There are much earlier archaeological artefacts including stone writing from much earlier than 457 B.C. This is the time after the destruction of the first temple by the Babylonians who dispersed the Jews around the area. Since then there were Jewish communities all over the middle east including in Egypt. I don't understand why the writer of the article is so baffled about this.
Just as an example, the Merneptah Stele is the first to mention the name Israel and is dated to 1203 BC. Ahab and Omri the Israeli biblical kings are mentioned in the Kurkh Monoliths and the Mesha Stele from 850 BC so to start to research Jews just from 457 BC looks a bit too late in the game.
From other things I've seen from Schama I think he starts the book there because he is fascinated with the episode, not because he thinks it's the first solid evidence of Jews.
He sees Elephantine as countering widely held beliefs about ancient Jewish life (that it was all in Israel, homogenous, etc), containing interesting analogues to the present day, and being an altogether interesting story.
It can be more difficult to spin a good yarn from the older material.
I can understand why Schama start from there, it is the time where we have a lot of other sources except from the bible and archeological sights here and there. My grief was more with the article writer and the idea that anybody thought there were no Jewish life outside Israel at that time. It is pretty common knowledge, from the bible itself which mention the life of Jews in Persia in the book of Daniel to anybody who read the history of Jews. It is not news and not surprising, we all know that the Talmud was written in Babylon, that's why it is called the Babylonian Talmud. There is no "widely held belief" that Jews lived only in Israel after the destruction of the first temple.
I didn't got that from the article. As far I understood it, during all this time, multiple iddentities appeared, evolved, split and disappeared, even if all can be traced back to the original Israel Kingdom.
Not strange at all, integration is an exception more than the norm. The various chinatowns, italian quarters, irish quarters etc should be a testament to that: communities always tried to stick together thorough time and space, now and in the past. There are comparatively few cases of succesful long term non violent integration.
> There are comparatively few cases of succesful long term non violent integration.
I beg to differ. I live in Eastern Europe, at the crossroads of different migration waves, and I'd say we've been quite successful at integrating people over the millennia. Just look at this widely circulated genetic map of Europe (http://brilliantmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/genetic-...), you can see that Romania (the country from where I'm from) is pretty diverse, and that happened because we're at the crossroads between "mainland" Europe, the Asian steppes, Anatolia/the Middle East etc.
And looking past genetics, I can give you countless examples of Transylvanian Saxons and Hungarians who, once they had passed the Carpathians into Wallachian and Moldavian lands, ended up by giving up their religion and language and completely assimilated (yeah, it took them a couple of generations or more, but the process was generally irreversible). The local Jews were also quite well integrated in terms of customs and everything, in fact one of the most famous Yiddish songs ("Roumania Roumania - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuj-qjyUjxY") mentions Romanian foods like "mamaliga" or "pastrama" (which we stole from the Turks, but everybody from the Balkans did that) in a melancholic way, like it also belonged to them, the Jewish people who used to live here.
jews still lived in jewish quarters, married mostly other jews and aggregated around jewish structures; being integrated is a little more than liking local dishes; beside that "integration" ended up in violence anyway even before wwii, when romanians started persecuting them.
I've actually made a map of the Jewish Bucharest buildings that were nationalized by the communists after WW2 (available here: http://bucuresti.maglina.ro/nationalizari/# - works better on desktop, not so sure about mobile/tablets), you can see that while there was a concentration of buildings in what people now call the "Jewish neighborhood" (which was not called like that back then) those properties were quite largely spread over the entire city (the Jews made 10% of the Bucharest population before WW2).
> beside that "integration" ended up in violence anyway even before wwii, when romanians started persecuting them.
WW2 and the 1930s were very difficult times (and not only for the Jews). I like to look at those times as the exception rather than the norm.
weird because we've been relatively paceful only in the first world and only in the last 30 or so years. jugoslavia was just torn in an ethnic war; spain, ireland and russian client state were host to terrorost movement up until a couple generation ago, with many issue yet unresolved and likely to resurface. before the first world war there were a host of proxy wars around africa and middle east, class cleansing in the east, before that full on wars in the americas, before that france england and germany were in a state of constant skirmishes, with spain under siege by the moors and italy cities changing state flag every couple of generations. china was in warring state mode too until unification, then class warfare, then religious warfare, then the great step ahead.
humans have been a bunch of assholes, we living in a niche of limited peace on a few locations shouldn't give us the peace of mind that everyone else understand the value of integration. note that a person or a family by itself is likely to integrate, it's significant migration that end up into more or less pronounced isolationism.
again, just have a look at all the chinatown and italian quarters. the actual border may be fuzzy, but the sense of identity is definitely there. and while wwii was an exceptional time, smaller conflict are still very present and the failure integration models are popping up every day stronger.
I think it's easy to forget that we've had relative peace in the west since WWII only because the two major powers built nuclear arsenals large enough to end all life on the planet in a matter of minutes.
Even with all the carnage of WWII, I have very little doubt we'd have been back at it 10 years later if it weren't for the specter of nuclear armageddon hanging over everyone's heads.
You'd be surprised. We did horrible things to our Jewish communities. But... in a strange way.
Current Romania was formed out of regions that were occupied by different empires. The Old Romanian Kingdom was formed out of the bits formerly under Ottoman control. In 1918 the kingdom expanded to include regions formerly under Austria-Hungarian and Russian control.
When far right sentiment flared during WW2, the Jews in Basarabia (ex-Russian territory) were persecuted, even butchered. The ones in the Old Kingdom weren't.
In a weird way, they were "our Jews". They were considered different, yet still a part of our community.
The amount of blood that the eastern European ground soaked up during the course of these great migrations, and recurrent sectarian violence in the Balkans into the present day stands as a strong counterpoint.
> The amount of blood that the eastern European ground soaked up during the course of these great migrations
Any source for that? I'm pretty interested in the history of the Middle Ages and as such I've learned recently that some historians have even started to question the long-held believe that the famous Mongol invasion of 1241-1242 was that bloody. Yeah, they did ransack a couple of towns in Transylvania and present-day Hungary, but that mostly happened because those people put up a fight, on the other side of the Carpathians (Wallachia, Moldova) there are no visible "destruction markers", so to speak (like burned villages and such). A couple of centuries earlier the Pechenegs and the Cumans did cause some bit of a stir in their wake, but that was comparatively short-lived, as they were very rapidly (again, comparatively speaking) integrated by the Hungarians in their kingdom (there was even a king of theirs called Ladislaus the Cuman) and also by the Wallachian/Romanian population which was not part of any established State: to this day "Coman" is still a a pretty popular family name among Romanians, and some big name-places bear Cuman/Turkic names, like the county of Teleorman (meaning "crazy forrest") or the plains of Baragan (meaning "winter storm" or something of the sorts).
It's difficult to peer into the internal history of the Eurasian steppe and its largely pre-literate past for the early periods. So we're largely forced to rely on the accounts of the literate peoples around the periphery, whether that be Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Persian, or Chinese who dealt with and recorded the results of incursions from these outside peoples from the heart of Eurasia. For whatever poorly-understood reason, peoples seem to have boiled out of either Scandinavia or Mongolia periodically, pushing along the adjacent tribes, who pushed on their neighbors, in something like a butterfly effect, until this knock-on effect pushed a tribe over the border into the territory of some settled people.
Invasion by the "Germans" is the explanation Caesar gives for the migration of the Helvetii; it's debatable how accurate he was being, and how motivated to find political justification for his actions, but something induced them to pack up and move for greener pastures. A similar explanation may be found for the movement south through the Balkans and into Asia Minor of the Celtic tribes that became the Galatians. There is perhaps more evidence of this effect in the series of great migrations towards the end of the Roman empire, where the Franks, Burgundians, Vandals, and Goths all were forced westward in front of the Huns and Alans, who were themselves pushed westward by other steppe tribes of central Asia, perhaps ultimately terminating in the Xiongnu and their conflicts with Han China. There appears to be another wave of migration some hundreds of years later, corresponding with the migration of the Slavs, Bulgars, Avars and others into eastern Europe and the Balkans, the expansion of the Rus, the rise of the various central Asian Turkic khaganates, and the expansion of Tang China. Then there is of course the expedition of Batu and Subotai, in which atrocity and total war was a favored tactic, and only a succession crisis after the death of Ogodei Khan spared the rest of Europe. Then there is German colonization under the aegis of the Teutonic Knights, the crumbling of the Byzantine Empire under assault from the Turks on the one hand and the Venetians on the other, incessant warfare as the Ottomans expanded and contracted northwards through the Balkans, culminating in the early 20th century "Baltic Question" tinderbox as that empire fell apart and led to hundreds of millions of deaths throughout eastern Europe and atrocity on a scale to rival Genghis.
It's a history of blood and sword; not perhaps categorically different than the history of most places, but amplified by virtue of being the crossroads of so many moving peoples.
That is one weird conclusion. The fact that there are still traces left from past migration waves is hardly evidence of failed integration.
How many generations does the ancestoral language usually survive? Two? Three? Integration succeeds en masse all the time, especially where religion doesn't interfere.
It's just that nationalist wars make more headlines than all the kids I went to school with who didn't even properly speak the language of their own mothers (something I find rather regrettable).
Ethnic ghettos are as much or more imposed by external oppressors than internal separatism.
The USA is full of Chinese, Italian, Irish etc descendants, most of whom do NOT live in those ghettos. After a generation to learn the local language and culture, descendants leave the ghettos for success in the wider world.
There is little in the way of ethnicity. Ashkenazi Jews are an ethnicity, Jews in general, aren't. They even spoke different languages before Hebrew became a thing in early XX century, and many of them still do.
“Ethnicity” is a pretty broad and vague term. People don’t have to speak the same language or be the same race to consider themselves the same ethnicity.
it's not as vague as you think. Ashkenazi Jews literally share a lot of genetic material, for example, when two Ashkenazi Jews get married and want to have a child, they get tested for genetic diseases that only Ashkenazi Jews have.
An ethnic group, or an ethnicity, is a category of people who identify with each other based on similarities such as common ancestry, language, society, culture or nation
I would dispute the notion of common ancestry is synonymous with common transfer of genes. The former is about descent, within a system of kinship, that may or may not recognize within it's domain an actual realized transfer of genes on the one hand, and may include in it's domain instances when no such transfer might have occurred (adoption/cuckoldry/politically motivated claims of kinship/etc.etc.).
come on, you are engaging in pointless sophistry. Common ancestry doesn't mean that it involves 100% guaranteed common transfer of genes every time - it just means that common transfer of genes was quite likely to take place at least relatively often. In the case of Ashkenazi Jews, we know it did.
And a lot of people (people who think they are Jews and also people who think they are non-Jews) are genetically mixed Ashkenazi with non-Ashkenazi.
And Ashkenazi happens one of the "tightest" ethnicities in the connected part of the modern world (Europe, America), since it is historically-long-insular low-population subgroup living within a large population.
I think it's a similar quandary with Arabs, minus the shared religion of course.
I'm Tunisian and I consider myself Arab, but many other Tunisians consider themselves (ethnically) Maghrebi and/or Amazigh. Tunisia and the remaining Maghrebi countries are part of the Arab League, though.
I'm sure it's even more complicated for Tunisian Jews :P
Even, in Tunisia, to quote Wikipedia: "In 1948 the Jewish population was an estimated 105,000, but by 2013 only about 900 remained"...
That said, the 2014 Tunisian constitution and its protections for freedom of religion was a huge step forward, and gives me a good bit of hope for the future.
What a bizarre comment. Saying "Jews, in general, aren't an ethnicity" is almost an oxymoron - for it is precisely the identity shared between this group of people, that justifies the existence of words such as "Jews". There is an evident sense of shared identity between different populations of Jews, based on common history, culture, customs and traditions - this is the very definition of ethnicity, and this why we refer to all of them as "Jews".
That's an interesting interpretation. I assume you mean as decendents of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? I had never considered Catholics or christianity an ethnic group. Because to me it implied shared genetic features.
You are confusing Judaism - the religion, with the Jewish people - an ethnorelegious group. Many modern Jews are atheists - they certainly don't believe in Judaism, yet nobody would doubt that they are Jewish, nor would they deny this themselves. Similarly - a Jew can become a christian or a muslim yet ethnically still remain a Jew. The same cannot be said about christians or muslims.
>a Jew can become a christian or a muslim yet ethnically still remain a Jew
I completely agree with your comment, and not only that but also find your view on the quote interesting as well.
A lot of Jews would say that any Jew who becomes a Christian is no longer Jewish (by ethnicity or religion) even if said "Jewish Christian" still abides by and observes many Jewish customs and holidays.
A lot of Jews are still mad that the greatest man among them started the most successful and enduring sect of Judaism ever, and then had the gall to welcome foreigners.
I may still be confused, because without the term Jewish people, it would seem that many adherents to the Jewish faith which are not ethnically Jewish would not be considered Jews?
I would argue that there are also many atheist Catholics (e.g. in Italy) who would disagree that they were not also part of an ethnorelegious group.
Judaism is very different than most religions in that it doesn't try to spread, but is instead quite insular. If you want to convert it's a big deal with study, testing, and culminating with a literal certificate of conversion - that can be revoked. It's also very unique in that Jewish Orthodoxy considers it 'genetic'. If your mother was a Jew, you are a Jew - regardless of whether you consider yourself e.g. an atheist.
The majority of Jews today (in the ballpark of 75%) are Ashkenazi Jews which is a sort of 'race' in that they share a very recent common ancestor -- which is also why so many Jews share common physical features. All of this is very different than other religions, even other Abrahamic religions. So it is not inconsistent that state that Jews are an ethnic group, but other religious groups are not.
Only in narrow areas, such as modern State of Israel (which is a blip in Jewish history, and not the world government of Jews), which very special circumstances.
It's complicated.
Also, you can be a non-Jewish woman, marry a Jewish man, and have Jewish children, who an Orthodox Jew might call non-Jewish children, but those children and their descendants and neighbors may never think are "not Jewish"
You have things reversed. What you see today is an extremely rapid reformation upon reformation of Judaism. This is the blip in Jewish history. However, what has led up to today is the product of what we would consider orthodox Judaism, which of course was simply called Judaism.
For instance, in the past interfaith marriage was not only frowned upon but something that would likely result in individuals facing exile from the Jewish community. This, for instance, is why most Jews today share so many distinct physical and other characteristics. In searching for some interesting numbers I came upon this article [1] which you might find interesting - it discusses the ongoing "reformation" of Judaism. The reason I put reformation in quotes is because I think it's "reforming" in the way that most religions are today - it's fading. And I think a century it will probably make no more sense to refer to Jews as an ethnic group than it would to refer to Irish Americans as an ethic group today. However, as of today Jews most certainly remain an ethic group by most all facets of the word.
There are multiple ethnic groups that follow the Jewish religion – Askhenazim are ethnically quite different from Mizrahim for example – both culturally and genetically. Now, there is some cultural and genetic commonality between the two groups, but is it sufficient to say they are the same ethnicity? Well, Italians and Spaniards traditionally share a religion (Roman Catholicism), speak related languages, and share some biological ancestry – does that make them one ethnic group? From a linguistic perspective, Italians and Spaniards arguably have more in common than Askhenazim and Mizrahim, since Italian and Spanish belong to the same branch (Romance/Italic) of the same language family (Indo-European), whereas Yiddish and Judeo-Arabic belong to completely different language families–Indo-European vs. Afroasiatic–despite sharing influence from Hebrew and Aramaic.
> Now, there is some cultural and genetic commonality between the two groups, but is it sufficient to say they are the same ethnicity?
Of course, because both groups view themselves as belonging to the same group of people, with shared customs, history, religion and tradition, that dates back to the Kingdom of Israel. What you don't seem to understand is that ethnicity is a social concept - the criteria isn't "how much two people have in common", but whether a shared identity exists between them. You should ask yourself what makes you refer to both Ashkenazim and Mizrahim as "Jews", and what makes them refer to themselves as such, even among people who don't believe in Judaism.
> Well, Italians and Spaniards traditionally share a religion (Roman Catholicism), speak related languages, and share some biological ancestry – does that make them one ethnic group?
If they share the same ethnic identity then of course.
Ethnicity seems to me to be a sort of taxonomic hierarchy. Some ethnic groups are more closely related to each other than others. Ethnicities can be grouped together into families of closely related ethnicities, which in turn can often be further grouped into broader families of less closely related ethnicities; ethnicities can often be further subdivided into sub-ethnicities. Are Jews a single ethnicity, or a family of related ethnicities? You could ask the same question about the Han Chinese, or about Italians; it is somewhat arbitrary, and the question is influenced by politics – Italian nationalism emphasises the notion of a single Italian ethnicity, separatist movements such as Sicilian nationalism or the Lega Nord emphasise regional ethnic identities instead.
You want to focus on subjective questions of identity, but it isn't clear to me that all Jews have the same subjective sense of identity. Does a secular Zionist in Tel Aviv have the same subjective sense of identity as a Satmar anti-Zionist in Kiryas Joel? Certainly their "subjective sense of identity" has completely different ideological foundations. They likely wouldn't agree on who is a Jew either, since their different ideological foundations would lead them to different positions on issues such as conversion standards and patrilineal descent.
Yes - both a secular Zionist Jew in Tel Aviv and a Satmar Jew in the US (both are, by the way, most likely Ashkenazi) would see themselves as belonging to the same broad group of people with shared customs, culture and history - the Jews. This is why we refer to both groups as "Jews".
This doesn't of course mean that their "subjective sense of identity" is identical in its entirety, but that's pretty much the case with every ethnicity.
Indeed, this fact this makes me proud to be a Jew. (A happy Passover to all whom it may concern).
As a young boy my father used to take me to the Pergamon museum in Berlin - one major exhibit is the Babylonian street of processions (it dates to the neo-Babylonian empire) He used to say - here you see our heritage, we were around the show when Berlin (and all the other great capitals of the world) were still a swamp.
Don't take this the wrong way, but from the outside, this seems condescending.
And secondly it's important to remember your roots, but in my opinion the focus was wrong (or maybe the conversation included this aspect, you just didn't present it): we were around back when Berlin was a swamp and we're still around now, prosperous and developed.
In my eyes that's the real achievement! (look at Iraq, Iran, Egypt, even Greece or India to some degree)
I don't see any condescension (it doesn't diminish the present greatness of the great capitals at all), it is a factual observation (also you might need a sense of humour to see the irony on the part of what used to be a persecuted minority, after all - and I used to be in east Berlin before the frigging wall came down)
Could be. What I do know is that I have Greek friends who express the same feeling and they weren't a persecuted minority. There's a certain hubris about nationalities with a rich past.
It's not necessarily bad, but it's still hubris :)
Greeks were still the majority in Greece and they were a well regarded minority in the empire. They were persecuted after WW1 (see the population exchanges and the Smyrna massacre).
But Greeks don’t view themselves as a persecuted minority, historically. It’s all about the mindset and self-perception.
I was born Jewish and was pretty religious for most of my life, but even when I was religious I never understood why we should be proud of this, or why this is a good thing in and of itself.
I would be really interested if you could explain more your way of thinking about it, because to me when my father explains that we should be proud of having the same meal our ancestors did Xthousand years ago I don't feel impressed in the least.
Instead, it just feels like a long streak of spreading a meme.
People often get surprised when I tell them I don't consider myself Jewish anymore or that I don't intend to bring up any children I have Jewish. They often cite their surprise to the fact that Judaism has a long ancestral history. And I really just can't understand this frame of thinking that says Judaism is good because it's been going on for long.
So I would be interested if you could explain why this impresses you :)
Its a personal thing, I am not in a position to persuade anybody. I think that our present is explained by the context of the past, and that you can't understand the present without looking at the past. Now the past is a complex thing that can't be reduced to some simple formula, I still believe that you can still learn out of it, because human nature didn't change to much throughout the ages. Our reality may be quite different from what it used to be, but we are not essentially different from our ancestors, so we can still learn from them (hope that helps). Our experience is similar to the experience of our ancestors, we are part of the same process - it may be distant, but it is still relevant (in my opinion), the accumulated experience of past generations is of great value (because we tend to repeat the mistakes of the past)
I know that I did repeat the same statement several times with variations, but it is as far as I can get.
Also: If something prevailed throughout time, against all odds, then that's pretty impressive to me.
> "Also: If something prevailed throughout time, against all odds, then that's pretty impressive to me."
This is dangerous logic, because you're not comparing it to anything. For instance one argument I've seen for the existence of a god was the fact that many constants and other seemingly 'magic numbers' of our universe are set just as is required to maintain life as we know it. The problem there is that assuming this is true, it's still meaningless since the only way we could ever come to observe this fact was if it was true. This observation is known as the anthropic principle [1].
Basically considering the merit or probability of something happening when you would be unable to observe it not happening is impossible. You could say you're comparing it against the failure of other groups, but this is probably somewhat disingenuous as I think it's reasonable to hypothesize that the oldest persistent ethnic group is likely some group within Africa neither you or I have ever heard of, and you'd probably be unlikely to praise their longevity and persistence in and of itself, even if it too was likely ripe with strife throughout time.
I'm not sure the Anthropic principle can be applied here. There is a broader data set than that which is relevant for that principle, based on my understanding.
"Against all odds" would seem to be the key words here. There are countless other ethnic and religious groups that were integrated into the larger Muslim culture when Islam was first spreading. The same is the case for Christian Europe. In fact, the Romani people may be a good example of what we would expect to naturally happen to a dispersed and oppressed ethnic group. They have no singular culture, principles, or beliefs; they assumed most aspects of the surrounding culture's mode of life and beliefs.
It isn't a stretch to call the survival of the Jewish people an unexplained historical exception. There are countless historians (Jewish and non-Jewish) who have researched and written on the topic.
Or, am I misunderstanding the application of the Anthropic principle as you are applying it in this context?
Who are you comparing Jews to? This is the point. I don't think there's any reasonable comparison. Judaism's pairing of extreme insularity with great economic success in most 'host nations' leaves them without any other group to compare against. Powerless minority groups are certainly not a reasonable comparison.
Oppression and dispersion takes on a different meaning for those of means, even more so when the shared genetic lineage also happens to provide a substantially higher IQ than average for the vast majority of the group.
I was taking you seriously until you wrote this, "Judaism's pairing of extreme insularity with great economic success" and this, "Oppression and dispersion takes on a different meaning for those of means"
I really think there is an undertone to this perspective that is colored by a narrative that is false at best and possibly something much worse.
I dont think there is any factual basis to claim Jews had great economic success or were of means outside of false narratives perpetuated by their enemies. Even if you can point to specific eras or individuals that had success, you certainly couldnt demonstrate it existed propritionately more so than others, or that it existed in all the periods where they were persecuted and oppressed...
Your post display an impressively poor knowledge of even the most basic facts of history, of which you then speak on authoritatively. And then you try to attack my character based on your lack of knowledge. Dear sir, I can only applaud your narcissism. It is impressive!
How does this article support your claim that Jews survived because they "had means"??? Showing a disproportionate amount of jews in finance in the last 500 years in a few limited instances...in no way shape or form speaks to the means of the vast majority of Jews nor does it to speak to 3000 years of persecution.
You wrote a previous comment about jews distinctive physical features and now you speak of their means and share an article about rotschild and than view a Jew who calls you out on your false narrative a narcissist?!
Ascribing a few peoples wealth on a group of millions is the very definition of anti-semitism... I refrained from calling you out sooner to try to give you the benefit of the doubt...but the fact is the wealth on one person or a few people lending money hardly reflects on the entire Jewish people...it is a dangerous stereotype not based on actual facts...just a stereotype based on a fraction of a fraction of the population...
Your belief that jews arent poor or oppressed minorities without means throughtout history is patently false! Even if you can point to a few exceptions to the rules.
Or you can search for literally any source. The extreme success of the Jewish communities throughout time is extremely well documented. This success, paired with insularity, was often one of the big motivations for their oppression throughout history. Expulsions would generally involve direct or indirect confiscation of material possessions. Between the 13th and 16th century Jews were expelled some 15+ times, in some cases multiple times from the same places (such as France) where they would be expelled, invited as their absence proved problematic, expelled again, and so on.
The reason Jews have distinctive features is because today about 75% of Jews are Ashkenazi - a very distinctive group with a variety of distinct features, both physical and nonphysical. For instance Ahskenazi individuals show an average IQ average nearly a standard deviation above the mean. The reason for the genetic relationship is that historically Judaism was far more insular than it is even today. For instance interfaith marriages is an extremely new phenomena. Pair a religion that makes it extremely difficult to join (and was only more difficult in the past) with extreme restrictions on things like marriage, and you end up with strong genetic similarity. It's not dissimilar, in effect, from geographic isolation which yielded most distinctive traits of various groups today.
Unique among religions and civilizations, Judaism mandated universal education though 6th grade for all males for reading, writing, "bible" and math 2000 years ago as the Romans were destroying The Jewish (animal sacrificial) Temple.
Some of those students went to yeshivas (religious schools) afterwards studying Talmud [1] (a written rendition of The Oral Law by tradition given to Moses by God along with the five books of Moses). A very high priority "law" (mitzvah) in Judaism is that Jewish males are supposed to spend at least a little time each day learning Talmud.
The Talmud is focused not so much on content but on process, on learning Jewish tradition and law though arguments among rabbis testing edge conditions (e.g., an object found overlapping both public and private property). In modern day, yeshiva students have taken the LSAT exam and have gone directly to law school without attending undergraduate education.
I believe the unique early emphasis on education, "The Law" (Torah), and lifelong learning among males helped to hold the community together.
>I really just can't understand this frame of thinking that says Judaism is good because it's been going on for long.
Im not a rabbi or in kiruv or anything, so take this with a grain of salt...but I would point to Jordan Petersons position about the longevity and survival of the bible stories and his response to atheists around it all sounding made up.
There is a reason these stories survived through the ages. There is wisdom and much to learn from the ideas in the Torah even if you dont buy into their accuracy. It's just too shallow to dismiss it as superstitious ancestors who werent as smart as us.
From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the very fact that we are finite beings in a world that will survive our existence means that our life will face tragedy...and the best way to cope with a tragic existence is to find meaning in life and in our actions.
Most fundamentally is buying into the idea that we can bargain with the future and that decisions we make today matter and have an impact on the future and future generations.
From that context, ritually connecting with the past and exploring how things that happened to your ancestors have an impact on your existence today is about the best way I can think of to get you to internalize the idea that what you do today matters to tomorrow.
The idea of mesorah(transmission from generation to generation) is framed as a way to verify the validity of the stories...but I really think its more along the lines of showing the unbroken chain between the past and the present...so you can internalize the responsibility of the chain between the present and the future...
It sounds like you've decided to start a new chain for your children and sever that connection to your past. For me, I think the responsibility and ramifications of that decision are massive and at the very least deserve a reckoning with the significance of how the decision impacts future generations regardless of what you finally decide...it feels to me that because you werent able to internalize the ideas (regardless of the factual nature of them) of "Hashem took ME out of mitzrayim" or "had the exodus not taken place, we would still be slaves" ...and never connected with the powerful idea that we eat matzah to commemorate what our ancestors ate rushing out Egypt...you either feel the decision for keeping your future generations connected to the past is inconsequential, or the past is blatanly wrong.
Considering you grew up religious, I am assuming you had a modern Yeshiva education...like many others, it sounds like they failed to show you the pragmatic wisdom in yiddishkeit and instead left you feeling unconnected with your brilliant history.
I would encourage you to try to pass on the parts that you did connect with and the pragmatic wisdom in much of the torah and halacha to atleast give your children the chance to make their own decisions.
You can reject the bible and reject religion and put science on a pedestal...but the idea that what you do matters and that you can bargain with the future...and that who and where you are today is a product of decisions your parents and their parents made...that lesson is too important not to pass on.
It would be a shame to be passedover!
This is great. I’ve dismissed my Jewish heritage and the teachings of religious texts, but this perspective gives me pause. Maybe I’ve been hasty in my assessment that religion doesn’t offer me anything for making a better future.
I ignored these for the longest time because they were about the bible. Well, they aren’t really. They’re kind of about everything, and now I wish I’d watched them a lot sooner.
> There is wisdom and much to learn from the ideas in the Torah even if you dont buy into their accuracy. It's just too shallow to dismiss it as superstitious ancestors who werent as smart as us.
>From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the very fact that we are finite beings in a world that will survive our existence means that our life will face tragedy...and the best way to cope with a tragic existence is to find meaning in life and in our actions.
Agreed.
> Considering you grew up religious, I am assuming you had a modern Yeshiva education...like many others, it sounds like they failed to show you the pragmatic wisdom in yiddishkeit and instead left you feeling unconnected with your brilliant history.
This is condescending, in my opinion. You're presuming to know why they don't accept the religious narrative. It's great that it speaks to you, but it doesn't speak to them and it doesn't have to. I might be reading too much into this, but it seems you're invoking the common meme that "if you would only have had the wonderful opportunities to learn in this yeshiva or that one, or to appreciate the 'true beauty' of this stream or another of Judaism, you'd agree with my point of view." Maybe, maybe not. Maybe GP had a superior education than you did, and if YOU would have had the education GP had, you'd reject religion too?
> I would encourage you to try to pass on the parts that you did connect with and the pragmatic wisdom in much of the torah and halacha to atleast give your children the chance to make their own decisions.
Maybe the opposite is true? Maybe the only way to give children a fair choice is to NOT indoctrinate them with ideas they didn't choose, and instead give them a blank slate from which to start?
No matter what you do for your children, you're making decisions for them. Raise them religious, you're exposing them to X instead of Y. Raise them secular, you're choosing Y instead of X. There's no way to give them everything, you have to make choices for them.
I doubt there is only one correct way to find meaning in our life and actions (though my take on it is that while paths may differ, an honest pursuit would lead to similar insights regarding the ultimate meaning). I also don't think you have an obligation to remain with a way you don't connect to. The only thing I disagree with is judging a path that doesn't resonate with your specific frequency when obviously (at least as I see it) it brings a net positive to civilization. While I'm not religious,
I can understand how on the surface things can be seen as primitive (especially when practiced at face value) while holding deeper truths underneath.
>Maybe the opposite is true? Maybe the only way to give children a fair choice is to NOT indoctrinate them with ideas they didn't choose
If only that were possible. You're going to indoctrinate them one way or the other (as you correctly concluded in the following paragraph), and since you're going to do so, the best indoctrination I can think of is personal and intellectual integrity, which might lead them to decide to go back to your roots or take a different path, both being fine if they come from the right place.
> It's just too shallow to dismiss it as superstitious ancestors who werent as smart as us.
This is commonly misunderstand point, as you hint at.
Our ancestors were about as smart as we are -- some smarter, some not, but on average they were far more ignorant of how the world works. There were plenty of brilliant ideas wrapped around less sure knowledge.
Just to throw in an additional perspective of what I find fascinating about this topic.
I don't think that all long lasting things are particularly interesting. Rocks have been around longer than the Jewish people but we don't celebrate that as extraordinary. It is considered perfectly natural. It is noteworthy when something is unnaturally long lasting; when other peoples/belief system were put under similar pressures the results have been drastically different. Imagine 50 people are dragged under water on a beach by a horrible undertow and held underwater for an hour. 2 out of the 50 survive while the other 48 don't; the 2 who survived are definitely of interest because we would want to know how they survived.
Not if you include those that did not survive in your sample / analysis. From the link "concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not".
Well, I can't answer for GP but I can relate to both of you, because I swing back and forth between the two modes.
I was also raised religious (Hareidi) and am now entirely secular, by most counts. And I've spent many hours trying to argue that it's ridiculous to take pride in the fact that some arbitrary tradition lasted for a few thousand years. So a bunch of people did this or that ritual for thousands of years...sucks for them! Why should I? (Never mind that the tradition may have evolved/morphed to the point that Talmud-era Jews would barely recognize it, let alone second temple Jews or earlier.)
Moreover, if I've already rejected the notion that the Torah is the word of God, why would I consider myself Jewish? How does being born to one woman versus another determine my identity and fate? If I don't believe, why am I "in the club" at all? Because the believers say that I don't get to choose my own identity? Shouldn't I be able to just laugh that off?
I went through a phase in which I refused to identify as Jewish, but it didn't stick. There is too much of my upbringing that I _do_ connect with, or remember positively, and feel good about. So I can't quite shake the identity. And lord knows I've tried.
Instead, as the sun sets on Tel Aviv for the last day of Passover, I'm writing a comment on HN and enjoying the challah I just took out of the oven. Let me check...yeah, it took more than 18 minutes to prepare. But what can I say? I'm Jewish, and what kind of Jew celebrates a holiday without challah? Not this one.
I think the point here is that identity, belonging, nostalgia, and a sense of connection to a larger community - not just a generation alive today, but a chain of generations - can be a powerful emotional driver for people. Simply put, the idea that "our ancestors" did this or that and the tradition and identity lives gives many otherwise rational people a feeling of belonging.
And while there's no shame in choosing to forge your own way, independent of the social environment into which you were born, it's no great honor either. It just is. Some people feel imprisoned by the narrative, some empowered, and some just don't care. And some - I suspect more than might meet the eye - are forever caught between a prison of arbitrary rules and the discomfort of floating listlessly through a strange and uncaring secular society.[0]
So if you managed to leave the baggage behind, all the power to you. For others, the baggage is inescapable. And for yet others, the baggage isn't baggage at all, but a source of positive emotion.
[0] I can't remember the exact page, but somewhere in Chapter 9 of Brachot the Talmud briefly addresses this conundrum. Search for "אוי לי מיצרי אוי לי מיוצרי". Hope I got that right...it's been many years.
We're not blank slates. There really are genetic differences. It very well might be that stereotypes about arguing and having opinions etc. are genetically-connected personality traits, who knows? Maybe some science has brought us a smidgen of understanding just enough to be dangerous…
The weird uncomfortable part is understanding that the strange individualistic rejection of culture and interest in just taking the best ideas from everywhere is actually a common experience of secular American Jews. You know what it's like to be a minority, just not part of the same club as everyone around you, so you question things and easily find the conclusion that most of the old traditions and views are nonsense. You're left wondering whether it's okay to find a "tribe" you fit (political or cultural or whatever) or if really the concept of tribes is itself just bad. If everyone else would stop being tribalist, we could all just live in a post-ethnic, post-diversity world or something where no individual has any more claim to any worldview or idea or culture than any other… but that's fantasy too.
The fact is: most people on the planet haven't even had the chance to be in a situation where they truly separate themselves from their traditions and consider the possibility of just not being of the group they grew up identifying with.
Consider the trans-racial ideas of that controversial lady in Spokane… these things are not easy ideas to grapple with.
As you I don't see why someone should be proud about anything inherited. It can be a gift (or a curse), but it is certainly not an achievement.
That being said, for me the Jewish tradition is immensely powerful, even though I'm not a believer in God. Sitting together with your family at the Seder table and talking about what it means to be free vs. to be slave is an amazing experience. It would be very hard to re-create that experience without the frame given by our Exodus narratives and the surrounding traditions.
I'm sure other cultures have their own powerful traditions for keeping values alive and transporting them across generations. But as you are already very familiar with Jewish traditions (probably much more than me), why not make use of this treasure?
>As you I don't see why someone should be proud about anything inherited. It can be a gift (or a curse), but it is certainly not an achievement.
One way to look at this is if you believe achievements are worthy of pride, or that pride is an 'incentive' to achieve, than recognizing how significant everything you do can be is a great way to inspire maximizing achievement... One way to do this may be to recognize that your achievements can have a positive impact on future generations, even in simply creating positive and breaking negative parenting cycles in your family, or how smiling at someone can have a ripple impact elevating numerous peoples days and possibly lives... its possible that training us to be proud of something that is as insignificant as being a product of our parents will nurture a sensitivity to take our ability to impact others with the seriousness and responsibility it demands. Just a thought.
In the words of Benjamin Disraeli
"Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon"
It's not. It's maybe even worse than racist, because most of Disraeli's ancestors probably weren't even members Solomon's kingdom, they likely were mostly Europeans who converted and then adopted the ancestry.
Why is that relevant to if the statement is racist? Yes there is a difference between kicking someone when they're down and kicking while down, but it is still kicking.
And in case anyone hasn't heard: There's reasons pride has been considered a sin. There's nothing redeeming about the emotion of pride. You can have pride in your belief about your ancestors or pride in your accomplishments. Either way, pride is not doing anything positive. There are healthier ways to feel positive about things, and pride can go the hell away, period.
I'm not sure what your father was on about. Was he trying to claim that Jews built the Ishtar Gate?
The Parthenon is only a century younger, and a much more architecturally impressive structure. Yet if a Greek or other ethnic European made a similar remark about the superiority of their heritage on the basis of it, they'd be accused of racism.
I don't understand this infatuation with ones genetic material. Given that I am blond and blue-eyed and live in Scandinavia, I'm probably just as much Vikingish as you are Jewish. Should I be proud of being a Viking?
If your objection is that the Vikings were horrible people that just pillaged stuff. Then I agree, but the ancient Israelites weren't that kind to women and slaves either. If your objection is that the culture didn't survive. Well, the good parts, Christmas, Midsummer (the traditions are pre-Christian) and binge-drinking did...
Even if ancient Israelite culture is objectively superior to Viking culture, you didn't create it, so why be proud of it? It's like being proud of being the heir of a billionaire. :p
It's not just genetic material. It's a combination of genetic material and culture. I don't know if you're Swedish or what, but I can tell you most Swedes I've met love their Swedish culture. Their King (though he's purely symbolic). The lagom of it all.
And you know well of the political movement in Sweden to restrict the definition of "Swedish" to those who have obvious Swedish ancestry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjand84BBKM
But when you write "it's a combination of ..." do you mean we must compare? Must I prove that a large enough percentage of Viking culture did survive to be able to call myself Vikingish? That seem arbitrary.
Yes, I know of the political movements you talk about. Yes, I think you can be grateful of being born in one of the best places on earth. Yes, you can enjoy have physical appearance that most women of the world consider very attractive. But being proud of it? Nah...
Hi, I'd like to chime in.
I'm Avishay, I'm a secular Jew from Israel. I'd like to say it's not an infatuation with our genetic material. Far from it. (enter an obligatory nose joke here)
It's being impressed our ancestors have been holding on to a religious and cultural identity for two thousand years. Years in which they were were a minority in different countries, spoke in foreign tongues, were forced to denounce their Judaism, and sometimes were haunted without even that choice.
It's that as a modern Hebrew speaker, I can pretty easily read a piece of text as the Bible - written thousands of years ago.
And that even though my ancestors were from Syria, Iraq, and Morroco - they shared the same ethos as the jews from Hungary, Germany, and Russia.
I grew up in a church, so I was raised to revere the Jewish people and honor their relationship. My step-father now is Jewish and I can never get over that he is related to the people I grew up hearing about. I've been told some Jewish people actually know which tribe of Isreal their people came from, but I never knew how true that is. If it is, I think it's incredible that they could trace their lineage back to Abraham.
Why be proud of a thing that happened to you by chance?
I was born into a particular family but that's nothing to be proud of, it wasn't exactly my achievement.
I'm Dutch by birth, but I'm not proud to be Dutch.
I'm a European by birth, but it doesn't make me proud either.
What I an be proud about is those things that I've achieved that were not 'normal' for a person of my birth station and privilege level. (And that's not a whole lot, given the fact that I was born in one of the wealthiest countries in the world as a 'white male' which means I had just about all the lottery cards picked just so.)
Is there anything wrong with being patriotic?
By being proud of your culture?
Yeah, I puff my chest when I think of my personal achievements. But that doesn't mean I don't feel a sense of pride when I read I piece of text written thousand years ago in the same language I speak today.
There's nothing wrong with being proud of being a part of something, as long you don't disparage others. But I guess it's easier to think in collective terms when you're born of a minority that for the larger part of history was oppressed.
Anyone interested in this topic should definitely check out Darryl Cooper's "MartyrMade" podcast, which had a Dan-Carlin-style series of episodes about early modern Zionism and the origins of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: http://www.martyrmade.com/fear-loathing-in-the-new-jerusalem... It does a great job of being even-handed and emotionally connecting the listener with the motivations of the people in history.
The history of the Jews (and the Jewish diaspora in particular) is fascinating. Between the typical opposing endpoints of assimilation/integration and separation there is this curious in-between state that seems both chaotic and stable over time -- the state of being "in a place" but not always being "of that place." The aforementioned podcast describes well the urge to assimilate or to remain distinct, positions held by both those in the Jewish community and those outside of it. The modern revival of the Hebrew language into a living tongue, both as a method of crystallizing identity and distinctiveness, is one example. Also interesting to consider how even small differences in "rules" between societies (like allowing usury or not, and to whom) leads to complex social consequences over time -- sort of a cellular automata analogy. Historical patterns of Jewish expulsion from various societies also make for interesting microcosms to understand tribe-based interactions: when the Jewish people were invited or allowed into a region, who was behind that change in policy and why? When pogroms or expulsions happened afterward, what were the causes and which segments of the population were the catalyst and why? It's an endlessly dynamic system that resists our efforts to create a simple static narrative -- and I suppose if anything it helps reveal that all of history is like that.
On a side note ...and I know I'll be sacrificing some points for this comment... I can't seem to get what everyone likes about Dan Carlin. I really enjoy history, and appreciate color commentary, but I've found the couple that I've heard didn't hold my interest very long. I started the Khans and one on the Romans, after hearing the non-stop praise on JRE. I really wanted to like it, which is why I was shocked that it seemed slow and light on the history despite being hours-long.
This is just, like, my opinion, man. I'm not trying to talk bad about it, I've just been curious if anyone else was disappointed or knows a better episode I should check out. I'm fascinated by Genghis Khan though, so I'm not sure how another topic could be more intriguing.
The World War 1 episodes might be slightly more enjoyable, because I think those deal a bit more with "history" in the sense of events and blow-by-blow of what happened. But it may be that Dan Carlin's stuff just isn't your style. Carlin's approach tends to be more of a discussion where he uses the backdrop of a historical event to ponder some aspect of the human condition. There is also a lot of repetition and redundancy and rambling when he talks, so some of the appeal is people who just plain like the sound of Carlin's voice and enjoy hearing someone talk about something interesting. I tend to divide up my podcasts into mental categories of "those I listen to at normal speed" and "those I listen to at 1.5x or 2x speed." Carlin's stuff fits into the first category for me.
Are there other history podcasts you've enjoyed? I think something like The History of Rome might be more of your style.
I've always been idly curious as to what happened in Israel (as in the geographic area) between, say, 35 A.D. and 1948. It seems, though, as if everybody who might have some insight there also has an agenda that makes any concrete information they might have to share indecipherable.
I don't know if some would call it biased, but it made a strong impression on me as a young adult. I am not Jewish, but it is fascinating in and of itself.
I just read the plot summary on wikipedia - and it seems that this book focuses on a family that leaves Israel pretty early on during these 2000 years.
Your idle curiosity has already yielded an important insight: the situation is complex. I think if everyone only knew one thing about the middle east, it should be that.
Just separating it based on religion is weird. I feel like in a 1-sentence tl;dr you should at least mention the Ottoman empire from 1299-1923 (ended in WW1).
Romans, Byzantines, Arabs/Muslims, Crusaders, Ottomans,
British. (You're connected to the greatest repository of knowledge in human history, you can look some of this up on your own.)
As soon as we hand history over to a good-willing person, even if they are a great artist, the matters quickly get foggy. This particular attempt at simplification of history has at least one significant flaw. It picked a plot line of different peoples fighting for land because they consider it holy and sticks to it, even though it's historically incorrect. Specifically, it is only fully correct for Jews, since, according to the Bible, the land of Israel was promised to Abraham and his descendants by God. Everyone else were and are primarily fighting for other reasons. For Muslims, Israel has never been a particularly important place - only the Jerusalem Mosque is somewhat important (not as important as Mecca and Medina), even though it is only thought to be mentioned in Quran as "the farthest Mosque". Now while Christians did call it a Holy land, I believe the real reason they were attracted to it was because of its association with Jesus.
So yeah, while Nina Parley is a terrific artist, be warned that this particular work of art distorts the truth, whether on purpose or not. The real story is that the Jews have a much stronger religious claim to the land than anyone else. Even more importantly, Israel is their only homeland, as opposed to everyone else who fought (and, arguably, still fights) for it.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
It appears to have gratified at least 159 people's intellectual curiosity (at the time of making this post).
I read Adam Kirch's review 'Why Jewish History Is So Hard to Write'. Perhaps it is because no one can ever seem to agree on what 'Jewish' actually is, as evidenced by some of the discussion threads here...
Fair point. I guess in that sense it's like "big data" or "blockchain", both concepts that I'm sure exist but I'm not quite sure how to define.
Anecdote: I was once in a conversation with a fellow who was a rabbi and this topic came up. He said, "well...the way I think of it is, if you can think of ten characteristics that are 'Jewish', anyone who has any six of them can claim the title." I guess that's one way to be flexible.
This article reads like a glorification of the kind of ethnocentrism and tribalism that most here categorically condemn when it's engaged in by white people.
Seeing as HN is supposed to be rational, pro-science, and skeptical, it's pretty strange to see an article on the front page so sympathetic to a religion--especially one that has infant genital mutilation as its core sacrament:
I sometimes wonder too- but then i meet the language lawyers, talking with the drm-legal team about, undefined behaviour in todays society- and suddenly.
Or if you sit with actual lawyers, and all they talk about is how you could get away with a crime, in a theoretical sense of course, if you used that trapdoor and lousy wording, and you realize, that is just exactly what you talked about the other day, with the database team over lunch.
You are right though, that the word hacker-culture does not capture it- its a mindset bend on edge cases, always looking for ways to circumvent.
It's not circumventing law, it's carefully sculpting it. In general, those hacker loopholes come from (1) over-broad policies made by ancestor rabbis to "build a wall around the Law", and (2) a desire to shrink the walled area, without (3) disrespecting the judgment of ancestors.
Do you think the US Supreme Court circumvents the Constitution and laws?
That's because "whiteness" is an invented category. There are no historical threads that bind together just the people you think of as "white" that don't include many others that you exclude based solely on a modern historical understanding of "white".
Write a history of the Irish diaspora, Sweden, the Balkans, or Russia and nobody is going to call you racist. Claim some sort of tribal group that incorporates all of Europe and the Middle East except excludes people of a skin color or specific religious history you don't like, and you'll find that you're racist. Magic.
> That's because "whiteness" is an invented category.
This is a common narrative now, and it seems malicious (or at least, misguided) to me - it's an attempt to deconstruct the generalized European identity as formed through ethnogenesis on the North American continent as different groups of Europeans intermarried. Can someone who hails from sixteen different European countries really make any claim to "belong" to any one of them? Doesn't it make much more sense for such a person to look at the superset of shared values, history, and beliefs that their ancestors had and make a synthesis of them all?
> There are no historical threads that bind together just the people you think of as "white" that don't include many others that you exclude based solely on a modern historical understanding of "white".
This is like saying there is no such thing as a puddle, pond, or lake because nobody can tell you exactly how many litres of water makes up the dividing line between them. Of course this is a clinal sort of division - it's not just genetics, it's also culture and outlook, behaviour, and whether or not a person has the desire to be identified as such. Expecting there to be some perfect formula that determines on-paper whether someone is white or not is an unreasonable expectation that nobody holds except to deconstruct it and diminish it as an identity. Such an attack would be horribly racist if applied to any other group.
From the article:
> For Schama, Jewishness comprises anything Jews have done, in all the very different places and ways they have lived. The boxer Dan Mendoza was a Jew, and so was Esperanza Malchi, the confidante of a sixteenth-century royal consort in the Ottoman court—just as fully as canonical figures like Moses Maimonides, the medieval Jewish philosopher, or Theodor Herzl. Schama offers an appealingly democratic and humanistic approach to Jewish history.
If this is fair and inoffensive to write (and I think it's fine), then why would a similar paragraph about "Whiteness comprises anything White people have done, in all the very different places and ways they have lived" not be fine? It's not like Jews are a unified racial group - there are a number of different groups within there, as we can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_ethnic_divisions
And yet, Jewish is not an "invented category" by any stretch of the imagination. Why would a different set of rule apply here?
> Write a history of the Irish diaspora, Sweden, the Balkans, or Russia and nobody is going to call you racist.
I don't know if that's necessarily true, it's going to depend heavily on the content of the book. I think that it's wise for a critical eye to be applied to any history book, it shouldn't particularly matter what's on the cover.
> Claim some sort of tribal group that incorporates all of Europe and the Middle East except excludes people of a skin color or specific religious history you don't like, and you'll find that you're racist.
Claim that an entire people doesn't exist, and deny their right to self-representation, and you may not find that you're a racist, but you may find that conflict is inevitable. This is not a line of thought that leads towards productive discourse, this is a line of thought that leads towards dividing society into opposing camps of enmity.
"White" was invented (by "White" people) to mean "everyone who isn't systematically oppressed under under local law and cultural practice". That's the only unifying thread. Irish, German, Jewish, Greek, etc became "White" wherever and whenever "White" people stopped discriminating against them. Scandinavian? European? Anglo? Western European? Eastern European? Fine. "White"? No.
Doubling down on a narrative that is severely lacking in historical evidence. Please, do, show me where all the white people got together and decided on this definition? Let me know where I'm supposed to get updates on who is, and who isn't? I must have missed my subscription to this topic.
I'm aware that various groups may not have been afforded every accomodation in the past by the dominant cultural groups in Europe and North America. This is an unfortunate legacy that is slowly being healed. I don't think individual white people alive today need to take on personal culpability for such (in a "sins of the father" sense), nor does it follow that White does not exist as a category merely because it has shifted in definition over time.
About all you can really say is that the definition is subject to further change in the future. Fair enough, but this doesn't mean the group doesn't exist.
> "White"? No.
You're very close to practicing "cultural erasure" by implying that people who identify as white (and there are hundreds of millions of such) don't exist, or are somehow mistaken in their own views about what they identify as. If this same tactic is used on literally any other group (whether it's racial, religious, ethnic, national i.e. Tibet, sexual i.e. LGBT groups, etc) it's viewed as a tremendously offensive act.
Why, then, is it okay to do against White people? Pray tell me why this group is the only one which you are not only permitted, but encouraged to deconstruct and deny the existence of?
Fuzziness not only in the topic here but in the meta discussion of the topic.
Yeah, there's something about white, American Christians to be discussed historically… boiling it down to "white" is probably better done by going with "European" but that's probably my own intellectual biases from my experiences of the language.
The thing about being Jewish is that it simply has been significantly different (even as there are parallels) to most other ethnic discussions. There are genetic similarities (read: inbreeding) within the primary Jewish ethnicities where other groups show more diversity. There's a weird tie between culture/religion and ethnicity.
I often make the analogy to being Cherokee or something. You don't just decide to believe some religious things and it makes you Cherokee, but they do have traditional beliefs and the idea of true adoption as a Cherokee isn't crazy. The Jewish religion is sorta like that where they discourage converts, and conversion is like getting adopted by a different ethnic group. That's quite different from Christianity and Islam that promote conversion.
For this and many other reasons, Jews stayed distinct in their own weird way.
Talking about "whiteness" and "white people" is actually more like "blackness" and "black people" where dark skin can come from a range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Lumping all dark-skinned people together makes little sense except for how it's treated (self-fulfilling prophecy somewhat) in our world in reality.
You may recall people remarking that our first "black" president was not only mixed-race but his African father was really African and not a descendant of American slaves. But obviously he still lived his life in a way that had him be a part of the American (slave ancestry) cultural reality.
So, yeah, fuzziness. But Jews really have had ties going back generations that the various conglomerations of "white" Americans have not… even as you can draw some analogies and questions.
> Talking about "whiteness" and "white people" is actually more like "blackness" and "black people" where dark skin can come from a range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Lumping all dark-skinned people together makes little sense except for how it's treated (self-fulfilling prophecy somewhat) in our world in reality.
I agree with this - but it's also very clear that Black people, especially in North America, have some amount of shared history that crosses their ethnic lines, and absolutely have shared interests. Can one really pretend Black people don't exist? Can one say that it should be deconstructed, and that we should talk about Ethiopians and Nigerians, etc - and if so, which sort, because within country borders there are still many different groups? How do we label an African American who can trace their history back to sixteen different countries? What do they identify as? I can tell you, it's an easy answer if you actually ask them...
Not only is this clinal (fuzzy), labels are also applied at different levels of granularity. There's still value in speaking about finer levels of granularity, and the shared history/values/goals/problems that apply at one level of granularity may not apply when you move up to the superset, but some still do.
It's those shared issues that highly coarse groupings are concerned with. Let's not miss the forest for the trees.
The self-fulfilling-prophecy is the key point. Anything we label actually exists if (this doesn't always happen), applying the label causes some remarkable effect.
Beyond that, the question is whether labels reflect real meaning or value? For instance, does the label assist in predicting anything else?
We do not live in a post-racial society because people who get labeled "black" are also predictably statistically more likely to be found to suffer various consequences of racism (police harassment, systemic poverty…). Can we predict things about anyone labeled "white"? Probably, but maybe less so. So, if the predictive value of a "white" label is less statistically strong than that of a "black" label, then the former is a less valuable label to discuss (I don't know about the truth of the stats).
So, everything is fuzzy, but those correlations that are real statistically powerful ones are the places where labels are most useful and reflective of insights into the world.
The danger is that the self-fulfilling part interacts with the other-correlation part. So, if "black" people are statistically poorer and everything correlated with that, then applying the label could reinforce that stereotype etc. etc. tough situation… and lots of dynamics for any particular label and consideration.
All these categories and identities are invented to some degree or another -- they exist in both a state of arbitrariness and meaningfulness (there's something "there" there because of consensus). Ireland wasn't always a unified thing, or any of the other nations you mention. I don't think that identities have to be some sort of pure Platonic form argued from first principles to be legitimate, they are just what they are. The idea of "blackness" is also an invented category -- the experience of African-Americans under historical slavery and the experience of Africans in African countries under historical colonialism or Africans whose lands were not fully colonized (Ethiopia) are very different sorts of backgrounds.
Identities are formalized based on observation of an Other who doesn't fit into the category, because those observations bring to light unstated assumed commonalities between peoples who didn't think of themselves as a single thing. This is one method of ethnogenesis where groups that didn't think of themselves as a thing gain that consciousness. The idea of "white people" is an example of ethnogenesis that I think had its origins mostly in the American colonial experience, where you had a mixture of European groups differentiating themselves from Africans and American Indian groups. In Europe, an Englishman and a Frenchman (themselves the result of their own ethnogenesis) may not see eye-to-eye, but in a new territory with other peoples with very different cultures, suddenly the English-French thing doesn't seem as big.
These things expand, shift, and contract over time. But at the moment, the consensus-driven model makes me see myself as "white" as one of my categories, invented or not (not that that's my sole identity or anything!). I see myself as white, others who I see as white see me as "white" (though probably if outside the US they see me as "American" more?), and others who aren't white probably think "white" when they see me, so in the end that's the category that we have at the moment, nothing wrong with that in and of itself as long as you treat others with respect.
I hear that "Imagined Communities" is a good read about the rise of different nation-feelings in recent centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_Communities I haven't read it yet myself, though.
> Write a history of the Irish diaspora, Sweden, the Balkans, or Russia and nobody is going to call you racist.
What about generalizing "western" history? There are significant trends in history like the Enlightenment, Renaissance, early Industrial Revolution, the rise of Protestant Catholics, the collection of countries who worked together in the Crusades, etc, etc that crossed regional boundaries like England, France, Sweden, German, etc but were still very much a homogeneous definable group among a wider Western population. Whose societies were very similar and evolved on a similar and distinct trajectory.
Even extending across continents from Europe into North America and South America, where simply using countries is to ignore plenty of higher-level context and wider cultural trends.
Not to mention the mixed European heritage of early North Americans, which developed an identifiable wider culture (even if much of it was built on top of slavery). Or the fact even England was largely a mix of Celtic, Scandinavian, Roman, etc which can be distinguished by going back in history but merged into one culture over time, much like America did.
I get the flaws, risks, and hostility to lumping them all into "white" though, so I'm in agreement there. All analysis requires context and race is a very poor category to work with. Even the neo-nazis and Hitler seem to struggle to define what "white" means and invent categories like Aryans, to exclude obviously white people like Slavs.
But still the human brain largely works via patterns and lumping groups into categories, whether that's socially acceptable or not. So even if it's not ethically "right" I can still see why it's such a common phenomenon, despite being a poor categorization.
We should all be using cultures rather than race, ethnic group, OR country/geographic area.
"Albion's Seed" or "American Nations" should be required reading for anyone obsessed with race to really understand the flaws of racial categorization:
Kind of tacky. The article is trying to address why the Jews as a persecuted group have survived throughout history. It's pretty impressive. I don't see "glorification" just history.
It's almost like you registered to talk trash about Jews. What are you adding to the conversation?
Jewishness is not just about race, religion, or ethnicity, it may encompass those things but it's more about shared identity and history, so getting into racism and then trying to bring up religious practices is just throwing darts at the wall.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadhttps://www.amazon.com/In-the-Beginning/dp/B00J97O91Q/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0398rkj/the-story-of-...
I actually started watching last night after never really been taught (or remember being taught) much about them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Figurine_from_Egypt_of_se...
He sees Elephantine as countering widely held beliefs about ancient Jewish life (that it was all in Israel, homogenous, etc), containing interesting analogues to the present day, and being an altogether interesting story.
It can be more difficult to spin a good yarn from the older material.
I beg to differ. I live in Eastern Europe, at the crossroads of different migration waves, and I'd say we've been quite successful at integrating people over the millennia. Just look at this widely circulated genetic map of Europe (http://brilliantmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/genetic-...), you can see that Romania (the country from where I'm from) is pretty diverse, and that happened because we're at the crossroads between "mainland" Europe, the Asian steppes, Anatolia/the Middle East etc.
And looking past genetics, I can give you countless examples of Transylvanian Saxons and Hungarians who, once they had passed the Carpathians into Wallachian and Moldavian lands, ended up by giving up their religion and language and completely assimilated (yeah, it took them a couple of generations or more, but the process was generally irreversible). The local Jews were also quite well integrated in terms of customs and everything, in fact one of the most famous Yiddish songs ("Roumania Roumania - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuj-qjyUjxY") mentions Romanian foods like "mamaliga" or "pastrama" (which we stole from the Turks, but everybody from the Balkans did that) in a melancholic way, like it also belonged to them, the Jewish people who used to live here.
> beside that "integration" ended up in violence anyway even before wwii, when romanians started persecuting them.
WW2 and the 1930s were very difficult times (and not only for the Jews). I like to look at those times as the exception rather than the norm.
humans have been a bunch of assholes, we living in a niche of limited peace on a few locations shouldn't give us the peace of mind that everyone else understand the value of integration. note that a person or a family by itself is likely to integrate, it's significant migration that end up into more or less pronounced isolationism.
again, just have a look at all the chinatown and italian quarters. the actual border may be fuzzy, but the sense of identity is definitely there. and while wwii was an exceptional time, smaller conflict are still very present and the failure integration models are popping up every day stronger.
Even with all the carnage of WWII, I have very little doubt we'd have been back at it 10 years later if it weren't for the specter of nuclear armageddon hanging over everyone's heads.
Current Romania was formed out of regions that were occupied by different empires. The Old Romanian Kingdom was formed out of the bits formerly under Ottoman control. In 1918 the kingdom expanded to include regions formerly under Austria-Hungarian and Russian control.
When far right sentiment flared during WW2, the Jews in Basarabia (ex-Russian territory) were persecuted, even butchered. The ones in the Old Kingdom weren't.
In a weird way, they were "our Jews". They were considered different, yet still a part of our community.
I’ve heard the same thing from Ukrainians. Isn’t the world fun like that?
Any source for that? I'm pretty interested in the history of the Middle Ages and as such I've learned recently that some historians have even started to question the long-held believe that the famous Mongol invasion of 1241-1242 was that bloody. Yeah, they did ransack a couple of towns in Transylvania and present-day Hungary, but that mostly happened because those people put up a fight, on the other side of the Carpathians (Wallachia, Moldova) there are no visible "destruction markers", so to speak (like burned villages and such). A couple of centuries earlier the Pechenegs and the Cumans did cause some bit of a stir in their wake, but that was comparatively short-lived, as they were very rapidly (again, comparatively speaking) integrated by the Hungarians in their kingdom (there was even a king of theirs called Ladislaus the Cuman) and also by the Wallachian/Romanian population which was not part of any established State: to this day "Coman" is still a a pretty popular family name among Romanians, and some big name-places bear Cuman/Turkic names, like the county of Teleorman (meaning "crazy forrest") or the plains of Baragan (meaning "winter storm" or something of the sorts).
Invasion by the "Germans" is the explanation Caesar gives for the migration of the Helvetii; it's debatable how accurate he was being, and how motivated to find political justification for his actions, but something induced them to pack up and move for greener pastures. A similar explanation may be found for the movement south through the Balkans and into Asia Minor of the Celtic tribes that became the Galatians. There is perhaps more evidence of this effect in the series of great migrations towards the end of the Roman empire, where the Franks, Burgundians, Vandals, and Goths all were forced westward in front of the Huns and Alans, who were themselves pushed westward by other steppe tribes of central Asia, perhaps ultimately terminating in the Xiongnu and their conflicts with Han China. There appears to be another wave of migration some hundreds of years later, corresponding with the migration of the Slavs, Bulgars, Avars and others into eastern Europe and the Balkans, the expansion of the Rus, the rise of the various central Asian Turkic khaganates, and the expansion of Tang China. Then there is of course the expedition of Batu and Subotai, in which atrocity and total war was a favored tactic, and only a succession crisis after the death of Ogodei Khan spared the rest of Europe. Then there is German colonization under the aegis of the Teutonic Knights, the crumbling of the Byzantine Empire under assault from the Turks on the one hand and the Venetians on the other, incessant warfare as the Ottomans expanded and contracted northwards through the Balkans, culminating in the early 20th century "Baltic Question" tinderbox as that empire fell apart and led to hundreds of millions of deaths throughout eastern Europe and atrocity on a scale to rival Genghis.
It's a history of blood and sword; not perhaps categorically different than the history of most places, but amplified by virtue of being the crossroads of so many moving peoples.
How many generations does the ancestoral language usually survive? Two? Three? Integration succeeds en masse all the time, especially where religion doesn't interfere.
It's just that nationalist wars make more headlines than all the kids I went to school with who didn't even properly speak the language of their own mothers (something I find rather regrettable).
The USA is full of Chinese, Italian, Irish etc descendants, most of whom do NOT live in those ghettos. After a generation to learn the local language and culture, descendants leave the ghettos for success in the wider world.
I think you mean "race."
An ethnic group, or an ethnicity, is a category of people who identify with each other based on similarities such as common ancestry, language, society, culture or nation
common ancestry - genes.
And Ashkenazi happens one of the "tightest" ethnicities in the connected part of the modern world (Europe, America), since it is historically-long-insular low-population subgroup living within a large population.
These Wikipedia articles have a lot of good material for those who aren't aware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_peoplehood and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_is_a_Jew%3F
I'm Tunisian and I consider myself Arab, but many other Tunisians consider themselves (ethnically) Maghrebi and/or Amazigh. Tunisia and the remaining Maghrebi countries are part of the Arab League, though.
I'm sure it's even more complicated for Tunisian Jews :P
For Lybian Jews, it's not complicated at all.
That said, the 2014 Tunisian constitution and its protections for freedom of religion was a huge step forward, and gives me a good bit of hope for the future.
I recently had the opportunity to try one a few months ago. So good.
If you are looking for a standard Tunisian sandwich, I asked my wife and she said this one looks good: https://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Tunisian-Tuna-Sandwic....
Fricassee is another tasty Tunisian tuna-based sandwich, but it requires that you also prepare the bread: http://www.afooda.com/tunisian-fricassee-fricasse-roll/
I completely agree with your comment, and not only that but also find your view on the quote interesting as well.
A lot of Jews would say that any Jew who becomes a Christian is no longer Jewish (by ethnicity or religion) even if said "Jewish Christian" still abides by and observes many Jewish customs and holidays.
I would argue that there are also many atheist Catholics (e.g. in Italy) who would disagree that they were not also part of an ethnorelegious group.
The majority of Jews today (in the ballpark of 75%) are Ashkenazi Jews which is a sort of 'race' in that they share a very recent common ancestor -- which is also why so many Jews share common physical features. All of this is very different than other religions, even other Abrahamic religions. So it is not inconsistent that state that Jews are an ethnic group, but other religious groups are not.
> If you want to convert it's a big deal with study, testing, and culminating with a literal certificate of conversion - that can be revoked.
https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/50602/can-conver...
Only in narrow areas, such as modern State of Israel (which is a blip in Jewish history, and not the world government of Jews), which very special circumstances.
It's complicated.
Also, you can be a non-Jewish woman, marry a Jewish man, and have Jewish children, who an Orthodox Jew might call non-Jewish children, but those children and their descendants and neighbors may never think are "not Jewish"
For instance, in the past interfaith marriage was not only frowned upon but something that would likely result in individuals facing exile from the Jewish community. This, for instance, is why most Jews today share so many distinct physical and other characteristics. In searching for some interesting numbers I came upon this article [1] which you might find interesting - it discusses the ongoing "reformation" of Judaism. The reason I put reformation in quotes is because I think it's "reforming" in the way that most religions are today - it's fading. And I think a century it will probably make no more sense to refer to Jews as an ethnic group than it would to refer to Irish Americans as an ethic group today. However, as of today Jews most certainly remain an ethic group by most all facets of the word.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/us/poll-shows-major-shift...
Of course, because both groups view themselves as belonging to the same group of people, with shared customs, history, religion and tradition, that dates back to the Kingdom of Israel. What you don't seem to understand is that ethnicity is a social concept - the criteria isn't "how much two people have in common", but whether a shared identity exists between them. You should ask yourself what makes you refer to both Ashkenazim and Mizrahim as "Jews", and what makes them refer to themselves as such, even among people who don't believe in Judaism.
> Well, Italians and Spaniards traditionally share a religion (Roman Catholicism), speak related languages, and share some biological ancestry – does that make them one ethnic group?
If they share the same ethnic identity then of course.
You want to focus on subjective questions of identity, but it isn't clear to me that all Jews have the same subjective sense of identity. Does a secular Zionist in Tel Aviv have the same subjective sense of identity as a Satmar anti-Zionist in Kiryas Joel? Certainly their "subjective sense of identity" has completely different ideological foundations. They likely wouldn't agree on who is a Jew either, since their different ideological foundations would lead them to different positions on issues such as conversion standards and patrilineal descent.
This doesn't of course mean that their "subjective sense of identity" is identical in its entirety, but that's pretty much the case with every ethnicity.
As a young boy my father used to take me to the Pergamon museum in Berlin - one major exhibit is the Babylonian street of processions (it dates to the neo-Babylonian empire) He used to say - here you see our heritage, we were around the show when Berlin (and all the other great capitals of the world) were still a swamp.
And secondly it's important to remember your roots, but in my opinion the focus was wrong (or maybe the conversation included this aspect, you just didn't present it): we were around back when Berlin was a swamp and we're still around now, prosperous and developed.
In my eyes that's the real achievement! (look at Iraq, Iran, Egypt, even Greece or India to some degree)
It's not necessarily bad, but it's still hubris :)
Greeks were still the majority in Greece and they were a well regarded minority in the empire. They were persecuted after WW1 (see the population exchanges and the Smyrna massacre).
But Greeks don’t view themselves as a persecuted minority, historically. It’s all about the mindset and self-perception.
Saki, The Jesting of Arlingthon Stringham
I would be really interested if you could explain more your way of thinking about it, because to me when my father explains that we should be proud of having the same meal our ancestors did Xthousand years ago I don't feel impressed in the least.
Instead, it just feels like a long streak of spreading a meme.
People often get surprised when I tell them I don't consider myself Jewish anymore or that I don't intend to bring up any children I have Jewish. They often cite their surprise to the fact that Judaism has a long ancestral history. And I really just can't understand this frame of thinking that says Judaism is good because it's been going on for long.
So I would be interested if you could explain why this impresses you :)
I know that I did repeat the same statement several times with variations, but it is as far as I can get.
Also: If something prevailed throughout time, against all odds, then that's pretty impressive to me.
This is dangerous logic, because you're not comparing it to anything. For instance one argument I've seen for the existence of a god was the fact that many constants and other seemingly 'magic numbers' of our universe are set just as is required to maintain life as we know it. The problem there is that assuming this is true, it's still meaningless since the only way we could ever come to observe this fact was if it was true. This observation is known as the anthropic principle [1].
Basically considering the merit or probability of something happening when you would be unable to observe it not happening is impossible. You could say you're comparing it against the failure of other groups, but this is probably somewhat disingenuous as I think it's reasonable to hypothesize that the oldest persistent ethnic group is likely some group within Africa neither you or I have ever heard of, and you'd probably be unlikely to praise their longevity and persistence in and of itself, even if it too was likely ripe with strife throughout time.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
"Against all odds" would seem to be the key words here. There are countless other ethnic and religious groups that were integrated into the larger Muslim culture when Islam was first spreading. The same is the case for Christian Europe. In fact, the Romani people may be a good example of what we would expect to naturally happen to a dispersed and oppressed ethnic group. They have no singular culture, principles, or beliefs; they assumed most aspects of the surrounding culture's mode of life and beliefs.
It isn't a stretch to call the survival of the Jewish people an unexplained historical exception. There are countless historians (Jewish and non-Jewish) who have researched and written on the topic.
Or, am I misunderstanding the application of the Anthropic principle as you are applying it in this context?
Oppression and dispersion takes on a different meaning for those of means, even more so when the shared genetic lineage also happens to provide a substantially higher IQ than average for the vast majority of the group.
I really think there is an undertone to this perspective that is colored by a narrative that is false at best and possibly something much worse.
I dont think there is any factual basis to claim Jews had great economic success or were of means outside of false narratives perpetuated by their enemies. Even if you can point to specific eras or individuals that had success, you certainly couldnt demonstrate it existed propritionately more so than others, or that it existed in all the periods where they were persecuted and oppressed...
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/usury-and-moneylend...
You wrote a previous comment about jews distinctive physical features and now you speak of their means and share an article about rotschild and than view a Jew who calls you out on your false narrative a narcissist?!
Ascribing a few peoples wealth on a group of millions is the very definition of anti-semitism... I refrained from calling you out sooner to try to give you the benefit of the doubt...but the fact is the wealth on one person or a few people lending money hardly reflects on the entire Jewish people...it is a dangerous stereotype not based on actual facts...just a stereotype based on a fraction of a fraction of the population...
Your belief that jews arent poor or oppressed minorities without means throughtout history is patently false! Even if you can point to a few exceptions to the rules.
Or you can search for literally any source. The extreme success of the Jewish communities throughout time is extremely well documented. This success, paired with insularity, was often one of the big motivations for their oppression throughout history. Expulsions would generally involve direct or indirect confiscation of material possessions. Between the 13th and 16th century Jews were expelled some 15+ times, in some cases multiple times from the same places (such as France) where they would be expelled, invited as their absence proved problematic, expelled again, and so on.
The reason Jews have distinctive features is because today about 75% of Jews are Ashkenazi - a very distinctive group with a variety of distinct features, both physical and nonphysical. For instance Ahskenazi individuals show an average IQ average nearly a standard deviation above the mean. The reason for the genetic relationship is that historically Judaism was far more insular than it is even today. For instance interfaith marriages is an extremely new phenomena. Pair a religion that makes it extremely difficult to join (and was only more difficult in the past) with extreme restrictions on things like marriage, and you end up with strong genetic similarity. It's not dissimilar, in effect, from geographic isolation which yielded most distinctive traits of various groups today.
Some of those students went to yeshivas (religious schools) afterwards studying Talmud [1] (a written rendition of The Oral Law by tradition given to Moses by God along with the five books of Moses). A very high priority "law" (mitzvah) in Judaism is that Jewish males are supposed to spend at least a little time each day learning Talmud.
The Talmud is focused not so much on content but on process, on learning Jewish tradition and law though arguments among rabbis testing edge conditions (e.g., an object found overlapping both public and private property). In modern day, yeshiva students have taken the LSAT exam and have gone directly to law school without attending undergraduate education.
I believe the unique early emphasis on education, "The Law" (Torah), and lifelong learning among males helped to hold the community together.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud
Im not a rabbi or in kiruv or anything, so take this with a grain of salt...but I would point to Jordan Petersons position about the longevity and survival of the bible stories and his response to atheists around it all sounding made up. There is a reason these stories survived through the ages. There is wisdom and much to learn from the ideas in the Torah even if you dont buy into their accuracy. It's just too shallow to dismiss it as superstitious ancestors who werent as smart as us.
From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the very fact that we are finite beings in a world that will survive our existence means that our life will face tragedy...and the best way to cope with a tragic existence is to find meaning in life and in our actions.
Most fundamentally is buying into the idea that we can bargain with the future and that decisions we make today matter and have an impact on the future and future generations.
From that context, ritually connecting with the past and exploring how things that happened to your ancestors have an impact on your existence today is about the best way I can think of to get you to internalize the idea that what you do today matters to tomorrow.
The idea of mesorah(transmission from generation to generation) is framed as a way to verify the validity of the stories...but I really think its more along the lines of showing the unbroken chain between the past and the present...so you can internalize the responsibility of the chain between the present and the future...
It sounds like you've decided to start a new chain for your children and sever that connection to your past. For me, I think the responsibility and ramifications of that decision are massive and at the very least deserve a reckoning with the significance of how the decision impacts future generations regardless of what you finally decide...it feels to me that because you werent able to internalize the ideas (regardless of the factual nature of them) of "Hashem took ME out of mitzrayim" or "had the exodus not taken place, we would still be slaves" ...and never connected with the powerful idea that we eat matzah to commemorate what our ancestors ate rushing out Egypt...you either feel the decision for keeping your future generations connected to the past is inconsequential, or the past is blatanly wrong.
Considering you grew up religious, I am assuming you had a modern Yeshiva education...like many others, it sounds like they failed to show you the pragmatic wisdom in yiddishkeit and instead left you feeling unconnected with your brilliant history.
I would encourage you to try to pass on the parts that you did connect with and the pragmatic wisdom in much of the torah and halacha to atleast give your children the chance to make their own decisions.
You can reject the bible and reject religion and put science on a pedestal...but the idea that what you do matters and that you can bargain with the future...and that who and where you are today is a product of decisions your parents and their parents made...that lesson is too important not to pass on. It would be a shame to be passedover!
>From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the very fact that we are finite beings in a world that will survive our existence means that our life will face tragedy...and the best way to cope with a tragic existence is to find meaning in life and in our actions.
Agreed.
> Considering you grew up religious, I am assuming you had a modern Yeshiva education...like many others, it sounds like they failed to show you the pragmatic wisdom in yiddishkeit and instead left you feeling unconnected with your brilliant history.
This is condescending, in my opinion. You're presuming to know why they don't accept the religious narrative. It's great that it speaks to you, but it doesn't speak to them and it doesn't have to. I might be reading too much into this, but it seems you're invoking the common meme that "if you would only have had the wonderful opportunities to learn in this yeshiva or that one, or to appreciate the 'true beauty' of this stream or another of Judaism, you'd agree with my point of view." Maybe, maybe not. Maybe GP had a superior education than you did, and if YOU would have had the education GP had, you'd reject religion too?
> I would encourage you to try to pass on the parts that you did connect with and the pragmatic wisdom in much of the torah and halacha to atleast give your children the chance to make their own decisions.
Maybe the opposite is true? Maybe the only way to give children a fair choice is to NOT indoctrinate them with ideas they didn't choose, and instead give them a blank slate from which to start?
No matter what you do for your children, you're making decisions for them. Raise them religious, you're exposing them to X instead of Y. Raise them secular, you're choosing Y instead of X. There's no way to give them everything, you have to make choices for them.
>Maybe the opposite is true? Maybe the only way to give children a fair choice is to NOT indoctrinate them with ideas they didn't choose
If only that were possible. You're going to indoctrinate them one way or the other (as you correctly concluded in the following paragraph), and since you're going to do so, the best indoctrination I can think of is personal and intellectual integrity, which might lead them to decide to go back to your roots or take a different path, both being fine if they come from the right place.
This is commonly misunderstand point, as you hint at.
Our ancestors were about as smart as we are -- some smarter, some not, but on average they were far more ignorant of how the world works. There were plenty of brilliant ideas wrapped around less sure knowledge.
I don't think that all long lasting things are particularly interesting. Rocks have been around longer than the Jewish people but we don't celebrate that as extraordinary. It is considered perfectly natural. It is noteworthy when something is unnaturally long lasting; when other peoples/belief system were put under similar pressures the results have been drastically different. Imagine 50 people are dragged under water on a beach by a horrible undertow and held underwater for an hour. 2 out of the 50 survive while the other 48 don't; the 2 who survived are definitely of interest because we would want to know how they survived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
I was also raised religious (Hareidi) and am now entirely secular, by most counts. And I've spent many hours trying to argue that it's ridiculous to take pride in the fact that some arbitrary tradition lasted for a few thousand years. So a bunch of people did this or that ritual for thousands of years...sucks for them! Why should I? (Never mind that the tradition may have evolved/morphed to the point that Talmud-era Jews would barely recognize it, let alone second temple Jews or earlier.)
Moreover, if I've already rejected the notion that the Torah is the word of God, why would I consider myself Jewish? How does being born to one woman versus another determine my identity and fate? If I don't believe, why am I "in the club" at all? Because the believers say that I don't get to choose my own identity? Shouldn't I be able to just laugh that off?
I went through a phase in which I refused to identify as Jewish, but it didn't stick. There is too much of my upbringing that I _do_ connect with, or remember positively, and feel good about. So I can't quite shake the identity. And lord knows I've tried.
Instead, as the sun sets on Tel Aviv for the last day of Passover, I'm writing a comment on HN and enjoying the challah I just took out of the oven. Let me check...yeah, it took more than 18 minutes to prepare. But what can I say? I'm Jewish, and what kind of Jew celebrates a holiday without challah? Not this one.
I think the point here is that identity, belonging, nostalgia, and a sense of connection to a larger community - not just a generation alive today, but a chain of generations - can be a powerful emotional driver for people. Simply put, the idea that "our ancestors" did this or that and the tradition and identity lives gives many otherwise rational people a feeling of belonging.
And while there's no shame in choosing to forge your own way, independent of the social environment into which you were born, it's no great honor either. It just is. Some people feel imprisoned by the narrative, some empowered, and some just don't care. And some - I suspect more than might meet the eye - are forever caught between a prison of arbitrary rules and the discomfort of floating listlessly through a strange and uncaring secular society.[0]
So if you managed to leave the baggage behind, all the power to you. For others, the baggage is inescapable. And for yet others, the baggage isn't baggage at all, but a source of positive emotion.
[0] I can't remember the exact page, but somewhere in Chapter 9 of Brachot the Talmud briefly addresses this conundrum. Search for "אוי לי מיצרי אוי לי מיוצרי". Hope I got that right...it's been many years.
The weird uncomfortable part is understanding that the strange individualistic rejection of culture and interest in just taking the best ideas from everywhere is actually a common experience of secular American Jews. You know what it's like to be a minority, just not part of the same club as everyone around you, so you question things and easily find the conclusion that most of the old traditions and views are nonsense. You're left wondering whether it's okay to find a "tribe" you fit (political or cultural or whatever) or if really the concept of tribes is itself just bad. If everyone else would stop being tribalist, we could all just live in a post-ethnic, post-diversity world or something where no individual has any more claim to any worldview or idea or culture than any other… but that's fantasy too.
The fact is: most people on the planet haven't even had the chance to be in a situation where they truly separate themselves from their traditions and consider the possibility of just not being of the group they grew up identifying with.
Consider the trans-racial ideas of that controversial lady in Spokane… these things are not easy ideas to grapple with.
That being said, for me the Jewish tradition is immensely powerful, even though I'm not a believer in God. Sitting together with your family at the Seder table and talking about what it means to be free vs. to be slave is an amazing experience. It would be very hard to re-create that experience without the frame given by our Exodus narratives and the surrounding traditions.
I'm sure other cultures have their own powerful traditions for keeping values alive and transporting them across generations. But as you are already very familiar with Jewish traditions (probably much more than me), why not make use of this treasure?
>As you I don't see why someone should be proud about anything inherited. It can be a gift (or a curse), but it is certainly not an achievement.
One way to look at this is if you believe achievements are worthy of pride, or that pride is an 'incentive' to achieve, than recognizing how significant everything you do can be is a great way to inspire maximizing achievement... One way to do this may be to recognize that your achievements can have a positive impact on future generations, even in simply creating positive and breaking negative parenting cycles in your family, or how smiling at someone can have a ripple impact elevating numerous peoples days and possibly lives... its possible that training us to be proud of something that is as insignificant as being a product of our parents will nurture a sensitivity to take our ability to impact others with the seriousness and responsibility it demands. Just a thought.
Put things in context, mate.
And in case anyone hasn't heard: There's reasons pride has been considered a sin. There's nothing redeeming about the emotion of pride. You can have pride in your belief about your ancestors or pride in your accomplishments. Either way, pride is not doing anything positive. There are healthier ways to feel positive about things, and pride can go the hell away, period.
The Parthenon is only a century younger, and a much more architecturally impressive structure. Yet if a Greek or other ethnic European made a similar remark about the superiority of their heritage on the basis of it, they'd be accused of racism.
If your objection is that the Vikings were horrible people that just pillaged stuff. Then I agree, but the ancient Israelites weren't that kind to women and slaves either. If your objection is that the culture didn't survive. Well, the good parts, Christmas, Midsummer (the traditions are pre-Christian) and binge-drinking did...
Even if ancient Israelite culture is objectively superior to Viking culture, you didn't create it, so why be proud of it? It's like being proud of being the heir of a billionaire. :p
And you know well of the political movement in Sweden to restrict the definition of "Swedish" to those who have obvious Swedish ancestry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjand84BBKM
Yes, I know of the political movements you talk about. Yes, I think you can be grateful of being born in one of the best places on earth. Yes, you can enjoy have physical appearance that most women of the world consider very attractive. But being proud of it? Nah...
It's being impressed our ancestors have been holding on to a religious and cultural identity for two thousand years. Years in which they were were a minority in different countries, spoke in foreign tongues, were forced to denounce their Judaism, and sometimes were haunted without even that choice.
It's that as a modern Hebrew speaker, I can pretty easily read a piece of text as the Bible - written thousands of years ago. And that even though my ancestors were from Syria, Iraq, and Morroco - they shared the same ethos as the jews from Hungary, Germany, and Russia.
Although, being a Viking is also very cool.
I was born into a particular family but that's nothing to be proud of, it wasn't exactly my achievement.
I'm Dutch by birth, but I'm not proud to be Dutch.
I'm a European by birth, but it doesn't make me proud either.
What I an be proud about is those things that I've achieved that were not 'normal' for a person of my birth station and privilege level. (And that's not a whole lot, given the fact that I was born in one of the wealthiest countries in the world as a 'white male' which means I had just about all the lottery cards picked just so.)
Yeah, I puff my chest when I think of my personal achievements. But that doesn't mean I don't feel a sense of pride when I read I piece of text written thousand years ago in the same language I speak today.
There's nothing wrong with being proud of being a part of something, as long you don't disparage others. But I guess it's easier to think in collective terms when you're born of a minority that for the larger part of history was oppressed.
The history of the Jews (and the Jewish diaspora in particular) is fascinating. Between the typical opposing endpoints of assimilation/integration and separation there is this curious in-between state that seems both chaotic and stable over time -- the state of being "in a place" but not always being "of that place." The aforementioned podcast describes well the urge to assimilate or to remain distinct, positions held by both those in the Jewish community and those outside of it. The modern revival of the Hebrew language into a living tongue, both as a method of crystallizing identity and distinctiveness, is one example. Also interesting to consider how even small differences in "rules" between societies (like allowing usury or not, and to whom) leads to complex social consequences over time -- sort of a cellular automata analogy. Historical patterns of Jewish expulsion from various societies also make for interesting microcosms to understand tribe-based interactions: when the Jewish people were invited or allowed into a region, who was behind that change in policy and why? When pogroms or expulsions happened afterward, what were the causes and which segments of the population were the catalyst and why? It's an endlessly dynamic system that resists our efforts to create a simple static narrative -- and I suppose if anything it helps reveal that all of history is like that.
This is just, like, my opinion, man. I'm not trying to talk bad about it, I've just been curious if anyone else was disappointed or knows a better episode I should check out. I'm fascinated by Genghis Khan though, so I'm not sure how another topic could be more intriguing.
Are there other history podcasts you've enjoyed? I think something like The History of Rome might be more of your style.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Abraham_(novel)
I don't know if some would call it biased, but it made a strong impression on me as a young adult. I am not Jewish, but it is fascinating in and of itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora
https://www.amazon.com/Peace-End-All-Ottoman-Creation/dp/080...
Your idle curiosity has already yielded an important insight: the situation is complex. I think if everyone only knew one thing about the middle east, it should be that.
And if you’re even vaguely interested, his books on Russia are fantastic too - The Romanovs and the two on Stalin in particular.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-evIyrrjTTY
So yeah, while Nina Parley is a terrific artist, be warned that this particular work of art distorts the truth, whether on purpose or not. The real story is that the Jews have a much stronger religious claim to the land than anyone else. Even more importantly, Israel is their only homeland, as opposed to everyone else who fought (and, arguably, still fights) for it.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
It appears to have gratified at least 159 people's intellectual curiosity (at the time of making this post).
Anecdote: I was once in a conversation with a fellow who was a rabbi and this topic came up. He said, "well...the way I think of it is, if you can think of ten characteristics that are 'Jewish', anyone who has any six of them can claim the title." I guess that's one way to be flexible.
Seeing as HN is supposed to be rational, pro-science, and skeptical, it's pretty strange to see an article on the front page so sympathetic to a religion--especially one that has infant genital mutilation as its core sacrament:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304793/Two-babies-s...
I sometimes wonder too- but then i meet the language lawyers, talking with the drm-legal team about, undefined behaviour in todays society- and suddenly.
Or if you sit with actual lawyers, and all they talk about is how you could get away with a crime, in a theoretical sense of course, if you used that trapdoor and lousy wording, and you realize, that is just exactly what you talked about the other day, with the database team over lunch.
You are right though, that the word hacker-culture does not capture it- its a mindset bend on edge cases, always looking for ways to circumvent.
Do you think the US Supreme Court circumvents the Constitution and laws?
Write a history of the Irish diaspora, Sweden, the Balkans, or Russia and nobody is going to call you racist. Claim some sort of tribal group that incorporates all of Europe and the Middle East except excludes people of a skin color or specific religious history you don't like, and you'll find that you're racist. Magic.
This is a common narrative now, and it seems malicious (or at least, misguided) to me - it's an attempt to deconstruct the generalized European identity as formed through ethnogenesis on the North American continent as different groups of Europeans intermarried. Can someone who hails from sixteen different European countries really make any claim to "belong" to any one of them? Doesn't it make much more sense for such a person to look at the superset of shared values, history, and beliefs that their ancestors had and make a synthesis of them all?
> There are no historical threads that bind together just the people you think of as "white" that don't include many others that you exclude based solely on a modern historical understanding of "white".
This is like saying there is no such thing as a puddle, pond, or lake because nobody can tell you exactly how many litres of water makes up the dividing line between them. Of course this is a clinal sort of division - it's not just genetics, it's also culture and outlook, behaviour, and whether or not a person has the desire to be identified as such. Expecting there to be some perfect formula that determines on-paper whether someone is white or not is an unreasonable expectation that nobody holds except to deconstruct it and diminish it as an identity. Such an attack would be horribly racist if applied to any other group.
From the article:
> For Schama, Jewishness comprises anything Jews have done, in all the very different places and ways they have lived. The boxer Dan Mendoza was a Jew, and so was Esperanza Malchi, the confidante of a sixteenth-century royal consort in the Ottoman court—just as fully as canonical figures like Moses Maimonides, the medieval Jewish philosopher, or Theodor Herzl. Schama offers an appealingly democratic and humanistic approach to Jewish history.
If this is fair and inoffensive to write (and I think it's fine), then why would a similar paragraph about "Whiteness comprises anything White people have done, in all the very different places and ways they have lived" not be fine? It's not like Jews are a unified racial group - there are a number of different groups within there, as we can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_ethnic_divisions
And yet, Jewish is not an "invented category" by any stretch of the imagination. Why would a different set of rule apply here?
> Write a history of the Irish diaspora, Sweden, the Balkans, or Russia and nobody is going to call you racist.
I don't know if that's necessarily true, it's going to depend heavily on the content of the book. I think that it's wise for a critical eye to be applied to any history book, it shouldn't particularly matter what's on the cover.
> Claim some sort of tribal group that incorporates all of Europe and the Middle East except excludes people of a skin color or specific religious history you don't like, and you'll find that you're racist.
Claim that an entire people doesn't exist, and deny their right to self-representation, and you may not find that you're a racist, but you may find that conflict is inevitable. This is not a line of thought that leads towards productive discourse, this is a line of thought that leads towards dividing society into opposing camps of enmity.
I'm aware that various groups may not have been afforded every accomodation in the past by the dominant cultural groups in Europe and North America. This is an unfortunate legacy that is slowly being healed. I don't think individual white people alive today need to take on personal culpability for such (in a "sins of the father" sense), nor does it follow that White does not exist as a category merely because it has shifted in definition over time.
About all you can really say is that the definition is subject to further change in the future. Fair enough, but this doesn't mean the group doesn't exist.
> "White"? No.
You're very close to practicing "cultural erasure" by implying that people who identify as white (and there are hundreds of millions of such) don't exist, or are somehow mistaken in their own views about what they identify as. If this same tactic is used on literally any other group (whether it's racial, religious, ethnic, national i.e. Tibet, sexual i.e. LGBT groups, etc) it's viewed as a tremendously offensive act.
Why, then, is it okay to do against White people? Pray tell me why this group is the only one which you are not only permitted, but encouraged to deconstruct and deny the existence of?
Fuzziness not only in the topic here but in the meta discussion of the topic.
Yeah, there's something about white, American Christians to be discussed historically… boiling it down to "white" is probably better done by going with "European" but that's probably my own intellectual biases from my experiences of the language.
The thing about being Jewish is that it simply has been significantly different (even as there are parallels) to most other ethnic discussions. There are genetic similarities (read: inbreeding) within the primary Jewish ethnicities where other groups show more diversity. There's a weird tie between culture/religion and ethnicity.
I often make the analogy to being Cherokee or something. You don't just decide to believe some religious things and it makes you Cherokee, but they do have traditional beliefs and the idea of true adoption as a Cherokee isn't crazy. The Jewish religion is sorta like that where they discourage converts, and conversion is like getting adopted by a different ethnic group. That's quite different from Christianity and Islam that promote conversion.
For this and many other reasons, Jews stayed distinct in their own weird way.
Talking about "whiteness" and "white people" is actually more like "blackness" and "black people" where dark skin can come from a range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Lumping all dark-skinned people together makes little sense except for how it's treated (self-fulfilling prophecy somewhat) in our world in reality.
You may recall people remarking that our first "black" president was not only mixed-race but his African father was really African and not a descendant of American slaves. But obviously he still lived his life in a way that had him be a part of the American (slave ancestry) cultural reality.
So, yeah, fuzziness. But Jews really have had ties going back generations that the various conglomerations of "white" Americans have not… even as you can draw some analogies and questions.
I agree with this - but it's also very clear that Black people, especially in North America, have some amount of shared history that crosses their ethnic lines, and absolutely have shared interests. Can one really pretend Black people don't exist? Can one say that it should be deconstructed, and that we should talk about Ethiopians and Nigerians, etc - and if so, which sort, because within country borders there are still many different groups? How do we label an African American who can trace their history back to sixteen different countries? What do they identify as? I can tell you, it's an easy answer if you actually ask them...
Not only is this clinal (fuzzy), labels are also applied at different levels of granularity. There's still value in speaking about finer levels of granularity, and the shared history/values/goals/problems that apply at one level of granularity may not apply when you move up to the superset, but some still do.
It's those shared issues that highly coarse groupings are concerned with. Let's not miss the forest for the trees.
Beyond that, the question is whether labels reflect real meaning or value? For instance, does the label assist in predicting anything else?
We do not live in a post-racial society because people who get labeled "black" are also predictably statistically more likely to be found to suffer various consequences of racism (police harassment, systemic poverty…). Can we predict things about anyone labeled "white"? Probably, but maybe less so. So, if the predictive value of a "white" label is less statistically strong than that of a "black" label, then the former is a less valuable label to discuss (I don't know about the truth of the stats).
So, everything is fuzzy, but those correlations that are real statistically powerful ones are the places where labels are most useful and reflective of insights into the world.
The danger is that the self-fulfilling part interacts with the other-correlation part. So, if "black" people are statistically poorer and everything correlated with that, then applying the label could reinforce that stereotype etc. etc. tough situation… and lots of dynamics for any particular label and consideration.
Identities are formalized based on observation of an Other who doesn't fit into the category, because those observations bring to light unstated assumed commonalities between peoples who didn't think of themselves as a single thing. This is one method of ethnogenesis where groups that didn't think of themselves as a thing gain that consciousness. The idea of "white people" is an example of ethnogenesis that I think had its origins mostly in the American colonial experience, where you had a mixture of European groups differentiating themselves from Africans and American Indian groups. In Europe, an Englishman and a Frenchman (themselves the result of their own ethnogenesis) may not see eye-to-eye, but in a new territory with other peoples with very different cultures, suddenly the English-French thing doesn't seem as big.
These things expand, shift, and contract over time. But at the moment, the consensus-driven model makes me see myself as "white" as one of my categories, invented or not (not that that's my sole identity or anything!). I see myself as white, others who I see as white see me as "white" (though probably if outside the US they see me as "American" more?), and others who aren't white probably think "white" when they see me, so in the end that's the category that we have at the moment, nothing wrong with that in and of itself as long as you treat others with respect.
I hear that "Imagined Communities" is a good read about the rise of different nation-feelings in recent centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_Communities I haven't read it yet myself, though.
What about generalizing "western" history? There are significant trends in history like the Enlightenment, Renaissance, early Industrial Revolution, the rise of Protestant Catholics, the collection of countries who worked together in the Crusades, etc, etc that crossed regional boundaries like England, France, Sweden, German, etc but were still very much a homogeneous definable group among a wider Western population. Whose societies were very similar and evolved on a similar and distinct trajectory.
Even extending across continents from Europe into North America and South America, where simply using countries is to ignore plenty of higher-level context and wider cultural trends.
Not to mention the mixed European heritage of early North Americans, which developed an identifiable wider culture (even if much of it was built on top of slavery). Or the fact even England was largely a mix of Celtic, Scandinavian, Roman, etc which can be distinguished by going back in history but merged into one culture over time, much like America did.
I get the flaws, risks, and hostility to lumping them all into "white" though, so I'm in agreement there. All analysis requires context and race is a very poor category to work with. Even the neo-nazis and Hitler seem to struggle to define what "white" means and invent categories like Aryans, to exclude obviously white people like Slavs.
But still the human brain largely works via patterns and lumping groups into categories, whether that's socially acceptable or not. So even if it's not ethically "right" I can still see why it's such a common phenomenon, despite being a poor categorization.
We should all be using cultures rather than race, ethnic group, OR country/geographic area.
"Albion's Seed" or "American Nations" should be required reading for anyone obsessed with race to really understand the flaws of racial categorization:
https://www.amazon.com/Albions-Seed-British-Folkways-cultura...
https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cul...
It should even be in high school history education IMO.
It's almost like you registered to talk trash about Jews. What are you adding to the conversation?
Jewishness is not just about race, religion, or ethnicity, it may encompass those things but it's more about shared identity and history, so getting into racism and then trying to bring up religious practices is just throwing darts at the wall.