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Posted on 09/29/2002 1:24:55 PM PDT by Richard Poe
IT'S NOT EASY being a half-Jew.
Not long ago, my name came up on the letters page of the neo-Nazi Web site VanguardNewsNetwork.com (VNN). The VNN-ites were poking fun at my vain attempts to explain – to persistent questioners on my RichardPoe.com message board – that I am not Jewish.
" `Poe’ is Jewish in every possible way, shape or form," snorted VNN editor Alex Linder. "…`Poe’ squirts around like a greasy kike squid, squirting ink… Quit jewing the truth, Pogrebissky."
Pogrebissky was my grandfather’s surname before he changed it to Poe. Nazi writers often call me Pogrebissky, in order to "expose" what they consider my "true" identity.
Now, most half-Jews have never had their family history scrutinized quite so bluntly by actual Nazis. But I recommend the experience. It is wonderfully clarifying.
It teaches an important lesson: If you reveal your half-Jewishness in public, you can and will become a target for people who hate Jews.
However, you will also anger many Jews, in the process.
Jewish tradition holds that there is no such thing as a half-Jew. You are either Jewish or Gentile. Simply uttering the phrase "half-Jew" can earn you a harsh rebuke from some rabbis.
Yet half-Jews exist. There is no denying it. And therein lies our dilemma.
My father was of Russian-Jewish descent and my mother of Mexican-Catholic heritage. Only the mother’s identity counts in Jewish law. Born of a Gentile mother, I can only be a Gentile. As a baptized Catholic, I can only be a Christian – unless, of course, I convert.
It all seems so simple. Yet, there is more to the story than rabbinical musings would suggest.
An April 6, 1997 article in The New York Times began:
It was 1938 in Berlin, and 19-year-old Hannah was shocked to hear that her father had been arrested by the Nazis. She had been raised in the Lutheran faith of her mother, and her father's being a Jew had never been an issue... So she went to the Gestapo to complain.
Officers said they couldn't help her and told her to go to the Jewish community center. Once there, she told people what had happened and was questioned about her upbringing. "We don't help your kind," she remembers being told. Determined, she went back to the Gestapo to protest. This time the officer in charge took her into a back room and asked two leering junior officers if they "liked what they saw." The commander left, and the two men raped her.
The article said that many such accounts were gathered by Bryan Mark Rigg, then a 25-year-old Texan doing graduate work at Cambridge University. Rigg had taken it upon himself to explore the fate of the mischlinge – the half- and quarter-Jews of Nazi Germany.
For a people who don’t exist, we mischlinge have a long and mournful history.
We confront it in different ways. Some, like my friend Jamie Glazov -- a noted cyberjournalist -- demand acceptance from Jews. Like his father before him, Jamie styles himself a "Catholic Jew."
The Glazov family suffered persecution as Jews in the USSR. But Jamie's Jewish father embraced Catholicism and his mother was Jewish on the "wrong" side – her father’s side. Jamie is therefore three-quarters Jewish – but still not a Jew by Halakhic law.
In a FrontPageMagazine.com article, Jamie declared that he was a Christian Jew. The reaction was predictable – a flood of letters telling him, "NO!"
I wish Jamie well. But he is trying to stop a juggernaut. In any case, Jews have a right to their ancient traditions. And so do we mischlinge have a right to ours.
Sadly, some Jews exhibit scant regard for our rights – even the right to be left alone to be ourselves.
The Web site HalfJew.com – dedicated to "establishing an identity for HalfJews" – receives enough hostile mail from irate Jews that its editors had to address the problem on their "Frequently-Asked-Questions" page, thus:
QUESTION: … I don’t understand why so many people keep posting on the site saying that if someone doesn’t have a Jewish mother, they aren’t Jewish. I thought this was a half-Jewish site, not a Jewish site.
ANSWER: It baffles us as well. We don't know why they are so angry, or what they are afraid of…
Neither do I.
The mischlinge of Nazi Germany formed their own support networks after realizing that help would come from nowhere else. Through such Web sites as HalfJew.com, America’s fast-growing population of modern-day mischlinge is learning to do the same.
_________________________________
Richard Poe is a New York Times bestselling author and cyberjournalist. His latest book is The Seven Myths of Gun Control.
America's Fifth Column ... watch PBS documentary JIHAD! In America
New Link: Download 8 Mb zip file here (60 minute video)
.....or maybe a Son of God. Go figure.
It's a shame they don't have a chatroom. Oh, the havoc Freepers could wreak there.
I'm sure they would love the opportunity to 'spread the word' amongst conservatives.
BTW, I think resurecting a concept like modern-day mischlinge is contemptable, given its origin. The boy's over at VNN and their ilk would disagree though, Adolph had it right.
Those changeable "who is" and "who ain't" rules to determine who gets into The Club are only man-made rules. They are not from God. To see the GENETIC trail click on this brief ISRAELITE HISTORY.
You can convert. What did you say that made them think you're nuts?
BTW, I'm blonde too, my kids too, my wife used to be, but her hair turned brown over the years.
David in the OT was described as "ruddy and fair". Sounds like a light haired (Red?) Irishman to me. Israelites Found In Ireland.
Make sure you delete whatever Nazi cookies your computer may have picked up.
Actually, I didn't say I was a Jew. I said I was a half-Jew. A half-Jew, by definition, is something other than a Jew.
"Christian with partial Jewish heritage" is fine. But does this formulation work in reverse? Is there such a thing as a "Jew with partial Christian heritage?"
Your analogy is questionable, because the terms "Christian" and "Jew" are not comparable in the way you imply.
It is quite normal to speak of someone being of "Jewish descent" or "partially Jewish descent," but it sounds very odd to speak of someone being of "partially Christian descent."
Doesn't it?
One is genetic, the other is a matter of choice.
"Christian with partial Jewish heritage" is fine. But does this formulation work in reverse? Is there such a thing as a "Jew with partial Christian heritage?"
Yes and no. A Jew who was a Christian is 100% Jewish as are their children. They blong to no tribe and clearly have a different genetic history. However, from a religious stand point, a Jew converted from something else has cut him or herself off from that heritage. In fact, he or she must do so for the conversion to the be true.
The basis is in the conversion of Ruth.
"Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried" (Ruth 1:16-17).
Hi Ron! Ruth married Boaz but did not become a Jew. There were no Jews at that time, only Israelites. There would be no tribal mixture of Israelites called Jews for more than another 500 years.
-LT
It is altogether quite common for the products of intermarriage to carry on about being half Jewish. If it is a religious distinction, it would have no meaning. If it is a racial description than it becomes an epithet.
If the distinction of "half-ness" is so bothersome, than why not convert?
Also, it's an issue of "legitimacy." 'Cause if people can say it's just a religion, then that defeats "nationhood" and Jews as a unique people. (Which also goes back to the Land - Jew is shortened from Judean - Judea.)
This thing about "converting" - "Oy vey." So, if one says a few words over a cat, does it suddenly become a giraffe? It may now think it's a giraffe, it may develop a fondness for some giraffe-like living, but, funny, it still doesn't look like a giraffe, nor is it a giraffe-giraffe.
It's also a question of power and "belonging" - this "group" issue, no matter what group one is talking about.
There are other points, but, in the meantime....people are who they are. And, even some 100% Jews aren't so good...so, everybody's different, and everyone's living their life, and moving through it, (in most cases) as best they can.
_______________
And, nobody has to lecture me about, "Oh, what about the black Ethiopian 'Jews,' etc., etc." Just like you're entitled to what you want to believe about "Who is a Jew?," I'm expressing my opinion, and ain't interested in a debate.
Joseph Lieberman, Paul Newman, Ted Koppel, Harrison Ford, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Kirk Douglas, Kevin Costner, Stephen Breyer, Yitzhak Rabin, Michael Landon, Lorne Greene, Mike Wallace, Benjamin Netanyahu, William Shatner, Douglas Fairbanks, Cary Grant, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Simon, Ariel Sharon, David Frost, Morley Safer, Ari Fleischer,
Jack Benny, Alan King, Casper Weinberger, Carl Reiner, George Burns, Red Buttons, Sam Levinson, Bernard Goldberg, Robert Downey Jr., Dustin Hoffman, Michael Douglas, Peter Sellers, Tony Curtis, Edward G. Robinson, Wolf Blitzer, Mel Torme, Paul Wellstone, Peter Falk, Leonard Nimoy, Jerry Springer, Arlen Spector, William Cohen,
Barry Goldwater, Robert Rubin, William Roth, Howard Metzenbaum, Hyman Rickover, Robert Reich, Russ Feinberg, Stanley Mosk, Arthur Burns, Milton Friedman, Bill Kristol, Victor Borge, William Kristol, Warren Rudman, etc., etc, etc.
The Celts and the Jews are genetic cousins. All are offspring from Jacob/Israel, and all are Hebrews, Semites, and Israelites. (See this HISTORY for more details...)
For ex: Paul Newman, Harrison Ford, Michael Landon, Caspar Weinberger, Michael Douglas, Peter Sellers, William Cohen, Barry Goldwater to name some without two Jewish parents.
That's an interesting twist. {ggg}. Did God require more than one parent (the male) to be Jewish in order for the offspring to be Jewish in his eyes? (Please, I am not interested in "tradition" or "culture", just the genetic links. Thanks.)
I don't know about G*d's eyes. I'm just talking about in my eyes. See, at times, THEY (the big they) say it's OK that the line can descend from one parent, the father, then they say, the mother - all to justify "outer-marriage," imo. Again, as far as I'm concerned, it's disrespectful to omit one.
He did, he's Catholic.
How else would you view it? I don't know what bias's could shine through, it is a comedy site run by Fade to Black On-line Comedy Magazine.
Well, the article says we have a Catholic Jew and a Christian Jew. No reason we can't have a Catholic Lutheran or a Moslem Unitarian. Religious beliefs don't enter into it do they? Sometimes the things people find to worry about puzzle me.
Actually, I have always been a Catholic. There was no conversion involved. I was raised in my mother's faith.
I knew that patience would pay off someday!
We should organize a Cha-NOO-kah and Christmas social.
It is, but evidently it didn't used to be.
My long-awaited copy of Bryan Mark Rigg's Hitler's Jewish Soldiers just arrived from Amazon.com. It opens with a very interesting section on the "Who is a Jew?" question. Among other things, it says (pages 6-7):
"In biblical times, a child `inherited' his Jewishness from his father. According to one common interpretation, in the Book of Leviticus, a `half-caste Danite' man who had a Jewish mother but an Egyptian father was rejected as not `belonging.' This example illustrates that at the time, Jewishness depended on descent through the father, contrary to today's practice. For example, Joseph's children are considered Jews, though their mother Asenath was the daughter of an Egyptian priest of On..."
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you. I understand your respecting your father’s faith and heritage. As a Catholic (and I presume with no regrets), why would you want to be considered a “half-Jew”? Why would it surprise you that the Jewish faith no more recognizes that concept than your Priest would recognize you as a half-Catholic?
I understand the VNN position, and acknowledge that the Nuremberg laws and the status of mischlinge are of historical interest. But, as your NYT articles notes, most mischlinge were not Jewish in their own minds, nor in the mind of either the Jewish or their accepted faith. The concept was an abomination, structured on the desire to ensure the “protection” of German blood.
I recognize that Alex Linder embraces the concepts of National Socialism, and so the concept of half-Jew would be important to him. From my perspective, if a Christian want’s to call themselves a half-Jew, it’s about a significant as calling themselves a half-frog, but I don’t see much importance to recreating a definition based on partial parentage.
>But isn't your contention that the Celts are a lost tribe of Israel really just a theory?
Of course all history is HIS-Story, and what really happened anytime in history is just a theory. Virtually nothing in history is proveable. All we have to do is look at todays news and see how much disagreement there is, let alone about what happened thousands of years ago.
Do we agree on what happened at the Kennedy assasination, with the incredible number of witnesses and media coverage? Do we agree what happened during World War 2? Do we agree what happened to TWA Flight 800?
Ulitimately, all history has to be re-constructed with the best evidence we can muster, but we must not be shy about changing our constructions as new evidence becomes available. Lots of new evidence has become available about The Lost Tribes of Israel in recent years.
The translation of the 23,000+ Assyrian Tablets in the British Museum has cast dramatic new light on what happened in Assyria during and after the Northern Kingdom captivity there. It's now time to seriously reconstruct our history of that time in the light of that stunning evidence.
In terms of how to present that evidence, all I can do it present it as I see it and leave it to others to challenge if they wish. As has been pointed out often on FR, humility and uncertainty here gets you nothing but bashed by additional nitwits.
-LT
Hmmm.
I think part of the problem is that you are confusing religion with ethnicity.
My religion is Catholic. My ethnic background is half Jewish and half Mexican. Religion and ethnicity are two different things.
As a columnist, I find it useful and interesting, from time to time, to draw on my ethnicity -- especially in cases where my ethnic background may give me a special insight into some news item or matter of cultural interest which I am discussing.
For instance, during last year's controversy over the allegedly "anti-Semitic" Easter installment of the B.C. comic strip, I wrote a column entitled, "Can Jews and Christians Live in Peace?", in which I offered some thoughts based upon my experience of growing up "half-Jewish" in an "interfaith" family.
On other occasions, I have written columns in which I drew upon my experience of being half Mexican.
Now here is what I find interesting.
When I write articles drawing upon my half-Jewish experience, I always seem to get a hailstorm of criticism from Jews telling me that there is no such thing as a half-Jew.
However, when I write articles drawing upon my experience of being half Mexican -- mirabile dictu! -- no legions of angry Mexicans appear to tell me that there is no such thing as a half Mexican.
In short, Mexicans don't seem to find anything odd or offensive in the idea that someone might be half Mexican and half something else.
Many Jews, however, DO take offense at the suggestion that someone can be half Jewish and half something else.
So Jews -- or at least some Jews -- seem to have a very odd reaction to a situation that most other people find very normal.
This makes me curious. And things that make me curious usually end up as the subject of a column sooner or later.
Does that make sense?
1 Chronicles 21:5 Joab reported the number of the fighting men to David: In all Israel there were one million one hundred thousand men who could handle a sword, including four hundred and seventy thousand in Judah.
1 Kings 20: 15 Then he mustered the young leaders of the provinces, and there were two hundred and thirty-two; and after them he mustered all the people, all the children of Israel--seven thousand.
1 Kings 20:20 And each one killed his man; so the Syrians fled, and Israel pursued them; and Ben-Hadad the king of Syria escaped on a horse with the cavalry.
Why don't these numbers match up? 1 Kings suggests there were very few Northern Kingdom Israelites alive only several hundred years after David's census. But let's examine the historical context:
David took over rulership of the insignificant Kingdom of Israel from Saul in 1010 BC and quickly built it into "perhaps the single most powerful kingdom on earth at that time". (REF: Halleys Bible Handbook.) When David took his official census of ALL the Israelites prior to the end of his reign in 970BC it had grown to between 5 Million and 8 Million people.
1 Chron 21:5-6 In all Israel there were one million one hundred thousand men who could handle a sword, including four hundred and seventy thousand in Judah. But Joab did not include Levi and Benjamin in the numbering, because the king's command was repulsive to him.
So, there are 470,000 fighting men in Judah alone, plus 630,000 in the North, with Levi and Benjamin uncounted. 1.1M x 6 = 6.6 Million total Israelites, plus the uncounted Levites and Benjamites. Whatever else may have been going on there, there is no doubt that the Kingdom of Israel was a major population center in that part of the world. (It would be similar in population to almost the entire Chicago Metro area today.)
At only 6 Million people, Israel then made up 10% of the global population, as large relatively as the United States and Canada and much of Mexico combined. The pre-split Davidic Kingdom of Israel was not just a trivial blip in history, but a major population force.
After the death of David and Solomon, the Kingdoms split into the northern Kingdom of Israel, (taking with it the Name and Title Israel along with the Birthright), and the southern Kingdom of Judah (which took the sceptre). From these naming rights alone we can assume the 10 tribed Northern Kingdom was still not smaller than the Southern Kingdom, and was probably a lot larger. The Kingdom of Judah of course picked up parts of the tribes of Levi and Benjamin, however small that contribution may have been.
So in 931 BC we can safely assume the Kingdom of Israel (the new northern Kingdom) had at last 4 Million members, and probably closer to 5 Million. That's almost a Million fighting men.
The next significant checkpoint in history is the battle of Quarqar only a hundred years later, in 853 BC. King Shalmaneser 3 of Assyria was already making his move on the small nations along the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean, and was eyeing the large Kingdom of Israel. A large stone tablet in The British Museum reports a coalition of forces including a small force of Israelites (200 chariots and 10,000 men) and others, led by King Ahab, held back the Assyrians advance. But the Assyrians claimed victory (for they owned the tablet) by killing of 14,000 Israelites. But there had to be a whole lot more Israelites than that who fought the Assyrians to a draw.
Shalmaneser tried to capture the Israelites again in 850 BC, and was thwarted again by another coalition of forces, including Israel. This is recorded on the same famous Black Obelisk, erected in Nineveh and discovered by Layard in 1846 AD. (The Black Obelisk is in the British Museum, along with 23,000 Assyrian tablets and monuments documenting the people, events, and times.) In 850 BC we have no reason to believe there were fewer northern Israelites, but probably more. At least 5 Million total, probably more like 6 Million, a very solid One Million fighting men.
Now along comes I Kings 20:15 talking about the same King Ahab suggesting there were only 7,000 total Israelites in the North, so we presume about 1,000 warriors. But the Assyrians said there was a HUGE force against them, made up of warriors from many countries and city states, of which only 10,000 were Israelite warriors. And the Assyrians killed 14,000 of them while fighting to a draw.
Something is not adding up here. This sole population citation from I Kings 20 is WAY out of line with the rest of the Biblical population accounts, and with the voluminous historical accounts of the Assyrians. If I Kings 20 had said "...King Ahab donated 150 chariots and 7,000 fighting men to the coalition..." it would make perfect sense. As it is, that single low number stands out like a sore thumb. I believe this I Kings citation must be a mistranslation, or there was a simple copy error somewhere along the way.
But assume for moment I Kings 20:15 is literally true. That would mean in only 80 years (931 BC - 853 BC), the great and powerful Northern Kingdom of 6 MILLION citizens shrank to only 7 THOUSAND??? Oh, Really????? Now that would be some kind of undocumented Holocaust. I don't think so.
Playing heavily into interpretation of Kings and Chronicles are such powerful collateral Biblical verses as Hosea 1:9-11
.....for you are not my people, and I am not your God.
" Yet the number of the children of Israel
Shall be as the sand of the sea,
Which cannot be measured or numbered.
And it shall come to pass
In the place where it was said to them,
"You are not My people,
There it shall be said to them,
"You are sons of the living God.'
Then the children of Judah and the children of Israel
Shall be gathered together, and appoint for themselves one head
This "Great Nation" promise was to the Kingdom of Israel (the Northern Kingdom), not to the Kingdom of Judah, and it speaks of the coming growth of Celtic Europe and America, followed by the rejoining of "the sticks", the "the Kingdoms". The Great Nation promised here cannot come to pass if it shrinks to the size of an insignificant American Indian Tribe (even if it has it's own Casino).
In contrast, the Southern Kingdom, after returning from Babylonian captivity never became a great nation among the giants of the globe. It has instead maintained a relationship with it's prosperous and generous Celtic cousins around the world, living among them whenever possible, to this day.
Finally, the default "excuse" for where the Lost Tribes of Israel went, "Well, they musta been assimilated", is 2nd only to "The dog ate my homework" in the creative history department. Like the lost homework, the trail of that exuse is also without documentation.
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