History of the Holocaust
- Thread starter S.A.M.
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A complete misrepresentation of my point. The Swedish/Polish war was used sole as a example of something that increased strife in poland due to its weakening. Strife of course leads to growing intolerance.
The Rom were not embedded and intermixed at all levels of every European society, Rom-related people were not ferreted out by geneology and interned, the Rom were a separate and economically/socially marginal defined group, and so forth.pj said:
Much of what happened to the Jews of Poland happened sporadically at the hands of armed groups of general Polish citizenry throughout the country, over a period of a few months to a couple of years, common weapons of choice being hammers and axes.pj said:
No much of what happened in poland happened because of the germans. The polish killed very few jews( much of which happened in soviet controlled areas) yet you insist on labeling them as perpatrators of the holocaust. and I like your back pedalling. You went from perpatrators to happened sporadically.
lets ratchet shit up a notch. apologies for the verbiage but i know you tards do not click links
I initially felt that it would be best not to respond to the calumnies and slanders of Steven Plaut’s article published in the January 10, 2007 edition of the Jewish Press, but after receiving a number of e-mails asking me to comment, I thought that perhaps out of bad things good things could come.
When they are not attacking one another, the tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of slandering and anathematizing their Sephardi cousins is part and parcel of their culture. With the formal bans that were proscribed against Maimonides, bans that were written and promulgated in Spain under the watchful eye and influence of the rabbis of the Rhineland and France, a glass ceiling was broken that would find many Sephardi Sages on the losing end of Ashkenazi rhetorical and religious violence throughout history.
The Maimonidean Controversy is often glossed over by Orthodox Jews who have amazingly appropriated the name “Maimonides” as a prime representative of an Orthodoxy that he himself never espoused, an Orthodoxy that he questioned with his use of philosophy, science and comparative study of religious traditions in the context of a resolute rabbinism. This controversy should never be that far away from our minds when we confront the hateful nature of Ashkenazi discourse.
One of the prime recipients of this hateful treatment was the great Sephardi Sage of London, Rabbi David Nieto, whose works on Judaism presented the Ashkenazim of his day with immeasurable conundrums and which ended up forcing upon him an anathema – in Hebrew, Herem. Nieto had to waste his time defending himself against the Herem even though he was perhaps the most brilliant and inspired Jewish thinker of his time, a man equally conversant in the works of Isaac Newton and the Talmud.
Ashkenazim, having adopted a number of critical Christian values central to their way of conceiving and practicing Judaism, articulated their concerns in terms of a set of dogmas that could not be breached. Such a concern for Orthodoxy, the correct way of thinking, a term anathema to the Maimonidean tradition of critical thought, placed Ashkenazi rabbis and leaders in the remarkable position of constantly making use of the anathema for religious rather than social reasons. Frequently the anathema would be marked by Christian-like provocations such as Imputation of Sin, Guilt by Association and, the worst of all, Inquisition.
As the Ashkenazi world broke off into bitter and acrimonious factions in the 19th century, formal mechanisms of Orthodoxy and Reform were instituted in different sectors of the community. The historical books of Heinrich Graetz were deemed impermissible for Orthodox readers, while Reformers sought to tear down the ritual strictures of Halakhah such as Kashrut, Sabbath restrictions and the like. The 19th century was a conflicted Ashkenazi age of Haskalah and Orthodoxy, of Reform and Fundamentalism.
It was into this world, a world that had almost completely ignored the Sephardi component of Jewish civilization – except to make use of such Sephardi culture when it suited the Ashkenazi polemicist, that Zionism was born. As we have made clear in many of our discussions on the subject, Zionism was born in the cauldron of Balkan Sephardi rabbinism. Before there was Herzl, before there was a Zionist Congress, there were the rabbis Yehuda Alkalay and Yehuda Bibas. These noble men were concerned with the global situation and the way it would affect their Jewish brethren. With the impending collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the increased precariousness of Russian and Polish Jewry, these Balkan Sephardim articulated a concern that Jews should have a refuge to protect them against the depredations of the Gentiles who would victimize them.
Alkalay and Bibas wrote books and pamphlets that were spread throughout Europe and the Middle East. Some Jewish leaders agreed with them while others did not. The basic premise of Zionism at this point was not to compromise the rights of those living in the region, but to ensure the safety of Jews who were in danger.
As Zionism developed, the names Alkalay and Bibas were progressively, as would be the case with most Sephardic rabbis when faced with the obnoxious behavior of the Ashkenazim, living in a self-enclosed world of their own making, eliminated from the discussion. Soon enough, Zionism was taken over by European Jews, many of whom were outside Orthodoxy, and who lent to Zionism the Ashkenazi secular assimilationist patina that it has had ever since.
Moving back to our discussion of Maimonides and David Nieto, we must see that the cultural universe of the Sephardic rabbis was one of openness to the outside world in the face of Ashkenazi rejectionism. In fact, seeing things in this way would not be correct and would be to a certain extent misleading. The Sephardim did not react to the Ashkenazi provocations, but until the Modern age actually led the intellectual community of Jewish scholars and thinkers.
Both Maimonides and Nieto were major figures whose Jewish bona fides were impeccable. Their communities and followers produced many great works of scholarship and demanded Jewish fidelity and continuity on the basis of the rabbinic tradition. A rabbi such as Saul Levi Morteira, born in Italy and the chief rabbi of Sephardi Amsterdam, was an enlightened Ashkenazi of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical dynasty who took on the mindset and values of the Sephardim.
None of this meant very much to an Ashkenazi world that remained off-kilter in Jewish terms. The Ashkenazim had created a Jewish world insular and isolated. It was a world in which options, rational and otherwise, were unavailable to its members. You followed the so-called Da’as Torah, the legal strictures of the rabbis of the community, or you were deemed to be persona non grata.
Such a formulation depended on the absolute isolation of the community from the world at large. It provided the Ashkenazi rabbinic elite with a power that was akin to that of the Vatican in Christian culture. Sephardim were less dogmatic and preserved a larger sense of freedom for the individuals in their communities. Rather than being fixated on the minutiae of ritual behavior, Sephardi rabbis were more concerned with the morality of commercial and personal actions. The use of the anathema in the Sephardi world had more to do with criminally anti-social actions in the business realm rather than with ritual infractions.
Among the Ashkenazim, the ritual trumped the ethical. To this day, it is not at all a secret that the Ashkenazi Orthodox world is riddled with corruption and immorality from an ethical perspective. When ritual is elevated over the moral, when the ritual becomes the moral, a skewed system of values is generated. Attacks over what one believes become more important than the actual moral rightness of the person in question. And with this the obverse is also true: Ritual punctiliousness can serve to hide a multitude of moral sins, leading to the value of hypocrisy as a primary mechanism of religious activity in the Ashkenazi community.
Since the 19th century – and even a bit earlier if one counts the reformist movement of Rabbi Israel Salanter for the promotion of ethical values among the Yeshivah community – there has been an increasing sense that there is something afoul in the very fabric of the Ashkenazi Jewish world. Those Jews who considered themselves “Enlightened” sought to purify Judaism of the dreck of the hypocritical, but did so by sometimes throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
By rejecting the values of rabbinic Judaism and opting for a completely secular approach, in many cases the Maskilim lost their way in restoring the values of a Religious Humanism; a value-system that had been put into place in the first centuries of Judaism after the advent of Islam.
In the writings of Se’adya Ga’on, Bahye ibn Paquda and Maimonides and in the vast literary-poetic output of the Jews of Andalusia, we witness an outpouring of Jewish thought in the context of the new Humanistic learning of the Muslims which was an inheritance of the Greco-Roman tradition through the agency of Philo of Alexandria and the Church Fathers in the East.
Religious Humanism became the cornerstone of all Sephardic Jewish thinking; a blending of the parochial Jewish traditions of the Bible and Talmud with the larger speculative understanding of science and rational wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the rest of the great Hellenistic thinkers and scientists.
Ashkenazi Judaism around the time of Maimonides emphatically rejected this value-system of Religious Humanism and insisted that religion and humanism were incompatible systems of thought.
Hunkering deeper and deeper into the magical dogmas of Talmudic thought, the Ashkenazi rabbis were almost completely disconnected from the organic centers of rabbinic life during the High Middle Ages, whose primary language, Arabic, they did not understand. They had invented for themselves a strange new world that the great Sephardi political theorist Daniel J. Elazar has called the “Romantic” strain of Jewish culture which strove to replicate in an absolute and anachronistic sense the world of Sassanid Persia in which the Babylonian Talmud was composed and redacted.
And to this day, we can identify in the Ashkenazi Orthodox world a proclivity for anachronistic behavior, be it in dress, comportment or in its ahistorical sense.
Rather than encouraging, as Maimonides did, a dialogue between the new ideas and the old, the Ashkenazi valorized the old ideas without question while rejecting the new.
It was because of this fierce attachment to ahistoricism that Maimonides was attacked and eventually removed from the accepted list of Jewish authorities. It should not be forgotten that the anathema was not the only means used to attack Maimondes, but in addition we can look to the literary screeds of Abraham ben David, the RABAD, and Moses Nahmanides, Maimonides’ Spanish antagonist, that are now incorporated into the printed editions of Maimonides’ works. In the case of RABAD there is a deeply disturbing and almost-primal hatred of Maimonides that was transmitted to Spain by the learning of Ashkenazim that was passed through Nahmanides.
The spirit permeating these critiques of Maimonides is very pertinent to discussions of Sephardim and Ashkenazim. The odious nature of Steven Plaut and others like him has its conceptual roots in the disgusting and degenerate words of RABAD against Maimonides. It is a primal hate that disfigures a good deal of Ashkenazi theological discourse and may be seen on the street posters dotting billboards in places like Jerusalem, London and Brooklyn which say the most vicious and slanderous things about members of the community who have been deemed “heretics” – just as Maimonides was – and as we can continue to see if we read the standard editions of his works.
What is interesting is not only that Ashkenazim have availed themselves of such a crude manner of dealing with perceived conflict, but that they have infected Sephardim themselves.
In the midst of the discussion of Maimonides and his “heresies,” we see the unfortunate spectacle of Rabbi Meir Abulafia stuck in the thick of the controversy. And here we can note a change in the traditional Sephardic approach to Judaism and to intra-communal controversy that took place even as early as the 12th century.
Under the sometimes unrelenting pressures of an Ashkenazi world that fed off of dogmas and mystical prisons, Abulafia was one of the central figures in the propulsion of the Maimonidean Controversy. Even though he would repent of his role in this sorry episode towards the end of his life, the manner in which he and others such as Nahmanides and those of that Sephardi neo-Ashkenazi school dealt with Maimonides, perhaps the most brilliant and inspired mind in the whole of post-Talmudic rabbinism, was shameful. Maimonides is a figure who continues to inspire controversy, a man whose ideas and visions continue to be rejected in the sorry fundamentalism of the Ashkenazi Orthodox. The attacks on his pioneering work were something that led to the collapse of his revolution in Jewish culture.
Similar to the rejection of the Falsafa in Islamic civilization by religious fanatics after the era of Averroes, this Anti-Maimonideanism led to the victory, as Jose Faur has so brilliantly taught, of the forces of obscurantism in the Jewish world, the forces of Ashkenazi Orthodoxy; an Orthodoxy that sought to divorce itself from the world at large and from the specific strictures of personal ethics as seen in a humanistic perspective and universal fraternity among the peoples of the world.
This, in a nutshell, is what the fight that Steven Plaut is waging is all about; part of the continued attempt by Ashkenazim to demonize and stigmatize Sephardi rabbinic humanists.
Taking as his clarion call the term “Anti-Zionism” Plaut has already won his argument before he begins.
Ignoring the many and different ways in which the term “Zionism” signifies the national values of Jewish tradition, for people like Plaut Zionism is an Orthodox creed that one either “believes” in or does not – there is, as is the case with so much Ashkenazi thinking, no area for discussion.
The point here which pushes so many vulnerable Jewish buttons raises the specter of the Neturei Karta and their particular brand of Haredi Manicheanism when it comes to Zionism. It should be carefully noted that this primordial battle being waged between “Zionists” and “Anti-Zionists” is another example of the binary nature of the Ashkenazi weltanschauung. Extremist Zionism and its equally extreme antithesis are both reflections of an anti-rational understanding of reality that does not seek to see things as they are, but rather as they should be ideally.
In addition, the idea of “Guilt by Association” looms large in his critique. The Ashkenazi mentality frequently imputes to others what it itself holds – that if you cite a name or speak highly of some idea or person that you must needs agree with everything they say.
This canard was one that was used in both the Maimonides and Nieto cases. In the case of Maimonides, here was a rabbi who studied the writings of pagan philosophers such as Aristotle and had the temerity to present himself as a “Jew.” While we might not fully understand such a stance, it being part of a paranoid and irrational way of seeing the world, a world where ideas cannot be freely exchanged and debated, we need to be careful to understand that the Ashkenazi tradition is littered with many examples of such rejectionist behavior.
Writers such as Azariah de Rossi, Moses Mendelssohn, Leone Modena, David Gans and others discovered in the world a new way of seeing things and each was forced to pay the price of the Ashkenazi wrath of its rabbinic leadership. Ashkenazi Orthodoxy, like its Catholic counterpart, was constantly vigilant in ferreting out “heretics” and was on the constant lookout for deviations from what it considered to be the Jewish norm – the Da’as Torah.
In this sense, things have not much changed; just the media and the technology that can speed up the process and make the thing go global within a nanosecond.
Plaut’s attack on me for violating what he believes to be a sacrosanct Zionist Orthodoxy – like a nationalist variant on the Ghetto Judaism that attacked Maimonides – assumes that Judaism and Zionism – the Zionism of Plaut’s imagining – are one and the same thing.
Such a thing is not only idiotic but impractical. What if Zionism violates the strictures of decency and the tenets of Jewish tradition? What then are we left to do? Should we fold our tent and stop fighting for justice? Such questions bring to mind the conundrum of Franz Kafka; an Ashkenazi writer with a noble soul who could not bear the world into which he was born and wrote stories of characters who fought their accusers under a veil of obscurity and incoherence.
As in the ways of the Ashkenazi Shtetl, there is nothing for the accused to do but to exhibit absolute submission – as in the semiotic definition of the word “Islam” – to an unquestioned authority. Here Plaut is less “Jewish” and more like those Muslim “terrorists” that he frequently uses to tar others of “Guilt by Association.” Like the McCarthyites of old, Plaut constructs a series of interlocking syllogisms that will be understood by the readers of the Jewish Press, a kind of Pravda of Brooklyn Ashkenazi Orthodox Judaism, with names and keywords used that will push buttons in a demagogic fashion.
Plaut has identified such words and proper names that will signify for his readers some very precise things and reinforce for them the battle lines that have been drawn within a paranoid Zionist self-understanding. Bogeymen are generated to frighten and to caricature. These bogeymen have no substantive relation to the Jewish tradition, but only to the invented values of Ashkenazi Zionism; a Zionism that has been realized in the State of Israel, a place where White Ashkenazim have been privileged over Black Sephardim.
If the Negro Sephardi acquiesces to the White Ashkenazi Uber-Mensch, then things are okay – Sephardim, of course, are Plaut’s “best friends” – he is even married to one!
If the Negro Sephardi refuses to acquiesce to Plaut’s demagogic vision which he shares with the other followers of Meir Kahane, a Jewish racist whose own views of ethnicity emerged from a tragically warped appropriation of Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, then that Sephardi is ripe for the attack that he unleashed upon me and other Sephardim. Their views are dispensed with in spite of the deeply humane work that they have done to restore a modicum of dignity and self-respect to the Sephardic community.
And here it should be noted that Plaut is unconcerned with the sins perpetrated by Zionism, and by the Ashkenazim over many centuries against Sephardim.
Because of demographic realities, there is no doubt that the Ashkenazim represent – even after the tragedy of the Holocaust – the majority of the Jews worldwide. But interestingly, the demographic of Israel is not quite the same. And here Plaut’s racist argument regarding the assimilation of Sephardim into the Ashkenazi Israeli “melting pot” plays an important role: The more that the Sephardim blend into the “melting pot” – a misnomer, as the “melting pot” is really an adaptation to Ashkenazi culture and a relinquishing of the Sephardi culture – the more Ashkenazi they become and the more they abandon who they really are as human beings.
We know well why this is a point that uber-Zionists like Plaut would need to maintain: Held deeply in this Zionism is a fierce hatred of Arabs and a rabid Islamophobia. Rather than seeing the salient role that Arabic Islam played in the transformation of Judaism – as in the case of Maimonidean thought and the literary revolution in Spain which would both have been impossible without the culture of the Muslims – Plaut gives the game away when he accuses me of “adopting an Arab view of history and political reality.” The key to remember here is that there is an ongoing campaign – really, a war – that has sought to co-opt Jewish history and demand that it be understood in a very specific way that lends sole credence to the Ashkenazi Zionist vision.
This vision is one where Jews were persecuted at all times and in all places.
Particularly salient here is the role of the Arab peoples in the perpetuation of this eternal Anti-Semitism. Obscuring – sometimes purposefully – the many centuries of Christian genocide against Jews, Zionism was most particularly concerned with the Arab world which it had decided to oppose itself to. Going beyond the Sephardi Zionist vision of Alkalay and Bibas which sought Jewish national security in a rabbinic context, Herzlian Zionism was a deeply xenophobic and racist nationalism that took its cues from the European Christian nationalism of G.W.F. Hegel that divided the world into superior and inferior races.
Zionism was to restore to the Middle East a superior white, Jewish European entity that implicitly and at times explicitly rejected the culture and history of the region in which it was now situating itself in. Part of this vision was to reject the culture, traditions and history of the Sephardim. For these purposes, Zionist ideologues such as the historian Ben-Zion Dinur looked very carefully at the native history of Jews in the Middle East and cast that history in a nefarious manner that became a crucial fixture in the way Zionists were to perceive the Arab peoples.
Imposing a pattern of institutional and legalized Anti-Semitism in the Arab world where none had previously existed, Zionist polemicists took examples of civic inequity and elevated it to a position of absolute doctrine. The haphazard nature of discrimination against minorities in the Arab world was brought to the level of the actual doctrinal nature of such Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe. Endless arguments were engendered regarding the nature of Arab Anti-Semitism as a salient feature of life for the Jews of the Middle East.
Such a distortion of history is conveniently covered by polemicists like Plaut under the guise of a “Jewish” understanding of history, when actually it is a repudiation of Sephardic self-perception; a matter that has become manifest in our communities, in both Israel as well as the Diaspora, by the complete absence of proper pedagogical materials for the teaching of this history to the children in our Sephardic schools. It should be known that our Sephardic schools are mostly run by Ashkenazim, or Ashkenazi-trained Sephardim who abide the principles that Plaut espouses in his twisted way of thinking.
The victimization of the Sephardim is thus initiated by a historical process that began centuries ago with the attacks on Maimonides perpetuated by Ashkenazim and Sephardi neo-Ashkenazim like Nahmanides, and now continue into the contemporary era with the degradation of Sephardim in Israel under the rubric of Ma’abarot and Israel’s institutionalized policies of racism.
That things have changed is somewhat true. How they have changed is less clear. Much of the change has been less a matter of acceptance by Ashkenazim of the greatness and importance of the Sephardi heritage, but by the acceptance by Sephardim of their own inferiority and insignificance.
And here it is important to note how many Sephardim will continue to accept Plaut’s thesis and demonize activist Sephardim. Sephardi activists such as Yehouda Shenhav and Sami Shalom Chetrit mentioned by name in the article seek not simply to restore the dignity of the Sephardic history and tradition – and have been mercilessly attacked for it by Plaut, but just as significantly articulate the historical grievances of the Sephardim against a predatory Ashkenazi civilization that has not only done immeasurable damage to Sephardim in particular, but to Judaism as a whole.
We can recount the tragedies of the Sephardim in Israel that these writers have discussed: the Ma’abarot, the Yemenite Babies, the Ringworm Children, the destruction of families and the brutal racism that has kept Sephardi culture outside the mainstream of an Israel that seems to never be able to come to terms with the fact that the Sephardim represent the hated Arab culture of the “enemy.”
And it is this enemy that in the Ashkenazi mindset of someone like Steven Plaut becomes conflated into a monstrous hybrid of epic proportions: the Sephardi for Plaut, the Sephardi who is proud of being Sephardic and who rejects the injustice and cruelty perpetrated upon him by Ashkenazim – Zionist or otherwise, is to become an object of control and manipulation.
“Do what I say,” implies Plaut, “or you will suffer the consequences.”
And here we can point to so many tragic stories of Sephardi leaders and rabbis who have fought and failed. The reputation of Maimonides has been maintained – even as it has been perverted and transformed to mean something it was not meant to mean – but the reputation of his son Abraham and his massive encyclopedic compendia of Jewish law and lore is not anymore available; prey to the attacks on his illustrious father, Abraham Maimonides’ massive opus on Judaism, thought by the great scholar S.D. Goitein to have been one of the most important achievements of Medieval Judaism, is not anymore available except in a few fragments. Israeli schoolchildren are not taught the works of Moses ibn Ezra, a man who acculturated Jewish letters in an Arabic key. They are not taught the apologetic works of Conversos such as the brilliant polymath Isaac Cardoso, whose classic Los Excelencias y Calumnias De Los Hebreos echoes with the catastrophic persecutions of the Catholic Church, persecutions which should remind us that Jews must reject all forms of racism and persecution and must not build our nation on the backs of anyone else.
In the end, the paranoid delusions of Steven Plaut represent the rantings of a hater of humanity, the words of a Religious Nihilist that have nothing at all to do with Judaism.
In point of fact I find it completely fascinating that in all of his hateful verbiage he never seeks to refer to Jewish law as a means of establishing the guilt of those he wishes to march into his own Ashkenazi equivalent of the famous Auto-Da-Fe.
In Plaut’s Ashkenazi “Procession of Faith” we Sephardim are supposed to swear fealty to those who have persecuted us – not the Arabs with whom we lived for centuries and who our rabbis such as the late Haim Nahum Effendi defended – I can only imagine what Plaut would say of Hakham Nahum – who beseeched his Egyptian Jewish community to make peace with their environment and who died in 1960 in Cairo; a funeral attended by Islamic leaders and government officials.
We are not here to placate fanatics like Plaut or to acquiesce to the various forms of Ashkenazi Zionist blackmail. Our commitment as Sephardic Jews is to the venerable and holy traditions of our forefathers. We have been degraded by Right Wing racists like Plaut and his Kahanist contingent of Brownshirts just as we have been marginalized by the Amos Ozes and Shimon Pereses of the world who call us “primitive” and “barbaric.” Interestingly, this very same canard of Sephardi “primitivism” is leveled by Plaut when he links the process of “Ashkenazification” of the Sephardim to adapting modern ways; as if the Sephardim lived in caves until they came to Israel and were exposed to the ways of the White Europeans.
In point of fact, the Sephardim were “modern” way before the Ashkenazim; the Maimonidean Controversy and its aftermath provide ample evidence of Ashkenazi backwardness. If this were not enough, the atavistic racism and primordial hate of such fanatics puts into question their own relationship to modernity.
Our commitment to Judaism and to the noble Sephardic heritage is not to be handled in the cowered and frightened manner that many Sephardim have chosen to handle it in the past – a strategy that has led us into the cul-de-sac we find ourselves in. We will not acquiesce to the blackmail and not be frightened by the bullying tactics of those who claim to be our friends but who in truth could care less about us. So long as the Sephardim represent a bulwark against the Arab, and in particular the Palestinian Arab, then things are cool.
But once the Sephardi begins to talk back and not remain docile and silent in the face of the butchery that has been done to us – and which we have sadly ingested and accepted as a way to run our own communities, insulting so many centuries of cultural greatness –then the Plauts of the world unload the Ashkenazi arsenal of bile and anathema that has been at the disposal of such miscreants for many generations.
Perpetuating the traditions of Sephardic rabbinic humanism has been a dangerous thing ever since the first ban was proclaimed on Maimonides.
As Jose Faur has taught us, the ban proclaimed on Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed led to the book being turned over to the Catholic Church which burned it. Within a generation of the burning of Maimonides’ holy book, the Church burned the Talmud. And while all this book-burning was happening, the Church was in the midst of a Crusade, a jihad, a religious Holy War, to take Jerusalem from the Muslims and along the way those great and noble Crusaders killed, raped and mauled as many Ashkenazi Jews as they could lay their hands on.
In the end, the Ashkenazim are a people who have no real sense of who they are and what they are doing. They whine, scream and carry on like little babies – as we see in Plaut’s screed – all the while they ignore the actual problems that we as Jews face. Screaming about Anti-Semitism in America, Jews today do not seem to understand the greatness of America – a place that many Zionists and Orthodox Jews degrade by their disrespect for the culture and traditions of this great and noble land – and are insistent about creating Shtetls and Ghettos wherever they go.
They behave in abominable and disgraceful ways and make their disgusting behavior quite public. They try to stifle all free discourse in favor of a purely Stalinist way of dealing with dissent. Those who have the audacity and temerity to speak up and speak out are bullied into silence.
And yet there are some us who refuse to give in.
David Shasha
Ashkenazim Using Sephardim for Target Practice: Maimonides to the Present
I initially felt that it would be best not to respond to the calumnies and slanders of Steven Plaut’s article published in the January 10, 2007 edition of the Jewish Press, but after receiving a number of e-mails asking me to comment, I thought that perhaps out of bad things good things could come.
When they are not attacking one another, the tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of slandering and anathematizing their Sephardi cousins is part and parcel of their culture. With the formal bans that were proscribed against Maimonides, bans that were written and promulgated in Spain under the watchful eye and influence of the rabbis of the Rhineland and France, a glass ceiling was broken that would find many Sephardi Sages on the losing end of Ashkenazi rhetorical and religious violence throughout history.
The Maimonidean Controversy is often glossed over by Orthodox Jews who have amazingly appropriated the name “Maimonides” as a prime representative of an Orthodoxy that he himself never espoused, an Orthodoxy that he questioned with his use of philosophy, science and comparative study of religious traditions in the context of a resolute rabbinism. This controversy should never be that far away from our minds when we confront the hateful nature of Ashkenazi discourse.
One of the prime recipients of this hateful treatment was the great Sephardi Sage of London, Rabbi David Nieto, whose works on Judaism presented the Ashkenazim of his day with immeasurable conundrums and which ended up forcing upon him an anathema – in Hebrew, Herem. Nieto had to waste his time defending himself against the Herem even though he was perhaps the most brilliant and inspired Jewish thinker of his time, a man equally conversant in the works of Isaac Newton and the Talmud.
Ashkenazim, having adopted a number of critical Christian values central to their way of conceiving and practicing Judaism, articulated their concerns in terms of a set of dogmas that could not be breached. Such a concern for Orthodoxy, the correct way of thinking, a term anathema to the Maimonidean tradition of critical thought, placed Ashkenazi rabbis and leaders in the remarkable position of constantly making use of the anathema for religious rather than social reasons. Frequently the anathema would be marked by Christian-like provocations such as Imputation of Sin, Guilt by Association and, the worst of all, Inquisition.
As the Ashkenazi world broke off into bitter and acrimonious factions in the 19th century, formal mechanisms of Orthodoxy and Reform were instituted in different sectors of the community. The historical books of Heinrich Graetz were deemed impermissible for Orthodox readers, while Reformers sought to tear down the ritual strictures of Halakhah such as Kashrut, Sabbath restrictions and the like. The 19th century was a conflicted Ashkenazi age of Haskalah and Orthodoxy, of Reform and Fundamentalism.
It was into this world, a world that had almost completely ignored the Sephardi component of Jewish civilization – except to make use of such Sephardi culture when it suited the Ashkenazi polemicist, that Zionism was born. As we have made clear in many of our discussions on the subject, Zionism was born in the cauldron of Balkan Sephardi rabbinism. Before there was Herzl, before there was a Zionist Congress, there were the rabbis Yehuda Alkalay and Yehuda Bibas. These noble men were concerned with the global situation and the way it would affect their Jewish brethren. With the impending collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the increased precariousness of Russian and Polish Jewry, these Balkan Sephardim articulated a concern that Jews should have a refuge to protect them against the depredations of the Gentiles who would victimize them.
Alkalay and Bibas wrote books and pamphlets that were spread throughout Europe and the Middle East. Some Jewish leaders agreed with them while others did not. The basic premise of Zionism at this point was not to compromise the rights of those living in the region, but to ensure the safety of Jews who were in danger.
As Zionism developed, the names Alkalay and Bibas were progressively, as would be the case with most Sephardic rabbis when faced with the obnoxious behavior of the Ashkenazim, living in a self-enclosed world of their own making, eliminated from the discussion. Soon enough, Zionism was taken over by European Jews, many of whom were outside Orthodoxy, and who lent to Zionism the Ashkenazi secular assimilationist patina that it has had ever since.
Moving back to our discussion of Maimonides and David Nieto, we must see that the cultural universe of the Sephardic rabbis was one of openness to the outside world in the face of Ashkenazi rejectionism. In fact, seeing things in this way would not be correct and would be to a certain extent misleading. The Sephardim did not react to the Ashkenazi provocations, but until the Modern age actually led the intellectual community of Jewish scholars and thinkers.
Both Maimonides and Nieto were major figures whose Jewish bona fides were impeccable. Their communities and followers produced many great works of scholarship and demanded Jewish fidelity and continuity on the basis of the rabbinic tradition. A rabbi such as Saul Levi Morteira, born in Italy and the chief rabbi of Sephardi Amsterdam, was an enlightened Ashkenazi of the Katzenellenbogen rabbinical dynasty who took on the mindset and values of the Sephardim.
None of this meant very much to an Ashkenazi world that remained off-kilter in Jewish terms. The Ashkenazim had created a Jewish world insular and isolated. It was a world in which options, rational and otherwise, were unavailable to its members. You followed the so-called Da’as Torah, the legal strictures of the rabbis of the community, or you were deemed to be persona non grata.
Such a formulation depended on the absolute isolation of the community from the world at large. It provided the Ashkenazi rabbinic elite with a power that was akin to that of the Vatican in Christian culture. Sephardim were less dogmatic and preserved a larger sense of freedom for the individuals in their communities. Rather than being fixated on the minutiae of ritual behavior, Sephardi rabbis were more concerned with the morality of commercial and personal actions. The use of the anathema in the Sephardi world had more to do with criminally anti-social actions in the business realm rather than with ritual infractions.
Among the Ashkenazim, the ritual trumped the ethical. To this day, it is not at all a secret that the Ashkenazi Orthodox world is riddled with corruption and immorality from an ethical perspective. When ritual is elevated over the moral, when the ritual becomes the moral, a skewed system of values is generated. Attacks over what one believes become more important than the actual moral rightness of the person in question. And with this the obverse is also true: Ritual punctiliousness can serve to hide a multitude of moral sins, leading to the value of hypocrisy as a primary mechanism of religious activity in the Ashkenazi community.
Since the 19th century – and even a bit earlier if one counts the reformist movement of Rabbi Israel Salanter for the promotion of ethical values among the Yeshivah community – there has been an increasing sense that there is something afoul in the very fabric of the Ashkenazi Jewish world. Those Jews who considered themselves “Enlightened” sought to purify Judaism of the dreck of the hypocritical, but did so by sometimes throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
By rejecting the values of rabbinic Judaism and opting for a completely secular approach, in many cases the Maskilim lost their way in restoring the values of a Religious Humanism; a value-system that had been put into place in the first centuries of Judaism after the advent of Islam.
In the writings of Se’adya Ga’on, Bahye ibn Paquda and Maimonides and in the vast literary-poetic output of the Jews of Andalusia, we witness an outpouring of Jewish thought in the context of the new Humanistic learning of the Muslims which was an inheritance of the Greco-Roman tradition through the agency of Philo of Alexandria and the Church Fathers in the East.
Religious Humanism became the cornerstone of all Sephardic Jewish thinking; a blending of the parochial Jewish traditions of the Bible and Talmud with the larger speculative understanding of science and rational wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the rest of the great Hellenistic thinkers and scientists.
Ashkenazi Judaism around the time of Maimonides emphatically rejected this value-system of Religious Humanism and insisted that religion and humanism were incompatible systems of thought.
Hunkering deeper and deeper into the magical dogmas of Talmudic thought, the Ashkenazi rabbis were almost completely disconnected from the organic centers of rabbinic life during the High Middle Ages, whose primary language, Arabic, they did not understand. They had invented for themselves a strange new world that the great Sephardi political theorist Daniel J. Elazar has called the “Romantic” strain of Jewish culture which strove to replicate in an absolute and anachronistic sense the world of Sassanid Persia in which the Babylonian Talmud was composed and redacted.
And to this day, we can identify in the Ashkenazi Orthodox world a proclivity for anachronistic behavior, be it in dress, comportment or in its ahistorical sense.
Rather than encouraging, as Maimonides did, a dialogue between the new ideas and the old, the Ashkenazi valorized the old ideas without question while rejecting the new.
It was because of this fierce attachment to ahistoricism that Maimonides was attacked and eventually removed from the accepted list of Jewish authorities. It should not be forgotten that the anathema was not the only means used to attack Maimondes, but in addition we can look to the literary screeds of Abraham ben David, the RABAD, and Moses Nahmanides, Maimonides’ Spanish antagonist, that are now incorporated into the printed editions of Maimonides’ works. In the case of RABAD there is a deeply disturbing and almost-primal hatred of Maimonides that was transmitted to Spain by the learning of Ashkenazim that was passed through Nahmanides.
The spirit permeating these critiques of Maimonides is very pertinent to discussions of Sephardim and Ashkenazim. The odious nature of Steven Plaut and others like him has its conceptual roots in the disgusting and degenerate words of RABAD against Maimonides. It is a primal hate that disfigures a good deal of Ashkenazi theological discourse and may be seen on the street posters dotting billboards in places like Jerusalem, London and Brooklyn which say the most vicious and slanderous things about members of the community who have been deemed “heretics” – just as Maimonides was – and as we can continue to see if we read the standard editions of his works.
What is interesting is not only that Ashkenazim have availed themselves of such a crude manner of dealing with perceived conflict, but that they have infected Sephardim themselves.
In the midst of the discussion of Maimonides and his “heresies,” we see the unfortunate spectacle of Rabbi Meir Abulafia stuck in the thick of the controversy. And here we can note a change in the traditional Sephardic approach to Judaism and to intra-communal controversy that took place even as early as the 12th century.
Under the sometimes unrelenting pressures of an Ashkenazi world that fed off of dogmas and mystical prisons, Abulafia was one of the central figures in the propulsion of the Maimonidean Controversy. Even though he would repent of his role in this sorry episode towards the end of his life, the manner in which he and others such as Nahmanides and those of that Sephardi neo-Ashkenazi school dealt with Maimonides, perhaps the most brilliant and inspired mind in the whole of post-Talmudic rabbinism, was shameful. Maimonides is a figure who continues to inspire controversy, a man whose ideas and visions continue to be rejected in the sorry fundamentalism of the Ashkenazi Orthodox. The attacks on his pioneering work were something that led to the collapse of his revolution in Jewish culture.
Similar to the rejection of the Falsafa in Islamic civilization by religious fanatics after the era of Averroes, this Anti-Maimonideanism led to the victory, as Jose Faur has so brilliantly taught, of the forces of obscurantism in the Jewish world, the forces of Ashkenazi Orthodoxy; an Orthodoxy that sought to divorce itself from the world at large and from the specific strictures of personal ethics as seen in a humanistic perspective and universal fraternity among the peoples of the world.
This, in a nutshell, is what the fight that Steven Plaut is waging is all about; part of the continued attempt by Ashkenazim to demonize and stigmatize Sephardi rabbinic humanists.
Taking as his clarion call the term “Anti-Zionism” Plaut has already won his argument before he begins.
Ignoring the many and different ways in which the term “Zionism” signifies the national values of Jewish tradition, for people like Plaut Zionism is an Orthodox creed that one either “believes” in or does not – there is, as is the case with so much Ashkenazi thinking, no area for discussion.
The point here which pushes so many vulnerable Jewish buttons raises the specter of the Neturei Karta and their particular brand of Haredi Manicheanism when it comes to Zionism. It should be carefully noted that this primordial battle being waged between “Zionists” and “Anti-Zionists” is another example of the binary nature of the Ashkenazi weltanschauung. Extremist Zionism and its equally extreme antithesis are both reflections of an anti-rational understanding of reality that does not seek to see things as they are, but rather as they should be ideally.
In addition, the idea of “Guilt by Association” looms large in his critique. The Ashkenazi mentality frequently imputes to others what it itself holds – that if you cite a name or speak highly of some idea or person that you must needs agree with everything they say.
This canard was one that was used in both the Maimonides and Nieto cases. In the case of Maimonides, here was a rabbi who studied the writings of pagan philosophers such as Aristotle and had the temerity to present himself as a “Jew.” While we might not fully understand such a stance, it being part of a paranoid and irrational way of seeing the world, a world where ideas cannot be freely exchanged and debated, we need to be careful to understand that the Ashkenazi tradition is littered with many examples of such rejectionist behavior.
Writers such as Azariah de Rossi, Moses Mendelssohn, Leone Modena, David Gans and others discovered in the world a new way of seeing things and each was forced to pay the price of the Ashkenazi wrath of its rabbinic leadership. Ashkenazi Orthodoxy, like its Catholic counterpart, was constantly vigilant in ferreting out “heretics” and was on the constant lookout for deviations from what it considered to be the Jewish norm – the Da’as Torah.
In this sense, things have not much changed; just the media and the technology that can speed up the process and make the thing go global within a nanosecond.
Plaut’s attack on me for violating what he believes to be a sacrosanct Zionist Orthodoxy – like a nationalist variant on the Ghetto Judaism that attacked Maimonides – assumes that Judaism and Zionism – the Zionism of Plaut’s imagining – are one and the same thing.
Such a thing is not only idiotic but impractical. What if Zionism violates the strictures of decency and the tenets of Jewish tradition? What then are we left to do? Should we fold our tent and stop fighting for justice? Such questions bring to mind the conundrum of Franz Kafka; an Ashkenazi writer with a noble soul who could not bear the world into which he was born and wrote stories of characters who fought their accusers under a veil of obscurity and incoherence.
As in the ways of the Ashkenazi Shtetl, there is nothing for the accused to do but to exhibit absolute submission – as in the semiotic definition of the word “Islam” – to an unquestioned authority. Here Plaut is less “Jewish” and more like those Muslim “terrorists” that he frequently uses to tar others of “Guilt by Association.” Like the McCarthyites of old, Plaut constructs a series of interlocking syllogisms that will be understood by the readers of the Jewish Press, a kind of Pravda of Brooklyn Ashkenazi Orthodox Judaism, with names and keywords used that will push buttons in a demagogic fashion.
Plaut has identified such words and proper names that will signify for his readers some very precise things and reinforce for them the battle lines that have been drawn within a paranoid Zionist self-understanding. Bogeymen are generated to frighten and to caricature. These bogeymen have no substantive relation to the Jewish tradition, but only to the invented values of Ashkenazi Zionism; a Zionism that has been realized in the State of Israel, a place where White Ashkenazim have been privileged over Black Sephardim.
If the Negro Sephardi acquiesces to the White Ashkenazi Uber-Mensch, then things are okay – Sephardim, of course, are Plaut’s “best friends” – he is even married to one!
If the Negro Sephardi refuses to acquiesce to Plaut’s demagogic vision which he shares with the other followers of Meir Kahane, a Jewish racist whose own views of ethnicity emerged from a tragically warped appropriation of Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, then that Sephardi is ripe for the attack that he unleashed upon me and other Sephardim. Their views are dispensed with in spite of the deeply humane work that they have done to restore a modicum of dignity and self-respect to the Sephardic community.
And here it should be noted that Plaut is unconcerned with the sins perpetrated by Zionism, and by the Ashkenazim over many centuries against Sephardim.
Because of demographic realities, there is no doubt that the Ashkenazim represent – even after the tragedy of the Holocaust – the majority of the Jews worldwide. But interestingly, the demographic of Israel is not quite the same. And here Plaut’s racist argument regarding the assimilation of Sephardim into the Ashkenazi Israeli “melting pot” plays an important role: The more that the Sephardim blend into the “melting pot” – a misnomer, as the “melting pot” is really an adaptation to Ashkenazi culture and a relinquishing of the Sephardi culture – the more Ashkenazi they become and the more they abandon who they really are as human beings.
We know well why this is a point that uber-Zionists like Plaut would need to maintain: Held deeply in this Zionism is a fierce hatred of Arabs and a rabid Islamophobia. Rather than seeing the salient role that Arabic Islam played in the transformation of Judaism – as in the case of Maimonidean thought and the literary revolution in Spain which would both have been impossible without the culture of the Muslims – Plaut gives the game away when he accuses me of “adopting an Arab view of history and political reality.” The key to remember here is that there is an ongoing campaign – really, a war – that has sought to co-opt Jewish history and demand that it be understood in a very specific way that lends sole credence to the Ashkenazi Zionist vision.
This vision is one where Jews were persecuted at all times and in all places.
Particularly salient here is the role of the Arab peoples in the perpetuation of this eternal Anti-Semitism. Obscuring – sometimes purposefully – the many centuries of Christian genocide against Jews, Zionism was most particularly concerned with the Arab world which it had decided to oppose itself to. Going beyond the Sephardi Zionist vision of Alkalay and Bibas which sought Jewish national security in a rabbinic context, Herzlian Zionism was a deeply xenophobic and racist nationalism that took its cues from the European Christian nationalism of G.W.F. Hegel that divided the world into superior and inferior races.
Zionism was to restore to the Middle East a superior white, Jewish European entity that implicitly and at times explicitly rejected the culture and history of the region in which it was now situating itself in. Part of this vision was to reject the culture, traditions and history of the Sephardim. For these purposes, Zionist ideologues such as the historian Ben-Zion Dinur looked very carefully at the native history of Jews in the Middle East and cast that history in a nefarious manner that became a crucial fixture in the way Zionists were to perceive the Arab peoples.
Imposing a pattern of institutional and legalized Anti-Semitism in the Arab world where none had previously existed, Zionist polemicists took examples of civic inequity and elevated it to a position of absolute doctrine. The haphazard nature of discrimination against minorities in the Arab world was brought to the level of the actual doctrinal nature of such Anti-Semitism in Christian Europe. Endless arguments were engendered regarding the nature of Arab Anti-Semitism as a salient feature of life for the Jews of the Middle East.
Such a distortion of history is conveniently covered by polemicists like Plaut under the guise of a “Jewish” understanding of history, when actually it is a repudiation of Sephardic self-perception; a matter that has become manifest in our communities, in both Israel as well as the Diaspora, by the complete absence of proper pedagogical materials for the teaching of this history to the children in our Sephardic schools. It should be known that our Sephardic schools are mostly run by Ashkenazim, or Ashkenazi-trained Sephardim who abide the principles that Plaut espouses in his twisted way of thinking.
The victimization of the Sephardim is thus initiated by a historical process that began centuries ago with the attacks on Maimonides perpetuated by Ashkenazim and Sephardi neo-Ashkenazim like Nahmanides, and now continue into the contemporary era with the degradation of Sephardim in Israel under the rubric of Ma’abarot and Israel’s institutionalized policies of racism.
That things have changed is somewhat true. How they have changed is less clear. Much of the change has been less a matter of acceptance by Ashkenazim of the greatness and importance of the Sephardi heritage, but by the acceptance by Sephardim of their own inferiority and insignificance.
And here it is important to note how many Sephardim will continue to accept Plaut’s thesis and demonize activist Sephardim. Sephardi activists such as Yehouda Shenhav and Sami Shalom Chetrit mentioned by name in the article seek not simply to restore the dignity of the Sephardic history and tradition – and have been mercilessly attacked for it by Plaut, but just as significantly articulate the historical grievances of the Sephardim against a predatory Ashkenazi civilization that has not only done immeasurable damage to Sephardim in particular, but to Judaism as a whole.
We can recount the tragedies of the Sephardim in Israel that these writers have discussed: the Ma’abarot, the Yemenite Babies, the Ringworm Children, the destruction of families and the brutal racism that has kept Sephardi culture outside the mainstream of an Israel that seems to never be able to come to terms with the fact that the Sephardim represent the hated Arab culture of the “enemy.”
And it is this enemy that in the Ashkenazi mindset of someone like Steven Plaut becomes conflated into a monstrous hybrid of epic proportions: the Sephardi for Plaut, the Sephardi who is proud of being Sephardic and who rejects the injustice and cruelty perpetrated upon him by Ashkenazim – Zionist or otherwise, is to become an object of control and manipulation.
“Do what I say,” implies Plaut, “or you will suffer the consequences.”
And here we can point to so many tragic stories of Sephardi leaders and rabbis who have fought and failed. The reputation of Maimonides has been maintained – even as it has been perverted and transformed to mean something it was not meant to mean – but the reputation of his son Abraham and his massive encyclopedic compendia of Jewish law and lore is not anymore available; prey to the attacks on his illustrious father, Abraham Maimonides’ massive opus on Judaism, thought by the great scholar S.D. Goitein to have been one of the most important achievements of Medieval Judaism, is not anymore available except in a few fragments. Israeli schoolchildren are not taught the works of Moses ibn Ezra, a man who acculturated Jewish letters in an Arabic key. They are not taught the apologetic works of Conversos such as the brilliant polymath Isaac Cardoso, whose classic Los Excelencias y Calumnias De Los Hebreos echoes with the catastrophic persecutions of the Catholic Church, persecutions which should remind us that Jews must reject all forms of racism and persecution and must not build our nation on the backs of anyone else.
In the end, the paranoid delusions of Steven Plaut represent the rantings of a hater of humanity, the words of a Religious Nihilist that have nothing at all to do with Judaism.
In point of fact I find it completely fascinating that in all of his hateful verbiage he never seeks to refer to Jewish law as a means of establishing the guilt of those he wishes to march into his own Ashkenazi equivalent of the famous Auto-Da-Fe.
In Plaut’s Ashkenazi “Procession of Faith” we Sephardim are supposed to swear fealty to those who have persecuted us – not the Arabs with whom we lived for centuries and who our rabbis such as the late Haim Nahum Effendi defended – I can only imagine what Plaut would say of Hakham Nahum – who beseeched his Egyptian Jewish community to make peace with their environment and who died in 1960 in Cairo; a funeral attended by Islamic leaders and government officials.
We are not here to placate fanatics like Plaut or to acquiesce to the various forms of Ashkenazi Zionist blackmail. Our commitment as Sephardic Jews is to the venerable and holy traditions of our forefathers. We have been degraded by Right Wing racists like Plaut and his Kahanist contingent of Brownshirts just as we have been marginalized by the Amos Ozes and Shimon Pereses of the world who call us “primitive” and “barbaric.” Interestingly, this very same canard of Sephardi “primitivism” is leveled by Plaut when he links the process of “Ashkenazification” of the Sephardim to adapting modern ways; as if the Sephardim lived in caves until they came to Israel and were exposed to the ways of the White Europeans.
In point of fact, the Sephardim were “modern” way before the Ashkenazim; the Maimonidean Controversy and its aftermath provide ample evidence of Ashkenazi backwardness. If this were not enough, the atavistic racism and primordial hate of such fanatics puts into question their own relationship to modernity.
Our commitment to Judaism and to the noble Sephardic heritage is not to be handled in the cowered and frightened manner that many Sephardim have chosen to handle it in the past – a strategy that has led us into the cul-de-sac we find ourselves in. We will not acquiesce to the blackmail and not be frightened by the bullying tactics of those who claim to be our friends but who in truth could care less about us. So long as the Sephardim represent a bulwark against the Arab, and in particular the Palestinian Arab, then things are cool.
But once the Sephardi begins to talk back and not remain docile and silent in the face of the butchery that has been done to us – and which we have sadly ingested and accepted as a way to run our own communities, insulting so many centuries of cultural greatness –then the Plauts of the world unload the Ashkenazi arsenal of bile and anathema that has been at the disposal of such miscreants for many generations.
Perpetuating the traditions of Sephardic rabbinic humanism has been a dangerous thing ever since the first ban was proclaimed on Maimonides.
As Jose Faur has taught us, the ban proclaimed on Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed led to the book being turned over to the Catholic Church which burned it. Within a generation of the burning of Maimonides’ holy book, the Church burned the Talmud. And while all this book-burning was happening, the Church was in the midst of a Crusade, a jihad, a religious Holy War, to take Jerusalem from the Muslims and along the way those great and noble Crusaders killed, raped and mauled as many Ashkenazi Jews as they could lay their hands on.
In the end, the Ashkenazim are a people who have no real sense of who they are and what they are doing. They whine, scream and carry on like little babies – as we see in Plaut’s screed – all the while they ignore the actual problems that we as Jews face. Screaming about Anti-Semitism in America, Jews today do not seem to understand the greatness of America – a place that many Zionists and Orthodox Jews degrade by their disrespect for the culture and traditions of this great and noble land – and are insistent about creating Shtetls and Ghettos wherever they go.
They behave in abominable and disgraceful ways and make their disgusting behavior quite public. They try to stifle all free discourse in favor of a purely Stalinist way of dealing with dissent. Those who have the audacity and temerity to speak up and speak out are bullied into silence.
And yet there are some us who refuse to give in.
David Shasha
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The history of pogroms and various terrorisms against Jews in Poland stretch back o before Poland, as we know it, existed. The ones in the 1800s in Warsaw and related places, then part of the Russian empire, are well known.SAM said:
The only reason to single out Poland (Romania, for example, where the Gypsies seem to have originated, was if anything worse) is that the thread chose that country, and that is where the Nazis found suitable locale for setting up the great killing camps of WWII.
Of course the Depression played a role. But anti-Semitic violence and oppression is no recent innovation, anywhere in Europe.
Impressive. :m:The Puritans were not the major pioneers of America, and were not fleeing persecution so much as searching for an arena to establish persecution by their own lights. It was Cromwell's persecution of the Irish and Scots, and his rigorous Puritan authoritarian regime, not the COE's persecution of the Puritans, that set the stage for future rebellion. If you want to trace the religious roots and support of the American Revolution, your major topic is the Scottish Reformation and the Presbyterian Church, not a backwoods cult of witch-hanging blackhats in Massachusetts
it irks that descendants of those turncoats still remain here in america to this day! we should have hung everyone of those damn loyalist pigs thus preventing them from spawning
umm, ice
you scotch-irish?
/taps
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And Presbyterian. But we long ago forgave the Highlanders and other Loyalists, after burning them out of course,gustav said:
("Tories with their brats and wives
should fly to save their worthless lives" - the boat people who fled Washington's triumphant "army", tens of thousands in fear back across the North Atlantic in the dead of winter)
because they supplied the culture and romance and pride and legend and music and other all-important bullshit. The Scotch-Irish were kind of, how does one put it, - thugs. Not true Scotsmen, you understand.
One of the intriguing parallels between the Scotch-Irish and the Jews, which may shed some light on the current mysterious alliance between Israel and the old Confederacy, is their historical lack of a country they can call their own, ethnically.
There are many nomadic tribes with no homelands. The Roma for example, they rotate between certain limited known lands and seem not to believe in land ownership. I tend to believe that land ownership is a consequence of agrarian settlements which is where the most evident signs of what we call civilisation and cities are seen through history. I think the desire of some of these non-agragrian tribes for settlements is a reflection of the loss of movement due to these settlements.
If only they had been left alone, rather than excoriated for their natural underpinnings.
Eif only zey vere like us!
Thats not been a problem in India. Obviously Europeans have their own issues with ethnocentrism/racism to resolve. Look at how they fear Muslim immigrants today, when its NATO invading and occupying other countries with military force.
- Status