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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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I follow Razib Khan on twitter who mostly writes about where different ethnicities came from.Which I do find fascinating.Anyway he has a long post on Ashkenzi Jews - who have had a huge impact on 20th century history - but were a footnote before.And thinking about it I don’t know another “people” who never had their own land in history with an army protecting it and all that. As far as culture war goes I feel like Jewish history fits but I’ve never discussed it or read much more than Nazis kills a bunch of them.Here’s the post:

How and when did the Ashkenazim come to be?

Sometime after the year 1000 AD, a group of Jews began migrating eastward across Europe, into the principalities of Germany and the kingdom of Poland, attracted by the combination of religious tolerance and economic opportunity. These territories were beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire; they were lands that Jews had traditionally not occupied. By the time these pioneers arrived in the small towns of Germany and the hamlets of Poland, Jewish communities had already been established in Persia and Egypt for 1,500 years.

For the next 800 years, these Jews waxed in numbers due to their essential economic position in the developing lands of Eastern Europe, but unlike the Hebrews of antiquity, they became culturally invisible to their gentile neighbors, quietly navigating a closed social universe organized around adherence to their own laws and focused on their own texts. Their ultimate origins were a mystery to the gentiles around them, and indeed became forgotten even to themselves. Were they the descendants of the ancient Hebrews, converts to the religion, or a mix of both? These possibilities were hidden from the Jews of Eastern Europe as their memory of their past faded and their written culture focused purely on matters of religion.

This curiosity is worth pausing over. Ashkenazi Jewish luminaries have recorded such outsized contributions to every aspect of human output in culture and knowledge over the past two centuries, it’s natural to assume that the familiar intellectual restlessness and insatiable curiosity of the community’s standouts have deep cultural roots. But if the textual record is anything to go by, nothing could be further from the truth. Hunting for attested evidence of Ashkenazi Jewish passage from antiquity to the 19th century is like trying to catch a glimpse of a secretive nocturnal creature. Not only did Jews receive unhelpfully scant coverage from gentile chroniclers, but the community itself also appears to have trained its considerable literacy and intellectual power solely on matters Talmudic, to the complete exclusion of any historical records of the various communities.

And yet, it was these people that flourished in the unknown and wild lands of Eastern Europe who would go on to beget 80% of the modern Jewish diaspora, and join the mainstream of Western civilization after 1800. These are the more than ten million Ashkenazim, whose members have left indelible marks on world history and culture so far out of proportion to their numbers, from Karl Marx to Albert Einstein, since their reintegration into the stream of Western civilization after the Enlightenment.

In the Bible, Ashkenaz is one of the descendants of Noah, and Jewish scholars associated his scions with various points north, initially Scythia, but eventually Germany. So the Ashkenazim were the Jews of Ashkenaz, of Germany and parts east, and their native language, Yiddish, was a dialect of German. The Jews of Spain and Portugal, the Sephardim, loomed large during the medieval period between 1000 and 1500 AD, producing the great rabbi Moses Maimonides and polymath Judah Halevi, and persisting in prominence into early modernity, with philosophers like Baruch de Spinoza. It was only in the 19th and 20th centuries that the history of Jewish prominence and cultural achievement became so disproportionately the story of the Ashkenazim, who were 92% of the world’s Jews in 1930, and have shared in fully 20% of all Nobel Prizes awarded.

And yet, though the Jews are a people whose history is extensively documented, from the Bible to Josephus’ Roman-era The Jewish Wars, the origins of the Ashkenazim remain a bit of an enigma. In 1096 AD, Christian crusaders infamously massacred Jews in the German Rhineland as warm-up for the slaughter they would inflict upon people in the Middle East, and the German-speaking lands saw widespread pogroms in the mid-14th century, at the height of the Black Death. But in comparison to their ubiquity in the 19th century, the Ashkenazim are mentioned only glancingly in the histories of this earlier period. They came to be notable only with their demographic ascendence in the massive dominion of Poland-Lithuania, as the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance 500 years ago. Not to mention in their later cultural explosion in the modern world.

Given Ashkenazi Jews’ newfound prominence and mysterious origins, in the late 19th century, European intellectuals began to explore the “Khazar hypothesis” for the origin of the Ashkenazim: the strange idea that Eastern European Jews descended from an ancient Turkic steppe confederacy destroyed by Kievan Rus 1,000 years ago. The Khazars are notable because much of their elite reputedly converted to Judaism while other groups were adopting Christianity or Islam. The Khazar hypothesis’ argument was that the Ashkenazim descended from the scattering of Khazar Jews westward into Europe. It is only with genetics in the 21st century that this theory has been able to be tested, and ultimately found wanting. The Ashkenazim are the synthesis of ancient Levantine Jews and various Mediterranean European populations with whom the former mixed. Their origins date back to the fall of Rome, not the fall of Khazaria.

In the intersection

To understand when and where the Ashkenazim come from, it is important to understand what they were before they became the distinctive people we know from history and fiction. The ancient King David was a simple shepherd, while the Babylonian Talmud outlines how farmers must maintain adherence to the laws of the Torah despite the agricultural season’s cycles. 2,000 years ago, the Jews were both pedestrian and unique. Pedestrian in that they were a nation of farmers and shepherds, as extensively documented in the Bible. Yes, large communities of urban Jews flourished in Alexandria, Rome and other large cities, but on balance, the Jews were not particularly urban. Like the Jews, Greeks outside of their homeland tended to be urban as well, but the average Greek was still a farmer or a shepherd, as were the vast majority of humans in the ancient world (not to mention, incidentally in the world as a whole until the 20th century). The ancient Jews were tillers of the soil and drivers of flocks, like all their contemporaries.

Where the Jews were unique was their strict adherence to a set of laws handed down to them by a god whom they held to be the one true god above all others. The Jews were zealous in their religious particularity, a reality which led to a war of liberation against the Greeks in 167 BC, where they rebelled against the imposition of pagan syncretism by raising an altar to Zeus in the Jewish Temple. Today we know of this war mostly through its commemoration at Hanukkah. Once Rome rose and conquered the Eastern Mediterranean, the Jews rebelled twice against the Roman imperium, once in the first century AD and once in the second. Again, the cause of their rebellion was the fact that they chafed at the rule of the religiously tolerant but unabashedly polytheistic Romans. The first rebellion was triggered by riots that erupted in 66 AD when pagan Greeks provocatively sacrificed birds in front of a synagogue, an act of sacrilege in Jewish eyes meant to inflame tensions in Jerusalem. The first rebellion ended a period when Jews were prominent in Roman elite circles, particularly due to the Judaean client king Herod Agrippa’s friendship with the Roman Emperor Caligula. From then on, Jews were tolerated, but seen to be different: a people apart.

The Jewish farmers and warriors who characterized the nation in the first centuries of the Common Era would eventually fade from living history, recalled only as legends in scripture and oral tradition. By the time European Jews became more than marginal curiosities in early modernity, pure subsistence agriculture and a martial ethos had become wholly alien to the Jewish mode of existence for the urban and small-town Ashkenazim. The Zionist movement made explicit efforts to synthetically re-install the ethos in the new settlers of Palestine. Zionism emerged from socialism and 19th-century nationalism and imagined a robust patriotic citizenry working the land on collective farms, the kibbutzim, at the ready to rise as a nation and take up arms against enemies near and far. Set against this future ideal was the contemporary bourgeois life that was aspiration and reality for many of the European Ashkenazim, who had already made the comfortable transition to material security in the wake of the piecemeal Jewish emancipation that swept the continent over the course of the 19th century.

But these assimilated Ashkenazim still came from an earlier regime, where Jews were set apart from the nations among whom they dwelt. Whereas their biblical ancestors had been farmers, pastoralists and warriors, the Ashkenazim known from later medieval and early modern history occupy professions avoided by Christians. The more modest members of the community were peddlers and artisans serving rural villages, while the Jewish elite were money-lenders and tax-farmers, intermediaries between the aristocracy that ruled much of Europe and the peasants whom they exploited. The enmity toward the Ashkenazim pervasive across much of Europe in the early modern period derived from this experience, as the dirty work of wringing tax

So there really is almost no Jewish history from roughly Romans to 1800? That was one thing I posted for. Like they rebelled against Roman’s some. Invented Christianity. Then sort of chilled for 1800 years. Made Hitler hate them. Then invented a ton of stuff in the 20th century.

Like that’s kind of a simpleton 30 second elevator speech but if I explained Jews to someone who knows nothing is that largely correct?

Hunting for attested evidence of Ashkenazi Jewish passage from antiquity to the 19th century is like trying to catch a glimpse of a secretive nocturnal creature. Not only did Jews receive unhelpfully scant coverage from gentile chroniclers, but the community itself also appears to have trained its considerable literacy and intellectual power solely on matters Talmudic, to the complete exclusion of any historical records of the various communities.

There is an extensive collection of Responsa from the middle ages which shines a light on the history of the jews in that area. While not a historical narrative (nor intended to be one), the Responsa sheds light on where jews lived at that time, and what they were going through in those areas. Of course, almost none of it has been translated into other languages, so modern historians have close to now knowledge of it.

You can read more about it here, and here's a paper reviewing two books that extrapolate history from sets of responsa.

What do you mean by “Jewish history”? Like, there’s easily 10,000+ religious Jewish works which were written in that period (the most famous/important being the Talmud), many which are still studied and having an influence on people today. I realise your typical gentile doesn’t care about the intricacies of Jewish law and hermeneutics but as a cultural product, surely it counts as “history”?

Aside from that, you even mention that Jewish thinkers throughout history have made important contributions to culture as a whole. Maimonides, Spinoza and many others produced important contributions to philosophy.

I’d also take issue with the term “chilled”. They more “survived as a persecuted minority for 1800+ years”. Yes, many Jews today suffer from a victimhood complex but let’s not pretend that Spanish Inquisition didn’t happen resulting in the mass expulsion of the Jews (1492). That’s just the most famous example. This Wikipedia article which has a long list of expulsions also has this very nice graphic.

Finally, I’m not sure why you think “they made Hitler hate them”. Even if you believe the Jews deserved the holocaust or whatever, antisemitism existed in Germany and Europe long before then. Hitler was a product of his generation, not some revolutionary thinker who had the epiphany that the Jews were the cause of all his woes. And why does the holocaust uniquely make its way into your “30 second” elevator pitch? As I tried to point out above, the holocaust was just the biggest and most prominent in a sequence of persecutions which have been going on for millennia. Seriously, skim that list. Not all persecutions are equally bad and not all persecutions are uniquely Jewish but antisemitism has an undeniably long history. Again, whether or not you think the Jews deserve it, why pretend that antisemitism is a 20th century phenomenon?

Come on chum, he said it was a simpleton's 30 second elevator pitch version of Jewish history, and he said it was a topic he didn't know a lot about. Off the top of your head, what's the simpleton's 30 second elevator pitch version of the history of the Bantu, Irish, Hmong or Russian?

resulting in the mass expulsion of the Jews (1492)

Also 1492, The start of the Golden Age

Yes, because opening new frontiers of settlement with a literally once-in-a-thousand-years bounty of new goods (see "Columbian Exchange") tends to result in Golden Ages.

Something to note when considering Ashkenazi in Europe is history is that they really were their own nation, a kind of mobile and extra-territorial nation who 100% believed they were their own peoplehood. The Rabbis had jurisdiction over their subjects and could excommunicate anyone at will. They had their own laws and traditions and tax codes. This means that when you read about “oppression”, you are actually reading about a conflict between two nations. This needs to be dwelled upon, because if you compare European-Jewish conflict to European-European conflict, you quickly see that Jews were the least attacked and the safest group in Europe by a large margin. (Consider this an historical White on White argument if you must). Of course there would be conflicts against Jews, their own nation was in a geographical area made up of many states and ruled by hereditary rulers. And of course they would lose these conflicts, because they chose to be their own traveling nation. But compare the bloodshed between, say, Catholics and Protestants, or even British versus British in the War of the Roses with 100,000 dead. Jews have little to complain about regarding their treatment in European history before the holocaust, as they were the safest group by a large margin.

If the Jews were behaving like sovereign citizens and (e.g.) refusing to pay taxes or follow laws, then "persecuting the Jews is no worse than a conflict with a foreign state" might be somewhat defensible.

But it sounds like you're saying "Yeah you pay French taxes and follow French laws and have lived in France all your life, but you don't follow French culture, so you shouldn't get the game-theoretic protections of being part of France". If you agree that (e.g.) Mormons deserve to live without persecution, I feel like that should also extend to Jews.

Jews in the middle ages often did live under their own laws and pay taxes separately while being citizens of the same state as gentiles.

I suspect "often" is doing some weaseling here. After reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_of_the_Jews_in_Europe I see exactly one example, which was in the town of Altona

From 1584 to 1639, as in the Middle Ages, the Jews of Altona paid taxes specific to the Jews, but no further taxes. Each Jewish family was required to pay 6 Reichstaler per year. Under Danish rule this changed: the Jews continued to pay the specifically Jewish taxes plus the same taxes as all other residents.

Do you think it was common for Jews to pay less in taxes than ordinary citizens? Can you provide an example of a kingdom where this happened? Do you think in kingdoms where this didn't happen (I'm guessing the vast majority) Jews shouldn't have received the same rights as other citizens?

The Middle Ages were radically different. Even disputing a Christian doctrine in a Catholic country could you have killed. Apostasy in a Muslim country would have you killed, and apostasy in a Jewish city as a Jew would have you made anathema with the threat of being killed. Today is much different than the Middle Ages. I’m merely asserting that the Jews as a whole did not face more threat than everyone else, because everyone else was dying in wars and starving to death (outside the “urban” center).

Yeah you pay French taxes and follow French laws and have lived in France all your life, but you don't follow French culture, so you shouldn't get the game-theoretic protections of being part of France"

This is of course perfectly coherent and sensible to essentially anybody before 1789.

The idea of nationhood as citizenship is a liberal innovation. And frankly, jury is still out on whether that was a good idea or not. Let alone if it's compatible with any national culture at all.

Not sure this is right. What about Hobbes? Surely the relevant point here is whether Jews were under the French state in a similar manner to Frenchmen, not whether they were considered part of the nation of Frenchmen, which doesn't seem especially relevant. They submitted to the leviathan, paid its taxes, followed its laws etc. so why should they not also benefit from its protection?

What about Hobbes? He's one of the earliest of Liberals and Leviathan, though it justifies this position very well in a way I personally believe, was an extremely controversial book that earned him the contempt of his royalist friends, anglicans and Catholics. He is by no means "essentially anybody".

Protection in exchange for taxes doesn't require hobbes, it's just feudalism. Earlier, even. The world's oldest profession... for men.

As long as the jews or goths or cumans pay taxes and obey the king, they should not be treated as a foreign army or persecuted by the rest of the king's subjects. One doesn't need liberalism to justify this arrangement.

As long as the jews or goths or cumans pay taxes and obey the king, they should not be treated as a foreign army or persecuted by the rest of the king's subjects.

Why?

I mean it, explain as you would to a catholic ruler why you shouldn't persecute those who have no kinship, cultural ties to your realm and whom you don't even share a religion with.

Why not just kill them and take their stuff or convert them except that it might be impractical at the moment?

The catholic church explicitly extended protection and tolerance to the Jews, something not extended to other religious minorities who were persecuted. The only reason Jews could exist in catholic and orthodox Europe was that they were Jews and not something else.

Mutual benefit. Loyalty without competition (as in, a jew cannot replace you as the new king like a catholic could). Honoring your word. You're asking why anyone would act morally. I doubt they do it because of 'cultural ties'.

Just because a policy is ruthless does not make it beneficial to the realm. The dutch and americans soaked up all the religious freaks nobody wanted and it made them rich. Has that king ever heard of the goose with the golden eggs?

Khmelnitsky’s uprising is a pretty clear counterexample.

Did Jews ever declare war on the standard European nations? If you had two countries like England and France who had numerous wars over their history, but every war was initiated by the French, I would say the English were "oppressed" of a sort.

This needs to be dwelled upon, because if you compare European-Jewish conflict to European-European conflict, you quickly see that Jews were the least attacked and the safest group in Europe by a large margin.

The logic in this claim seems completely wrong. You're comparing the number of times, say, England and France declared war on each other, to the times they declared war on Jews. Only, the jews are living in England and France; when an invading English army sweeps through the French countryside, they don't carefully avoid the Jewish settlements. So the jews get hit with the same attacks as everyone else in their country, and they get hit with specifically targeted attacks against jews also. That's a lot more threat, not a lot less.

Jews did not primarily live in the countryside during European history outside of Russia, iirc. They would live in close proximity to the King with whom they had a unique economic partnership. There were no agricultural Jews in Northern, Southern, or Central Europe, unless I am mistaken.

Jews did not primarily live in the countryside during European history outside of Russia

Could they even own or rent land? Or be serfs?

They had their own quarters of a city with nearly full self-rule and a religious freedom that no one else in Europe had. This was clearly desirable to them which is why they traveled great lengths to live in Europe. Humans don’t really value whether they “own land” (after all, in America it’s not yours if you don’t pay taxes), they care whether they have a place of their own with self-rule. They were given their own unique quarters of European cities where they were free of all the pains of the typical serf or peasant and were protected by the personal interest of the King. In practice, is that ownership? In the cases where they loaned money, they held the value of many properties, but as non-agricultural people, they had no interest in owning and living in farm lands in Western Europe. In fact, the Talmud has passages about how farming is a disreputable profession, which is one of the reasons Ashkenazi didn’t farm much.

Humans don’t really value whether they “own land”

Do you have any evidence for this?

More generally, any sources that whether people historically want to live in the countryside is independent of whether they could earn a living, either on their own land or someone else's, in the jobs that exist in the countryside?

It seems that legal restrictions on what Jews could do is a sufficient explanation of why they lived in cities, sometimes with segregation to Jewish quarters. When they could work in the countryside, as in parts of Eastern Europe, it seems they did, like everyone else in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

In Central Europe during 30 years war:

https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/4545974

The rewards for their cooperation began to accrue to the Jews directly following the crushing of the Bohemian rebels at the Battle of the White Mountain, in November 1620. With the Protestant forces dis-persed, the city of Prague was ruthlessly sacked, all that is except for the Judenstadt. The emperor's soldiery were under strict instructions, which they obeyed, not to enter the Jewish quarter.

The privileged treatment continued under the new governor of Bohemia, Karl von Liechtenstein, a nobleman with close links with Jacob Bassevi, the Jewish financier who was at the center of the efforts to raise Jewish cash for the emperor and who had been ennobled--the first Jew to receive such an honor from a Holy Roman Emperor--by Rudolph II, in 1614.

In conclusion, it does seem that previous views of the fate of Central European Jewry during the Thirty Years' War stand in need of revision. The influence of certain preconceived notions appears to be widely dis-cernible in the historiography, ideas which have tended to distort our view of the question. On the one hand, there is an entrenched expecta-tion that as a defenseless and supposedly constantly victimized group, the jews of Germany and Austria must have been "easy prey for the marauding soldiery."

On the other, there is the marked tendency in pre-1939 German Jewish historical writing to flatly deny that the Jews were affected by or experienced major historical events differently from other Germans. The truth is that the terrible upheavals of the Thirty Years' War mostly worked in favor of German and all Central Euro-pean Jewry, appreciably enhanced the Jewish role in German life, and prepared the ground for the "Age of the Court Jew"-the late seven-teenth and early eighteenth century-the high-water mark of Jewish influence on Central European commerce and finance.

Note that 30% of HRE population died (though, unsure how many from violence and starvation rather than disease; perhaps 3-6% of that number) during the Thirty Years’ War. I also can’t find a number on the the number of Jews in the HRE at that time, but we can be certain they died less due to starvation, pillaging, and combat.

As for all of European history? I don’t think any Academic has crunched those numbers.

I guess a comparison could be made to other peoples in territories ruled by another power (eg the Welsh).

The best example of this right now are arguably the Kurdish.

And the Celts. The celts were obliterated by the Romans and then the Saxons, and Wales was the last Celtic holdout.

The Jews are by far the ethnicity I have the most respect for, they punch so far above their weight class it's ridiculous.

As someone who finds HBD glaringly obviously true, I have little compunction about praising them, if only it wasn't for their propensity to embrace wokeness, at least in the US.

And Israel is the country closest to being an isekai protagonist, absolutely cut off, besieged on all fronts, yet absolutely wrecks armies a dozen times their size. The only potential threat to their hegemony would be the Arab armies embracing automation, unless they decided to train their military AI on Classic Arab Doctrine, it's far harder for them to be as hilariously incompetent.

What other nation tolerates being bombarded with rockets on a regular basis, only to swat them away like inconvenient flies? Palestine should count itself lucky they pose no real threat, because the Israelis could and should clamp down on that cankering sore, and all concerned would come out better.

They punch so far above their weight we should almost declare procreate with a Jew day a national holiday.

If I want to put a tinfoil conspiracy hat on and an alien civ was guiding our development they would 100% be a Jew. Even AI is Sam Altman and Yud. Who interesting enough both skipped college.

Was hoping someone would throw in some more history so I guess I just have to assume this story they were just sort of chilling in Eastern Europe is true.

I’m curious if Civilization (the video game) create a Jewish civ what would their special abilities be.

Jewish civ bonuses:

Chosen people - ancient era bonus for developing monotheism and great prophets

Money lender - middle ages trade bonus, discount on banks

Lie back and think of Israel - modern era fertility bonus

The Civ devs are cowards who decided that religions as disparate as Buddhism and Islam deserve no special military or cultural modifiers in their games, so expecting benefits from Judaism would be pointless!

That said, an Israel Civ could be represented by high science and military production but lower pop growth IMO.

absolutely cut off, besieged on all fronts

I suppose except their entire shoreline from where they can always freely be supplied by the most powerful country in human history which unconditionally supports them diplomatically economically and militarily often to the detriment of its own geopolitical standing.

absolutely cut off, besieged on all fronts, yet absolutely wrecks armies a dozen times their size.

Besieged on all fronts but the one that matters - the air. If Israel gets in trouble, they need only threaten to use their nukes (that curiously fly under the radar of the US-sponsored anti-proliferation treaty) and the US will airlift them as much weaponry as they need and more. No matter the cost! It doesn't matter if the Arabs then organize a devastating oil embargo that costs the West hundreds of billions in economic damage, the US will not suffer Israel to come to any harm. It doesn't matter if they poison US relations with the Arab world, if they sell weapons to China, if they spy on the US, if they create a rather interesting precedent for annexing other people's land in the sacred post-WW2 rules-based international order... They get immense military aid, generous subsidies for their own military industry and all the US's best toys.

Your isekai protagonist metaphor is spot on. I'll add another trope - the strongest warrior in the world inexplicably falls in love with the MC and will stick with him, no matter what wacky and expensive disasters he embarks upon, she'll bail him out.

I'll add another trope - the strongest warrior in the world inexplicably falls in love with the MC and will stick with him, no matter what wacky and expensive disasters he embarks upon, she'll bail him out.

I can't think of an isekai series that does this.

Israel isn’t large enough for resupply from the US to be an option in any serious conflict

It literally happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Nickel_Grass

That the Israelis won a couple of battles by the time the C-5s started landing doesn't make the aid useless, the extra aircraft and supplies made it much easier for them to counterattack. One can be much more aggressive when your losses are sure to be replenished.

And of course, it was America that pressured Israel into ending that conflict on terms that were extraordinarily generous (far more generous than any American government had ever previously been in victory in a major war) to the defeated parties.

The Arab war goal was to retake the Golan Heights and Sinai peninsula which they lost when Israel attacked them in 1967. The US persuaded Israel to give up Sinai and bribed Egypt extensively to accept the deal, to sign a peace treaty with Israel. Partly this was due to Soviet pressure on the other side. Golan remains in Israeli hands. The US foreign aid budget to Egypt increased enormously (as it did when other Arab states recognized Israel and signed peace treaties). All the generosity here is flowing from the US to Israel, by bribing its enemies to stand down and persuading the Israeli govt not to bite off more than they can chew.

It's the worst deal in the world. The US got massive enmity from the Arabs, in exchange for forever paying bribes to Egypt, Lebanon and so on so they wouldn't be quite so angry with Israel. And endless military aid to Israel, so they can bomb and invade their neighbours whenever they like.

If the US simply stopped meddling in the Middle East, stopped reflexively prostrating before Israel (the Iraq War was heavily motivated by the perceived need to destroy Israel's enemies), the US would be a lot better off. On the pure logic of national interests, the US should favoured the Arabs (who are numerous and have oil) over the Israelis who are few and lack oil.

This has me imagining a potential counterfactual world, though, one in which Israel sided with the Soviets (which I think they threatened to do in reality), and today exists as a stubborn and nigh-impossible-to-dislodge pariah state with ties to America's modern enemies (a la North Korea), and internet pundits like us ceaselessly bemoan the state of America's Arab allies, all of whom can't fight a war to literally save their lives (a la the Republic of China and the Republic of Vietnam), who we expect will get blown away first the second WWIII starts, and who keep spitting in our faces despite our supposed alliance because we're an insufficiently-pious nation.

Interesting scenario. Would they do so well though? Where would Israel even get oil for their military? North Korea has China and Cuba actually has a surprising amount of oil.

I think Israel would instantly disintegrate the moment it loses its superpower sponsor. North Korea and Cuba could endure losing Soviet subsidies because they were pretty homogenous. How could Israel survive if its fuel and trade were suddenly cut off? The Palestinians and their friends in the CIA would see about the end of the Tel Aviv Regime. Of course, if they had nukes it would be different. Then again, without US support, they probably wouldn't have nukes.

But just think about the gains to be had from the Arabs! Cheap, secure oil supplies. Saddam and Syria would be on our side, no problems there. Osama Bin Laden wouldn't be angry with us. Negligible Islamic terrorism. Maybe we'd get an Israeli terror group to substitute for Al-Qaeda, which could be alarming, especially if Israel has nukes.

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It's been tried before though, hasn't it? Twice, in fact. And both times Israel was able to repulse massive armies before the U.S. got involved. In fact, the U.S. had to intervene because Israel was TOO successful.

Raw numbers don't mean that much in the face of massive organizational, technological, and motivational superiority.

I suppose you could theoretically zerg rush Israel with like 1 million poorly trained soldiers and win. I don't think that's possible right now absent a major casus belli to motivate the troops.

Didn't that get tried, and fail... in less than a week... while Israeli equipment wasn't any better than their opponent's?

Looks like you are right. I just checked Wikipedia and the invaders did have nearly 1 million troops in 1973 and over 500,000 in 1967.

Need more zerglings then. Maybe 2 million would suffice?

I'm not sure that "more manpower" would solve the issue with Arab militaries. A better cohesive structure might have allowed Egyptian and Jordanian military forces to hold together long enough to bring their numbers to bear, but holding together long enough to use superior numbers is a bar that Israel's main historical rivals show an incapacity to meet.

I believe this sentiment is actually very common with online Hindu nationalist types. My best guess is that they see Israel as a country of hyper-competent Brahmins (without the 1.5 billion riffraff bringing them down) and associate its enemies of "Muslim hordes" with Pakistan.

Lmao, if you think that I'm an "online Hindu nationalist type", you literally couldn't be further off the mark (I do accept that I'm technically online).

I absolutely despise Hindutva, neither am I a Hindu, nor am I a Brahmin for the matter.

I grudgingly concede that Brahmins are likely smarter than the typical Indian, at least on the basis of their over-representation in prestige fields, but that's more of an outcome of being a stickler for intellectual honesty than some weird superiority fetish.

Turns out, people can and do hold idiosyncratic views if they try and let themselves be guided where the evidence leads..

But don't let me keep you from armchair psychoanalysis, it's at least entertaining if nothing else.

I'm about as sincere as it gets. Jews are based.

The enmity toward the Ashkenazim pervasive across much of Europe in the early modern period derived from this experience, as the dirty work of wringing tax

More like the enmity is what created those niches (at least partially) - no self-respecting trade guild would accept somebody as lowly as a Jew into their numbers, and trading with them may make your own reputation to become tainted too. However, money lending, activity prohibited to Christians, but necessary for the economy and especially warfare - well, that can be tolerated to a certain measure. With an added bonus that if it proves too hard to return the money, one could just tell the Jews to take a hike (provided you are powerful enough of course) - they're not even proper Christians, who'd defend them?

With an added bonus that if it proves too hard to return the money, one could just tell the Jews to take a hike

And then those same gentiles would be crying about why the Jews were charging them such high rates of interest, I know that "counterparty risk" was not a term at that time but this is just common sense.

How and when did the Ashkenazim come to be?

Post ww2, America became the unofficial homeland for Jews, after Israel. That is where they thrived and became such dominant force, thanks to meritocracies, where Jews really thrive. It was not going to be anywhere else. Great Britain had its entrenched monarchy and parliament. Other countries were too small or too homogenous. America, by being so meritocratic, powerful, and accommodating of diversity, was perfect.

Great Britain had its entrenched monarchy and parliament.

Slightly puzzled by this. What would the nature of Parliament have to do with the status of Jews in post-war Britain, or indeed the monarchy? Surely the more plentiful economic opportunities in America is the more prosaic explanation?

It's not without precedent. According to Wiki, "A law in place until the 1850s stated that no member of the Jewish religion could be elected to Parliament. Some Christian denominations were similarly prohibited. If elected, a member would be excluded if he refused to swear an oath of abjuration with a strong Christian wording."

Perhaps but Jewish immigration to the U.S. didn't take off until very late into the 19th century.

Yeah but it's more about the meme, which lives in memories. It's like how black people think cops are hunting them - they aren't, but black people think they are so they act accordingly. And then America you get the opposite meme - it's the land of the free where anyone can rise to the top.

And don't forget there was no internet, it used to be much harder to find out various laws and rules and procedures. You had to rely on the word of others a lot more, and who are you going to trust, the young clerk who says Jews aren't banned from parliament or your uncle, who insists he is right?

Kind of want to see where this goes before commenting more. But Marxism and the initial basis for monetary policy fiscal spending (Keynes) was pre ww2. And pre-20th century Jesus and the whole Christianity thing. And I’m probably missing a bunch.

Guess he wrote too many words was trying to copy it all. Here’s the link

https://razib.substack.com/p/ashkenazi-jewish-genetics-a-match

And twitter

https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1656952555639848962?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

I assume this community has above average members of this tribe. I don’t think Jewish history has been much discussed so other sources would be interesting. I feel like I’ve studied every civ at some point. It seems like an understudied area since all of us have been fighting ideological wars that Jews created with weapons Jews created and now debating AI doom from a Jew quite interesting from such a small subset of humanity with no land (Einstein, Marx, Keynes, Friedman, Yud) and even before this century fighting religious wars over a religion (Jesus).

Keynes wasn't Jewish.

You are right on that. Wander why I thought that. Only thing I guess is so many top economists are.

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