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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.