Antisemitism. What is the origin?
When did some groups start disliking or hating Jewish people? Is there anything particular about their lifestyles that is unappealing? And why do most religions not have a word for anti(that religion)? There aren't actually that many Jewish people in the world on a whole. I don't know what threat some people see.
Comments (174)
Culturally, Jews like to argue. They'll complain. They're a people whose tradition rests on constant argumentation and debate in contrast to other cultural traditions. They can be a stubborn people. Then there's the economic history where Jews were often the middle-men such as loaners and bankers making them unpopular.
TLDR: This is a complex question but IMHO if you really wish to understand anti-Semitism I recommend reading the New Testament, specifically the Gospels.
The Jews are somewhat unique in surviving with their own distinct culture in place as a diaspora people. However, there are other diaspora peoples, and they have faced similar issues as well.
Second, the fact that the two great monotheistic faiths descend from Judaism has given it a unique place in Christian and Muslim lands. While Jews have been the victims of oppression and violence from both groups over the generations, they have also been tolerated far more than any other faith due to this connection. Christians, for example, exterminated all "pagan" religions and generally tried to purge lands they conquered from any trace of Islam (e.g. the Iberian peninsula). Jews however, were allowed to stay as a separate group due to their connection to Christianity, although they were also often beset by ghastly pogroms due to their differences.
You see a similar phenomena in Islam, although Islam historically tended to be more tolerant of Christians than vice versa.
No other diaspora group has this same sort of deep link to major world religions.
The NT is a compilation largely written by Jews for other Jews or for recent converts to Judaism. Had Christianity flamed out in its first 150 year or so, it would be thought of as a sect within Judaism. So, with that in mind, it's hard to see how it could really be "anti-Semitic," as such. The justification for allowing Jews to continue to practice their religion, unlike the pagans, was drawn from the NT.
Saying the NT is anti-Semitic is a bit like saying Luther or Calvin's work is "anti-Christian." To be sure, their work has motivated a good deal of prejudice, oppression, and violence against Christians, but it's an [I]internal[/I] schism.
Once a Jew has accepted the divine revelation of Jesus Christ he has placed himself outside of Judaism. If religion were sport then he would be playing a very different sort of ballgame. We have religious schisms within Judaism at this time: See Hillel vs Shammai.
If the writers were born Jews then they were surely not anti-Semites in the modern sense, but their writing in critiquing the Pharisees so harshly (and imho sometimes unnecessarily) served as a springboard for anti-Semitism.
John 14
"Trust in God; trust also in me... my Father's house... I AM the way and the truth and the life... If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have SEEN him... Anyone who has seen me has SEEN the Father... Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?... The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him... On that day you will realize that I am in MY Father, and you are in me, and I in you." Jesus (my emphasis)
Judaism fractured because of this renegade's life. It's never been the same
Prior to the Christian era, the Jews were one of several religious ethnicities that were periodically plundered / conquered by stronger neighbors. The Babylonias didn't conquer them because of religion or ethnic features. They were just inconveniently located on property the Nebuchadnezzar wanted.
The Christian Era began some time after the crucifixion (and alleged resurrection) of Jesus Christ by the Romans. Jesus was Jewish, of course, and if he was born to be the savior of Israel, it didn't work out very well.
The early church began informally and eventually became a capitalized group -- Christians. By this time, the Jews had revolted, and in reprisal the Romans totally profaned the Temple and scattered more Jews across the empire.
Somewhere along the line, Christians got the idea that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus = god = deicide. That worked well enough for Christians. Somebody needed to be blamed, and the Romans were no longer in business (as an empire in the West, at least). So, blame the Jews.
Enemies are handy because so many things -- plagues, wars, financial problems, bad harvests, etc. -- can be blamed on them. The Jews were numerous enough in total, but nowhere in particular. They didn't have a lot of power. They were duly blames for bad news.
Being on good terms with a group and at the same time viewing them as enemies is cognitively dissonance. As time went on, Jews became a caricature in the portrayals by Christians. The Church (Roman and Orthodox) was the vehicle for distributing antisemitism.
Antisemitism has been well established in Christian countries since... pick a century -- 13th? Maybe even before then, It has put down deep roots among Slavic, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, and various other ethnic groups,
Then there's Islam,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism
It is in their Bible. It wasn't until Vatican II in the 1960s that the Catholics officially repudiated the idea. But if one were to just pick up and read the NT the most straight-off answer is that the Jews were behind it.
"His blood is on us and our children" (Matthew 27) cry the blood-thirsty Jews during the crucifixion.
Ye but the Romans tortured him to death. They didn't have to. It was their choice
Yes, it was done by the hand of Pilate. No one is arguing that. Pilate is described as hesitant. All I'm saying is that there's solid biblical grounds for pointing the finger at the Jews. He was tried in front of a Sanhedrin, an ancient Jewish court.
Maybe historically he bought their anathema upon himself. John chapter 6 has Jesus telling people to eat him, and according to many scholars this was considered an insulting use of language. It seems like he was prodding them to do something. If he was just a man this could be forgotten way long ago. But many believe what he said..
This is a lighter view of it all from 8 years ago.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ECscKICzsJ0
Of course. Jesus challenged the Jewish power elite, which outside of the Temple was subordinate to the Romans.
But the narrative of the Jewish elite's animosity towards Jesus wasn't, in my opinion, responsible for anti-semitism. I don't know of antisemitic attacks on Jews in the late Roman era, or in the immediate period after the collapse of the Western Empire (around 480). I don't think I've read about antisemitic attacks in Europe until the 10th - 15th centuries.
[quote from Wikipedia]The ghetto system began in Renaissance Italy in July 1555 with Pope Paul IV's issuing of the Cum nimis absurdum. This change in papal policy implemented a series of restrictions on Jewish life that dramatically reshaped their place in society.[/quote]
[quote from Wikipedia]on March 31, 1492, in the Alhambra's resplendent Hall of the Ambassadors, Ferdinand and Isabella signed an edict, the Alhambra Decree, expelling the Jews from Spain.[/quote]
If there has been a thousand years of antisemitism in Europe, there were also a thousand years after Jesus when there wasn't much antisemitism. Something besides the Biblical Texts was at work. My guess is that the early slanders, i.e., using Christian children's blood to make passover bread, was authored by some sons of bitches in the church, or by some of their running dog lackeys. But for what reason did the bastards do it?
What wiki illustrates is that there is a coinciding of religion, ethnicity, and economic group. Conflict Sociology suggests that the more these boundaries align, and the sharper they are, the more likely there is to be open conflict. And as is usual in living systems, the reverse is also the case, the more there is conflict, the more aligned and sharp the boundaries will remain.
Most often, the Picts, Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Normans, Huguenots, etc, etc merge over time into a common folk sharing the land to the extent that such identities become lost entirely. If I had to speculate, I would suggest that the language and the Book were central along with a rare tradition of universal learning, (hence 'argumentative'?) aided by a tribal religion with strict rules about marriage and something of an obsession with lineage.
Humans don't need any special reason to split themselves up into groups and then hate each other. But Jews and Christians had a peculiar dynamic.
A jew could technically become a christian at any point by accepting the saviour. At the same time, the refusal to do so always included a sort of challenge to the christian majority. Reactions to this differed based in the ebb and flow of the fortunes of the overall community.
Jews were often tolerated explicitly to demonstrate christian superiority. The notion was to keep jews around as distinctly second class citizens to constantly remind them of their inferiority and entice them to convert.
But, when the fortunes of the overall community fell, this notion could fold in on itself. Then the separate, marginalised community could look like an intentional mockery. In the christian anti-semitic tales, such as the blood libel, there seems to be an element of christian practice, reflected in a distorting mirror.
Isaac Asimov said the Jews invented religious intolerance and then went on to profoundly influence the rest of the world, setting the stage for becoming victims of intolerance themselves.
The basic idea is that in the ancient world, it was normal for people to respect foreign gods. If you went to city X, you stopped by to honor their gods and then proceeded with your business. The concept of a false god is Hebrew in origin.
You're confusing anti-zionist positions with anti-semitic positions. Israel is an oppressor and occupier of land that doesn't belong to it and continues to settle it. Meanwhile commiting gross crimes against humanity in its treatment of Palestinians under its occupation and Israeli Arabs. The current government even condones and supports settlers killing people in the West Bank and unilaterally "legitimises" illegal settlements as if has the authority to do so. That's established fact, nobody speaks about the occupied territories as if it belongs to Israel. How about an unequivocal comdemnation from you about those crimes?
That same government is killing thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and collectively punishes them for the terrorist attack by Hamas. The majority of victims are children and women. Israel is so tough killing so many unarmed civilians! Such manly men and courageous women. Or as we call them war criminals.
Or are you just going to "gloss over Palestinian victims"?
Right, but the actual teachings of Jesus are more against the Sadducees' formalism than the Pharisees. The shift in named focus probably has more to do with the fact that the Sadducees had been significantly reduced as a contemporary power by the time the Gospels were set down.
Judaism at the time had already split into multiple competing sects: Sadducee, Pharisee, Zealot, and Platonizers.
The NT certainly motivated anti-Semitism at times, but so did the OT. The OT's prolific examples of Israel's collective recalcitrance and evil doing was often used as justification for oppression. And yet I find it hard to classify the Tanakh as "anti-Semitic," in any straightforward way, given it's also a pillar of Jewish culture and that culture's survival itself.
But the story itself leaves open this possiblity of being used in this way precisely because, unlike many holy books, it frequently casts its people in a negative light. The Book of Johna for example has the hated Assyrians repenting of their sins in a way the Jews never fully muster, much to the chagrin of Jonah himself. Job features the piety and holiness of an Edomite, a descendant of Esau, whom the Jews continually warred with and oppressed. Ruth again shows a foreigner acting more holy than most of the chosen people. These texts open the door to internal and external critique, although they also seem to set the ground for success as a diaspora people living among and (in antiquity) converting large numbers of foreigners. Because, around Christ's time, we see Jews actually being quite successful in converting large numbers of foreigners. And, their Platonizing (Philo to Alexandrian Christians) actually seems to have set the ground work for later Neoplatonism too.
Not originally. The first center of Christian worship was the church led by James in Jerusalem. This Church was made up of Jews who considered themselves Jews. Paul's letters acknowledge the authority of this church and ask that funds be sent there. He sees his role in preaching to Jewish converts as special (the "Gentiles" in this context were largely non-Jews who had already accepted the Jewish God). Converts are something you see in the OT, e.g., Achior in the Book of Judith, Ruth, etc.
"Jewish Christians," appear to survive into the fourth century in Palestine and Armenia in isolated areas. And of course this tradition exists today in Messianic Judaism, which makes much of the early, more Jewish James/Peter centered faith.
Christians only began taking on a distinct identity during the rebellion against Rome, which they sat out, circa 70 AD. Paul's letters actually pre-date this period, as do some of the others.
Quoting Benkei
I am not. When crowds of protestors are screaming "gas the Jews" in Australia or when Jews are being told by police to stay away from these pro-Hamas marches that is a sign of anti-Semitism. When Jewish students are threatened on college campuses like Cornell that is anti-Semitism. There has been a massive upsurge of anti-Semitism in the US. It has become a big problem on college campuses. Statistics that track these incidents bear this out.
Because of the Jewish claim that they are "God's chosen people".
While atheists are likely to dismiss this claim as religious fancy or delusion of grandeur, it actually means something to other people who also believe in God.
Religions typically claim supremacy; ie. each religion claims to be superior to others. This is not special. But there are only few religions that also claim ethnic supremacy.
Islam and Christianity accept and even welcome new members of all nationalities and all races, by an act of conversion, without the requirement of being born and raised into said religion. But some religions aren't like that. And those that aren't seem to be more likely to become the target of persecution of those who are more inclusive.
They read at least the Bible, as the Old Testament is also part of Jewish scripture.
Just read it, no further explanation necessary.
Yes, chosen to carry out the 613 commandments, only 320 of which are applicable without the temple. Chosen to perform such commandments such as placing a mezuzah on one's door.
Quoting baker
Not something you'd hear in a synagogue if you ever ventured into one.
Quoting baker
They are universalistic religions who will push their beliefs and have caused considerable harm in doing so. Jews do not convert by the sword. Jews are not here to tell everyone else that they should be a Jew. But one can convert to Judaism if they like and are prepared to take on the challenges.
Chosen as in "preferred over all others".
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
It goes without saying.
Not everyone can convert to Judaism, or at least not to just any school of Judaism.
They refuse to integrate into the society they live in, they set themselves apart.
No, they believe they have a special relationship with God, the gentiles will suffer when they die, and God will eventually put the Jews in charge of the world.
Quoting baker
I do my best, but certain prejudices (cough, cough) can make that challenging.
Like what?
Like the belief that jews refuse to integrate into the society they live in, they set themselves apart.
Many of the jews of Germany in the 1930s considered themselves completely assimilated into German society. Boy did they get that wrong.
Do you have any concerns about the future of Judaism? Do you think that integration will cause you to become the end of the lineage? Would it bother you if you did?
Yes there is a special relationship, but God watches over the entire world. Jews don't know the relations he has with other groups because Jews are just with other Jews. Jews only record their own experiences/revelations, meanwhile the Muslims believe that God spoke to Muhammad giving the Arabs their own special insights. This isn't unique to Judaism. The Hindus have a rich history of the Gods interacting with their people.
They do not believe the gentiles get worse afterlife. Gentiles only have the laws of noah to follow, meanwhile jews are saddled with 600 or so laws. the talmud says "the righteous of all nations have a place in the world to come." it patently untrue that the gentiles get a worse afterlife for not being jews.
everyone has their own endtime prophecies. christians believe jesus will return. i'm not dealing with endtime prophecies today but if someone would like to enlighten us they're welcome to.
Thing is, this othering can go both ways.
Others expect me to stop othering them, but they refuse to stop othering me. What does it matter if I stop othering others if they still other me?
It's in the Talmud. The rabbis would debate exactly how long a Gentile needs to be tortured to make up for being a Gentile. In the World to Come, God brings the Gentiles low and raises the Jews up so the Gentiles finally see how horribly wrong they were. Both of these ideas were adopted by the Jews from external sources, but they shaped them into mechanisms for revealing divine justice.
The reason for this goes back to the Covenant. The Covenant was like a contract: they follow the Mosaic Law, and God protects them. Since a fair portion of the Law was about hygiene, it was obvious that it was protective, but then through a series of catastrophes, it became blatantly obvious that God wasn't protecting them. The only way to continue on with their faith was to devise alternate scenarios for the manifestation of God's justice.
I doubt Jews need this kind of mechanism right now. They're free to evolve. But the danger is they'll evolve right out of Judaism into something else.
You left out the nasty bits where those organizations insisted upon conversion and wiped-out heretical forms deemed inadmissible to their faith.
Quoting baker
You left out the bits where they spent centuries in ghettos without the rights of other citizens unless they converted. Living on the margins, they developed markets not permitted by the others. That co-dependency developed in many different ways.
Hannah Arendt made a useful distinction between religious/racial hatred from "anti-semetism" because the latter grew as an international movement that equated the idea with world domination through secular institutions. I know some churches we could visit together if you wish for a loving spoonful of the stuff.
If Hitler says you are a Jew or a queer or an imbecile or a Jehovah's Witness, it doesn't matter what you think or who you other; off to the extermination camp you go. In the game of identity power is everything. But what is your point? There is nothing personal here. No one expects anything of you, except to die when killed.
That it is pointless to criticize othering as long as one engages in it oneself, and even profits from it.
My comments were not meant to be an argument against that thought.
I question your interest in pinning that tail on one particular donkey when there are herds of asses to choose from.
You say Jews just believe this and "it goes without saying." If anyone is looking for theological anti-Semitism look no further.
I am Jewish btw. I have never heard this idea -- that Jews are superior to gentiles -- uttered by anyone. It doesn't make sense and I don't really care to entertain it. If Jews are so superior why are they constantly getting humbled by other nations in the bible?
I've heard it many times. It's not polite to say it, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews_as_the_chosen_people
Presumably other nations are testing them, testing their claim.
The history of antisemitism makes the Jews liable to a higher standard, though.
What is that higher standard?
As I previously observed, your view of history, in this regard, is very selective.
Granted, perhaps that higher standard seems to be justified because of the centuries of persecution. Victims tend to be assumed innocent and morally superior.
What other religio-ethnic group has been targeted worldwide and for so long as the Jews? They are unique in this regard.
This is beginning to remind me of some very upsetting parts of my upbringing.
Impregnate yourself.
Nobody wants to entertain parts of their heritage that aren't attractive.
Quoting frank
How quaint. I had never heard this before either, and certainly not from jews. So I googled it and what I learned is that it is a long-standing prejudice, probably stemming from a misinterpretation of the phrase chosen people, or else a convenient application of that term to justify a sense that jews wield too much power in the world.
Quoting baker
Im betting you heard it from non-jews.
You don't think I could have come across the idea from historians?
Native Americans also don't integrate much into American society. They don't get the abuse Jews do.
Because they accepted their deals of surrender up to the point they were given places to be in a separate place. Your comparison sucks.
Quoting Paine
Up until the mid 20th century, Jews in the U.S. refused to integrate into social institutions such as country clubs, summer camps and Ivy league schools, and instead founded their own clubs, camps and even schools (Brandeis). Oh wait, that was because they were barred entry into those places.
There it is.
Either that or kick everyone out and bomb the hell out of it so it's radioactive for generations so nobody can fight over it.
"The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" is a good example of this psychological phenomenon.
I think it is potentially useful to recognise what oneself and everyone else is doing with our lives and our deaths. It might be possible to do it less vehemently at least, and it might be possible to modify societies so that the fault lines of identity become more blurred. For instance, the separation of powers between religion and politics, and between politics and economic status, the encouragement of intermarriage, common education and other shared facilities, and so on. In a slogan, "Down with purity!"
Such measures do not make us better people, but if our loyalties are divided, because auntie is a Palestinian and uncle is a Jew, we are less likely to resort to violence. The conflict is not ended, but becomes intra-personal rather than interpersonal. This is the essence of conflict theory in sociology.
It was both. They weren't welcome in the court of the Czar, but they also abhorred the possibility of adulteration of their communities with foreign ways. So wherever they went, they had their own governments. They were more educated than the locals. They took roles as middle men.
Why exactly you find any of this to be insulting, I don't know.
Who said I found it insulting? This is what concerns me:
From Wikipedia:
1)aThe belief that Judaism is a racist religion which teaches its adherents to hate non-Jews by espousing the belief that they are not even human. This vicious anti-Semitic canard, frequently repeated by other Soviet writers and officials, is based upon the malicious notion that the "Chosen People" of the Torah and Talmud preaches "superiority over other peoples", as well as exclusivity. This was, of course, the principal theme of the notorious Tsarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
2) A trope found in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but dating to before that document, is that Jews are more loyal to world Jewry than to their own country. Since the establishment of the state of Israel, this trope has taken the form of accusations that Jewish citizens of other countries are more loyal to Israel than to their country of residence.
That does sound concerning. But you said you'd never even heard of the idea that Jews think they're superior to Gentiles. That's actually why they've traditionally refused to assimilate. It's repeated explicitly in the Torah. As I mentioned earlier, Isaac Asimov said the Jews invented religious intolerance and went on to become the world's greatest victims of it. I think he was right. Christian condemnation of Judaism is a reflection of Judaism's own fierce devotion to their own identities.
The fact that you haven't heard of it, and that it seems wrong to you, indicates that you are probably the end of the line for Jewishness in your family. Your children probably won't be Jews. Your heritage lived as long as it did because of a sense of having a superior position among humanity in terms of connection to God and morality.
By the way, reading the history of Jews in Russia is an excellent way to see how anti-Semitism would appear at the grass roots level when Jews acted as tax collectors for the boyars.
I cant speak to what the average jew in the biblical or medieval period said about gentiles, but I can speak from my own experience growing up in a Conservative jewish home, and living in Israel for a year with my family. I can tell you that no jew Ive encountered, of any age, ever expressed such sentiments to me. Do religious jews believe their faith offers them a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics which is preferable to that of other religions? I would hope so. Otherwise, why bother to remain within the faith? But you seem to have a stronger notion of superior in mind that you may have to spell out for me.
I can easily imagine that. But remember: the topic is the origin of anti-Semitism. You're going to have to dig into history to dredge that up. To state the obvious, anti-Semitism starts with the fact that Jews remained separate. Some Jews ditched their Jewishness and became Christian, but if you're Jewish, it means your ancestors embraced being a stranger in a strange land, so to speak. Pretty much the same thing happened to them everywhere they went, but each case was shaped by local stresses. For instance, the Germans wanted to become a nation-state like England and France, but their fragmentation was an obstacle. The worked to try to assimilate everybody into a single identity, but with limited success. One group they had absolutely no success with was Jews. Jews were an obstacle to their goals. In each case where Jews were persecuted, you have to sort through the events to discover why their separateness ended up making them victims this time around.
Quoting Joshs
The majority of Jews for the last 2000 years would say they adhered to their faith because the Torah explicitly condemns straying from the faith. For these Jews, other religions are not alternate paths to God. They're all paths to the Devil. The gods of other religions are false gods, and it's evil to worship them. There's nothing anti-Semitic about commenting on this. It's traditional Judaism. Look into it.
Quoting Joshs
No, it's just that Jews didn't traditionally separate themselves from their faith. Jewish was pervasively who they were, not just a religion they had.
You're fond of taking the high ground and lecturing people about what they have to do to know the stuff that you know, but your posts show very little evidence of having a clue about anything, to be frank.
Was there something specific you disagreed with?
Quoting frank
Do you know anything about the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist denominations of Judaism? Within these theologies, there are no revealed truths, no miracles, only endless exegesis and interpretation. My fathers touchstone for his understanding of the application of jewish law was the Rationalism of Maimonides. Given that 90% of American jews adhere to one of these denominations rather than Orthodox Judaism ( what you call traditional judaism), your emphasis on strict adherence to law is foreign to the practice of the vast majority of American jews.
I know. Likewise, progressive American Christianity is fairly interfaith.
Would you agree that the varieties of contemporary anti-semitism expressed by the likes of Henry Ford, Heidegger, Hamas, Charles Lindburgh, Kanye West and Louis Farrakhan have less to do with the judaism of the middle ages than with their interpretation of the motives and practices of the modern world Jewish community?
Sure. I was trying to explain earlier that anti-Semitism has to be understood with reference to the problems and stressors of the times in which individual cases of it appear.
I guess Jesus's teachings could be compared and contrasted with both groups. When I read the gospels I see Jesus primarily critiquing Pharisaic materialism. A popular Pharisaic idea was basically to try to balance one's material life with one's religious obligations. One foot in the material, one foot in the divine. The Pharisees have a civilization to run. The differences are many. The Pharisees favor long-term planning, Jesus says do not worry about tomorrow. Pharisees laud grey hair as a sign of wisdom; Jesus elevates the role of the child. Jesus and the Sadducees certainly disagree on a variety of issues, but imho its his disagreements with the Pharisees that are the most interesting and pertinent. It is in his disagreements with the Pharisees that his radicalness is revealed.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I get that. I just find the writers of the NT in their descriptions will take certain liberties. For instance the way they describe the Pharisees in Luke 16 in the parable of the shrewd manager. "The Pharisees, who love money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus." There's the teachings of Jesus and then there's the accounts of the disciples/writers.
Thank you for the very informative post BTW.
Thats because you are taking the Gospels as gospel. Not a good move if you are approaching as critical historian. Depending on your interpretation, Jesus seems to have been quite conversant and possibly somewhat educated in a Hillel Pharisee milieu for much of his halachic interpretation of Torah law. When condemning Pharisees, it would be then as one from the inside and possibly contra the Shammaite Pharisees. My more speculative interpretation would be that he was a trained Hillelite Pharisee who later became an apocalyptic Jew as influenced by Essenic John the Baptist. I dont buy the merely a peasant portrayal. He may have been of am ha-aretz tekton background, but clearly somewhere became relatively educated in Pharisee interpretations of Jewish law. His brother James headed this hybrid Pharisee/Essene sect, but the groups fundamental nature changed amongst the groups diaspora adherents with the forceful evangelizing of Paul and his interpretations of Jesus as the Christ. Other strains like the Johannite strain that conceived of Jesus as the pre-existing Logos combined Greek/Platonic elements as well. By this time, Jesus the itinerant Pharisee/Essenic Jew became something much different in these diaspora communities and those became the gentile/Pauline churches that became Christianity. The original Jamesian sect died out several hundred years later in the Levant.
I was brought up by anti-Jewish parents. My Dad taught me unpleasant rhymes about greedy Jews; my Mum said the people who'd moved in down the street were 'Very nice people. Jews, you know.'
I do feel some personal grounding is needed in debating 'antisemitism'. A lot of the debate here has been very theoretical. As it happened, for me, loads of my schoolmates, including the arty ones I got on with, were Jewish and I emerged into adulthood without prejudice, indeed a bit pro-Jewish, and anti-racist in general, as far as I can tell. But those rhymes and comments of my parents live forever in me. I can't wipe my memory. There is something atavistic about prejudice, to find emotional and intellectual explanations for life's difficulties in the Other, and Jews are Other everywhere they have gone - yet have resolutely survived.
Now Zionists among Jewry have established a state where every non-Jew is Other. To me this is both a remarkable triumph over adversity, and once a two-state solution became impossible, a never-ending tragedy. Leaders squirm over the difficulties this gives rise to: in my native UK the opposition party leader can't bring himself to condemn what I think of as vile Israeli actions (in response to vile Hamas actions); it seems like only the Irish government in the EU dissents from an EU pro-Israeli stance; but the ordinary human sympathies of Brits, Irish and Europeans are, as far as I can see, more with the helpless Palestinians. Awfully, under these sympathies the atavism of anti-Jewishness bubbles up. I just try to stay reasonable. What more can be done?
Do you think that there is an anti-Jewish bias in Europe stemming from pre-Holocaust ideas of Jewry that is not present in newer Western nation like the US? There are certainly hate groups everywhere but I am wondering if geography influences these trends.
Certainly as "official" policy, Germany has to show "atonement" of some sort and so has bent over backwards to show their sordid history in the 30s and 40s. Other countries had various attitudes and memorials and outreaches about the atrocities. But this is official government gestures, I wonder if there are just ancient hatreds as you describe that get passed down and perpetuated when discussing Jews as a group (not necessarily individuals...and your example was a really good one can be a fan individually and not as a group). It's more of a "genteel" anti-semetism that I am speaking.
Europeans brought their prejudices with them when they emigrated to America. Not just anti-semitism ( there were many prominent anti-semites, such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindburgh) but anti-catholicism, and conflict among catholic ethnicities. My grandmother remembered seeing signs posting No jews, catholic or dogs.
Major cities like New York, Chicago and Boston were divided up into fiefdoms bounded by major streets and centered around local parishes. You ventured beyond your groups neighborhood at the risk of a beating. This faded by the 1960s ( with the exception of prejudice against people of color) with the flight to suburbia and the integration of public and private institutions.
I think the key tends mitigating against separatism
are urbanization, secularization, inter-marriage
and population diversification.
True true. Good points. It all sucks, huh?
I was thinking more this:
Quoting Mount Vernon
and also:
Quoting archives
But that is more official government, not daily life and general attitudes per se. But the positions have been nuanced and changing over the years I am sure.
With that disclosure, my current understanding is that the vast majority of modern anti-semitism traces its origins back to the New Testament itself, which has many denunciations of Judaism, mostly allegorical, but some quite explicit. The reason I mention Joseph Atwill above is that his research has thoroughly convinced me that the New Testament was written by a small network of scholars of Judaism who were loyal to the Flavian family of Roman emperors. This hypothesis is also reinforced by the vastly different ideologies embodied by the contemporary Judaic messianic literature found in the Dead Sea scrolls (which escaped Roman censorship) that were militaristically anti-authoritarian - which makes sense because Judea was actively subjugated by the Roman empire at the time - as opposed to the New Testament, which is incredibly deferential to authority and pacifistic.
The New Testament was created to exploit existing Judaic religious beliefs, turning them into tools to encourage compliance with Roman subjugation and encourage animosity against Judaic sects (especially messianic movements) that were not as pro-Roman as early Christianity.
Therefore the Christian passages describing Judaism as a tree that no longer bears fruit and needs to be uprooted, or as a shepherd who has started leading his flock over a cliff, or the passages blaming Jews for the death of Christ, and exonerating the Romans who - explicitly - were the actual killers in those very passages.
Christianity was invented to quell the anti-imperialism of pre-Rabbinic Judaism. And you can't really supplant an existing belief system without condemning it, and that is exactly what the New Testament did, and still does. This is the reason that virtually all anti-semitic arguments (all that I've seen, anyway) either directly originate from the New Testament, or mirror its passages in some way.
I'm inclined to think, as a subsequent poster says, that people carry their prejudices with them when they migrate. One reason I responded with a personal story here is that there does tend to be a lot of sometimes quite arcane debate about how other people's prejudices arose over the centuries, but not a lot of confrontation of one's own prejudices.
In Europe the picture is patchy. Germany may seem nowadays upfront in its acknowledgement of Holocaust responsibility, but it took nearly 20 years before such acknowledgement began in a serious way. Some figures of the central European right, e.g. in Poland, tend to mitigate their own countries' role in antisemitic murders 1933-45.
Quoting TiredThinker
There was a moderate increase in the Jewish population of 'Palestine' in the late 19th century, some call it 'the first Aliyah'. Then many thousands came from the Russian Empire in the 1900's; and after the First World War many more arrived. The British did not 'give' Israel to Jewish settlers. Rather, the British helped create the tragedy of Palestine/Israel in 1914-20: they first promised support for a single Arab state; they reneged on that with the Sykes-Picot deal of 1916 which carved up Arabia among the Imperial powers, should the allies defeat the Ottomans; they then in 1917 supported the Balfour declaration of a Jewish 'homeland', on condition that the rights of Palestinian Arabs were respected. Mutual contradictions abound in these stances. Once the Ottomans were defeated, the League of nations, formed after the war, granted the 'mandate' over Palestine to Britain, lasting until 1948 (and also the 'mandate' over Transjordan, which became independent in 1946).
It's something of a forgotten war, in 1916-18: British, French and Italians, in alliance with local Arab forces, fought for Arabia against the Ottomans. 50,000 Brits (including Empire forces) died and 500,000 were injured. Those who remember this war already know the name of Gaza: it was the site of two Ottoman victories in 1917. One of my great uncles came home from there permanently mad; another later became a British Palestine policeman, which family lore says he found an impossible job because Britain tried to face in several directions at once.
Dumb religions. In this case Christianity because a Jew betrayed Jesus. So Christians thought all Jews were evil sons of bitches and were excluded from everything and pushed into ghettos, except the one thing Christians weren't allowed to: lend money!
So Jews got in the lending game and since they were the only ones they cornered the market and did rather well. The rulers of the country saw they were getting rich and started to tax them. So the Jews raised their rates, and the rulers raised their taxes. That went on until the borrowers started to default and the "evil greedy Jew" charicature was born because understandably they'd rather squeeze a borrower than lose their heads for not paying taxes. During these centuries every country thought they had a Jew problem so they were kicked around all the time.
The Balfour declaration was the UK's solution to their Jew problem. Hitler tried to kill them all. Eastern Europe had their pogroms in more or less the same time period.
That's in a nutshell the historic perspective. Of course, the insistence of Israel as the nation state for Jews and how Israel treats Palestinians is definitely giving rise to a new wave of anti-semitism.
I think it's plausible Jesus was educated in the Jewish educational system. Teachings such as "love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you" cannot be found in Hillel or Shammai. His views on the Sabbath, I believe, place him well outside of Jewish tradition. But for sure some of his views do have echoes in the Talmud. I also see the influence of the Essenes in Jesus and of course John the Baptist; I believe a common view among the two groups is to never swear a vow to heaven. My own personal Jesus is more along the lines of Mark/Matthew. I also find Jesus terrifying. He assumes a greater degree of certainty and authority than the Pharisees.
:lol: This is very much an anachronism. Like the rest of the ancient world a large percentage of Judean/Galilean Jews were illiterate. And I am willing to say Jesus was also illiterate and that almost every portrayal of him is basically propaganda, but I do think there is a historical person in the trappings that the New Testament writers wanted to portray him as. That being said, I think that is onto something. I have heard of the Flavian theory, and though I don't necessarily buy it completely, I think there is definitely moves (post-Pauline/Gentile church formation) to portray Jesus in a certain newly-created theological light. That being said, in my own hermeneutics, I like to use the "embarrassment criteria", that is to say, "What looks embarrassing to a Pauline community". These kind of glaring discrepancies with Pauline theology that could not be written off so early, and were still included, reveal perhaps the "real" historical character rather than the caricature of him. That is to say, there are a decent amount of quotes attributed to Jesus on Jewish Law that an uneducated am ha-aretz (person of the land/peasant/uneducated Jew) would likely not understand. There was no universal "Yeshiva" system or the kind of educational emphasis on minutia of Mosaic law, as in the post-Temple Rabbinic Judaism. Rather, one would most likely have deep familiarity with Pharisee-style commentary. There are several books on this, as well as tons of scholarly articles regarding how his interpretation of Law can be construed as a kind of Pharisee.
I do think that it was more like a "Hillel with urgency" approach to law, combining the more lenient views of Halacha of the School of Hillel (he was still around when Jesus was born, but his sect became the major force in Pharisee thought), with Essenic ideas of the End Times, which clearly he seemed to move towards with his encounter with John the Baptist's group. Even his "condemning of the Pharisees" can be found in the Talmud (which has strands of earlier Pharisee thought), such as this:
Quoting Talmud
This seems to be an internal debate, not external.
I read about him. Fascinating guy.
I do think the answer lies in a sociological analysis. Jews are unusual in that they half-way assimilate into the greater culture. They don't remain so insular that they avoid all economic or social interaction with their neighbors, but they do remain seperate in many ways dictated by their religious beliefs. An Orthodox Jew (which really describes all Jews not too long ago) would not eat with non-Jews (because of the rules of keeping Kosher), they would not marry non-Jews, they would only send their children to Jewish schools, and they would live in communities surrounding the local synaguage because they had to be within walking distance (due to rules of keeping the sabbath). None of these decisions were based upon prejudice toward the greater community, but it was due to adhering to their rules.
Add in also the Jews had their own culture that involved distinct dress, distinct language, distinct food, songs, and much else.
Despite these differences, they did involve themselves in commerce, were educated, and could be vocal. And so that made some to think them parasitic or distrusted and that made them subject to scape goating.
The flip side of this is that it made them survive much longer than most, if not all, other sub-groups. It also resulted in a certain amount of disproportionate economic and educational success.
What you see in Jewish culture often reminds me of what you see in the US with regard to recent immigrant cultures, especially Indian and Asian ones. They tend to be insular as well, marry only within, heavily value education, but they still are heavily involved in commerce and that results in economic success. In fact, I had a Asian client who I told that I was Jewish and he said "Oh, you do things like us."
He'd still be a Jew though, just with really strange beliefs.
Well the OP inquires about the "origin" of antisemitism, which predates Modern community behavior by millenia. Though kudos to you for not a bad review of some reasons for it's perpetuation.
In my opinion, the origin lies closer to the Jewish rules prohibiting usury (as was common in antiquity)... BUT only to others Jews, ie allowing (encouraging?) usury upon Gentiles.
Usury was not permitted to Christians. Jews were outside that legal system.
Exactly, thus the desperate went outside the system (just like now).
It was the Christians desperate for alternatives along with excluding a group that could help them as much as anything.
But by the 1500s the Italians provided Europe with banking to finance wars and what not.
I think the stereotype of the money-minded Jew comes from the fact that they were usually wealthier (and more educated) than the local peasants. Envy, basically.
Let's say then "educated in the Jewish tradition" - such a statement seems self-evident to me as Jesus is able to cite Scripture 78 times and draws from a wide variety of the books. Luke 4 describes Jesus reading from a scroll. I don't particularly doubt Jesus's literacy. Amos, a shepherd, was literate and wrote in the 8th century BC. I believe there's a tradition of literacy in Jewish culture. I would also question whether Jesus was a peasant and if he was not that would have raised his prospects of being literate. In any case, I don't find it that far fetched that he was literate.
EDIT: After further research I am less certain in my position. Jesus may have been illiterate. Chris Keith's "Jesus's literacy" concludes that Jesus was unlikely to have been literate. In the gospels, however, Jesus is not omniscient. Scholarship seems divided on this.
Quoting schopenhauer1
:up:
Quoting schopenhauer1
It's internal in the sense that Jesus is a Jew criticizing other Jews. I do believe Jesus & followers were originally a break-away sect of Judaism. Yet IMHO his teachings as presented in the gospels are a different animal than what one would find with Hillel or Shammai, although I'm not well read on either of these two.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Jesus is stricter on some things (e.g. monitoring one's thoughts and eye contact) and looser on others (shabbat restrictions, hand washing.)
The element of being literate and educated certainly played a part but it should not be ignored that great efforts were made to convert them to Christianity or confine their civic rights and participation.
@Jamal
True. Around the turn of the 20th Century, the Germans tried mandatory education for Jewish children to force assimilation. It didn't work. The USA would later use the same tactic on the Lakota. It destroyed their culture.
Not everyone engages in othering, though, it doesn't come naturally to all people. This is a problem, for them at least.
But to what end?
War and strife are massive mid-term incentives for economic growth, as crude as this sounds.
What point is it to save the body at the cost of destroying the spirit?
Them? or Us? That is, are they that engage in othering a problem for us who do not, or is it the other way round? No, actually, don't even try and answer. I'll just repeat: everyone engages in othering.
But what was the purpose for this state-issued and state-protected religious freedom?
Did Washington believe that all religions are equal, equally true, equally valuable in some profound spiritual way?
Or was the reason for this state-issued and state-protected religious freedom more prosaic, namely, to get the various religions and factions to stop fighting with eachother for supremacy? Given that in those fights, there can be a lot of collateral damage, general civic unrest, etc..
It would be strange if religions wouldn't fight.
When one religion claims to have superior knowledge of "how things really are", this is an automatic declaration of war to all other religions.
Religions are in constant competition with one another. They differ only in how they engage in that fight. Things just get more bloody the more guns one side has.
Just because the members of two religions aren't currently shooting at eachother doesn't mean they are not at war. What they have is "negative peace", a tense state without open armed combat, but with a war-like mentality of hatred and contempt for the other side.
If only.
How is that different from the situation for poor people who have been barred from even more places?
In other words, the Jews haven't been the only ones facing that kind of predicament. So it's misleading to single them out, as if everyone else was having a great time.
You'll have to explain to me how Judaism popularized resentment as its moral foundation. If you ask the Jews I suspect they'll tell you morality consists of following God's commandments, none of which involve resenting.
Ain't that the truth.
I think Nietzsches highly complex formulation of ressentiment, and its relation to historic judaism, is likely to be misconstrued on this forum as simply a blaming of the jews. I appreciate that Nietzsches larger concern in the Genealogy of Morals was not to single out some group for attack but to apply his notion of Will to power, as a
psychic battle among competing drives, not just to the history of morality but to the history of scientific truth.
I would suggest, though, that there are other ways of understanding the emergence of the morality of Good and Evil besides that of a weakness or sickness. This implies some sort of pathology or regression occurred in human history with respect to a prior period of a healthy Will to Power. Why not treat the rise of Judeo -Christian morality without the value judgement implied by weakness of will? It can be seen instead as a phase of a historical development or evolution, which made Nietzsches own philosophy possible.
Quoting baker
Let me get this straight. You dont want to single the jews out as the only recipients of discrimination. But you do want to single the jews out in the follow way:
When one religion claims to have superior knowledge of "how things really are", this is an automatic declaration of war to all other religions.
What we know is that there was no religious intolerance throughout most of the ancient world. That changed when monotheism and the concept of false gods became prevalent. It's probably overly simplistic to say the Jews were responsible for that. It's probably more that the western world in general went through a transformation that the Jews had gone through much earlier.
Either way, that transformation was accompanied by a new emphasis on truth and an association of falseness with evil.
You can measure anything as a standard for what makes an enemy- ideology, religion, power. For much of history it was power. In the West, religion and ideology gradually replaced power alone, but certainly, power was never dead as a reason.
Exactly. Where there are multiple cultures in competition, there are two primary survival tactics: military prowess and intolerance of foreign ways. It's shouldn't surprise us that the world is now full of both. It could be seen as a kind of natural selection.
You might be interested in this just posted:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14754/western-civilization/p1
I would just say it's important to take Nietzsche's history with a grain of salt, not just because of his own attitude regarding the mythical nature of truth, but because there was much information about the ancient world that just wasn't known at the time.
He didn't know anything about the Bronze age because little was known about it at the time. I remember overlooking a fair amount of false conclusions from him, though I'd have to look back at it to remember details. My take was that his outlook should be taken as myth making. There is truth in there, but it's not necessarily based on facts on the ground. I'd go with MI Finley over Nietzsche as far as history goes.
Yea, but that was by someone who's not all that bright himself. :razz:
You can find literature for any and every position on Jesus. As I said, I'm willing to accept that all of it is myth. But if Jesus not only referenced biblical literature (not vague stories or oral tales), and if he understood also various hermeneutics used by the Pharisees which seems evident, I would say that it is not only possible, but probable that he was heavily influenced, or was even a student at some point in that group. If that is the case, t makes sense the mythological component needs to divorce him from this embarrassing fact so as to "other" Jesus from a particular Jewish group and his Jewish background in general. If he looks like a "one of a kind" he can then be a universal figure, a Christ, a Logos, a Son of God, and not particularly nationalistic or internal to "his people". He is sui generis and thus not quite "Jewish" but only "within the Jews". But it takes knowing a bit about the goings on of Greco-Roman Judean/Galilean geography, politics, religion, history, and society. You also have to figure in players like Herod Antipas, the tetrarchy, the Decapolis Romanized cities in the Transjordan, Judean direct rule under prefects (and then procurators), versus being ruled by puppet kings, and various views on the powers that controlled the region. This helps understand the religious groups positions towards that foreign power. Essenes were highly metaphysical (End of Times, Good/Evil, Messiah is immanent, angels will help the cause, repent now, return to a purer understanding of Torah). Pharisees were "wait and see", but not all. The Shammaites seemed more aligned with the Zealots and eventually there were internal rivalries (perhaps violent ones) between the Hillelites and Shammaites in Jerusalem and on the Sanhedrin. The Sadducees did not seem to care about moralism, or widening the purity laws democratically, as why would they? They also seemed more influenced from an Epicurean standpoint of the "here and now" is what matters, not a World to Come. Anyways.. a lot going on at that time.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
So, no group in its early phase is "monolithic". Name a major political party now that doesn't have "factions" and disagreements. That is to say, we really don't know if the Hillelites held "official" positions and that there could not be ones that could vascilate between various points of view, but generally align with the core ideas of their main "party" or "school of thought". So I don't think that really provides solid evidence against this. Rather, Jesus' call for intention over ritual seems more in line with Hillelite ideals.
Also, and you really overlooked my point here, the idea of "condemning various types of Pharisees" is clearly seen within the Pharisee tradition itself, so if anything, it would more solidly put Jesus in that tradition of self-examination.
Quoting Vaskane
Nietzsche says:
the Jews were a priestly nation of ressentiment par excellence. Ressentiment is structured around revenge and hatred , a revaluation of values.
The ascetic ideal emerges from ressentiment, and is characterized as a coping mechanism to deal with a weak, degenerative, impoverished and sick physiology:
I'm a big fan of Nietzsche. I feel a connection to his writing that goes deep, like into the realm of dreams. He was the forerunner of people like Freud and Jung. Like you, I'm fascinated by the way consciousness evolves, but I think we're limited to metaphors in describing that. Historical accuracy isn't required or called for by Nietzsche's project. That was my point, I guess.
This quickly becomes a precarious topic because on the one hand, Judaism is possibly the most influential orientation of consciousness in human history. On the other hand there are huge, unhealable wounds that humanity bears that are touched upon by the OP.
If you don't let go of the past, your heart won't have any room for the present
Waking from a dream.
Rising to the surface as a sun, exhaling streams of light
Making the world
Is a loveless job
:cool:
Quoting Vaskane
What Im centrally interested in is how you would
characterize ressentiment, particularly its manifestation as the ascetic ideal, from a critical philosophical stance. Put differently, what, according to Nietzsche, is the crucial philosophical self-understanding lacking in those (including the jews) who believe that a nirvana of pure will to nothingness is a solution to the pain and suffering of living, or that science progresses toward absolute objective truth, or that there are moral universals? How are these all examples of the ascetic ideal (which the jews bought into lock, stock and barrel), and what kind of ethics should replace them?
From what I understand, Nietzsche's opinion as Jews as "anti-life-affirmation" is actually just the inverse of Schopenhauer's opinion of Judaism as life-affirming. He liked to do that with Schopenhauer. Broadly-speaking, Schopenhauer characterized Judaism, Islam, and Protestant Christianity as "life affirming" because of their emphasis on embracing the here and now, and this life. He characterized Buddhism, Hinduism, and Catholic Christianity as life-denying, as they emphasized an asceticism beyond the confines of this life. Since he thought the only way to deny the "will-to-live" was to embrace asceticism, he praised these ideas and maligned the former. I do want to emphasize that Schop's anti-Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism is very much a caricatured archetype so that he can have a foil for his life-denying views. It is also important to note that he wasn't fond of Catholic, or even Eastern religious trappings of asceticism either. He just thought they were more on to something with ascetic ideals. He wanted asceticism pure and simple, no mythology.
Anyways, Nietzsche actually seemed to reverse this notion. Instead, Judaism, mainly in its step-child Christianity, became a philosophy of the "weak" because it emphasized humility, charity. It was a sort of philosophy of the slave, and not of the aristocrat which he championed. It is bizarre 19th century playing with idealized and caricatured religious archetypes to try to promote a philosophical viewpoint.
Either way, it seems like Judaism can't win with either. It's either too life affirming or life denying, depending on how you want to spin them. And this goes into a broader idea of anti-Judaism and antisemitism. That is to say, people turn it into whatever the boogeyman is that they want to malign. You associate it with that group and proceed to make them your proverbial bad guys. You want lefty-communist bad guys-type antisemitism, you blame Jews. You want world bank owning super-capitalists, you blame the Jews. You want X bad thing. It is the immutable nature of its mutability of how you can use the Jews as a foil, that makes it pervasive.
I will say, the kind of anti-Judaism of Schopenhauer, was probably a bit too early for the modern style antisemitism. As far as I know, he didn't hate Jews more than any other ethnic group. He had something mean to say about everyone, including fellow Germans. Nietzsche's era was getting closer to actual antisemitism in the modern sense, but he seemed to disavow such views.
In Nietzsches early years, it seems as if the elements were in place for a Heidegger-style anti-semitism. Like Heidegger, the young Nietzsche was in the throes of German nationalism, and idolized the early Greeks. This combination in Heidegger led him to connect the German Volk with the proper path of thinking the Greeks laid out, turning the jews into outsiders who corrupted this early thinking and spread the corruption to Christianity. A return to the proper path meant embracing the way of the German Volk against that of the rootless outsiders. But Nietzsche turned against both the Greeks and German nationalism. If the jews were corrupters, they just happened to be among the first and most effective. Since the inclination to turn the will against itself was present in all of humanity, there was no need to fetishize the jews, and no reason to assume they were any less capable than any other group of overcoming nihilistic tendencies.
:up:
I think this is an interesting quote:
Quoting Article
I can't seem to get the rest without paying, but I can see where it's going on.
Another quote is also revealing but in a different way regarding what I mentioned earlier, of slave philosophy versus aristocratic will-to-power:
And here:
This to me, indicates, he is against the values (of embracing the principles of humility/charity/being quiet and prayerful, etc.) not the people. And really, it is anti-Christian principle (akin to criticizing Schopenhauer's notion of asceticism in Catholicism), rather than actually being "anti-Jewish". It's kind of a schizophrenic hodge-podge, but consistently he does not like Wagner-style antisemitism.
Quoting Nietzsche article Hadassah
That does not account for Hegel who was bold enough to claim what that history was destined to bring about.
It also excludes those philosophers who presented "natural' right as outcomes of our development as human beings, as seen in the differences between Hume, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, etcetera.
Against that backdrop, the use of the word Genealogy by Nietzsche seems less explanatory than others.
Quoting Paine
Ah, but Nietzsches view of history is untimely, neither history as a chain of empirical events viewed from an external perspective nor history as dialectical progression, but a history whose basis and sense is rethought in every epoche. This is the sense of the genealogical for Nietzsche.
I don't think he's trying to let each "epoche" speak for itself. He's myth making to explain why we have directly opposing conceptions of goodness. His answer is that it's our heritage, built into our language. One could easily swap that answer with something about the structure of the human psyche.
Quoting frank
Our heritage is defined by our practices, and a genealogy of history tracks changes in our practices, and how these changes alter the sense of meaning of our linguistic concepts. In its most general sense the genealogical is the method of analysis of the Will to Power, which is not a psychological concept.
What I have in mind by the untimely is captured by Deleuze here:
Yet everyone ought to agree that he is/was Jewish.
Quoting schopenhauer1
All literature on Jesus is myth? Then on what basis do we form an idea of him? Some things must be taken as truth or truthful. imo It is not fair to regard everything in the gospels as myth; this is not just my position its also Bart Ehrman's.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting schopenhauer1
There are trends in the Hillelite tradition, otherwise we wouldn't be able to talk generally about it - it would just be a collection of disparate individuals with their own disparate opinions. I agree that Judaism is generally life-affirming. Jesus is unquestionably life-denying if we regard his teachings in the gospels as accurate representations of his thought.
Regarding the question of whether Jesus is a Pharisee... I don't wish to get too bogged down in semantics. Maybe he had a Pharisaic upbringing. It's entirely possible. Could have been a member of Pharisaic civilization. When I form my views on Jesus as a thinker I am based my analysis of him based on what he says in the gospels, particularly Mark and Matthew. Pirkei Avot is a Talmudic tractate on Jewish ethics at that time and I find considerable contrasts (although with some common ideas) with the teachings of Jesus. It's fascinating for me: Pirkei Avot has timeless wisdom with a practical utility; with Jesus his teachings tends to focus more attaining the ideal even if it puts one at great danger. Jesus never really expresses concern for his followers physical well-being or living a long life; OTOH he says it is of no great matter whether one dies at e.g. age 6, 30, 60, or 90 because it is all in God's hands. Jesus differs from Judaism both on the nature of salvation and on the nature of God.
Right, and that is my whole point countering the general way you are interpreting Jesus. You are taking traditional (Christian) Gospel portrayals as gospel. In scholarship of texts in the ancient world, you have to understand the intent of the authors, the surrounding context, the surrounding differences in cultures, the conflicts going on when they were writing, their audience, their influences, and then weigh what was trying to be conveyed to what was probably the case.
The authors of the New Testament have a point of view. They need Jesus to look sui generis. You can see this "othering" of Jesus (both as in othering from his Jewish origins to othering as even a human being) by the way he is portrayed in Mark (it starts at what people actually knew about him.. his preaching years in the Galilee and being baptized and being associated with the more well-known Jewish charismatic leader at the time, John the Baptist). It then moves to Matthew which focuses on more of his mashalim (parables) and revealing more of his understanding approach to halacha (Jewish law interpretation). However, I am willing to admit, as I said, that the this is also pure propaganda by the author who knew a thing or two about Pharisee-law and placed it in the character of Jesus. But that would be dangerous, as it now re-focuses Jesus in a more Jewish context of debating the minutia of Jewish law. But then, this actually endorses the "embarrassment theory", as it would be embarrassing to have Jesus embroiled in common 1st century debates on the minutia of Jewish law. He should be busy being Othered as a Son of God who is the Logos and beyond all that stuff. Well, Matthew cuts it both ways, see, in this mythological account, he is given a Roman-style birth story, where he is the "son of a virgin" a concept foreign to Jewish Second Temple Period theological notions of messiah (or God for that matter), but very common in the pagan Greco-Roman-Near Eastern world. Luke gives us an elaborated version of this with angels and such, further putting Jesus as certainly divine, at the least something of angelic origin, leading a way for a Son of God. By John, we start getting full blown Platonic notions of the "Logos", and clearly influence from Diasporan Platonic notions (pace Philo of Alexandria). This Logos in John is still its own thing because it isn't just the Logos, an organizing principle and telos, but the "Logos made flesh", which combines Platonic AND mystery-cult aspects of a god that "dies for the (sins of?) humanity" (pace Mithra).
So this is to all to say, you have to peal back those mythological layers, to get to the "historical" figure. If you buy into Jesus "condemning the Jews", you have now bought into the Othering of Jesus from his Jewishness so that he can now become safe for non-Jews to have him as their own, so they can worship him without having to worry about that more "national/ethnic" aspect of him. Since this is a thread on antisemitism, you can see how this Othering of Jesus contributes to this, by removing the Jewishness from Jesus, as well as the humanness from being someone embroiled in the Jewish religio-political debates of his time, to being some otherworldly Christ who died for the sins of humanity. He is not Jewish, but universal and then the Othering is complete.
I think now you are getting bogged down in making a fluid understanding of Torah-law interpretation into something Ideal and archetypical. Don't read Rabbinic post-Temple views of the world as 1st century Pharisee notions of the world. The Pharisees may have been more fluid. They were pioneering these interpretations in a time of turmoil in regards to the Roman Empire. Could there have been Pharisees that also had leanings towards Essenic style apocalypticism? Certainly. After all, in Josephus and the Talmud there is a mention of "Menahem the Essene" who mysteriously left the Sanhedrin as Av Bet and Shammai took his place. Could the idea even of a "Son of Man" who would help the righteous Jews defeat their enemies even been more potent during the time of Jesus and other Pharisees even, certainly. We even see this notion of an angelic Enoch (in his angelic form as Metatron), in Enoch 3, a Rabbinic Jewish esoteric text (though not canonical in anyway, it reveals possible attitudes towards that idea).
No, I don't think so. I think you misunderstood something.
It helps if you make an argument for your position.
Did you make an argument for the gospels being life-denying? I didn't see that.
my position is due to the clear and powerful emphasis that jesus places on the afterlife and avoiding hell. he preaches a hard line. do you disagree?
Where is this in the gospels?
His predominant message was about love and forgiveness when he wasn't talking about the end of the world. Yes, the afterlife comes up from time to time, but Jesus didn't inject that into Judaism. It was already there.
Thanks! :smile:
It also implies that a human can and should find ultimate satisfaction in an unending consumption and constant conflict and struggle. Eat, drink, make merry, fight, and never get bored with any of it.
Quoting Joshs
I'm not even singling them out.
Every religion normally believes it is the superior one, this religious supremacism is not special.
What is rarer is the combination of religious supremacism and national/racist supremacism. Some examples of this are Judaism, some schools of Hinduism, and national Catholicism.
As for my comparison with poor people being discriminated against: How come so few people cry foul when it comes to discriminating against poor people?
And that as such, no religion has ever received any "divine revelation", but instead made its own religous doctrine?
But then this doesn't take into account, well, to put it in gross terms, the value of "keeping up appearances."
It seems to me that in many religions, there are 1. the things that you're supposed to say, 2. things that you're actually supposed to believe, 3. things you're actually supposed to do, and all three are different. There is an art to reading between the lines.
It's not clear that, for example, the Christian emphasis on humility is supposed to be taken beyond verbal affirmation. Yes, humility should be talked about, it should be preached, but not actually done.
It seems naive to take religious doctrines simply at face value. It often seems they are intended as sand thrown in the eyes of the enemy, or a means to cull the weak (who actually believe the doctrines and try to behave accordingly).
If a religion teaches, for example, humility, does this have any other significance but to paint a particular self-image? It seems more like an act of mimicry, deliberately pretending to be harmless. Or, on the other hand, an attempt to control the other person by (in)directly instructing them to be humble ("_You_ should be humble and let me do whatever I want").
This sounds like something from a self-help book.
I have trouble believing that what you're saying is really what Nietzsche meant. It sounds just so plebeian. Do aristocrats really think of themselves in such terms? Do they think of themselves as "living life to the fullest" and "breaking out of one's comfort zone"?
Indeed. Self-righteousness becomes its own smug example of non-humility. If you are humble, you simply ARE humble, you don't have to say it. It is not a slogan, "WE are the humble ones". That already negates it. But I think you are speaking more about using it as a tool to make sure people are compliant, as in "Shut up and be humble!". It is commanding to be docile and therefore allows people to be controlled more easily. I think that is true, however, the value of humility is infinitely better to get along. For example, in the San Bushmen society, there is an element of downplaying one's kill in the hunt which got meat for the community. Why? Because that person might get a big head and then get ideas that he is better and there goes the social structure. Egalitarian societies die when certain people (families/coalitions) start thinking they deserve more.
Here is a thread that has to do with Jewish people. As an analysis of them and some phenomena related to them, you have been offering the arguments of someone who flat-out denies or ignores what is central to Jewish people, namely, the existence of God and God's revelation to the Jewish people. And who instead, basically, implies that the Jews merely invented their morality and religious doctrine as a reaction to certain challenges.
Does this seem fair to you?
With his analysis of the Jews, Nietzsche is imposing his own atheism on them, taking for granted that atheism is the only correct way to see things.
If anything, this discussion leads me to conclude that the origin of antisemitism is atheism.
Quoting Vaskane
I don't seek to understand Nietzsche per se. I am skeptical about how relevant his input is to understanding the origin of antisemitism, given that as an atheist, he dismisses the possibility of divine revelation -- all the while proposing to analyze people who believe to have received divine revelation.
No, that's not what I mean. I'm talking about the importance of _t_talking the _t_alk.
There are many things in life that one is supposed to understand on one's own, without anyone explaining them to one. There is a whole art to saying things for the sake of saying them, and all involved know one doesn't mean them and isn't even supposed to mean them. And it's taboo to point this out.
A common example is to always answer "Fine, thank you" when someone asks you "How are you?" Because that "How are you?" is not actually a question. It's a cue sentence, meant to show that the person saying it is playing by the rules, and testing the other person whether they do so too, a test they pass if they reply "Fine, thank you".
My contention is that this phenomenon goes far further than that, that it extends to many ideological claims.
This is disgracefully facile. It goes to show you have no respect for those you presume to analyze.
Irrelevant. What Nietzsche is doing (and now you, along with him) is plain old authoritarianism, a kind of cultural imperialism.
It's not an "emotional reaction". It's about fairness.
I'm not a theist, nor do I particularly like theists in general. So I'm not defending them on this count. But to go so far as to presume to analyze someone, and yet dismiss as irrelevant that which they consider important to them?? I would not do that. Perhaps this disqualifies me from being an Übermensch such as yourself.
So here's an Übermensch for you:
Yes it helps people successfully operate in the world. Jesus says all who humble themselves will be exalted and all who exalt themselves will be humbled. As humans we could behave in any number of ways: Don't go around exalting yourself... for numerous reasons. Jesus provides helpful social advice and helps one be well liked/attractive. Similar ideas can be found in Jewish thinking but Jesus puts in stronger terms. Jesus teaches you be attractive.
Yes forgiveness is very important, but there's a not-so-subtle reason for it. "For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you." (Matthew 6:14).
To what end?
Can you tell?
It's not about merely reading it, is it. It's about liking it, agreeing with it.
Jesus has a pretty bad temper in Mark. He's cool as a cucumber in John. Some scholars speculate that he's a composite of a number of preachers who came out of the desert to rant about the status quo. You can make up any Jesus you want and start your own religion!
Judaism popularized a book where the oppressed are uplifted and mighty kings are humbled. it is not about hating the aristocratic. much of the old testament attests to the regal glory of the mighty king david. it is jesus who says "blessed be the poor and meek" and "it is harder for a rich man to get to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle." it is the jesus of the gospels who most adequately encaptures what jesus refers to as "jewish slave morality."
The idea is that there's a brand of morality that idealizes the underdog. History is a cloud out of which you can pull whatever narrative you like. I can easily support Nietzsche's assessment with certain facts about Judaism. I can easily show that Christianity didn't inherit a pacifist spirit at all. It's all a matter of what axe you want to grind or what chip you have on your shoulder.
And the Old Testament displays a certain narrative where the weak are uplifted and the mighty are humbled. I never said Nietzsche was wrong; only that his "slave morality" is typified in the Jesus of the gospels. Some people think Jesus epitomizes Judaism. I never said that Christians were or ought to be pacifists. Some narratives are good and needed, others are immature and lacking.
You're right. If the OT says the weak are uplifted and the mighty are humbled, that's slave morality. And yes, Jesus' message is definitely slave morality as well.
But only if they are slaves to God. Not to just anyone. That's the point, and the difference between being slave to man and being slave to God.
Nietzsche's point was that slaves want something that's directly opposed to what warlords want.
Which is so ironic, coming from someone with a position like yours.
All this says something about Nietzsche, but not necessarily about anyone or anything else.
That's not my argument. You won't even correctly capture what I'm saying.
You, Nietzsche, and much of mankind are doing this same thing, acting by the formula:
[i]"You are whatever I say that you are.
You think whatever I say that you think.
You feel whatever I say that you feel.
Your intentions are whatever I say that your intentions are.
You actions mean whatever I say that your actions mean.
You words mean whatever I say that your words mean.
I am the boss of you."[/i]
Pretty much every parent, kindergarden nurse, teacher, psychiatrist, social worker, boss, police officer, IRS agent, anyone with any bit of power over the other person does this.
I suppose that's "master morality": imposing one's own image of others upon those others, holding others responsible to this image, and punishing them if they don't.
They are competing religions. Just like Christians are opposed to Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, or any other religion that isn't Christianity. Competing religions cannot peacefully coexist (other than in the sense of negative peace, where the parties involved simply don't have the material means for warfare). There is no profound reason for religions being intolerant of eachother. It simply comes from being different religions (regardless of what they actually propose to teach; for example, they can teach "non-violence" or "love thy enemy" but given the opportunity, they go on killing sprees just like everyone else, as long as material circumstances permit).
If you don't hear much about, say, Christian anti-islamism, anti-buddhism, or anti-hinduism, etc. that has to do with those not being in such close geographic proximity to Christianity as Judaism. On the other hand, go to Asia and look at the arguments Christian missionaries have against the native religions there, and there's full-blown Christian anti-islamism, anti-buddhism, or anti-hinduism, etc. We just don't hear much about that here in the West, ti doesn't exactly make it to the news.
For comparison, you could also try to look into various Asian supremacisms and the negative view they have of Christianity, European history, being white, being "Western" etc. It's tempting to ascribe that to the bad colonial history, of course. But Asian supremacisms are older than that, and go deeper.
If you look at the bigger picture, it offers a very different perspective on the matter.
So the Jews that favorably received Nietzschean theories about Judaism and anti-semitism were actually originally interested in finding ways to undermine anti-semites? As in, "Look at them, they hate us for nothing!" This actually makes sense.
There is a popular theory that people who hate others do so out of their own insecurity, weakness, because they feel threatened by them.
But, and this isn't mentioned very often, it's also possible that they hate (or more like, despise) others because they feel entitled to do so, because they feel entitled to what those others have.
Of course, it's more ego-friendly to think that those who hate one do so because of their own insecurity, weakness.
It's far less friendly to one's ego to think that one is being hated or despised because the haters feel entitled to do so.
Given what Nietzsche seems to have meant by "affirmation of life", I simply think that he was wrong, operating out of some romantic ideal, failing to account for the existential boredom that results from hedonic pursuits.
Yeah, that's the 30,000 foot view. Big picture. But the OT isn't 100% like that. You have the story of King David and Solomon where their riches are written of positively. Israelite strength is portrayed positively. Be strong. Be wealthy. Be knowledgeable. Be righteous. It's really Jesus who imho truly encapsulates and preaches servant morality. The themes are still present in the OT though.
You keep comparing the whole OT to the message of Jesus. There's much more to Christianity than the sayings of Jesus as depicted in the gospels.
Did you know some historians believe it's possible that both Homer's epic and the book of Exodus are memories of something that happened around 1170 BC?
David was a piece of shit. He impregnated another guy's wife and then sent him to the front line in battle to have him killed.
He excused his son when his son raped his sister.
Among many other things.
I never read him in overly positive light. I mean, he was a good king I suppose, but I'd agree with you. He was not a Jesus like figure. Although Jesus was supposedly from his paternal line, because he Bible says the messiah must be, but Jesus had no paternal lineage, being the son of God and all. I never understood that
So today, we have the edifying spectacle of Right-wing Nationalists on a "counter-demonstration" turning up to the remembrance cenotaphs, getting drunk, and chucking stuff at the police in supposed protection of the sacred remembers of the fallen and against the pro-Palestinian marchers, (who were elsewhere, a mile or so away), and therefore in favour of Israel, all while giving a modified (with a pointy finger) Nazi salute, because such gestures can get you arrested.
Thus is the doctrine that my enemies' enemy is my friend played out in all its manifold hypocrisy, based on the contrivance that those who mourn the dead are the enemies of those who protest the dying.
It all fits neatly together with the observation made somewhere very quietly, that Palestinians are also Semites.
Remembrance Day is meant to remember those who died in war, but I doubt it was meant to remember the enemy combatants, like the axis power soldiers who lost their lives in commitment to the destruction of Britain. That is, it is not just a day to lament death, regardless of who has died, but those who died in war defending Britain.
And so the day gets hijacked by those with a political message, contrary to the intent of the day, with the express message of a moral equivalence of these past wars with the Palestinian resistance, under the guise that all they mean to say is that death of any sort is a bad thing.
I'm opposed to chucking stuff at police, and do hope they, like their political opposites who often do the same, are properly charged.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/544984 :mask:
Well My state owned radio featured a reading of "All quiet on the Western front", a German story of lament for the loss of one German youth, and another program about the dreadful failure of the armistice to bring peace in the long term to either Europe or worse to the Ottoman Empire, largely due to its inequity as between races and nations. I find the suggestion that one is or ought to be partisan about the dead a bit offensive, not personally, but to the long tradition of using the poppy as a symbol of the common colour of all our blood regardless of flag or skin. It seems that even in death we are a long way apart.
But my main point was to expose the irony of the likes of Tommy Robinson defending Israel. and the dreadful fact of the British government encouraging him.
I've broadly bought into this idea. I could be convinced otherwise if there were other Jewish preachers/thinkers who preached ideas analogous to Jesus but I haven't quite come across them. Show me the sources and my views can be changed. "Blessed be the poor in spirit", "love your enemies" - show me Jewish thinkers who preached in a similar vein.
So, I've already sufficiently answered your question regarding this. I would say reference the the whole post again, do some more research on historical Jesus studies that isn't just quoting the New Testament verbatim. That's like watching Fox News and calling it good for an accurate portrayal of current events.
I was thinking more along the lines of e.g. "Rabbi Gamliel preached..." which is similar to Jesus's view. If you're not going to use the gospels then what is our source for Jesus's teachings? We must use the gospels. I mention nothing of the miracles here; only the teachings.
I quoted the most anti-Pharisee passage and showed that there were similar (self-critical) texts in the Talmud. Then I pointed to the fact that there were no fixed ideas at the time, because they were pioneering them. There may have been some chain of oral tradition that went back to that time, but certainly not all views and all understandings were going to be kept. Jesus gave a halachic interpretation of eating on the Sabbath. That doesn't mean he condoned work on the Sabbath arbitrarily but that he defended his men (he himself didn't do it) for eating the wheat kernels because they were basically in starvation mode and backed it up from evidence using David and the Showbread. This looks like Pharisee style interpretations of law. In regards to washing hands before eating, it could be an extant understanding of washing of the hands. Perhaps he represented a very liberal interpretation, or it could be along the same lines as the eating on the run interpretation. Either way, the New Testament has an idealized version of him, but certain ideas can be perhaps interpreted in the Pharisee style way he went about justifying his interpretations. Hillel had a more lenient view of Mosaic practice. Everything recorded in the Talmud by Hillel himself (which isn't much actually) doesn't mean that was the whole of the corpus. The Talmud is playing long distance telephone. You can have some religious a priori notions that the rabbis of the 200s-600s perfectly kept the records of the [s]rabbis[/s] Pharisees from the 00s, but I would balk at such overconfidence because of prior religious commitments or because of some bias.
Oh and you brought up Rabbi Gamliel. In Acts, if there is anything of truth in that Pauline reinterpretation of events, Rabbi Gamliel is sympathetic to the group in a "wait and see" kind of way. There could be some sympathy there, or an echo that the group had some Pharisee origin (albeit went off on a tangent with the influence of John the Baptist apocalyptic Essenic ideas).
David was the ultimate survivalist and very politically savvy. But yes one doesn't need to look too far to see his faults. The Jesus of the gospels is a very strange figure who is represented differently across different gospels. Regarding lineage, Mark provides a genealogy from David to Joseph who was the husband of Mary. I don't believe there's any mention of the virgin birth. Mark is generally considered the oldest gospel. Jesus also clearly denies divinity in Mark 10:17.
He also said "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Therefore man is lord even of the sabbath." He seemingly claims to know God's intention behind giving man the Sabbath in the Genesis account. Jesus certainly engages in biblical interpretation; it just seems when he does this he'll assume high degrees of certainty/knowledge. The gospels note how he speaks with authority unlike the rabbis/pharisees of the time. So it seems Jesus would be against what we would call restrictive Sabbath rules.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The handwashing episode highlights Jesus's take on defilement which as far as I can tell is unique to him and not the position taken by the writers of e.g. Leviticus, but an interesting one nonetheless.
"There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.
So eating shellfish (or eating with unwashed hands) will not defile but e.g. thinking dirty thoughts will. See Mark 7:14.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Thank you for sharing. I did not know that about Gamliel.
Did you just start reading the gospels a week ago?
do you have anything to contribute?
I was actually curious. Keep it to yourself if you must.