In the course of its evolution, mankind has come a long way from animal herds to modern society. Standing out from the animal world, people inherited from it a subconscious desire to surround themselves with faces like themselves (people of their tribe) and a hostile attitude towards people who have visible differences in appearance, behavior, lifestyle. This rudiment of an animal’s human condition gives rise to an intolerant attitude towards the “white crows” - people who are different from the majority. The primitive tribe did not know what tolerance was: the instinct for the preservation of the tribe dictated people care only about children, and people were hostile to other members of the tribe, different from most of its representatives.
At what stage in the development of mankind did the concept of tolerance appear? As soon as the tribes began to enter into peaceful, exchange-based communication with each other, people began to discover the “other”. Xenophobia, that is, the fear of an alien, unusual, began to give way to a craving for a new, unknown. Increasingly, situations began to occur when people from one tribe settled in the habitats of another, continuing to follow their customs, preserving the language and traditions. In ancient texts, we meet the first moral demands and calls for tolerance. For example, the Bible (Exodus 22:21, Lev.19: 33) gives clear instructions to be tolerant, and at the same time reveals the reasons for such tolerant behavior: do not oppress the aliens, because you yourself were also alien aliens in Egypt.
Here we see tolerance for foreigners, that is, speakers of a different language and a different culture. But the modern concept of tolerance is much broader than in antiquity. What does tolerance mean for a modern person? This term means tolerance in relation to other behavior, lifestyle, views, religion. But in the word “patience” itself is already embedded the overcoming of something, “suffering” from what we are forced to endure. This is a tribal rudiment when we are unpleasant with a different way of life and thoughts. We are still ready to reconcile when the "others" exist somewhere far away, but when they become our close neighbors, people begin to feel uneasy.
Over the course of history, there have been many excesses of intolerance towards members of a different race, peoples, and ethnic groups. Anti-Semitism is neither the first nor the last of them. But what if the representative of your nation, the person who speaks your language, who, in principle, based on the fact of belonging to your people, should be no different from the majority, suddenly chooses a different faith, a different way of life, other values? In the Middle Ages, when norms of a tolerant attitude were already adopted towards other nationalities , the attitude towards religious dissidents in the bowels of European Christianity was still barbaric. Tolerance was known in the 13th century, when the inhabitants of the city of Beziers were urged to give all the heretics living in it to the crusaders, but the inhabitants - although they were mostly Catholics - refused to do so. Then the crusaders killed all the inhabitants of Beziers for the "sin of tolerance."
In the era of Religious Wars, the need to determine what tolerance became is particularly relevant. The countries of Europe were divided into "Catholic", where the majority of the population were Catholics, and "Protestant", where there was a minority of Catholics. Then the norms of religious tolerance were adopted, according to which representatives of different faiths were free to practice their cult.
Voltaire has one of the most capacious definitions of what tolerance is: "Your views are deeply disgusting to me, sir," he wrote to his opponent, "but I will give my life so that you can freely share them." In modern jurisprudence, the principle of tolerance was enshrined only in 1995, when UNESCO adopted the Declaration of Principles of Tolerance.