Posted on 02/06/2022 2:56:05 AM PST by Kaslin
There has never been in America a Jewish Question, at least, not until now.
America was built on the idea of a universal identity and a tolerance of differences. From the evolution of a liberal Protestant theology to George Washington’s embrace of the Jewish community, America -- unlike Europe -- did not see the Jews as strangers in its midst, as a people apart, or as a group whose identity stood at variance with others.
In America, there was no compelling desire for society to define the Jew. In Europe, Karl Marx, himself born a Jew and later a convert to Christianity, wrote an anti-Semitic screed, On the Jewish Question. Later Thomas Mann, who might be called a Philo-Semite, authored a lengthy essay with a similar title because the subject haunted Germany and Jews needed a defender.
Europe was consumed, if not obsessed, with the Jew in its midst.
While America had no shortage of anti-Semitic customs and displays of bigotry, Jews were well integrated into American society from the founding of the Republic until the great waves of Eastern European immigration began crashing on America’s shores and brought a different kind of Jew to its attention.
Nonetheless, Jews defined themselves. There was bigotry, hatred, and gentlemen’s agreements, but American intellectuals did not feel compelled to define the place of the Jew in society. To do so would have been contrary to America’s primary values.
America might not have uniformly adhered to its primary values, but its aspiration to embrace those values led to Jewish acceptance that never occurred in Europe even to this day.
But that has now changed and is the biggest threat to Jewish existence since the Klan almost took over the Democratic Party in the early 1920s.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
That's true only if you take a very very long view of human history. Most groups of people in the ancient world were ethnically non diverse and came complete with their own gods.
There are lots of other such groups such as Samaritans, Yazidi, Alawites, Parsis, Mandaens etc.
Samaritans are divergent Hebrews who follow a close version of the Torah. Alawites are an ethnic Muslim sect, etc. There may be a million Yazidi but almost nobody has ever heard of them and of those that have, few could tell you what they believe. There cultural impact on Western civilization has been zero, or close to it.
Of all the worlds' ethno religious groups, only the Jews survived into the modern Western world, and their contribution to that world has been off the charts. In all the ways that matter, they are unique.
-— For every Boris Epshteyn and Mark Levin, you will see a thousand Bill Ayers and Ron Klain’s.-—
Come on, it’s not quite that bad. Most estimates show about 30% of US Jews voted for Trump.
I wasn’t taking a long view.
Parsis, Yazidis are significant to tye areas they lived in.
And Samaritans are a distinct group of hebrews from Jews
There are many, but they are in Arabic or Turkish.
“Jews are now defined as white, something they have not been in America, especially since the latter part of the 19th century.”
Really? American Jews weren’t considered White? Someone probably should have told Judah Benjamin and David Levy Yulee that.
But very convenient in the current climate to claim that you aren’t White, I guess.
And their significance outside those areas? Zero or near zero. Existing does not make you unique.
The parsis have wide influence from south east Asia to iran and, thanks to Faroukh Bulsara, the west
You mean they are not in many languages from across the Earth, articles written over the centuries in many places far away from their original homeland, and from many countries whose history contains significant involvement like the involvement of the Jews?
No he was born Lutheran.
Correct.
Well, all races are a rather loose social construct.
For a long time, Siciliano were not considered “white”.
I’m a swarthy guy, clearly Middle Eastern, but white as far as I am concerned.
A Joe Biden of 1970 or Robert Byrd or any of the various Stormfront trolls that show up here periodically would say I am not white.
Claptrap. He fails to quantify how the “Jewish Question” has reemerged in America, other than that Jews are now defined as white, and therefore the target of woke-ism and CRT paradigms. Uh, yeah. Most Jews are white. Shakespeare said as much about Jews in the Merchant of Venice. Eyes, nose, mouth, hands, feet, sensibilities. If you tickle a Jew, doth he not laugh? If you poison him, doth he not die? If you wrong him, doth he not seek revenge? Actually, not very much these days.
Call me dog, and look you to my teeth. I could use a good dentist. Rarf!
Sorry but this (the part in bold) doesn't make any sense to me.
Just an altered quote from Merchant of Venice.
“He hath called me dog. Now look him to my teeth.”
I was about to start a response with “But to anti-semites, he remained a Jew in race”
And, while that is true, I think we need to separate out different types of hatred towards “Jews”. Prior to Darwin it was religious in nature and after a couple of generations of marrying out and converting, they disappeared in Christian and Muslim lands (while the treatment of religious Jews who didn’t convert varied by place and time).
Post Darwinism, the racial theories led to the Nazi racial hatred of Jews. So Marx was more a “Jew”, while Disraeli was “of the Jewish race” only as an offhand.
There has been no anti-semitism in southern or western India where Jews have been since 500 BC (Cochin) - because there wasn’t the relationship to other Abrahamic religions and also because India was always multi-multi-cultural.
The “Jewish question” was exclusively put in Indo-European languages and in Europe.
the Yazidi question was in Turkish, Arabic and to some extent Farsi, discussed across a wider area - from Spain to Tajikistan.
Jews as an ethno-religious community are only unique to western minds who have not heard of the other ethno-religious communities.
“Most Jews are white. “
Nope, there is no such “race” as “white” or “black” for that matter. Brushing our complexities under the “white” or “black” label is white- (or black-) washing.
Mizrahi Jews, Sephardic Jews, Cochin Jews, Bene Israelis, Ethiopian Jews, even the Bulgarian Jews (mostly Sephardic but they developed a unique culture) are unique culturally.
I am Jewish and have four Jewish grandparents who came here from Russia and Poland. I have very religious Jews in my extended family. It sickens me to see so many leftist Jews and Wall Street + tech type Jews who are on the Democrat/socialist/ communist side trying to destroy America. The kind of America I grew up in. Then we must add the negative cultural influence from Jews in Hollywood and in American culture.
By Wall Street I mean companies like Blackstone. Zuckerberg too, though he is tech.
By so many I mean the obvious. The percentage of Jews in America is 2%. Their destructive influence is as if Jews are 15-20% of America’s population.
When I think of my Jewish people, I prefer to think of right wing Israel and the religious Jews around the world.
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