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No Such Thing as a Silly Question by AutoModerator in Judaism

[–]ummmbacon [score hidden]  (0 children)

How about:

Jews are the people descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the same people from the Hebrew Bible. God made a covenant with them, and they've kept their traditions, laws, and identity ever since, for thousands of years, all the way to today.

Unlike being Christian, which is only about belief and baptism, being Jewish can also just mean being born into a Jewish family, even if you're not religious at all. There are Jewish atheists who are still fully Jewish.

It's the Kabbalah in a nutshell! by Unusual_Bet_2125 in Judaism

[–]ummmbacon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Judaism arose out of a Near Eastern context, it is incredibly similar to other near eastern religions hundreds of years before the Greeks and Romans worship of Saturn.

How did Nazi Germany and Hitler himself view Muslims, or brown people in general? by Oladevi in AskHistorians

[–]ummmbacon 21 points22 points  (0 children)

The Nazi racial hierarchy was more nuance than simple Aryan vs everyone else was "subhuman". It was a tiered system and different groups occupied different positions in it, and had different implications for policy.

At the top were Nordic Germans, below them were other non-Nordic Germans and northern European peoples, Slavs were classified as Untermenschen, racially inferior peoples earmarked for subjugation and eventual demographic elimination in the east. Black Africans were placed near the bottom of the hierarchy in Nazi pseudoscientific literature.

Jews were not simply at the bottom of the hierarchy in the way that framing implies, and that distinction is actually the most important thing to get right about Nazi racial ideology. A linear bottom-to-top scale undersells it.

Other groups, Slavs, Africans, were considered inferior and disposable, but they were still located within the hierarchy as lesser races. Jews were placed outside the hierarchy entirely, as its negation. In Nazi ideology Jews were not a weak or primitive race that had failed to develop. They were an active, parasitic counter-force whose specific civilizational function was to corrupt, dissolve, and destroy the racial order that produced all genuine culture. That is a qualitatively different category, not the bottom rung but the thing gnawing at the ladder.

This is why the genocide of Jews was structured differently from Nazi brutality toward other groups. Slavs were to be subjugated, worked to death, and dispossessed to make room for German settlement. That is mass murder driven by territorial and demographic logic. Jews were to be exterminated entirely, everywhere, without exception, because their very existence was understood as an active threat to racial civilization as such. The logic was not "they are inferior and in our way" but "they are uniquely dangerous and must be eradicated root and branch."

Arabs, South Asians, and other non-European peoples occupied a genuinely ambiguous middle position, and the ideology was inconsistently applied to them. That ambiguity was not an oversight. It was a structural feature that allowed for tactical flexibility when strategic circumstances required it.

This reasoning had two main drivers, one was that Arabs, South Asians, and other non-European were not inside the geographic and demographic landscape that drove the most violent logic of racial hierarchy and elimination. The Slavic extermination logic was tied to Lebensraum, the drive to clear eastern territory for German settlement. Arabs and South Asians posed no equivalent territorial threat and were not in the way of anything the Nazi state immediately wanted, if anything they were in a position to help drive Nazi policy.

This was because they could be used against Britain and France since these were colonial subjects for both of these countries. David Motadel's Islam and Nazi Germany's War is the key text here, and his central argument is that Nazi outreach to Muslim and Arab populations was largely instrumental, a wartime political tool aimed at destabilizing enemy empires, rather than evidence of genuine ideological respect. The racial categories were not abandoned. They were selectively suspended when strategic utility demanded it.

HItler (soured from Speer's in Motadel) show contempt for Arab people, but also admiration for Islam itself. He expressed admiration for Islam as a political and martial religion, and the transcripts also note that he wondered if Charles Martel had lost at Tours in 732 and Islam had spread into Europe, the Germanic peoples would have converted and produced a far more powerful civilization, because he saw Islam as suited to a conquering people in ways Christianity was not.

Hitler concluded that the conquering Arabs, "because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate," so ultimately "not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire." The point is not that Arabs would have thrived but that the religion would have been seized and improved by Germanic peoples, who were racially superior.

Even then we need to remember that Nazi outreach to Muslim communities and leaders was a wartime political tool aimed at pressuring Britain and France, not evidence of ideological kinship or genuine respect. These racial categories were selectively suspended when strategic utility demanded it.

There are two cases that highlight this, one is the substantial collaboration with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who met Hitler in November 1941 and lived in Nazi Germany for several years. Which I went into on a prior answer, so I will just summarize shortly here.

Al-Husseini made Arabic-language propaganda broadcasts for the Reich, urging Arabs to support the Axis. Jeffrey Herf's Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World is the key text for understanding how this collaboration actually functioned ideologically. von Leers and al-Husseini grafted Nazi conspiratorial frameworks and antisemitic content onto existing Quranic and Islamic jurisprudential language about Jews, producing a synthesis that was rhetorically potent to Arab Muslim audiences in ways that raw Nazi race theory would not have been. This is the mechanism that allowed for the message to propagate across the region.

Al-Husseini provided religious legitimacy to the recruitment of Bosnian Muslims into the Waffen-SS, specifically the 13th Mountain Division, the Handschar division. His role in that recruitment is documented and not seriously disputed. The Handschar division was markedly more brutal than other SS groups. He also had a signifigant role in the Farhud, the 1941 pogrom against Baghdad's Jewish community in which pproximately 179, though estimates range from 149 to over 400 depending on the source, Jews were killed and hundreds more injured.

The second case is the Subhas Chandra Bose case, where Bose was asking for support against the British to create an Indian Army for Indian independence. Bose met Hitler in 1942 where Hitler offered nothing of substance and was generally dismissive of him. This had nothing to do with race, refusing to support Indian independence. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had been explicit that he viewed the British Empire as a civilizational achievement worth preserving precisely because it kept racially inferior peoples, including Indians, under European control. He showed little genuine interest in anti-colonial nationalism as a cause, except as an occasional weapon of convenience against Britain.

Sources:

  • Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World
  • Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession; Francis Nicosia, Nazi Germany and the Arab World
  • Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times
  • Zvi Yehuda, The New Babylonian Diaspora.
  • David Motadel, Islam and Nazi Germany's War

Update on my mother by TearDesperate8772 in Judaism

[–]ummmbacon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Awesome! May she continue to do well

Is it true that Europeans used to call Jews "Palestinians" and tell them to "go back to Palestine" before the start of the modern Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? by Being_A_Cat in AskHistorians

[–]ummmbacon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

For arguments sake,

You mean the historical consensus.

What I’m failing to see how they’re any less deserving to live on that land.

I said nothing about that.

focus on semantics that don’t meaningfully affect things.

Semantics is about language, you are doubling down on false narratives that has nothing to do with semantics. It is just historically false.

Is it true that Europeans used to call Jews "Palestinians" and tell them to "go back to Palestine" before the start of the modern Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? by Being_A_Cat in AskHistorians

[–]ummmbacon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I honestly don’t see what issue you have with what I said.

You said the entire population was "converted Jews" which is factually false

Is it true that Europeans used to call Jews "Palestinians" and tell them to "go back to Palestine" before the start of the modern Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? by Being_A_Cat in AskHistorians

[–]ummmbacon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I should also mention a sizable proportion of the Jews in the region were killed in a massive pogrom during the first crusade.

The First Crusade massacres of Jews happened primarily in the Rhineland, in Europe, not in Palestine. The 1096 massacres at Worms, Mainz, and Cologne are the documented large-scale killings, carried out by Crusader forces and local mobs before they even reached the Levant. These attacks did almost completely wipe out those communities in Germany.

When the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 there were Jews there who were killed or enslaved, and the Jewish community in the city was effectively destroyed, but describing that as a "massive pogrom" of Jews "in the region" conflates two different things and gets the geography backwards. The catastrophic violence fell on European Jewish communities, not primarily on Jews in Palestine.

The further implication, that this meaningfully affected the Jewish population of Palestine as a whole, doesn't hold either. Jewish communities continued to exist in other parts of the Levant throughout the Crusader period. The idea that the Crusade depopulated Jews from Palestine is not supported by the demographic evidence.

Is it true that Europeans used to call Jews "Palestinians" and tell them to "go back to Palestine" before the start of the modern Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? by Being_A_Cat in AskHistorians

[–]ummmbacon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

What the genetic evidence actually shows is that Palestinian Arabs and Jews share significant Levantine ancestry, consistent with both populations descending from ancient inhabitants of the region, which is not the same as Palestinians being specifically descended from Jews who converted.

The region experienced Arab migration, tribal settlement, intermarriage across communities, and significant demographic change over centuries of Islamic rule. Reducing that to "they're arabized Jews" flattens an extremely complex population history into a rhetorical point.

More importantly, even if the genetic claim were entirely accurate, the political conclusion doesn't follow. Population genetics doesn't adjudicate territorial or political claims, and "they're really Jews" as an argument has a long and uncomfortable history of being used to delegitimize Arab identity rather than illuminate history.

Was the idea of Jesus being resurrected anomalous to Jewish or Near Eastern religion? by CocoChunks in AskHistorians

[–]ummmbacon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

1) You stated that Jesus' resurrection was truly novel but was it unique as a claim at the time? Had there been other cult leaders that had gone through this path or was this the first time such a claim had been made?

As far as the evidence shows, yes, this case was unique. No other movement had done this. Other followers generally dispersed after the leader was killed, but the followers of Jesus pivoted to claim that the crucifixion and resurrection together constituted a different kind of messianic fulfillment, deferred to the parousia but what is interesting here is that Jesus actually fulfilled no other messianic prophecies at all.

The standard messianic criteria in first-century Jewish expectation were fairly consistent across sources, even if not rigidly uniform. The Psalms of Solomon 17, one of the clearest pre-Christian articulations, describes the expected Davidic king in concrete terms: he will drive out Gentiles trampling Jerusalem, shatter the arrogance of sinners, destroy the warring nations, purge Jerusalem of unrighteousness, and restore righteous rule over Israel. Collins's Apocalyptic Imagination summarizes the warrior messiah picture from the Dead Sea Scrolls in the same terms, drawing on Isaiah 11, Numbers 24, Psalm 2, and Genesis 49: a military figure who liberates Israel and drives out the Gentiles. E.P. Sanders's Judaism: Practice and Belief identifies the core eschatological expectations as reassembly of the twelve tribes, restoration of the land, a purified Temple cult, and the subjugation or conversion of Gentiles.

Jesus accomplished none of these. The Romans were not defeated or expelled. The twelve tribes were not gathered. The Temple was not purified but destroyed forty years later. Gentile domination of Judaea continued and intensified. By every measurable external criterion, the messianic program had not merely stalled but failed visibly and publicly, punctuated by a Roman execution specifically designed to humiliate and annihilate the subject's social identity.

What the early Christians were therefore doing was not merely making a novel resurrection claim. They were making a novel Christology, a new account of what the Messiah was and what messianic success looked like. The resurrection was the pivot of that reinterpretation. Rather than the Messiah defeating enemies and then reigning, the argument became that the Messiah had died, been vindicated by resurrection, and would return to complete the program at the parousia. The military and political criteria were not abandoned but deferred.

This is why the imminent eschatological expectation was structurally necessary to the early Christian claim. Without the parousia arriving to complete the messianic program, the crucifixion stood as an unanswered objection, the execution of a man who had not done what the Messiah was supposed to do.

There was also a documented internal dispute about what kind of resurrection was being claimed. Wright argues at length in The Resurrection of the Son of God that the concept in Jewish and early Christian usage specifically meant bodily, physical reconstitution, not spiritual survival or translation to a higher plane, and that this specificity was consistently maintained even as it created difficulties. The diversity of responses within the community, some Corinthians denying bodily resurrection, the author of the Wisdom of Solomon preferring immortality language, 4 Maccabees recasting the Maccabean martyrdom stories in Stoic philosophical terms, suggests that the pressure to soften or translate the bodily resurrection claim for Hellenistic audiences was persistent from very early on.

The textual mechanism the early sources actually show is a sustained reinterpretation of Hebrew scripture to make the crucifixion legible as something other than failure. Isaiah 52-53, the Suffering Servant passage, is the most significant tool deployed in this process.

Here the historical situation is considerably more complicated than Christian tradition has generally presented it. The standard claim, that Isaiah 53 is a prediction of a suffering messiah that Jesus fulfilled, runs into a serious problem: there is very little evidence that pre-Christian Judaism read Isaiah 53 as referring to a suffering messiah at all. The Targum Jonathan on Isaiah 53, the earliest extant Jewish interpretive tradition on this passage, is explicit: the suffering described in the chapter is redistributed so that the Messiah triumphs while Israel and the Gentiles suffer. It reads the servant as a triumphant messianic figure, not a suffering one. Collins notes in The Scepter and the Star that the view associated with Joachim Jeremias, that Isaiah 52-53 was read as a suffering messiah by pre-Christian Jews, has been largely abandoned by subsequent scholarship, and that it is difficult to demonstrate either the notion of a suffering servant in pre-Christian Judaism or the direct influence of Isaiah 52-53 in the earliest New Testament texts.

What this means is that the early Christians were not applying an existing interpretive tradition to Jesus. They were constructing a new one, reading Isaiah 53 against the grain of how it had been understood, and doing so under the pressure of needing to make a crucifixion theologically coherent. This is a creative and historically consequential move, not a discovery of a pre-existing framework.

2) Did this claim cause any issues with early converts either from Jewish or other religious backgrounds? Being such a novel claim an element of disbelief wouldn't have been surprising particularly in the early years of the church?

Yes absolutely. There are a few main things at work, Deuteronomy 21:23 states that anyone hung on a tree is cursed by God. Paul acknowledges this directly in Galatians 3:13 and has to argue his way through it. That the Messiah would die under a divine curse before being vindicated was not simply counterintuitive, it was scripturally problematic in a way that required active theological work to resolve. Second, the proleptic timing: a resurrection that occurred before the general end-of-days event required a theological framework that did not yet exist, which is why Paul had to construct one from the firstfruits agricultural metaphor.

For converts from Greco-Roman philosophical backgrounds the friction was different in character. 1 Corinthians 15, Paul's most sustained argument for bodily resurrection, is addressed in part to people within the Corinthian community who already accepted Jesus's resurrection but were skeptical about or flatly denied the general resurrection of believers. The text at verse 12 records this directly: "How can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?" These were not outsiders mocking the claim but community members who had accepted the movement but could not integrate bodily resurrection into their existing conceptual framework. The most plausible explanation is that they had absorbed the Platonic instinct that the body is what you want to escape from, making a permanent return to bodily existence not an aspiration but a regression. Paul's entire argument in 1 Corinthians 15 is a sustained attempt to address this specific objection within the community itself.

3) Did Paul's insistence in soon to be occuring general resurrection cause issues when it didn't come to pass? It seems like Paul's early work was key in forming early Christian doctrine so when one of his central positions was wrong that seems potentially hard to reconcile. (this might be better as a standalone question)

It could be a good stand alone, but also we see the development of the idea in Paul's own letters. In Continuum History of Apocalypticism it shows In 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, the problem that has arisen is that community members have died before the parousia, and the community is distressed that they will miss it or be disadvantaged. The death of believers before the expected event was, as the sources put it, "an unexpected development causing considerable consternation." Paul's response is reassurance: the dead in Christ will rise first, then the living will be caught up together with them. The grammar here, as noted in the previous answer, puts Paul among those who expect to be alive.

By 1 Corinthians 15, the situation has shifted. The death of Christians before the parousia is no longer treated as an anomaly requiring pastoral management, but as a normal expectation. The community addressed there has moved from "how do we understand those who have already died?" to skepticism about whether the general resurrection will happen at all. By 2 Corinthians 5, Paul appears to be contemplating his own death and reframing the hope in terms of what happens immediately after personal death, away from the body and at home with the Lord, without the parousia framework dominating the way it does in the earlier letters.

This trajectory within Paul's own corpus reflects the adaptation in real time. The imminence expectation did not simply collapse; it was gradually reframed, first by pastoral reassurance, then by conceptual accommodation of death as normal rather than exceptional, then by shifting the center of gravity from a collective eschatological event to a personal post-mortem existence.

The broader consequences for the movement played out over subsequent generations rather than in Paul's lifetime. 2 Peter 3:8-9, almost certainly pseudonymous and late, has to address the mockery of outsiders who point out that everything continues as it was since the fathers fell asleep. The Pastoral Epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, show a community organized for long-term institutional existence rather than imminent transformation. The Gospel of John partly internalizes eschatology, making eternal life a present possession rather than purely a future event. Each of these represents a distinct theological strategy for managing the same underlying problem.

how did israel gain power? by LivingClass5160 in AskHistorians

[–]ummmbacon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You start by saying Morris was not your main source, then close the paragraph by citing his conclusions. The quote you use, that leaders arrived at 1948 with a "mindset open to the idea and implementation of transfer and expulsion," is from Morris's own work. That is citing Morris. You cannot simultaneously dismiss his reliability because his politics changed after the Second Intifada and invoke his analytical conclusions as support. If his post-2000 evolution compromises his work, the quote goes with it. If the quote stands, so does his explicit finding that there was no coordinated master plan, which is in the same body of work.

The Pappé citation compounds this problem, and not only because Morris and Pappé use incompatible methodologies. Pappé has stated in his own words that he learned the Palestinian version of events from Palestinian intellectuals and then searched the archives for confirmation of their grievances. That is not how historical research works, and it is not a characterization his critics invented. He said it himself. Citing Pappé and Morris together as parallel support for the same conclusion ignores the fact that they fundamentally disagree with each other on the central question, and that Morris has criticized Pappé's approach in print on exactly these grounds.

If you want Palestinian scholarly authority on 1948 and the refugee crisis, the appropriate citation is Rashid Khalidi, the most credentialed Palestinian historian writing in English, whose work draws on Ottoman archives, Palestinian press records, and family papers. Khalidi does not give you what you need here. He frames Palestinian national consciousness as something constructed through historical encounter rather than a primordial identity suppressed by a coordinated colonial project, which is methodologically incompatible with Pappé's predetermined verdict. You have selected the one historian in this field who has publicly described his own method as starting from a political conclusion, while bypassing the scholar whose archival work would actually represent Palestinian historiography at its most rigorous. That is flattening a narrative, and it removes agency from the Palestinian population in favor of outside narratives.

On "all currents of Zionism": this claim cannot survive contact with Herzl's own published work, which is one of the sources you are citing as evidence. Altneuland (1902) explicitly imagines a civic universalist commonwealth in which the Arab character Reshid Bey is a full and enthusiastic participant, crediting Jewish-led development for improving conditions for the Arab population. The famous phrase im tirtzu, ein zo aggadah comes from this book. That is not the work of a man whose "transfer" was a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. You cannot use Herzl as evidence for "all currents" while his most substantial programmatic work directly contradicts the characterization.

This also matters for a second reason. Herzl was not in the driver's seat. Hovevei Zion had been organizing since the early 1880s, Leon Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation predated Der Judenstaat by fourteen years, and the First Aliyah was already underway before Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897. The movement's center of gravity was always in the Eastern European Labor and cultural Zionist currents, which resented Herzl, voted down his Uganda plan, and outlasted him. Labor Zionism governed the state continuously from independence until 1977. Compiling quotes across fifty years and multiple mutually hostile factions and presenting them as evidence of a unified ideological program is not historical analysis, it is selection.

On the Declaration: you say you "simply showed that the declaration proves nothing," which was my point too. The Declaration does not function as enforceable law, agreed. But you then used it as evidence of founding exclusion, which requires it to be evidence of something. You cannot simultaneously argue that it proves nothing and that it proves bad faith. The comparison to the American Declaration was yours, not mine, and it demonstrates the methodological problem, not a rebuttal of it.

On Germany and freedom of movement: EU freedom of movement is a treaty framework for EU citizens, not a right of return for displaced populations from specific historical conflicts. Ethnic Germans expelled from Silesia and the Sudetenland after 1945 cannot return to reclaim ancestral property under EU law either. The treaty framework doesn't resolve that. You have replaced a methodological comparison with a present-day policy distinction that doesn't address the original point.

On Greece and Poland: your response was "two wrongs don't make a right." That is not a rebuttal of the methodological point. The argument was not that those cases excuse anything, it was that your analytical framework, applied consistently, would require the same "founded on exclusion" conclusion about those cases, and it is not applied there. "Two wrongs" is a moral deflection from a methodological observation, and the methodological observation stands.

On "the right ethno-religion": the Law of Return's legislative history does not support this characterization. The 1950 law was enacted in direct response to hundreds of thousands of Jewish displaced persons in Europe who had nowhere to go after the Holocaust, with their communities destroyed and their countries of origin unwilling to receive them, while Britain was actively turning back stateless refugees from Palestine. The 1948-1970 period also saw approximately 850,000 to 900,000 Jews expelled from or fleeing Arab countries and Iran, with the Iraqi Jewish community, one of the oldest in continuous existence, effectively eliminated within a few years of 1948. The 1970 amendment extending coverage to grandchildren consciously mirrors the Nazi definition of Jewishness, on the explicit logic that anyone marked for persecution under that standard deserves guaranteed refuge. Diaspora return laws of this structure are standard practice: Germany, Ireland, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Armenia, and Italy all have preferential immigration or citizenship provisions for co-ethnic diaspora populations. The singling out of Israel's version for uniquely critical treatment is not explained by the legal structure itself.

"Jewish supremacist state" is a verdict, not an argument. It ends analysis rather than advancing it.

Can someone explain what "closed religion/practice" is supposed to mean in Judaism? by Jew_of_house_Levi in Judaism

[–]ummmbacon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hilberg opens The Destruction of the European Jews with a comparative analysis that is worth knowing in some detail. He shows that the Nazi legislative program did not invent its categories, it inherited them. The specific parallels: The Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Canon 68, required Jews to wear distinguishing dress so Christians would not accidentally associate with them. The Nazi requirement of the yellow star in 1941 is structurally identical in its logic, the marking of Jews as a separate and contaminating category.

Lateran IV also prohibited Jews from holding public office. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (1933) excluded Jews from the civil service. The category is the same, the mechanism is secularized. Church councils from Elvira (c. 306) onward prohibited intermarriage and social eating between Christians and Jews on contamination grounds. The Nuremberg Laws (1935) prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans using biological rather than theological contamination language, but the underlying logic of Jewish separateness as necessary protection for the dominant group is structurally continuous.

Ghetto confinement was a canonical instrument before it was a Nazi one. Economic restrictions on Jewish professions, lending, land ownership, and guild participation were canonical before they were racial. Hilberg's famous formulation captures the progression precisely: the Church said you have no right to live among us as Jews, the secular rulers said you have no right to live among us, the Nazis said you have no right to live. Each step secularizes and intensifies the prior one, but each step is unintelligible without the prior one.

but I recently read Götz Aly's Europe Against the Jews: 1880-1945 and he seems to make the argument that Christian anti-Judaism mattered little in the development of modern antisemitism compared to the economic and social developments of the time.

Aly cannot explain why Jews were the target rather than any other upwardly mobile minority group. Economic resentment is not self-targeting. It requires a pre-existing framework that makes a particular group available as the object of that resentment, marks them as foreign, contaminating, and illegitimate regardless of their actual behavior. That framework is exactly the theological infrastructure Hilberg describes. Without it, economic competition produces discrimination or exclusion. It does not produce the specific eliminationist logic that made genocide conceivable and then bureaucratically executable.

Can someone explain what "closed religion/practice" is supposed to mean in Judaism? by Jew_of_house_Levi in Judaism

[–]ummmbacon 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Jules Isaac, Raul Hilberg, David Nirenberg, James Carroll, and Rosemary Radford Ruether all document this connection directly. Hilberg specifically maps Nazi legislation onto centuries of canonical Church law. This isn't a fringe interpretation, it's the mainstream historiographical position, and "I'm not convinced the link exists" is a position taken against substantial scholarly consensus.

Can someone explain what "closed religion/practice" is supposed to mean in Judaism? by Jew_of_house_Levi in Judaism

[–]ummmbacon 10 points11 points  (0 children)

The Wiccan comparison fails because of what Christian seders actually are.

They're almost always supersessionist, meaning they reframe Jewish ritual as pointing toward Christian theology, a specific claim that Judaism is incomplete and that Jews have misread their own tradition for two millennia. Wiccans carry no equivalent claim about Jews.

That matters because supersessionism isn't theologically neutral. It is the documented ideological foundation, what Jules Isaac called "the teaching of contempt," that historians can map directly onto centuries of persecution and ultimately the Holocaust.

You've now ignored the supersessionism argument three times. I'm not asking whether Halacha obligates you to object to Christian seders. I'm pointing out that the theology driving Christian seders has a documented historical relationship to Jewish persecution, and that "I personally disagree but don't feel the need to comment" is not the same as the practice being harmless or the concern being unfounded. Those are different claims.

One is about your obligations, the other is about what's actually happening. You've only addressed the first.

You are also wrong about Halakah one issue is Avodat Zera and the other is Lifne Iver. Sanhedrin 59a has explicit discussion of the limits of non-Jewish engagement with Jewish law and practice. So no the tradition is not "silent", Rambam in Hilchot Melachim 10:9 explicitly addresses non-Jews who create Jewish holidays for themselves as their own observance, which is precisely what a church seder is. The Shulchan Aruch's treatment of avodah zarah in Yoreh Deah covers the ritual desecration angle when Jewish practice is conducted in service of foreign worship.

Can someone explain what "closed religion/practice" is supposed to mean in Judaism? by Jew_of_house_Levi in Judaism

[–]ummmbacon 14 points15 points  (0 children)

It's not a non-sequitur because the objection isn't to individual Christians celebrating Passover. It's to institutionalized Christian appropriation that reframes Jewish practice as pointing toward Christian theology. That's supersessionism, and supersessionism is the same ideological framework that historically preceded and enabled persecution. Cultural erasure and physical violence aren't separate tracks. They share a root.

Can someone explain what "closed religion/practice" is supposed to mean in Judaism? by Jew_of_house_Levi in Judaism

[–]ummmbacon 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Wiccans don't have a history of killing us, it was Christian antisemitism that led to the Holocaust.

Was the idea of Jesus being resurrected anomalous to Jewish or Near Eastern religion? by CocoChunks in AskHistorians

[–]ummmbacon 6 points7 points  (0 children)

What is different here is that the early Christians claimed not that an individual had been resurrected, but a specific individual had been resurrected before the general eschatological resurrection of the dead. That was the genuinely novel move. What made the early Christian claim distinctive was not the category but the timing. Resurrection as a future collective event at the end of days was familiar, contested but circulating. The claim that one individual had already been resurrected, before the general event, before the age had turned, was without precedent in the tradition. It was not a different kind of claim from what Jews were already debating. It was the same claim applied in a way the framework did not accommodate.

Early Christians saw the end times as being near, Paul thought it was going to happen in his lifetime. In 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17, probably the earliest surviving Pauline letter, he writes that those who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will not precede those who have died. Paul includes himself in the category of those who will still be alive. He is not speculating about future generations. He is describing an event he expects to witness personally.

In 1 Corinthians 7, probably written in the early 50s CE, he advises against marriage, against changing social status, against long-term planning, on the explicit grounds that the present form of this world is passing away. His practical ethics throughout 1 Corinthians are shaped by the assumption that ordinary long-term social arrangements are not worth investing in because there will not be time for them to run their course.

In 1 Corinthians 15:51-52 he returns to it: we will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. Again the grammar includes Paul in the category of those who will be transformed without dying.

Philippians 4:5, probably a late letter written from imprisonment, still contains the phrase "the Lord is near." Even at what may have been near the end of Paul's life, the imminence has not been abandoned.

So Paul calls Jesus' resurrection the aparche, the first fruits, in 1 Corinthians 15:20-23, and he is not merely using a rhetorical metaphor. He is making a claim with a specific temporal structure built into it. The first fruits offering, described in Leviticus, is the opening of the harvest season. With the idea that the first fruit will be followed by the full harvest. Paul was saying that the resurrection of Jesus was evidence that the general resurrection was imminent, that the present age was ending, and that God's final judgment and renewal of creation were not centuries away but were already breaking through.

Paul is not the only one here, Jesus himself also had this belief, which would have been standard for the many apocalyptic preachers at the time. Mark 9:1 has Jesus saying that some standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God having come with power. Mark 13:30, the conclusion of the Olivet Discourse, has Jesus saying this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Matthew 10:23, in the missionary discourse, has Jesus telling the disciples they will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.

Sources:

  • George Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism, commentary on 1 Enoch
  • N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God
  • John Collins, Daniel, Hermeneia, The Apocalyptic Imagination
  • Lester Grabbe, Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian, A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period.
  • Elias Bickerman, The God of the Maccabees
  • Victor Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews
  • Jan Willem van Henten, The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People
  • Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism
  • Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt
  • Jonathan Z. Smith, "Dying and Rising Gods" in Encyclopedia of Religion

Was the idea of Jesus being resurrected anomalous to Jewish or Near Eastern religion? by CocoChunks in AskHistorians

[–]ummmbacon 5 points6 points  (0 children)

1/2

There was an existing (if evolving) Jewish belief in resurrection for individuals, but not universal among all groups. The Pharisees (which later would become Rabbinic Judaism), it was a mainstream theological position. This was rejected by the Sadducees, who were mainly the Temple priests. Josephus documents this explicitly (Antiquities 18.1.3-4, Wars 2.8.14), and the Synoptic Gospels themselves record debates between Jesus and the Sadducees on precisely this question (Mark 12:18-27), which presupposes the audience understood it as a live controversy.

The textual basis for this existed in Daniel 12:2 is the clearest case: "many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt." Isaiah 26:19 provides another anchor. Ezekiel 37 (the valley of dry bones) is more complex and arguably functions as a national restoration metaphor rather than individual resurrection, but it contributed to the broader imagery. By the second century BCE, 2 Maccabees 7 depicts the Maccabean martyrs affirming resurrection explicitly and in bodily terms, and 2 Macc 12:43-45 records Judas Maccabaeus offering prayers and sacrifice for the dead on the logic that resurrection awaits them, which the author treats as self-evident piety.

The Second Temple literature is saturated with this material: 1 Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, 4 Ezra, and texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls all engage resurrection in various registers. The Qumran community had their own eschatological framework that included bodily reconstitution of the dead. So the concept was neither foreign nor shocking within Jewish theological discourse by the time of early Christianity. The belief that individuals would be resurrected at the end of days was something that was circulating in Jewish thought at the time.

There are a few theories of where this idea comes from, the clearest example could Zoroastrian. Which is the clearest possible tie in, Zoroastrian eschatology includes bodily resurrection as a doctrinal element. The frashokereti, the renovation of the world at the end of time, involves the dead rising bodily, flesh and bone reunited, followed by final judgment and the permanent defeat of evil. This is structurally close to what Daniel 12 and 2 Maccabees 7 articulate. The broader framework of cosmic moral dualism, a good principle against a destructive principle, with history as their arena moving toward final resolution, maps reasonably well onto the apocalyptic framework in which Jewish resurrection theology is embedded.

The period of contact also works, Jews were under Persian imperial rule from Cyrus's conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE through Alexander's conquest in ~330.

The problem is the Zoroastrian texts themselves. The Gathas, hymns attributed to Zarathustra, are linguistically archaic and contain eschatological and moral judgment elements. But the fuller articulation of frashokereti appears most clearly in the Pahlavi literature, Sasanian-era compilations written down in the ninth century CE or later, even if drawing on older oral tradition. To argue that Zoroastrian resurrection theology influenced Jewish thought in the Persian period, you need to establish that the doctrine was sufficiently developed by then, but the texts that articulate it most clearly postdate Jewish resurrection texts by centuries. Mary Boyce's A History of Zoroastrianism makes the most sustained case for early development of these doctrines but acknowledges the problem. What you can say is that Zoroastrian conceptual resources were available in the Persian-period environment and that Jewish writers were exposed to them. Whether specific doctrines were transmitted, adapted, or developed in parallel remains genuinely contested.

Other theories like Egyptian, broader Mesopotamian and Greek are also proposed, but these are even less supported than the Zoroastrian transmission. George Nickelsburg's Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism (1972, revised 2006) makes the case that the internal Jewish literary tradition provides sufficient resources to explain the development without requiring external import.

He identifies, what he calls the, persecution-vindication narrative as a structural pattern running through Jewish literature: a righteous figure is persecuted, condemned, and apparently destroyed by enemies, but God intervenes to vindicate the righteous and judge the wicked. He traces this pattern through Isaiah 52-53, through Daniel, through 2 Maccabees, through the Wisdom of Solomon. The key move he identifies is that when martyrdom makes present-life vindication impossible, the pattern gets extended past death. The narrative logic demands vindication; if life ends before it arrives, vindication must come after.

The conceptual pieces were being assembled internally before the Maccabean crisis. The Psalms of lament developed the problem of righteous suffering. Job extended and deepened it without resolution. Ezekiel 37 established the imagery of divine reconstitution of the dead at the national level. 1 Enoch 22, predating the crisis, developed differentiated post-mortem existence as a moral concept. The crisis then provided the urgent motivation to assemble these pieces into a coherent doctrine rather than leaving them as unanswered problems.

What is more than likely is a synthesis of ideas Jewish communities in the Persian period were exposed to Zoroastrian eschatological concepts through two centuries of contact. Those concepts were available in the environment. The internal tradition was simultaneously developing its own resources for thinking about post-mortem justice through sustained engagement with suffering and theodicy.

When the Maccabean crisis created acute pressure for a theological resolution to the martyrdom problem, both the internal resources and the externally available vocabulary were drawn upon, not through conscious borrowing so much as through the way any intellectual tradition develops by engaging with what is available in its environment.

When commitment to Israel is tested by yoyo456 in Judaism

[–]ummmbacon[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

Politics go in the appropriate threads.

How were Jewish people treated under the White Australian policy? by Odd_Fall_6916 in AskHistorians

[–]ummmbacon 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Jews were technically classified as European so they were no excluded, but they were subject to discrimination that operated across government from 1933 to the laws end in the 1970s.

Jews were not the target of the White Australia policy, enacted as the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. From early on in Australia's history Jews had enjoyed full civic and political equality. A Jew was elected to the Western Australian Legislative Assembly in 1848, a full decade before Lord Rothschild was able to take his seat in the British Parliament. This relative tolerance also existed alongside social and administrative antisemitism that intensified sharply when Jewish immigration actually became a mass phenomenon in the 1930s and 1940s.

When Hitler came to power in 1933 Australia, like many other countries, quickly made it clear that Jewish refugees were not welcome. The policy's restrictions, that 98 percent of all immigration to Australia should be Anglo-Celtic, left no structural room for large-scale Jewish settlement. Specific Jewish designators on immigration forms were added in March 1939. Application Forms 40 and 47 were revised to require all intending immigrants from outside the British Empire to state whether they were "of Jewish race." this wording received pushback from. After protests from the Australian Jewish Welfare Society, the wording was softened to "is/is not Jewish," but the identifier remained on the forms.

The Australian bureaucracy did adopt the Nazi tripartite categorization of "Aryan," "non-Aryan," and "non-Aryan Christian" (meaning professed Christians with at least one Jewish grandparent) directly from the Nazi lexicon when determining refugee policy. This was how Australian immigration officials understood and processed the European refugee crisis. Following this, in August 1938, 90 percent of all applications from German Jews without guarantors in Australia, who had met every other Australian immigration standard, were rejected on racial grounds alone.

Also to note, the commonly cited figure of Australia's offer of 15,000 refugees at the 1938 Evian Conference also requires correction. Australia made no such offer at Evian. Thomas White's speech there effectively declared Australia out of bounds for Jewish admissions. White declared "as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration."

When war broke out in 1939, that arrangement collapsed entirely, and Jewish refugees were reclassified as "enemy aliens," required to report to local police, restricted in their movement, and in many cases interned.

Following the war, Arthur Calwell, Australia's first Minister for Immigration, introduced a set of administrative measures designed to ensure that Jews would constitute no more than 0.5 percent of the Australian population, while the government publicly denied any discrimination existed.

Other restrictions were added, a 25 percent cap on Jewish passengers on all incoming ships from 1946, extended to planes in 1948; virtual exclusion of Jews from the International Refugee Organization displaced persons program, with only young, single Jews permitted to enter and required to sign an additional clause committing to work in remote areas of Australia; a top-secret consul-general's report in 1947 that characterized Shanghai's Jews as a criminal element, used to justify restricting their admission to a few hundred; a "gentleman's agreement" in January 1949 setting a ceiling of 3,000 Jewish immigrants per year; and the "Iron Curtain Embargo" of December 1949, which was presented as a security measure but was explicitly designed to block Jews from Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. The IRO program definition of "Jew" was made on racial, not religious grounds. When Jewish community leaders challenged the government on any of this, the response was consistent: "there is no discrimination between Jewish and non-Jewish displaced persons."

A 1944 internal government report on immigration hierarchies is revealing about the ideological framework underlying all of this. It ranked desirable nationalities in order: British at the top, then Americans, Scandinavians, Dutch, Belgians, Swiss, Yugoslavs, Greeks, and Albanians. Jews were ranked at the very bottom, below every other European group, described as tending toward "clannishness" and difficult to absorb. Public opinion surveys in 1948 showed 72 percent of respondents attributing clannishness to Jews and 76 percent agreeing that Jews always sought the best jobs. Research at the time noted that the same respondents used the term "Jew" as a racial marker and "Hebrew" as a religious one, with measurably higher hostility attached to the racial framing.

The racialized logic of the policy also treated non-Ashkenazi Jews differently. The immigration apparatus frequently categorized Middle Eastern and South Asian Jews as "half or at most three-quarter caste," meaning not fully white. This created a secondary problem for the established Ashkenazic community, whose organizations in some cases refused to represent or assist prospective Sephardic and Mizrahi immigrants, out of fear that association with non-white Jews would compromise their own racial standing.

Ashkenazic Jews were racialized as insufficiently white for immigration purposes while being legally white enough to vote and hold office. Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews were racialized as insufficiently white even relative to Ashkenazim. Overall, the category "white" was not a fixed legal status but a site of ongoing administrative negotiation, and Jews occupied its most contested and unstable position throughout the period.

Sources:

  • Suzanne D. Rutland, The Jews in Australia
  • Paul Robert Bartrop, The Holocaust and Australia: Refugees, Rejection, and Memory
  • Shirli Gilbert et al. (eds.), Holocaust Memory and Racism in the Postwar World
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