Why Jewish History Is So Hard to Write

> That's because "whiteness" is an invented category.

This is a common narrative now, and it seems malicious (or at least, misguided) to me - it's an attempt to deconstruct the generalized European identity as formed through ethnogenesis on the North American continent as different groups of Europeans intermarried. Can someone who hails from sixteen different European countries really make any claim to "belong" to any one of them? Doesn't it make much more sense for such a person to look at the superset of shared values, history, and beliefs that their ancestors had and make a synthesis of them all?

> There are no historical threads that bind together just the people you think of as "white" that don't include many others that you exclude based solely on a modern historical understanding of "white".

This is like saying there is no such thing as a puddle, pond, or lake because nobody can tell you exactly how many litres of water makes up the dividing line between them. Of course this is a clinal sort of division - it's not just genetics, it's also culture and outlook, behaviour, and whether or not a person has the desire to be identified as such. Expecting there to be some perfect formula that determines on-paper whether someone is white or not is an unreasonable expectation that nobody holds except to deconstruct it and diminish it as an identity. Such an attack would be horribly racist if applied to any other group.

From the article:

> For Schama, Jewishness comprises anything Jews have done, in all the very different places and ways they have lived. The boxer Dan Mendoza was a Jew, and so was Esperanza Malchi, the confidante of a sixteenth-century royal consort in the Ottoman court—just as fully as canonical figures like Moses Maimonides, the medieval Jewish philosopher, or Theodor Herzl. Schama offers an appealingly democratic and humanistic approach to Jewish history.

If this is fair and inoffensive to write (and I think it's fine), then why would a similar paragraph about "Whiteness comprises anything White people have done, in all the very different places and ways they have lived" not be fine? It's not like Jews are a unified racial group - there are a number of different groups within there, as we can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_ethnic_divisions

And yet, Jewish is not an "invented category" by any stretch of the imagination. Why would a different set of rule apply here?

> Write a history of the Irish diaspora, Sweden, the Balkans, or Russia and nobody is going to call you racist.

I don't know if that's necessarily true, it's going to depend heavily on the content of the book. I think that it's wise for a critical eye to be applied to any history book, it shouldn't particularly matter what's on the cover.

> Claim some sort of tribal group that incorporates all of Europe and the Middle East except excludes people of a skin color or specific religious history you don't like, and you'll find that you're racist.

Claim that an entire people doesn't exist, and deny their right to self-representation, and you may not find that you're a racist, but you may find that conflict is inevitable. This is not a line of thought that leads towards productive discourse, this is a line of thought that leads towards dividing society into opposing camps of enmity.

Kind of tacky. The article is trying to address why the Jews as a persecuted group have survived throughout history. It's pretty impressive. I don't see "glorification" just history.

It's almost like you registered to talk trash about Jews. What are you adding to the conversation?

Jewishness is not just about race, religion, or ethnicity, it may encompass those things but it's more about shared identity and history, so getting into racism and then trying to bring up religious practices is just throwing darts at the wall.

I'm not sure what legalistic hermeneutics has to do with hacker culture.

Assessing which historical sources are factual is not a trivial problem.

All these categories and identities are invented to some degree or another -- they exist in both a state of arbitrariness and meaningfulness (there's something "there" there because of consensus). Ireland wasn't always a unified thing, or any of the other nations you mention. I don't think that identities have to be some sort of pure Platonic form argued from first principles to be legitimate, they are just what they are. The idea of "blackness" is also an invented category -- the experience of African-Americans under historical slavery and the experience of Africans in African countries under historical colonialism or Africans whose lands were not fully colonized (Ethiopia) are very different sorts of backgrounds.

Identities are formalized based on observation of an Other who doesn't fit into the category, because those observations bring to light unstated assumed commonalities between peoples who didn't think of themselves as a single thing. This is one method of ethnogenesis where groups that didn't think of themselves as a thing gain that consciousness. The idea of "white people" is an example of ethnogenesis that I think had its origins mostly in the American colonial experience, where you had a mixture of European groups differentiating themselves from Africans and American Indian groups. In Europe, an Englishman and a Frenchman (themselves the result of their own ethnogenesis) may not see eye-to-eye, but in a new territory with other peoples with very different cultures, suddenly the English-French thing doesn't seem as big.

These things expand, shift, and contract over time. But at the moment, the consensus-driven model makes me see myself as "white" as one of my categories, invented or not (not that that's my sole identity or anything!). I see myself as white, others who I see as white see me as "white" (though probably if outside the US they see me as "American" more?), and others who aren't white probably think "white" when they see me, so in the end that's the category that we have at the moment, nothing wrong with that in and of itself as long as you treat others with respect.

I hear that "Imagined Communities" is a good read about the rise of different nation-feelings in recent centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_Communities I haven't read it yet myself, though.