Between the eastern shore of the Black Sea and the western border of China there is a huge world of lost kingdoms of which we know nearly nothing. They are in the Transcaucasus and Central Asia, bordering the Caspian Sea, and encompass all that the former Soviet Union had dominated and cut off from the outside world. Most of them lay alongside the highways of conquest used by Darius, Alexander, Temujin, and Tamerlaine, and the Silk Road traveled by Marco Polo.
I was deployed to Uzbekistan. It was like the fabled island of Brigadoon. The people had not formed an opinion about Americans and that’s what we liked about it.
Georgia itself is an isolated Christian land with its own language, alphabet, and church patriarchs. Hard to believe it was the birthplace of the monster Josef Vissarionivich Djugashvili, aka Stalin.
I was deployed to Uzbekistan. It was like the fabled island of Brigadoon. The people had not formed an opinion about Americans and that’s what we liked about it.
Georgia itself is an isolated Christian land with its own language, alphabet, and church patriarchs. Hard to believe it was the birthplace of the monster Josef Vissarionivich Djugashvili, aka Stalin.
Well said. This is also the area from which the Ashkenazi Jews derived the force of their culture. They were not the Hebrews of the Torah of the Middle East, but the people who took on Judaism and developed the Talmud. This overlap of two different cultures, and its resultant confusion over who is a Jew (the very word "Jew" being an Ashkenazi creation in contrast to "Hebrew") lasts to this day.
These are not irrelevent details. Massive amounts of slaughter and wars from the Middle Ages onwards have results precisely from the cultural confusion of what Jews are, where they came from, what they represent, where they live, etc., and then since the creation of modern Israel, how all of that fits together.
Even starting to figure it all out is a mess - asking questions and trying to determine definitions automatcally steps on toes. Muslims exploit the hell out of the confusion as well (which is ridiculous, since they want to kill everyone who isn't converted to Islam anyway).
And it doesn't help that it's almost impossible to find a translation of the Talmud - even now, in the days of the internet.
Sounds like an interesting place...