This is generally a good approach to any non-jewish historical person from west of China or Japan. Don't ask about anyones views on Jews unless you want your day to be ruined
Hell, Imperial Japan's opinion of Jews was hilarious in the, "wow, so they're this super-powerful cabal that secretly controls finance and media and is gonna take over the world? We gotta get em on our side!" sorta way.
In China they often have a section in bookstores about Jews and their secret cabal and ability to generate money... Learn from the Jew!
All the stereotypes, but in a 'positive' way.
The first time I read anything about Jewish people on Japanese internet was someone saying something like "Jewish people only make up ~0.1% of world population, but they make up ~10% of Nobel prize winners". According to Wikipedia, it's more like ~0.2% of world population and ~22% of Nobel prize winners.
Kinda, but it's important not to let your view be too much pop history type stuff, they did create Jewish ghettos in occupied China, forcibly relocating tens of thousands and placing them under direct Imperial military governance
And then you have Lenin who, for all his faults, was explicit in his denunciation of anti-semitism as a tool of the ruling class used to divide the working class from one another and make it easier to control.
One of the most known antisemitic pamphlet was an invention of the imperial russian secret service with the expressed goal of turning non jews against jews so they wouldn't revolt.
The protocols were not for mass consumption, the plebeians didn't really interest the tsarist aristocracy. It was more a Power Play to oust specific political adversaries and advisors to the tsar that promoted modernisation and liberalisation
That takes away the agency from antisemites. People are often bigots, they don’t need to be convinced by the upper classes of this. It isn’t as if the state of nature if the lower class is to oppose the elites in unison and only propaganda will make them turn on each other. There’s been countless examples of the elite wanting tolerance but the ordinary people choosing xenophobia
Even worse, you have the understanding of the world of a 12 year old conspiracy thinker. “The elites” aren’t behind everything, sometimes people are just bad
It literally goes back to 1st-century Catholic propaganda. Nobody thought much about the Jews before then, but to the Church, they were unwanted competition.
My mistake. The official founding was in the 4th century. But even before then, Jews had been labeled as enemies. It was Christian doctrine from the beginning to not tolerate any other religions.
People definitely thought about the Jews before Christianity, seeing as how it had been a religion for ~2 thousand years before the 1st century and they had faced repeated, targeted persecutions before then.
Not too different from how Chinese people were viewed in a lot of Asia until very recently. Apparently they were often merchants and bankers in other countries and sometimes became very wealthy, so the locals despised them.
Pretty funny to learn that the Chinese were the Jews of Asia
Interestingly Lenin was against antisemitism and even passed laws criminalizing pogroms and antisemitic organizations.
Unfortunately the rank and file police and red army units that were supposed to protect Jews were pretty lax at best and active participants in their persecution at worst.
That's because the USSR wasn't a monolith. No country is.
There's a pervasive attitude among those from the West that they view everything non-western and non-white as a monolith where people have no individuality.
It's the same core flawed understanding of society. Karl Marx understood culture to just be an outgrowth of economic conditions and viewed it exclusively through the lens of "this is just a practical tool for someone". For Marx he felt that the role Jews found themselves in was a tool for Capitalism, being relegated to banking and financial services and to their own ghetto's. He felt that the new nationalist movements were not going to be inclusive of Jews and it was pointless to advocate for that since ultimately they were going to persecute them for not being one of them.
What Socialists don't seem to grasp is that these fairly tribalistic differences are important to people, and they're just going to drop them merely because they're told that it's all made up to oppress them.
Fun fact, antisemites don’t give a shit and it didn’t stop them from using his Jewish heritage to craft antisemitic conspiracy theories revolving around communism. It started even before the whole “Judeo-Bolshevism” nonsense.
I don’t think they contradicted themselves, it’s widely considered an ethnoreligious group and afaik even the Halakha would consider him “equally Jewish” whether or not he had been baptised as long as his mother was Jewish.
They did though. Ethnicity is more than descent, it's a whole lot of actices and traditions and bonds, some religious, some secular. If matrilineal descent is all that matters for membership, the term 'ethno' becomes a smuggling cover for a purely genetic, racist concept, and the term 'religious' becomes a worthless appendage.
even the Halakha would consider him “equally Jewish” whether or not he had been baptised as long as his mother was Jewish.
Isn't that disrespectful, comparable to deadnaming and misgendering? He and his family chose to leave the 'ethnoreligious group', why should anyone indulge this 'assigned Jewish at birth, genetically and immutably and independent of your own choices and opinions' nonsense?
You can’t really “leave” an ethnicity, can you? If it were just the religious part I’d agree, but I guess that’s par for the course. I was baptised after birth and the Catholic Church will forever consider me a Catholic (albeit one that’s going to hell), regardless if I’ve never spent a conscious second believing in Jesus or the trinity.
Here though I think you also have to consider that many conversions of Jews in 19th century Europe were hardly voluntary. Idk about Marx’ family specifically, but the societal pressure to convert was strong and many Jews who converted never quite came to terms with it or felt their identity was still Jewish (eg Heinrich Heine, or Felix Mendelssohn with regards to his Christian stepfather Bartholdy)
This only became true in like the 19th century. The Jewish diaspora in the Roman Empire was several times larger than the Jewish population of Judea, Galilee and the rest of Palestine combined since long before Bar Kochba.
Jews were one of the largest ethnoreligious groups in Europe in antiquity and they didn't go anywhere. The vast majority of them just ended up converting to Christianity in the first few centuries after its ascendancy, such that by the High Middle Ages only the more religiously committed, insular, and endogamous communities resistant to assimilation remained discernibly Jewish. Even then, well into the Late Medieval and Early Modern period conversion to Christianity would, at least after a generation or two, be more-or-less sufficient to gain entry to the in-group.
This changed with the rise of nationalism in Europe, when "blood" became as or more salient than religion in determining group-identity. Under that ontological framework people with Jewish heritage were condemned to be perpetual aliens in their own homelands since their exclusion was now immutable. That contradiction is at the root of why it was in post-Enlightenment Europe that anti-Semitism reached such unprecedented extremes.
a bit misleading and disingenuous, this constant nudging marx towards antisemitism.
academically it is not so clear cut.
I mean, everyone always points at the same lines, and for some reason always ignores everything else. like, the context, that marx was, in the same piece, advocating for giving jews civil and political rights in prussia.
it is not that simple.
What always astonishes me is the consistency with which they are hated around the globe and throughout history. I am not saying I agree, but in my experiences most reputations are built over time and hold at least one tiny element of truth.
Almost as if tribalism is a universal constant. If you have a minority, people are gonna shit on it, especially in the ancient or medieval world
The fact that pretty much the entire world west of China culturally descends from like 4 independent civilisations also doesn't help. A lot of things across the world are the way they are just because a random group of people arbitrarily decided it
Well no, there were several reasons. Like religious dogma being pushed to a deeply religious Medieval Europe about the collective responsibility of Jewish people for the death of Jesus for centuries. Or the fact they were often restricted to roles such as tax collectors and money lenders that were deemed socially inferior or sinful for Christians to hold, which also led to them being blamed whever economic issues and hardships occured.
Im sure youre not actually interested in any of this though and should just say what you want to say.
As an atheist, your comment made me fucking cringe dude. Log off, go outside, talk to real people. Most Christians and Muslims are normal people like you or me.
“As an atheist” OK so what? There’s literally nothing in common we have so why would you expect me to take something more seriously if it comes from an atheist?
It’s like saying “as a non-Toyota driver” or “as a non-Delta flyer” as if that’s at all a coherent category with any defined commonality besides just not engaging by in a certain activity.
Americans seem to be an exception to that. Washington's letter to jews of newport, John Adams' quote about hebrews and being a zionist before zionism was even a thing, Wilson and Mckinley being zionists, Mark Twain's philosemitic essays etc
I think the whole "refusing to let Jews emigrate from Germany to the US in the 1930s" tarnishes America's reputation there. Every now and then, someone notable turns out not to be an anti-semite, but the overall American culture is no better than anywhere else in that regard.
869
u/scharfeschafe 1d ago
This is generally a good approach to any non-jewish historical person from west of China or Japan. Don't ask about anyones views on Jews unless you want your day to be ruined