"Israel" is a theological concept meaning the "the whole of the people of Judaism." It should not mean "the lands currently occupied or blockaded by the Zionist Entity" (TLCOOBBTZE), but usually does nowadays. In this article, I'll just shorten and neutralize TLCOOBBTZE to "The Place That Must Not Be Named" (TPTMNBN). Whatever name we give it is just going to make somebody angry so we might as well not give it a name at all. Through it's history, TPTMNBN has gone by many different names, or has been divided up in various different ways. Usually, the biggest and baddest empire of the time gave it the then-current name, whatever that was, if not two names over a span of time, in the language that particular empire spoke. Such empires have included nearly every one in the West that has come down the pike from hell in the last 4000 years. Nearly every one has lusted for TPTMNBN if not conquered it. Jerusalem has been reconquered 44 times. Just a few of those times were by Hebrews, or Jews who never actually controlled TPTMNBN completely or for very long. The Phoenecians were the greatest of the empires created by those who are apparently the true indigenous of the region, the Canaanites. "Canaan" and "Palestine" are rooted in names for "purple" in different languages. Phoenecian Canaanites got rich and famous around the world in the Bronze Age for selling purple dye and people said Canaanites even looked purple. Who are the descendants of Canaanites? The closest descendants are Samarians and Lebonese and Palestinians. European Jews are considerably less related. Ultimately, we are all related...the Phoenecian empire was so long ago all humans alive are to some degree descended from Phonecians especially in the western hemisphere., and the Phoenicians really got around too. Jerusalem was named and built by Phoencians. They named it after the Canaanite Goddess of Evening and Peace. It was a solidly built and fortified city with a (very rare at the time) fortified water supply (through which David and his militia entered the city) when it was first conquered by a Hebrew King David whose patriarch Abraham was alleged to have been from Ur in Sumeria (now Iraq). ("Judaism," as such didn't exist. King David was not a Jew, he was a Hebrew. By his own story, he was only of mixed Canaanite (indigenous) descent, and was at first an attacker--and later a client--of the nearby Canaanite Phoencian empire which also lasted though the era of Davidian Kings...both Phoenecia and the northern part of TPTMNBN were conquered by the Assyrians at about the same time. Judah, the smaller area around Jerusalem, remained for awhile until conquered by the Babylonians, then some leading religious and other people were taken into captivity But later, only the Jewish Temple was reconstructed with funding from Persia to become a religious client presence. Surely no new empire wanted to re-assemble the Phoeneican Empire and all its gods.)
"Jew" means a person of Judaism. The "people of Judaism" is a fairly broad concept because each person is individually responsible for living up to the laws of Judaism. We don't have to decide whether a Jew is a Good Jew or not, it's not ours to decide. So Jew means someone who is a practicing Jew, or one of their children or descendants (since practicing Jews will also bring up their children in Judaism, etc). However, each person is individually responsible for their own such 'practice,' it can include those who have stopped practicing, were never brought into Judaism because their parents didn't practice it well enough, or have become non believers, atheists, etc.
Now, Israel sets a practical limit of the fraction of Judaic descent one must have in order to be considered (by them) to be Jewish. But the Torah covenants actually apply to all generations of descent. That means if you have even the least bit of Jewish ancestry you're Jewish, by Torah rules. That pretty much means all humans are covered by the Judaic covenants by this point. If there was really an Abraham 3500 years ago or whatever, who has living descendants today, the probability is above 99% or more for each of us that we among them, and the same is true for descent from his sons Isaac and Ishmael Human descent works that way, spreading way outwards over hundreds of generations, and helped by a 5% rate of false paternity. Jews have also done even better than Phoeneicans in getting all around the world. At 3000 years we are all descended from anyone of that time or before who has living descendants. At around 2000 years, the time of Jesus, the probability of direct descent is well above 90%.
(Now, you might argue, this only applies to maternal descent, so one non-Jewish great grandmother and you're out...but the same rules that I just elaborated on would apply to her, meaning she'd almost certainly be a descendant of Abraham too, etc. Also it turns out that the Maternal Descent rule wasn't always followed, anyway, etc.)
There is no central authority in Judaism either, there are many different 'movements,' including Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and many others. Each Rabbi is ordained by another Rabbi, not a central authority, so such divergence is natural in the interpretations of holy books and probably desirable, generally.
However, the Zionist disaster (a genocidal monster created initially by non-practicing Jews and bitterly opposed by practicing Jews, but which ultimately came to be accepted by a wide swath of Jews, even many Orthodox) should engage a re-thinking, which might as well start now, while all good people are trying to neutralize the Zionist monster, that is eating Jewish human minds as well as Jewish and Palestinian bodies.
Where did it all go wrong? How did the people of Judaism, following the rules which are supposed to peacefully heal the world, end up becoming some of history's worst war criminals?
It has seemed to me that the rabbinic movement which ultimately created the Mishnah and Talmud was largely inspired by the failure of the Bar Kochba Revolt, which was universally denounced by the rabbinate immediately afterwards (as it should have been, as it resulted in mass conversions away from Judaism in Judea). The new expanded laws and commentaries in Rabbinic and Talmudic Judaism attempt to reinforce the earlier writings (ignored by Bar Kochba and his rabbis) that Jews must not attempt to 'retake' the 'Land of Israel' by human means. So this prohibition is written in, not as Jeremiah's debatable metaphors, but as The Three Oaths. Right there, it says "Don't Do Zionism." Later, other passages reinforce the message: "Wait until the Messiah heals the entire world, when there is no war or oppression , and all people will be Jews. Then G_D will provide the Temple for all people."
However, after the Holocaust, other passages in Talmud were often accepted as meaning 'the time had come for this anyway.'
BTW, the Talmud was written in Babylonia, which had become THE center for Jews in the first millenium AD. But Jews had already been almost everywhere for a long time. It was a proselytizing religion, and Jews did a lot of international commerce, by traveling to places and setting up trading posts and communities of Jews to operate them. By the time of the Roman Republic, more Jews lived outside TPTMNBN than within it. Just about everywhere had a Jewish community. That's really, as I see it, the way Judaism is supposed to work. Jews are supposed to be cosmopolitan, in diaspora everywhere, and committed to good behavior, thereby greasing the skids of international commerce and banking, which their books like the Talmud were designed to help them do well. Talmud schools were designed to be good training for international businessmen, by exemplifying and promoting good behavior, orderly debate and careful analysis of alternative scenarios. This is the ultimate completion of the vision of the Pharisees--who were the successful small businessmen of their time and place. The world needs ethnicities like that.
The world does not need or want ethnosupremacist Zionism, which is clearly a replay of Naziism. The Talmudic sages had become wise enough to realize that human attempts to reconquer TPTMNBN were not a good idea, and their strict prohibition of it successfully prevented such attempts for over a millenium.
Long before the Talmud, the Torah was either written in Persia, or possibly in TPTMNBN immediately after Persia installed Jews there and funded them to build a new temple--under Persian rule of course, part of Persia's plan of having local client religious authorities, or in (of all places) Alexandria, Egypt (it was certainly translated there, if not actually written there in the first place) as part of the Greek empire. The uncertainty exists because the earliest Torah fragments are from the later Greek era. It makes more sense it would have been written in the Persian era, and in Persia, so Persian authorities could see it had the right slanders (evil slavers) on Egypt.
So it's quite possible all 3 of the most important sets of books in Judaism were not even written in Judea. The semi-indigenous religion of the Hebrews was vastly different, it seems to be polytheistic. The purpose of the Torah is to lay down a monotheistic religion broadly similar to Zoroastrianism, which would serve Persian needs well. Jews would peaceably maintain order and not themselves be a target while the Persian armies rolled in and out.
A clear distinction needs to be made between Judeans (the people who live in Judea, possibly extended out to the full TPTMNBN, as it was in say, 'The Judean Province' under Rome) and Jew (the people of Judaism).
Not all of the people in TPTMNBN have EVER been self described Jews or Hebrews. Most who have lived there in the past 4000 years have NOT been Jews.
Jews had a few good years, particularly the 100 years or so under the Hasmonians. Their control of TPTMNBN increased in stages over time to something like a majority of TPTMNBN. Still, even then, I'd doubt even most of the people of TPTMNBN were "Jews" as such. They would often identified as part of another ethnic group or another still, such as Samarian or Galilean. Within TPTMNBN, the highest concentration of People of Judaism would be inside and immediately around Jerusalem, during eras of Jewish control. Conquering empires often liked to install their own in Jerusalem, and even the Hasmonian (let alone the Herodians) were not Davidic. Conquering empires wanted compliant vassals. People who are not deeply connected to the local population. Jesus (and his "brother" James the Just who became the first Jewish Christian leader) were critical of the Herodian dynasty and their support for Pharisees. Jamesians were opponents of Pharisees and Saducees, and by withdrawing from Jerusalem before the sacking they were spared ruination and exile (though James himself was stoned by Pharisees not long before, which also says something--Jerusalem had become polarized--and many have cited the murder of James as the precipitating cause of the Roman Siege). Jamesians became dominant in TPTMNBN after 135 AD until Islam, which has a simliar view of Jesus and other things replaced it.
Since the collapse of the first Hebrew kings, since there were even 'Jews' as such, most have not lived in TPTMNBN. During the periods outside of Hebrew or Jewish control, residents of Judea often converted in large numbers to other religions. After the spectacular failure of the Bar Kochba revolt, the peasantry of TPTMNBN, which was 90% of its population, converted en masse to Jamesian (Jewish) Christianity. Then later, in the 7th Century, when Jewish Christianity was denounced by other Christians and Jews, most Jamesians became Islamic, because it was compatible in many ways and had a similar pro-proletarian slant, at least initially.
There was never a mass expulsion of the people from TPTMNBN to elsewhere. Even the Romans specifically made slaves of fighters, not the peasantry, who were 90% of the population. Mass conversions from one religion to another occurred. Outside Arabs did not conquer TPTMNBN people, they fought with Romans over imperial control, foreign and Syrian troops were used, the people of TPTMNBN were not involved and generally preferred to dump Rome anyway. Christianity was invented in TPTMNBM, and after 135 CE had been the dominant religion of peasants in its "Jewish Christian" (Jamesian) form. When both Judaic and Christian authorities renounced Jewish Christianity, residents of TPTMNBM were more than happy to convert to Islam in the 7th century, which had been invented nearby and included Jerusalem as a key part of its story (where Mohammed rose to heaven) and get rid of Romans in same package. TPTMNBN as a whole was never en mass resettled, not by the Arabs or anyone else, until the Zionist debacle forced in more Jews and forced others out. Romans and distant Arabs were primarily focused on the proxy governments, apparatchiks, and soliders in Jerusalem.
So the way it looks, more and more, is that Judaism has always been enforced upon the Judeans, first (in Hebrew form) by conquering kings like David, then by the Persians in second temple Judaism form, then by the Hasmoneans (who re-imported the stuff from Egypt), then ultimately by the Western Europeans, who had inheirited their Judaism from the Babylonians, then ignored it and went ahead and conquered TPTMNBN all over again in spite of that Talmud's plainly stating that it is forbidden.
So, while a Jew is defined a person "of" the 'religion from Judea', it appears that even Judaism itself is less from Judea than not, and most Jews may be less following their Judaism than not. (No one except Zionists should care how much of Judaism was developed 'in Judea' or not.) Furthermore, Judea is a small region right around Jerusalem, it is not the full TPTMNBN. It was evil how the Hasmonian Kingdom once forced most of TPTMNBN to 'convert' to Judaism (including adult male circumcision). What the Zionists are doing is a similar but different evil.
And curiously there are other religions like Christianity that are as much or more 'from Judea' as Judaism, and were more popular in Judea for a longer period of time until Zionist Settler Colonialism. (Many many more religions were invented in the TPTMNBN, which seems to have been especially adept at inventing religions, if not keeping them.)
(*"Following" or not is their responsibility.)
Now, it could be that the failure of Talmudism to prevent Zionism despite specifically outlawing it comes down to a fundamental fault in Talmudism itself. A Christian would certainly point to the fact that Rabbinism and Talmudism were the successors of Phariseeism. And Jesus--a Gallilean Jewish teacher--was plenty critical of Pharisees. Paul himself was a leading Pharisee until he renounced it for Christianity.
Pharisees claimed to have an 'Oral Tradition' which was what ultimately was enshrined in the Mishnah and Talmud, supposedly clarifying God's laws. (Actually, part of the Torah itself says humans should not try to do this, and Karaites among others have never recognized the Talmud as binding.) This consisted of adding additional clauses to 'clarify' each rule. Pharisees were often businessmen who wrote contracts.
Jesus (as well as other sects, including the Essenes) called this hypocrisy. Paul went all the way and pretty much threw out the whole book, not just the oral tradition, for faith and love. (But with too much emphasis on empire building 'belief' in the impossible in my view.)
Perhaps contracts are necessary for the forseeable future. (I'd see them as a necessary evil until all oppression is eliminated--aka communism--which is about the same as saying 'Until the Messiah Returns'.) But it is also worth understanding they are never complete. More is needed. In commerce, that more is called 'Good Will.'
Now in this critique, I'm only trying to be helpful. Despite proclaiming itself as the religion of faith, love, hope, and all that, more people have died in war crimes and genocides delivered by Christians than any other. Prior to Zionism, Judaism had not been very warlike at all, except to the degree that Jews have participated (sometimes not) in wars and empires of Christian countries. Islam has been somewhere in between, though not even close to the horrors born by Christian Countries, including The Crusades...
It doesn't really matter what their books say, it's what people do that counts. (That's paraphrasing Jesus, a Jewish teacher--second Temple Judaism--but not a Pharisee) Jews had generally done very well in these regards until Zionism. Or perhaps it was the combination of Zionism and the Holocaust that triggered the moral catastrophe overriding the 'be a good citizen of wherever you are' wisdom of the Talmud.
Zionism is indeed anti-Judaism. Second Temple Judaism was about being a peaceful religious teacher (in the Persian empire, or perhaps it was the Greek empire). Talmud Judaism is about being an international peacemaker and trader well respected by all countries. Zionism is about becoming a genocidal war criminal, hated by the rest of the world, having abandoned the goal of healing the world but instead trying to hide from it, right in the most visible and sensitive place--the interconnection and holy lands to half the world, everything and everyone else be damned, out of the frying pan into the fire, but it's our fire so it's good. Instead of the sensible love of Talmudic Judaism, it's lunatic evil whose pitch inches closer to hell every few years, and now as never before.
But I have an idea about where it went wrong... The Talmudic codes are designed to cover every aspect of life, including sexual reproduction. But the 'system' was devised over a millenium ago, when reproduction was kept in check by high death rates among newborn. Carried into the modern era, the Orthodox Judaic system produces too many children to be sustainable. The world needs international businessmen, but not that many. Jewish 'quarters' become Jewish ghettos.
Many if not most Jews escaped from the Orthodox strictures with Judaic movements that aren't so birtherist. I won't claim that birthrates for Conservative or Reform Jews are any different from other affluent ethnicities in modern countries. BUT, then when withdrawing from the full weight of the Talmud over life, Jews lost touch with the parts of the Talmud that promoted thinking about the big picture, diplomatic good behavior, honoring all life, and anti-Zionism. The stage was set for cannibalizing international relationist Judaism into blinkered militarist imperialist Zionism.
Before I was too rosy about Talmudism, I should point out that one of my personal heroes, Spinoza, rejected it and withdrew from his Talmudic academy. In his subsequent and sadly too short life, however, Spinoza embodied the wide ranging thinking and good behavior it was intended to promote. He was not rich, but internationally respected by the greatest philosophers of his era. So, I'd say, he got it. The same is true of the Apostle Paul, who rejected his Pharisee training. Though I dislike the belief cult he created, which later grew into a terrible monster under the Roman Empire and later, Paul was clearly brilliant and immensely successful in dealing with a lot of people in many countries--he was possibly the greatest international religious entrepreneur of all time. And the Christianity he invented was very much like Communism. He was an early author of the idea "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" echoed by Marx, another brilliant and internationally well regarded (atheist) Jew who rejected Talmudism. You may get the best results with a principled and complete rejection. You may get the worst results from cherry picking, like Zionists.
OTOH, Cherry Picking, it could be said, is generally what I do. I think I do it very well, picking the best ideas from different systems and combining them. I think Zionists have done it very badly, leaving out the most essential, and not understanding the full depth of Jewish responsibilities to others that the Talmud lays out.
Another idea which is observed directly in Zionism is Insularity. Zionists don't see the world that everyone else sees. Zionists only see the world that other Zionists see. Another word is Tunnel Vision.
Such a thing could come directly from the isolated nature of the Talmudic education system itself. Though in fact, Zionism came from non-practicing Jews, and Jews with a Talmudic education at first resisted it. But an insulated educational system might fail to self-correct once such an idea took hold. So I think it would be good for Talmudic (or Hebrew) classes to include Christians, Muslims, Atheists, Buddhists, and Confucianists for diversity, not that any of those are taught, but to hear their opinions.
The third idea is the trickiness of the notion of being God's Chosen People. Many non-Jews point to this. A Jew with a correct Talmudic education will realize this chosen-ness is not a one way street. It's not "Sit back and play video games, and you'll inheirit the nicest part of the most sought after real estate in the world." It's more like being chosen to work in a peculiarly demanding company. If you're a lazy bum, it would have been better not to be so "chosen" and find something easier that you could have been fairly good at.
But without fully grasping the meaning of this, that the rewards are tied to the responsibilities, the unqualified idea could lead the untutored astray.
I'm somewhat disturbed by reports by some Jews that a distinction is clearly made between Jews and non-Jews. While the Talmud insists that non-Jews must still be treated fairly in all instances, it also insists that other Jews be treated more than fairly. Right there, the discrimination starts. Christianity, which itself started from Second Temple Judaism, insists you Love your Neighbor as much as yourself, regardless of their identity. (A Jewish friend of mine suggested that was only applicable to your immediate neighbor. I think that is wrong, it basically applies to everyone in the world.) So, right from the start, Christianity suggests universality while Judaism doesn't. However you could argue the fairly / more-than-fairly distinction is what people always do for families, tribes, corporations, and nations. It's only human, but Talmud has made it more explicit in order to ensure faithful performance towards both Jews and Gentiles. It's a highly evolved but personally oriented ethical system which goes to great pains to spell things out that wouldn't often be thought of.
Now, in fact, and often driven by other Mishnahs, Jews can be some of the nicest people even to non-Jews. Not all religions even prescribe treating outsiders fairly. Few emphasize things like Hospitality as much. But I see the suggestions of chosen-ness and treating the in group better than others as being like large bumps in a mountain road. They may throw some who aren't fully anchored in the responsibilites required astray. And that's probably where the work needs to be done.
I focus on the ideas and context because there is no good reason to believe that genetics or anything like that are important in these regards. Biologically people are so similar in their potentials as being virtually identical. Differences come from how people are raised and the sum total of all their experiences and the contexts they are currently in.
To be clear, nothing at all in any of the documents, histories, or traditions of Judaism authorizes the genocide of Palestinians. Many of those documents and traditions strongly proscribed such activities or anything like them. Talmudic sages and Pharisees must be rolling in their graves for such a breach of the ethical religious system they carefully constructed. But the trip wires need to be set better for next time, assuming there is a next time.
Here is an additional reference on the Maccabees, Hanukkah, Christian Judaism, and Islam.
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