Posted on 04/21/2012 5:34:00 AM PDT by Kaslin
Believe what you will. Islamic Spain was a golden age for Jewry. Major philosophical works were written and new liturgy developed. Also, it was a time where, unlike the rest of Europe, individual Jews could work their way up in society... and did not live in fear of persecution.
As for the Ottomans, where to you think many European Jews fled to when Spain expelled all their Jews after the Reconquista (which, I might add, was not revoked until 1968, yes... 1968) and when the Spanish Inquisition kicked into high gear? As the Sultan of the time stated, “Ye call Ferdinand a wise king he who makes his land poor and ours rich!”
It wasn’t until the 18th century that the Ottoman empire became a place that wasn’t very welcoming for Jewry.
Point taken, but Rambam is a bad example. He fled Spain as a boy to escape fundamentalist Muslims who had taken power and were persecuting/forcibly converting Jews. However, on your point, he did not go to Christian Europe. Instead, he went to Morocco and eventually Egypt - where more tolerant Muslims afforded him freedoms that would have been unheard of in Europe at the time.
Thanks for the Jewish history lesson.
It still makes no sense to base tribal hate and love on what happened in history while ignoring what is happening now. That is why they call hate insane.
True, but he is the most famous.
:-P
But yeah, as the Reconquista got more and more successful, things got worse and worse for Jewry in Islamic Spain.
He's built his entire life on it, beginning as a collaborator with the Gestapo in Hungary as a young man.
One, the distrust of Southern evangelicals is misplaced. Antisemitism was foreign to the South, whose Confederate government elevated Judah Benjamin to Jefferson Davis's cabinet. Southerners did not imbibe antisemitism the way tony Northeasterners did after the Civil War, and only began to be cross with Jews after liberal and Communist Jewish lawyers started showing up at defense tables in notorious cases of black-on-white rape, the very worst offense under Jim Crow, to perform a conspicuous mitzvah at the expense of the defeated South. Before that, antisemitism was nonexistent below Mason-Dixon.
Two, the evangelicals and fundies (I am neither) have offered Israel and the Jews the most steadfast support and respect of any group or subgroup in America, but according to you they deserve no credit for that, because they respect their own faith, too.
If that really is the case, that Jews prefer the company of Moslems to that of Christians, then the obvious solution is for all Jews to become residents of the West Bank. The Moslems can go crazy killing Jews, the Jews can rejoice in their tolerant neighbors, and the American Christian community can look on in befuddlement, but no longer despised because no longer neighbors. Would that make everyone happy, do you think?
I would say that's a pretty good reason why Muslims hate the Jews!
Just two things:
1. WTF? Where did you see anything about American anti-semitism in my posts, north or south?
2. What made you think that an explanation of how past Jewish history influences current Jewish thought equals that Arab Moslems are tolerant of Jews? Seriously, dude... WTF?
It’s no more than explaining why the Mongol invasion of Russia created a situation where Russians today don’t much like the Mongols... despite the fact that Mongolia hasn’t been a thorn in Russia’s side for nearly a thousand years.
Seriously, your train of thought makes absolutely no sense to me.
Dang, I wish this place had an edit button.
Meant to write:
1. WTF? Where did you see anything about Southern anti-semitism in my posts?
Your comment about Christians -- American Christians. In context, you couldn't have been talking about anybody else, since you didn't specify "Christians except for American ones."
I was pointing out that your comment re Christian antisemitism is false at least in part and offering the argument, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
You're describing a Jewish community in the States (what we were originally talking about) that overgeneralizes about American Christians, imputing to them the impulses of the German and Russian Christian pogroms of the High Middle Ages, and the Spanish Inquisition and the forced conversion of the moriscos.
Clearer now?
I was pointing to the fact that Southerners, Christian almost to a man historically, have been remarkably free of animus toward Jews -- something Jews don't acknowledge according to you -- except on those few occasions when the ACLU or someone equally pink sent Jewish lawyers south to annoy the locals.
You keep saying that, as if I'd said something really stupid. Knock it off, you know exactly what I mean.
You said that, despite the fact that Southern Baptists and other fundies and evangelicals are some of the most stalwart friends Israel could have, that American Jews -- or is that all Jews? -- prefer Moslems as neighbors.
I tested your commitment and fidelity to your statement by suggesting that Jews who prefer the company of tolerant Moslems try the West Bank, whose denizens are, as you said and not I, more pleasing to Jews, who distrust and fear those Christians.
Am I getting this right, or is there a piece missing, something you forgot to tell us, about Jewish aversion to strongly religious Christian believers?
Are you telling us that Jews would prefer to live among amoral materialists and people who indulge the practices of Egypt?
Very carefully.
No, I said that, in the living past, American Jewry experienced discrimination, most clearly showed with college, hospital, and country club admissions. And gave proof with an example of why you can find hospitals with names like "Mt. Sinai..." or "Beth Israel...".
Which influenced how they raised their children.
And I showed that, in the past, it was far better for a Jew to live in places like Islamic Spain or the early Ottoman Empire... as compared to Christian Europe, where... for the most part, you could expect blood libels, confiscation of wealth, and expulsion - if you were lucky.
And somehow you conflate that with a general Jewish desire to live with current Arab Muslim nations.
---
All this was an just an explanation of past history that has shaped the culture of those who actions you puzzle over. Which is why I brought up the Russians vis a vis the Mongols. It's the same thing, an explanation of why they act the way they do on certain issues. (for the Russians... their reactions to the Mongols)
Well, that is what I was contesting w/r/t the South. I don't think there was anything like the persistent antisemitism that grew up in the resort country of New York and the drawing rooms of our leading cities 140 years ago. You don't have Jewish colleges, hospitals, etc., in the south. In New Orleans, though -- it's been abandoned now for many years, but it still stands -- you had a very big turn-of-the-century synagogue to testify to the presence and activity of the New Orleans Jewish community.
I can understand keeping memories of the former discrimination, which is gone now; but the Calvinists of the South were never Jewry's problem and are their friends now. Maybe American Jews could come to recognize that -- and quit voting for secular Marxists and supporting the Marxist-materialist-postmodernist beatdown of America's authentic Jacksonian values, as they survive in the South?
We are doing world class gymnastic back bends daily in this country because people of African descent were once kept as slaves.
Yet American blacks were never targeted as a group for mass murder. They were never hated en masse and put in death camps.
Now no one publicly admits that Jews are such targets, historically and TODAY. We are afraid to blame a violent black boy for his death by shooting, because he was black, and descended from victims, and this is huge politically, but Jews targeted for extermination is not really news or a big public deal.
. In a recent survey published on Beck’s web site last week, 90 percent of Jews said they perfer Muslims over Christians.
Ridiculous. I know not one Jew, no matter how liberal, who feels that way. We know who our enemies are.
Most liberal Jews I know or have recently talked to want to vote for Romney. They no longer want Obama and they are pretty firm about it.
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