With the _current_thing_ going on, discussions around Jews have been front and center of the national discourse. Coincidentally, I was supposed to be in Israel this week and have been in the midst of a deep-dive on Abrahamic religious history, given it is top-of-mind I’ve put together a brief collection of arcane Jewish knowledge.
Who were the ancient Jews?
It is oddly conspicuous that Herodotus, writing in the 5th Century and known for deep interest in profiling the diverse ranges of peoples, cultures, religions, and customs, makes no note of the Jewish peoples living in the Middle East.
Russell Gmirkin uses this and other points of evidence to claim that the Jewish Torah as we know it today was not written in the Iron Age Levant (eschewing the mainstream Documentary Hypothesis) but is instead a product of the much later Hellenized world.
Specifically, in his bold and ambitious book Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus. Gmirkin argues that the Pentateuch - the first 5 books of the Old Testament were written ~270 BC and were directly influenced by two Greek writers Berossus and Manetho who wrote histories of Babylon and Egypt respectively. Prior to this Judaism as we knew it was entirely different. In his follow-on book, Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible, Gmirkin argues that Jewish law was directly based on Platonic ideals in The Republic and Laws.
It’s a very bold claim and draws off evidence from various ancient writers, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Elephantine Papyri to back up his claims. Specifically referenced are areas where written history directly contradicts law and scripture as we know it in the Torah.
For example the Elephantine Papyri (written c. 419 BC) describe a Jewish practice:
Without scriptures
Without an Aaronic priesthood
Without knowledge of Abraham, Moses, or any other figures from the Bible
Without a resting sabbath
With accommodations for polytheism
With animal sacrifice done outside of the temple in Jerusalem.
Gmirkin’s hypothesis opens up many fascinating corollaries. Including the possibility that the original Hebrews were a colony established in Judea by the Egyptians or were an offshoot of the Hyksos or followers of the Egyptian cult of Seth-Typhon.
These are claims made by ancient writers like Hecataeus of Abdera. Manetho, and Posidonius. It should be noted that the Egyptians were noted as the original practitioners of circumcision. They also worshipped the pig – Frazer in the Golden Bough relates kosher prohibition on eating pork to an ancient worship of the sow. Ironically (or perhaps not) the Judensau, or Jewish pig would become a regular slander of Jews nearly a millennium and a half later.
There is no definitive answer to who the ancient Jews were, but the questions posed by it open up just as intriguing possibilities as what the Torah tells us.
Which came first the Christian chicken or the Rabbinical Jewish egg?
St Ignatius’ quote above stating that Judaism was actually a perversion of Christianity always causes controversy when raised. However perhaps it is not as absurd of a claim as it appears prima facie.
Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel Jacob Yuval, in his book Two Nations in Your Womb describes how, following Titus’ destruction of the 2nd temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD, Rabbinical Judaism evolved in response and reaction to rapidly advancing Christianity.
Struggling to recuperate, Jewish leaders claim to the proper inheritance of God’s covenant was insecure given the rampant popularity of Christianity (which in less than 3 centuries would become the official religion of the Roman Empire) versus Judaism which was floundering.
Yuval reveals in multiple places where the Talmud, the Oral Torah that forms much of the basis of Jewish practice, is rife with polemics and responses against ascendant Christianity.
Including a section describing Jesus as spending the afterlife in a boiling pile of shit in hell.
The Jews began to identify first the Roman Empire and then the church-at-large as Edomites, the cursed sons of Esau whose eschatological downfall would mark the coming of the messiah and end times.
Yuval exhibits how much of temple practice and Passover rights evolved borrowing from and in direct communication with Christian practices. In this way Judaism as we know it today actually co-evolved and was heavily influenced by Christianity as Yuval states it, Judaism is not the mother-religion to Christianity, rather the two are sister religions, both growing together and shaping each other.
Where did some mainstream antisemitic tropes come from?
Through late antiquity into the early Middle Ages Jews stood in a rather reclusive world apart. Beyond the nose thumbing acts noted above and being slurred as Christ-killers various of the more extreme acts of late antiquity and medieval Jewry were contorted into antisemitic legends and tales of evil.
There were various circumstances, such as at Worms or Trier, where facing death or Christian conversion during a pogrom whole Jewish families or communities would commit ritualistic suicide, first murdering their young before themselves. These acts along with still-debated episodes like Simon of Trent. Would lead to the myths of blood libel.
These acts were often centered around bodies of water as they represented final baptismal salvation and Yuval points to these leading to the legends of well poisoning.
Further, these actions also often included the desecration or burning of Jewish temples which were convoluted into tales of black masses and host desecration.
The countryside was still the realm of pagan belief (pagan is linked etymologically with peasant). Jews were generally confined to the cities or burgs as burghers often further secluded into segregated shtetls or ghettos.
Jews were further circumscribed in the economic activities they could partake, often limited to moneylending, banking, and finance many Jewish families became synonymous with banking itself: Rothschild, Warburg, Pincus.
It is noteworthy that Judetum, the German word for Judaism had the derivative meaning of commerce.
As feudalism slowly receded and Europe emerged from Middle Ages, the select Jewish families found themselves more powerful, wealthy, and influential than ever before. Spurring the ire and envy of many looking from the outside.
The end result of antisemitism was violence against Jews. Pogroms took place across hundreds of European cities where tens of thousands of Jews would be killed and many more brutalized. The Pale of Russia was prolific in this regard, in one three-year span (1881-1884) there were over 200 mass killings in modern day Ukraine. These were the same events my mother’s ancestors looked to escape when they emigrated to America. With violence rising Jews were searching for any solution - but brighter days were ahead.
“The second [main goal] is to attenuate, if not destroy, the tendency of the Jewish people to so many practices contrary to civilization and the good order of society in all countries of the world. Evil must be stopped by preventing it; it must be prevented by changing the Jews.”
- Napoleon, in Letter on the Sanhedrin
How did Jews fit into European/Western culture?
The enlightenment espoused the equality of man. As these ideals took root from the 18th to the start of the 20th century Jews began to receive legal imprimatur and full civil rights.
Jewish Emancipation took different shapes in different places and at different times. From Napoleon’s edicts in 1806 to the short lived Russian Republic’s equality of religion in 1917.
However, the Jew’s move out of the shtetl and into mainstream western society provided a culture shock both for themselves and the western civilizations that took them in.
The Jewish Question - how the Jews were to fit into European culture hung over the head of Jewish thought leaders for decades if not centuries. It formed the bulk of Theodor Herzl’s (the father of modern Zionism) seminal essay “The Jewish State”. Hannah Arendt wrote her first article on the question. The struggle for fitting into an ill-fit society is a leitmotif of my favorite author, Franz Kafka.
Cuddihy in his book The Ordeal of Civility, traces out how in attempting to grapple with the assimilation of newly emancipated Ostjuden to western society helped shape two giants of Jewish (if not world) intelligentsia: Sigmund Freud & Karl Marx. According to Cuddihy:
Freud’s psychological model of the Id versus ego/superego was an analogy and apologia for the “Yid” or shtetl Jew contra the more genteel gentile.
Marx shifted the onus of the dehumanizing ills of capitalism off mercantile Jewry and onto a secular capitalist class and system.
Worth noting here that Karl Löwith stated that Marxism was just secularized Judaism.
Or as Marx put it:
“Let us consider the actual, secular Jew—not the sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us look for the secret of the Jew not in his religion but rather for the secret of the religion in the actual Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Bargaining. What is his worldly god? Money. Very well! Emancipation from bargaining and money, and thus from practical and real Judaism would be the self-emancipation of our era.... Christianity arose out of Judaism. It has again dissolved itself into Judaism. From the outset the Christian was the theorizing Jew. Hence, the Jew is the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has again become a Jew. Christianity overcame real Judaism only in appearance. It was too refined, too spiritual, to eliminate the crudeness of practical need except by elevating it into the blue. Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, and Judaism is the vulgar practical application of Christianity.”
- Karl Marx (with his own emphasis) from his essay On the Jewish Question
Both thinkers sought to justify the issues of Jewish assimilation by sublimating them to a struggle that all mankind faces.
The question of Jewish assimilation was preeminent in the past two centuries. It drove some of the largest ideological movements and shaped history, this story is still very much being written..
What about the [REDACTED]?
Well in short: vae victus
What does the future hold for Jews?
Jewish assimilation called for a shift in people’s beliefs in the disparity of outcomes. The cause for differences in refinement between Jews and gentiles had to be sought out as accidents of circumstance, environment, or opportunity (I.e., antisemitic persecution) not anything innate or essential to Jews as people.
Jewish assimilation would provide a social blueprint for other struggles for self-styled social justice: civil rights movement, decolonization, and many more up to the present day.
The nurture not nature approach founded in Jewish emancipation was symbiotic with enlightenment or classical liberal thought and eventually is the basis for what we know now as liberalism or progressivism. It is the political milieu that we live in.
Given that it existed in the shadows of many Jewish thought leaders; that it saw the re-establishment of a Jewish state in Israel; that we swim in a Jewish-inherited political milieu, is it any wonder why Yuri Slezkine calls the 1900’s The Jewish Century and states that we’re all essentially Jewish now?
Perhaps we really are the chosen people, but we will have to see what this present century holds….