3300 years of reparations. Jeff Jarvis and
Charles Johnson link to
an article from Al-Ahram which reports a group of Egyptian lawyers is planning to sue "the Jews" for stealing about one ton of gold from their ancestors. Specifically, Pharoah's citizens, right before the Hebrews left Egypt.
Someone emailed me about this article and suggested I compare it to
Talmud Tractate Sanhedrin 91a, in which the sages - in their usual clear-eyed, unflinching way -
discuss whether the Israelites did indeed steal the gold and utensils, and come up with
various rationalizations and explanations.I wonder if the Egyptian jurists are aware that a judgment was already made in this case?
On one occasion the Egyptians lodged a complaint against the people of Israel before Alexander the Great . They said to him : Is it not written: 'and the Lord gave the people favor in the eyes of Egypt' and they complied? Now give us back the silver and gold which you took from us ... He said to them: I too will bring you proof from the Torah, for it is written: 'And the sojourn of the Israelites who dwelt in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years'. Give us compensation for the labor of 600,000 men whom you enslaved in Egypt for four hundred and thirty years ... They searched but could find no answer.
Heh.
Not to mention that there isn't any solid proof the Exodus story happened (we don't have reliable archeological evidence of Hebrews until about 800 BCE). But we do have solid evidence of the Jews' treatment at the hands of Muslims from the Middle Ages to the expulsion of 800,000 Jews from Arab lands (and confiscation of their property) in the mid 20th c. (the "Golden Age of Spain" only lasted a couple of centuries), so I would say whatever gold we took from Egypt 4000 years ago is a drop in the bucket of what their descendants owe us, if we wanted to play that game.
So the Egyptians would be smart to drop the issue - if we took them seriously we could bankrupt them.
The
LGF crowd is all over this.
. . . only Copts (app. 10% of Egypt's population) are real descendents of the ancient Egyptians.
Technically, if anything was stolen it wasn't from Muslims because at the time the Egyptian people were doing the Ra, Isis, jackle-headed god thing, right? So then what about all the people decended from Jews (Christians), are they gonna be sued also?
You can see the way they strain to acknowledge Moses and Aaron, while repudiating the Jews and "rabbis" (lol, rabbis before sinai). Their position makes no sense - they have to somehow allow Israel to retain theological significance via the OT w/o acknowledging the Jewish people as its rightful heirs, and they can't really get that to make theological sense.
So what's wrong with this suit besides res judicata (already decided by Alexander) and evidentiary problems (how to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the riches were stolen)? Well, there's always the statute of limitations. But more importantly, if the plaintiffs are accepting the Torah as having evidentiary value, then they must also concede that G-d promised the Holy Land to the descendants of Jacob. I think there may be a basis to strike a bargain here.
OK so don't the egyptians have to give an Itemized list of the allegedly stolen articles along with proof of ownership? Also wouldn't Islam be liable to return Mecca and Medina since the Quran goes into great detail how the Jews who owned it were driven out robbed raped and Murdered ?
Exodus 12:35-36 suggests that the ancient Egyptians gave the gold to the Israelites in order to get them to leave, presumably because of the killing of the first born children by the Israelites' "militant" ally. It is worth contemplating application of such a principle to a more modern situation in which "militants" are killing children in a conflict, the Arab - Israeli conflict. Running the numbers, each of the 600,000 Israelite adult males (Exodus 12:37) got 500 grams of gold, worth about $6,000 today. Under this "Gold for Peace" approach, the ancient Egyptians and Israelites agreed it was worth making such payments in exchange for the Israelites leaving the country. Applying this plan to the modern Arab - Israeli conflict, Israel would pay similar amounts of gold to Arabs to leave the Land of Israel. The total would be a few billion dollars, comparable to foreign aid to the frontline countries in one year. The plan is workable financially.
300 tons of gold is worth about 3.5 billion dollars today. I think that's about how much aid we give Egypt in two years. That oughta cover it.
The Farkites
are also having a good time with this, and Jonah Goldberg points out
what about the Jews' cut of Egypt’s tourism industry? Since the Jews built a lot of that stuff – without compensation – shouldn’t they get a cut of all that too?
You would think a group of lawyers would research their case a bit more thoroughly before making asses of themselves in public, especially if their culture is so driven by the avoidance of humiliation.
Jews in odd places: Australia: There has always been a precarious relationship between Sydney's Jewish community and evangelical Anglican Christians . In March, the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies called on the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, to
rein in his overzealous followers.
Stephen Rothman, the Board of Deputies' president, said the board had received "complaints in the hundreds" in the past few years about inappropriate and disrespectful proselytising by Anglicans in Sydney.
Ghetto mentality. My question for Diane is:
if conservative Christians are such fair-weather friends of Israel that they are willing to retract their support of Israel over
Jewish discomfort with Mel Gibson's passion play, why on earth should Jews kiss their butts to make them stay? Friends like that we don't need.
But I don't think most of them are such fair-weather friends. Even if their support is based on end-times theology (which is problematic in itself), it is not conditional on what Jews think of Mel Gibson's movie. They have become knowledgeable about Judaism out a desire to understand a historical Jesus, so they know Jesus was a Jew, and most of them accept that the Romans killed him. Beyond theology, they know what Islamism is, they know the history of Israel's relations with its Arab neighbors, they know who has a thriving democracy which protects the right of all religions, and who doesn't.
The larger issue is: if we don't believe the West should base its relations with the Muslim world on placating their easily offended sensibilities,
letting them guilt-trip us instead of calling them on their shit - to put it bluntly - why is it a good idea for Jews to succumb to the same kind of emotional blackmail by Christians? The days are long past when Jews - at least in America - need to placate the more powerful majority. If we cannot stand up staight and have an honest debate with our fellow citizens (Christian, Muslim, Wiccan, or whatever) about nasty old stereotypes and their probable consequences, can we have that same debate with the mullahs who preach hatred of Jews all over the Arab world, make TV series out of the
Protocols, and spread blood libel? If we are not willing to give the Islamists a pass, why give American evangelicals one?
I guess i don't take well to the idea that I should try to placate
anyone who tries to bully me. The minute any group who claims to be my friend issues a veiled threat that I'd better fall in line or else, is the minute when I tell them what
my criteria are for friendship, and if they don't agree they can take a hike. There is no other appropriate response, unless I want to live permanently in fear of others' disapproval.
I am not saying Jews should issue ultimatums to Mel Gibson (which we aren't and can't), or that a discussion of artistic responsibility should be acrimonious. The Jewish and Christian challenges to the film were made firmly but with respect. But veiled threats are not part of debate, they are manipulative ways to avoid debate and force aquiesence.
In fact, the frankness and fact-based specificity of Jewish and Catholic criticism have had a positive effect, in that
Mel seems more open to our concerns than he was a few months ago.A spokesman for "The Passion" said the script that Sister Boys read was outdated and had been revised. "The vast majority of the things they are afraid of are not in the film anymore," the movie's marketing director, Paul Lauer, said in a phone interview. "Jews are not Christ-killers. They should not be charged with deicide. We condemn that." Lauer said the filmmakers had "extended an olive branch" by inviting the Anti-Defamation League to see the movie, and had "gone way beyond the call of duty" to invite critiques. He said other Jewish leaders had been invited to discuss the movie "and help us make whatever minor changes can be made while keeping the film's history and religion accurate."
During centuries of diaspora, in both the Christian and Muslim worlds Jews had to cringe to survive, developing a "ghetto mentality." One of the main reasons for reviving
the Jewish state was to eliminate that necessity. And as Leon Weiseltier has pointed out, the United States also turned out to be a place where the fundamental relation between Jews and fellow citizens, is - in stark contrast to Europe and Asia - is based on respect and inalienable rights, not on privileges capriciously granted by all-powerful State.
In Israel and in America, the rights of the Jews are axiomatic. . . . the United States represents a revolution in Jewish history, a country that is — in its philosophical foundations and in its political practices — structurally hospitable to us. We cannot be pilloried as a state within a state in a state that is comprised of states within a state. We cannot be excoriated for difference in a society in which difference is the substance of sameness.
. . . the story of Jew-hatred in America differs profoundly from the story of Jew-hatred in Europe. It is a scandal to be refused admission to a school or a hotel or a club; but it is not an expulsion or a pogrom. And it is not only the virulence of anti-Semitism that has been diminished in the United States. Its legitimacy, too, has been diminished. In fact, its legitimacy has been altogether repudiated. The remarkable fact about the American Jewish campaign against anti-Semitism in America, like the African American campaign against racism in America, is that it is made in the name of American principles. Not the Jews, but the bigotry against the Jews, is the anomaly here.
The "ghetto mentality" unfortunately lingers on in the United States in the 21st century, but it's as anachronistic as African-Americans shuffling and saying "yassuh" whenever a white person walks by. Abraham Foxman understands this when he says:
Here's the first time we've heard that linkage: We support Israel, so shut up about anti-Semitism. ... If that's what support of Israel means, no thanks.
(
Here's Foxman's presentation at the
YIVO Conference on antisemitism. I was in the audience, and I thought he was a mensch.)
Jews in odd places: Alsace: JTA delves into the campaign to save Jewish history in Alsace, a rural land that once provided most of the chief rabbis and scholars of the French Jewish community.
"Within the next five years, some 20 to 30 synagogues in the region could be demolished. And if not torn down, they could become — as some already have — a Christian parish hall and gym, a storehouse for fire-fighting equipment, a garage, a cinema or a private home.
Indeed, the oldest synagogue in Alsace, built around 1290 in Rouffach, is home to an architect. No other synagogues in the area should suffer a similar fate, says Catherine Lehmann, P.R. director of
Jewish Heritage of Alsace. Lehmann not only spearheaded the drive to save synagogues, ritual baths and cemeteries in wine-producing Alsace, but is also a driving force behind what this fall will be the fourth “European Day of Jewish Culture” in 20 to 25 European countries."
The California recall - the Jewish view? If you follow the Jewish press, there is apparently a "Jewish" viewpoint on the whole mess. According to the
JTA, "most Los Angeles Jews to offer public comment on the issue seem tepid about both the election and Schwarzenegger’s bid as a Republican candidate." They're Democrats - go figure.
Mostly, they are just confusing the Democratic viewpoint with the Jewish one, because so many Jews, especially prominent figures, are Democratic. As Democrats, Jews will naturally be predisposed,
if not to support Governor Davis outright, then to at least oppose his recall.
However, it would appear that Jews in California were not asked their opinion on Davis or the recall. They were treated as just another Democratic interest group that needed to be
prodded out to support the flailing Governor. Front and center is the
Forward newspaper, which has run numerous editorials
parrotting the
Democratic party line.
The most disgusting aspects of this prodding were the attempts to
slander and
defame U.S. Representative
Darrell Issa, the main financier of the recall petition campaign. Darrell is a huge supporter of Israel, contrary to all the crap thrown at him. He has one of the highest scores given out by AIPAC. Darrell is a great, fun guy, who just happens to be conservative. It is no surprise that he would get dragged through the mud. I was sorry to see him not run for governor once his recall campaign finally succeeded, but would he have somehow been "bad for the Jews"? I don't see how.
What might be a Jews' concerns (ney, a Jewish Democrat's) about Arnold, besides that he is running as a Republican?
1.
His father was a member of the Nazi Party and served in the German army during World War II:
Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, recalls that in the mid-1980s, Schwarzenegger became an active member and patron of the center, and later its Museum of Tolerance.
“In 1990, Arnold came to see me and said he was troubled because he really knew so little about his father,” Hier says. “He asked us to use our researchers and resources to track down his father’s past.”
The search showed that Gustav Schwarzenegger, a small-town Austrian police official, tried to join the Nazi Party in 1938, immediately after the Anschluss, but was not formally inducted into the party until 1941.
He served in the German army, stationed in Austria in a police function. No records or complaints were found to implicate the father in any war crimes or persecution of Jews.
OK, not a nice thing to have in the family, but the complaint is too easily lobbed at most Germans/Austrians.
2.
He has a strange relationship with Kurt Waldheim. Again, not a good thing. Unlike number 1, Arnold has control over this. But what exactly the relationship is, no one can specify -- even
Tim Noah, Slate's mudslinger extroardinaire.
All in all, there is no "Jewish" aspect of the recall. It is just an exercise in direct democracy. We can agree or disagree on the sensibilities of it all, but the legality is obvious and the pedigree goes all the way back to ancient Greece. Right-wing conspiracy it is not.
And it is certainly not an anti-Jewish one.
With
over 100 candidates to choose from (I personally prefer
Brooke Adams, a reliably conservative Republican who happens to be a hot chick as well), Jews should not have trouble finding someone they like. And it is clear that, aside from a few key interest groups whom he has bought off, no one likes Grey Davis.
Jews in odd places: Hispanic Americans: Throughout the Southwest, Hispanics are discovering a Jewish past. A few of these descendants of conversos or crypto-Jews are
returning to the faith of their ancestors.
But let's not exaggerate the trend. Most people who discover a crypto-Judaic or converso heritage do not return to the faith, says Stanley Hordes, founder of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies.
"Crypto-Judaism is an unusual phenomenon in that most of the people who I've dealt with are initially very reluctant to reveal who they are to anyone," Hordes says. "And even if they do talk about their heritage with other people, conversion to Judaism or even establishing a relationship with mainstream Judaism is something that occurs quite rarely. For the most part, for the last 500 years, most of these people have been Catholic or Protestant, and their Christianity has certainly become part of their heritage as well."
Jews in sports: Jeff Halpern: What would his mother think?!
One of my favorite pubs,
Grevey's (in northern Virginia at the intersection of Rt. 50 and Gallows Rd.), has a
Jeff Halpern dish with about a three dollar markup, proceeds of which go to one of Halpern's charities.
Halpern is a Jewish boy from Potomac, Maryland, who plays center for the Washington Capitals hockey team.
Fair enough that he should have a dish named after him which raisies money for charity. But guess what dish it is?
The bacon cheeseburger.
Now I realize that Jeff doesn't keep kosher -- neither do I -- but I would bet my mother would be upset if that was how my name was being used...
A nice Jewish doctah. We've only been doing it for a coupla thousand years.
"Five hundred years ago, 50% of the doctors in Europe were Jews," Heynick said at a recent reading of "Jews and Medicine," at a Brooklyn Barnes & Noble. At the time, Jews made up less than 1% of the total population of Europe. But from the lowest rung of society to the court physicians, Jews were deeply embedded in the medical profession. Medicine was a profession that the Jew — wandering from land to land — could take with him. "Fast forward 500 years: 36 Nobel Prize winners in medicine were Jews — and [the Jews] are not even approaching 1% of the world population."
Eicha. . . I
wrote last week about the Jewish holy day of Tisha B'Av, which commemorates the destruction of both Temples and other calamities.
Here is a meditative piece about observing Tisha B'Av at the Temple Wall itself.
Cold War Jokes:
Question: What does friendship among Soviet nationalities mean?
Answer: It means that the Armenians take the Russians by the hand; the Russians take the Ukrainians by the hand; the Ukranians take the Uzbeks by the hand; and they all go and beat up the Jews.
(from
Gene Spafford, via
OxBlog)
This week's Pintele Yid recommendation - For our gentile friends and Jews who want to rediscover their heritage - recommending quintessentially Jewish cultural works (books, TV specials, CDs, Torah teachers, poets, websites, and more) which transport you inside a Jewish skin and show you the world through Jewish eyes.
Last week's recommendation.Week 6 recommendation.Week 5 recommendation.Week 4 recommendation.Week 3 recommendation.Week 2 recommendation.Introduction to the series and first recommendation.Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, by
Daniel Boyarin.Let's dip a little deeper into the world of the redactors of the Talmud. Boyarin is
a Berkeley professor and the book is written from a scholarly pomo viewpoint, but don't let that put you off. The prose is accessible, and on the whole, the book is less dry and formal than
this excerpt. Boyarin is interested in what we can learn about Talmudic (and therefore Jewish) attitudes toward sexuality from the Paul Bunyan-like tall tales of the shamans, miracle workers, tzaddiks, holy fools, crafty politicians, or great scholars and lovers who were the Sages.
These stories, embedded in legal arguments and spiritual teachings, have didactic functions, but many of them are also hilarious, touching, scary, sexy, and just plain weird to our 21st century minds. (Some of them remind me of nothing so much as
Native American Coyote stories.)
Carnal Israel imparts a sense of the Sages' intellectual playfulness, how they structured their arguments, what they valued, and how they shaped the Judaism we inherited.
This study of rabbinic constructions of the body, gender, and sexuality is one of the very few programmatically feminist readings of ancient rabbinic culture that, at the same time, is deeply learned in the sources and existentially committed to the traditions grounded in them.
. . . Daniel Boyarin argues that rabbinic Judaism was based on a set of assumptions about the human body that were profoundly different from those of Christianity. The body--specifically, the sexualized body--could not be renounced, for the Rabbis believed as a religious principle in the generation of offspring and hence in intercourse sanctioned by marriage. This belief bound men and women together and made impossible the various modes of gender separation practiced by early Christians. The commitment to coupling did not imply a resolution of the unequal distribution of power that characterized relations between the sexes in all late-antique societies. But Boyarin argues strenuously that the male construction and treatment of women in rabbinic Judaism did not rest on a loathing of the female body.
Although there are
several books which
extract rabbinic stories from their Talmudic settings and render them in narrative form, this one - in keeping with the purpose of this series - examines both the stories and the rabbis' methods of exegesis to describe an often-unrecognized yet fundamental Jewish worldview.
UPDATE: Yes, Boyarin was responsible for
clearing an Arab professor in his department who said that he didn't know if
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a forgery. To me this is like not being sure whether the moon is made of green cheese, but apparently Boyarin has elastic requirements for his professors.
Carnal Israel is still a great book.
Six degrees of "meet cute." What a coincidence - I just saw
this wedding announcement on
Protocols. Gay Salisbury used to rent out her spare bedroom in a B&B arrangement, and I stayed there once about 4 years ago (for about a week). She lived on 95th & Columbus. She was a lovely host - even let me check my email using her computer.
Siman tov u mazel tov, Gay!
What I Did During the Blackout, by YehuditI live on 8th Avenue in the 50s. I first realized there was a problem when I tried to send an email and couldn't connect. (The laptop had switched to battery power without my noticing.) After determining that the power was out at least on my floor, I looked out the window.
Lots of people milling around. I went back out in the hall, someone came up the stairs and told me what was going on. I filled some pots full of water, took a shower and washed my hair, because I didn't know how long it would be till I got a chance to do that again. Water pressure was okay. I had lots of food which would be okay for a while in my fairly new refrigerator, and 8 bottles of orange-flavored seltzer, so I decided the only thing I needed was AA batteries, so I could read at night and listen to music.
I'm only on the 7th floor, so going up and down wasn't too bad, although the hallways and stairwell were dark. (Memo to super: It doesn't cost that much to put battery-powered emergency lights in the stairwell.)
I walked all over my neighborhood looking for batteries, and had the same experience as Amy Langfield in Brooklyn:
Rite-Aid was closed, and customers were pissed because they had batteries but refused to let people in. Radio Shack was closed. Tarzian hardware was closed. Key Food was closed. Even Hagen-Dazs closed. But it was the mom-and-pop stores and the immigrant places that were open, being extremely accommodating, friendly and no price gouging that I saw. Almost all the pizza places were open. Lots of Thai and Chinese places were doing brisk business. Loads of people walking down the street with Mr. Softee ice creams and gelatos.
I was glad my flashlight takes AA batteries - all the stores were out of Ds. (Next time make
an emergency kit like this.)
I was also glad I had gone to the ATM recently, because it was a cash-only economy. Every block I would pass someone sitting in a car with the door open listening to the news, and I would hang out there until I was caught up.
I didn't hear about any looting and didn't see any chaos.I thought about
walking to Times Square - 10 blocks from my apartment - to see how eerie it would be without lights, but I decided what I really needed was
a nice sunset, and maybe some stars and Mars. I walked up to Hudson River Park on the Upper West Side, where I chatted with two people I met there till 11 PM, then we three walked up 72nd st and found a restaurant that had put its tables out on the sidewalk and was serving decent Italian food and red wine, all lit by candles. We all had dinner, then they walked up Bway and I caught the 104 down Broadway (buses were running by evening).
I was amazed by how undark it was, compared to - say - even my neighborhood in Austin at night with the lights
on. Even before the moon came up. The starscape was pathetic, but all the locals were ooing and ahhing about it.
We did see Mars rise over the Trump Towers, from the pier, and it was amazingly bright. Someone told me the best place to see astronomical phenomena is on the East Side Promenade - people set up telescopes over there. So maybe I will go there to get a view of Mars at its closest next week.
By late evening my cell phone worked, but I didn't get landline and DSL back till this afternoon. My apt has good insulation so the temp was tolerable until Friday morning when the power came back on.
Head Heeb gets the last word:
It was New York all over; we piss and moan about ordinary things, but when it hits the fan, we show the world how it's done.
