> They were killed for being men from the opposing side (perhaps killing women and children was considered too barbaric, or women were considered useful for some reason).

Or because they were men and thus seen as being future potential combatants where women and children were not. Men were seen as potentially future detriments and thus were killed.

The distinction is thin to the point of being indistinguishable.

Under that logic, eugenics isn't genocide either. The intent isn't to eliminate a specific group, it's to get rid of some trait they attribute to that group.

I'm not aware of any instances where Jewish people were rounded up purely for being Jewish. There was always some misguided and wrong justification, like a belief that the plague was caused by Jewish people poisoning wells, or that their numbers were enough to threaten the Christian institutions, or that they sabotaged the war effort. In other words, they were perceived as "the opposing side" in one misguided way or another.

I can't recall any sort of -cide where the cause is purely because of membership in some group. In purely practical terms, it's too expensive and too large an undertaking to randomly decide to do. There's always some kind of twisted logic underneath it.

At that point though, those Jewish people were in fact persecuted and murdered purely because of their ethnicity. It matters not that the persecution was justified with stories of poisoned wells. What matters is that those stories pertained directly to a specific ethnical group, and that group was subsequently hunted.

Flimsy excuses either matter or they don't, and the application is universal.

Your comment broadly argues that killing of one group by another is never done with purity of intention. I submit almost nothing people do is for its own sake, but rather woven within individual and collective stories. To think otherwise is to deny the role narrative plays in human consciousness.

A cursory glance through a list like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom shows numerous examples of massacres of Jews (and others, but mostly Jews). The attackers always claim justifications--again, no group attacks any other group without somehow justifying it to itself, either initially or post-hoc.

1. What about the many massacres of the Jews for rejecting Christianity? Surely those are examples of being rounded up for the sake of being Jewish, since the Jewish religion is incompatible with, for example, the concept of the divinity of Jesus. A key point here is that Judaism is a tribal and not universal religion. Thus, it is hard to divorce attacks on the Jewish religion from attacks on the Jewish people.

2. What about the massacres justified by absurd pretenses, such as (As you mentioned) poisoning wells, corrupting the host (Communion), or the blood libel (That Jews kill Christian children and use their blood to bake Matzo). These justifications, which do not hold up to scrutiny, only work for a population that wants to believe them in the first place. The sheer number of nonsensical justifications points to the underlying fact--there is no justification at all.

3. Need I mention the Holocaust, in which the stated aim of the Nazis was to eliminate the Jewish race? Even those with Jewish ancestry but with no religious practices (and who were not considered Jews by themselves or other Jews) were nonetheless sent to the death camps.

By the way, I have focused on historical violence from the Christian world, but this is not to the exclusion of violence from the Islamic world, of which there has been much as well.

In sum, if there was ever an example of a group persecuted for purely "being themselves", it is the Jews.

My point was primarily that in a world view where flimsy excuses like the side of a combatant makes something not a gendered massacre, those same flimsy excuses would also apply to other instances of mass killings. I'm essentially arguing that if a mass killing predominantly or solely impacts a certain group of people, then it counts as a targeted killing of that group. The justification is largely irrelevant.

Given the 2 responses, I apparently did a poor job of conveying that and should have been more clear.

Killing an enemy combatant in war is justified--after all, he or she is coming to kill you. That isn't a flimsy excuse at all. And the fact that men were conscripted into armies as opposed to women is no accident. It is attributable to human sexual dimorphism. But when many men die during war, that doesn't seem to me to be a targeted killing of men, since wouldn't women be killed as well if they were soldiers? And I don't quite get the analogy to mass killings, which seem to me to have an entirely different moral valence altogether.

> Killing an enemy combatant in war is justified--after all, he or she is coming to kill you. That isn't a flimsy excuse at all.

Certainly, but I don't think those actions are the troubling part. The troubling parts come before and after. The decision to only conscript men (that part'll be below), and the decisions to conduct massacres after combat had ceased. It wasn't uncommon to massacre the male civilian population once a city had been seized or an army subdued. The strongest counter argument there to me is that women weren't killed, but rape may have been prevalent. I don't know what the occurrence would have been in those situations, and I don't want to hazard an uneducated guess.

> And the fact that men were conscripted into armies as opposed to women is no accident. It is attributable to human sexual dimorphism.

To some degree. The minimum age for Roman conscription was 16, and I think that gap is a lot closer when you're comparing fully grown women against boys. In other words, if conscription was gated by some kind of "minimum strength requirement" where the lower bound was set by 16 year old boys, I think the sexual dimorphism claim loses some weight.

Even then, some of these events happened after the invention of the firearm where raw strength became almost entirely removed from the "who wins a fight" question.

> But when many men die during war, that doesn't seem to me to be a targeted killing of men, since wouldn't women be killed as well if they were soldiers?

Sure, but they weren't. To turn it around a little bit, would it not seem problematic to forcibly place solely a particular group of people into an incredibly dangerous job? If only Native Americans were eligible for conscription, I don't think "but other races would be killed too, they just aren't soldiers" would be an acceptable excuse.

> And I don't quite get the analogy to mass killings, which seem to me to have an entirely different moral valence altogether.

The likeness, to me, is that they have the same end result, but with different mechanisms. A mass killing is hunting down people with the intent to kill them. Conscription is hunting down people with the intent of repeatedly exposing them to events with a high probability of killing them.

I do think the moral valences are divergent. Genocides seem to be an act of outright hate to me, where conscription largely strikes me as the result of indifference. They both end with a lot of deaths of a somewhat homogenous group of people, though.

As for the whole whether "Kill all <historically persecuted/minority group>" should be considered equivalent to "Kill all men", I suppose one way to justify treating them differently is the likelihood of anyone actually taking such a suggestion seriously. We know there's been at least one massive-scale attempt to kill (virtually) all Jews, and we know there are still people around today who admire the ideology behind that and could potentially develop the capability to carry out such an attempt - I don't think, despite the list of examples just given, you could seriously suggest there's a group of people with sufficient admiration of an ideology that says "all men should die" and a capability to attempt carrying it out.