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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?
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.
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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?
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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.
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