I don’t think the English consider Beowulf to be their holy book, so I’m not sure this is quite applicable.
I think you underestimate the impact of the Bible on modern Jews. I mean, the obvious example is Israel. It wasn’t founded where it was by chance. It’s where it is today because that is the land promised to Jews in the Bible. Hell, even today some Jews even use it as justification for why they should take more land.
Ok, but when the ADL asks whether people agree with the statement: “Jews are responsible for the death of Christ.” It’s like one of those questions designed to trip you up on the SAT. They’re clearly gunning for the yes answer to use as evidence of antisemitism.
I’d have to question whether answering yes to, “Did Jews kill Jesus?”, is evidence of anything at all.
Let’s say for a moment that it’s the truth. Does saying that people of one religious group group killed anyone two thousand years ago mean anything at all about what you think about people today affiliated with that religion?
And if it’s false, but that’s what you were taught and you still believe it, does believing an untrue thing about people of one religious group group killing someone two thousand years ago mean anything at all about what you think about people today affiliated with that religion?
As an isolated fact, I would say neither means anything beyond what you think is the truth about a 2,000 year old murder. Surely the ADL or anyone else can’t (and I hope doesn’t) point to this one thing and claim it is evidence.
Everybody hates everybody in Britain. Hatred against Jews is no more or less significant than hatred against Asians, Muslims, the French, chavs, and the government. I’ve lived in the country for 3/4 of my life, and I feel confident in echoing the other Brits in this thread who say that amongst people in general, Jews are not hatred any more than any other group.
Even the BNP is accepting Jews. And the BNP is widely known as the party that hates the most people.
Remind us, if you will, who your rabbi was when you became Bar Mitzvah.
You are ignorant of the history of Zionism. The early Zionists were secular, the region was chosen because of its historical significance, not religious. The fact that you’re using some nutter Jews who want to expand to “God’s Promised Land” as evidence that the bible is that type of influence for “modern Jews” in general is the fallacy of composition. Going from that fallacious generalization to individual examplars of Judaism is the fallacy of division.
The fallacy of composition, along with the fallacy of division, by the way, are the twin foundations of pretty much all bigotry, racism and prejudice.
That’s because it is evidence of anti-Semitism.
What’s the verb there, Treis? “Are” is not past tense. “Are” is present tense. If you believe that “Jews” today are responsible for actions allegedly taken by a handfull of people who are so ancient that their bones are dust and their names mostly forgotten? Then yah, that’s anti-Semitism.
Having looked at these charts, all I can say is that if I were Jewish, I wouldn’t even fly over Hungary let alone visit it. Since I’m not, I’d feel rather safe flying over it, but I still wouldn’t visit.
Actually no, according to traditional Judaism, eating Sushi won’t send you to hell.
It’s only if you eat sushi AND are Jewish that it’s a problem.
As far as they were concerned, Kosher laws etc. applied to Jews and no one else.
The same is true of Muslims. They think Muslims have to pray five times abstain from alcohol, not eat pork etc., but that doesn’t apply to Christians or Jews.
I am curious as to why the ADL segregated this question from the other four. Their grouping of results suggests, though it doesn’t specifically claim (that I noticed), that agreeing with any three out of the four statements is a pretty definite indicator of anti-semitism. Then they chart the Jesus-killer thing entirely separately. Any idea why?
In all sincerity, can you expand on this for non-Jews like myself who don’t find the concept of Judaism as different parts religion, ethnicity, and Zionism to be intuitive at all.
I understand some about Judaism as a religion and it seems to be very much based on ancient history. However, there are many secular Jews so that isn’t the full answer. Jews being viewed as an ethnicity is a little harder because they do accept converts that come from many different ethnic groups but they don’t proselytize so the convert population is fairly small. I can understand wanting to keep an ethnic group self-segregated from the rest of society based on historical ties but the price has been unusually high for Jews to do that so there must be some compelling reason to try to maintain it over thousands of years. I don’t think I know much about Zionism and how it negates most of the historical elements of Judaism based on what you just said.
This is an honest question and I really am interested. Can you or anyone else give us a quick primer on Judaism for non-Jews and how those different elements fit together?
I’m not sure, they charted a few answers separately. If I had to hazard a guess, and it is only a guess, it’d be because the belief that “the Jews” are responsible for the death of Jesus is due to traditional Christian theology from Matthew 27:25, a belief which has historically been used to demonize and persecute Jews. IIRC the Catholic Church apologized for this somewhere in the modern era. Vatican II maybe?
First off, you need to understand that “Judaism” is a convenient umbrella term for multiple sects ranging from ultra-Orthodox splinter sects to Reconstructionists, some of whose congregations have completely eliminated any references to a deity from their liturgy. Second, Jewishness and Judaism is largely based on tradition, but not all of it ancient. Most ultra-Orthodox, for example, dress the way they do because their ancestors dressed that way in the shtetl. Many Jews, like the Reform Jews (like me) treat the Torah as a set of ‘sacred stories’. And, much like me, (as you mentioned) a whole bunch of modern religious Jews are atheists and atheists are accepted by all major Jewish sects as full and complete members of both the cultural and the religious community.
Remember, we came long, long before modern definitions of race and ethnicity, so they don’t really apply. Think of us as a tribe, if that helps. You can convert to tribal membership if the tribe accepts you. And you can be expelled from the tribe if you violate its key strictures (being an atheist is fine, believing that Jesus was the messiah means you’re out of the tribe.) And not only do Jews not prosletyze, but rabbis are required to refuse, three times, anybody who asks to convert, before they say yes on the fourth.
That’s actually a stereotype. In virtually every culture where Jews were accepted and not persecuted, we blend in and tend to fade over time. Jews were kept segregated. The word “ghetto” comes from a district that the Italians forced their Jewish population into.
The early Zionists were secularists. The homeland of the Jewish people was and is Israel. It wasn’t any more religious than Irish Americans who want to see The Emerald Isle some day. My family members were among the first 14 families to found the first Jewish settlement in the territory of Ottoman Greater Syria (in the part that is now known as Israel) in the village of Rishon L’tzion. (meaning “first to Zion”). They did not immigrate because they thought God told them to, but because they were riding the initial wave of nationalism and wanted to do their part in helping the Jewish people resettle our ancestral home.
They charted all 5 statements separately, but then combined 4 of them and charted the people who agreed with any three of the four. The 5th question was the Jesus one, and there has to be some significance as to why it was not compiled with the others. O don’t mean this as a criticism of you, but I can’t help but wonder why that was treated as some kind of “special” question.
Maybe I clicked on the wrong link? Are you not referring to the link Ibn posted?
Starting on page six I see separate charts for the first few questions, then the first four were combined. Then the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth were charted individually and not combined later on. Other than my previous guess, I really haven’t the faintest clue why they didn’t graph it with the other questions.
Wait, what do you mean by live sushi? And no, Jews on the whole don’t believe in hell. The blashephmey and idolatry are, admittedly tricky. Lots of discussion has gone on about what exactly constitutes those ideas.
Yes, that’s the right link, but I didn’t pay much attention to those last three questions because they were not so much about attitude as an attempt to determine the origin of them, or more accurately how their attitude was changed by (or conflated with) what they knew about Israel. I think the Jesus question was logically related to the first four, and none of those five were nearly as related to the last 3. So it make sense to me that the last three weren’t compiled with the first 5.
Yeah, the best guess I think I could make is that the first four are:
In contrast, the Blood Guilt is an ancient religious anti-Semitic trope. Whether or not they should be charted separately is a matter of opinion, I suppose, and I don’t feel strongly either way. But I can understand how the religious nature of the trope differentiates it from the secular nature of the first four.
See, you are not referring only to people who use “Chosen People” as a slur. You are referring to anyone who harbors the notion that Jews regard themselves as a “chosen people” as that concept is presented in Deuteronomy 7:6. And those people (which I submit would include most Protestants at least) you give no benefit of the doubt. You don’t say they have a misunderstanding of modern Jewish beliefs. You accuse them of “slander,” and now of now of much worse.
Did somebody say something about the fallacy of composition being the basis of bigotry?
Very few of the Jewish people today do not want peace (it would seem) the majority of both Jews and Palistinians want peace. But a few on both sides like to keep animosity going. Just as in this country, the greatest part of Americans are good and kind people, but there is a small percentage that don’t respect others or their rights, they are like the thorn in the lions foot. Imagine how much less taxes and money people would pay in this country because of crime, that the small % of people do.
We don’t say all americans are crimnals nor should we say Jews, Etc, are bad. I believe it is bad to generalize a whole culture, government etc, because there maybe one spoiled apple in the bushel.
I think he means something like drunken shrimp, where you take a live shrimp, put it in alcohol to stun it, and then eat it alive. And I’ve got to think something like that is a a pretty clear violation of the Noahide laws.
