Mark Twain, answering the question of why Jews are hated in 1898, says that they are hated because they are so successful. In other respects, he says they are hard working, not violent, take care of themselves and their own, and in most respects model citizens, who were simply too good for others too compete with.
(I've seen this essay edited so as to emphasize the bad things Twain has to say, which are hard to find if you look at the complete essay. I interpret the bad things as incidental to showing the corruptness of society itself and/or the stupidity of non-Jews. Within a cleverly edited version, the larger essay becomes satire with the bad things the ultimate explanation.)
Twain doesn't much succeed in determining the origins of Jewish success as coming from anything but pluck and luck. I think he misses one not unique but somewhat important fact. In 1898, there was no Israel. Jews did not have an ethnic homeland anywhere in the world.
I think THAT was the crucial fact. They were not weighed down by the need to preserve and defend an ethnic homeland, and could focus their energies independently on a wide variety of other things, and master them all.
Nationalism, militarism, and all that, atrophies the moral and intellectual compass, and displaces universal and visionary thinking with ethnic jingoism and short sighted goal grabbing.
When I was growing up, Jews were giants of moral and intellectual virtue, as well as social stature. People like Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, Justice Brandeis, and so on. Far and away more giants like this than you would expect from their numbers. Almost everyone, it often seems, I deeply respect.
It may simply be my limited knowledge, but I can't think of a towering generation of Jews like that anymore. Instead, we have the likes of Kirchner and Netanyahu, partisan nationalistic crooks, good at riding the whale of empire and corruption but little else.
There are still Jews who are giants of moral and intellectual compass, in my estimation, but they are no longer the figures of great social standing. I consider all the Jews involved in peace media and organizations now to be moral if not also intellectual giants. But they are mostly people few have heard of, like Norman Finkelstein, Max Blumenthal and Ariel Gold, with only a few pretty well known people like Noam Chomsky--who still too few people have actually read.
Even some of the in between generation who used to be giants themselves, like Rob Reiner. Once a towering comedic genius and social critic, he's now a partisan loser still pushing Russiagate.
Even my own Jewish friends, basically all of my best friends until I graduated from college, and most of them afterwards, seem to have been in a kind of mental decline since about 1967, the year that Israel decided to hang on to the West Bank and Golan Heights. The kids who were the smartest in the room are becoming more and more just average. Their ability to critique the world in universal terms has fallen dramatically, and along with it the ability, it has seemed to me, to accurately critique most everything else. Sheeple--like most everyone else. I did have personal friendships with a very few anti-Zionist Jews, who were almost all of the best and smartest people I've ever known, but now they are all dead, of either age (some were a much older generation) or perhaps bad stress.
Now it seems, rather than being the most pioneering scientists and statesmen around the world, many Jews are lucky to get a subsidized home in the Occupied Territories, after an early burnout in the USA, allegedly because of anti-semitism, as if that hadn't existed in 1898, when Jews were anywhere and always more successful than anyone else at anything they were allowed to do, despite the anti-semitism, according to Twain.
(I've seen this essay edited so as to emphasize the bad things Twain has to say, which are hard to find if you look at the complete essay. I interpret the bad things as incidental to showing the corruptness of society itself and/or the stupidity of non-Jews. Within a cleverly edited version, the larger essay becomes satire with the bad things the ultimate explanation.)
Twain doesn't much succeed in determining the origins of Jewish success as coming from anything but pluck and luck. I think he misses one not unique but somewhat important fact. In 1898, there was no Israel. Jews did not have an ethnic homeland anywhere in the world.
I think THAT was the crucial fact. They were not weighed down by the need to preserve and defend an ethnic homeland, and could focus their energies independently on a wide variety of other things, and master them all.
Nationalism, militarism, and all that, atrophies the moral and intellectual compass, and displaces universal and visionary thinking with ethnic jingoism and short sighted goal grabbing.
When I was growing up, Jews were giants of moral and intellectual virtue, as well as social stature. People like Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, Justice Brandeis, and so on. Far and away more giants like this than you would expect from their numbers. Almost everyone, it often seems, I deeply respect.
It may simply be my limited knowledge, but I can't think of a towering generation of Jews like that anymore. Instead, we have the likes of Kirchner and Netanyahu, partisan nationalistic crooks, good at riding the whale of empire and corruption but little else.
There are still Jews who are giants of moral and intellectual compass, in my estimation, but they are no longer the figures of great social standing. I consider all the Jews involved in peace media and organizations now to be moral if not also intellectual giants. But they are mostly people few have heard of, like Norman Finkelstein, Max Blumenthal and Ariel Gold, with only a few pretty well known people like Noam Chomsky--who still too few people have actually read.
Even some of the in between generation who used to be giants themselves, like Rob Reiner. Once a towering comedic genius and social critic, he's now a partisan loser still pushing Russiagate.
Even my own Jewish friends, basically all of my best friends until I graduated from college, and most of them afterwards, seem to have been in a kind of mental decline since about 1967, the year that Israel decided to hang on to the West Bank and Golan Heights. The kids who were the smartest in the room are becoming more and more just average. Their ability to critique the world in universal terms has fallen dramatically, and along with it the ability, it has seemed to me, to accurately critique most everything else. Sheeple--like most everyone else. I did have personal friendships with a very few anti-Zionist Jews, who were almost all of the best and smartest people I've ever known, but now they are all dead, of either age (some were a much older generation) or perhaps bad stress.
Now it seems, rather than being the most pioneering scientists and statesmen around the world, many Jews are lucky to get a subsidized home in the Occupied Territories, after an early burnout in the USA, allegedly because of anti-semitism, as if that hadn't existed in 1898, when Jews were anywhere and always more successful than anyone else at anything they were allowed to do, despite the anti-semitism, according to Twain.
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