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_massacre#The_massacre
I've been reading a lot about pogroms recently and I truly wonder…how can a Christian think for even a second that any of this evil is acceptable and that it would please Christ along with the apostles who were born jewish themselves? Why was such demonic violence so widespread in periods in which it is commonly thought that "everyone was Christian"? It is truly shocking for me to picture mobs of people calling themselves Christian, holding pitchforks, mutilating crying jewish little children wherever they found them for literal days and torturing jews to forcibly convert them despite this not making any difference anyways. It also wasn't just brainlet peasants partaking in such senseless monstrous violence and the crusaders did so too, despite the fact that they were supposed to be faithful soldiers of Christ, which makes me think that it seems rightful that they then went on their way to the Holy Land only to be massacred by the muslims whom the jews unsurprisingly ended up helping and fighting side to side with. What good did any of this do? Christ surely wasn't with those crusaders and never knew them (Matthew 7:21-23). If I were a jew who's aware of the centuries of gruesome anti-jewish pogroms which were often "justified" by absurd slanderous accusations made against single inidividual jews and conducted by so-called "Christian" hypocrites and impostors, it would pretty much be psychologically impossible for me to even consider converting to Christianity.
Any thoughts on this matter?