Why Jewish History Is So Hard to Write • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Jewish History Is So Hard to Write

#161

Post by avshyz » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 4:17 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #140

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, this fact this makes me proud to be a Jew. (A happy Passover to all whom it may concern). As a young boy my father used to take me to the Pergamon museum in Berlin - one major exhibit is the Babylonian street of processions (it dates to the neo-Babylonian empire) He used to say - here you see our heritage, we were around the show when Berlin (and all the other great capitals of the world) were still a swamp.

Why be proud of a thing that happened to you by chance? I was born into a particular family but that's nothing to be proud of, it wasn't exactly my achievement. I'm Dutch by birth, but I'm not proud to be Dutch. I'm a European by birth, but it doesn't make me proud either. What I an be proud about is those things that I've achieved that were not 'normal' for a person of my birth station and privilege level. (And that…

Is there anything wrong with being patriotic? By being proud of your culture?

Yeah, I puff my chest when I think of my personal achievements. But that doesn't mean I don't feel a sense of pride when I read I piece of text written thousand years ago in the same language I speak today.

There's nothing wrong with being proud of being a part of something, as long you don't disparage others. But I guess it's easier to think in collective terms when you're born of a minority that for the larger part of history was oppressed.

Re: Why Jewish History Is So Hard to Write

#162

Post by pavelrub » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 1:31 AM UTC

skissane wrote: post #158

pavelrub wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, there is some cultural and genetic commonality between the two groups, but is it sufficient to say they are the same ethnicity? Of course, because both groups view themselves as belonging to the same group of people, with shared customs, history, religion and tradition, that dates back to the Kingdom of Israel. What you don't seem to understand is that ethnicity is a social concept - the criteria isn't "how mu…

Ethnicity seems to me to be a sort of taxonomic hierarchy. Some ethnic groups are more closely related to each other than others. Ethnicities can be grouped together into families of closely related ethnicities, which in turn can often be further grouped into broader families of less closely related ethnicities; ethnicities can often be further subdivided into sub-ethnicities. Are Jews a single ethnicity, or a family…

Yes - both a secular Zionist Jew in Tel Aviv and a Satmar Jew in the US (both are, by the way, most likely Ashkenazi) would see themselves as belonging to the same broad group of people with shared customs, culture and history - the Jews. This is why we refer to both groups as "Jews".

This doesn't of course mean that their "subjective sense of identity" is identical in its entirety, but that's pretty much the case with every ethnicity.

Re: Why Jewish History Is So Hard to Write

#163

Post by LifeLiverTransp » Sat, Apr 07, 2018, 4:06 PM UTC

bordercases wrote: post #95

LifeLiverTransp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That religion also spawned the first Hacker culture. If you can circumvent god and men law with logic - you are a rabbi.

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

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30475

I sometimes wonder too- but then i meet the language lawyers, talking with the drm-legal team about, undefined behaviour in todays society- and suddenly.

Or if you sit with actual lawyers, and all they talk about is how you could get away with a crime, in a theoretical sense of course, if you used that trapdoor and lousy wording, and you realize, that is just exactly what you talked about the other day, with the database team over lunch.

You are right though, that the word hacker-culture does not capture it- its a mindset bend on edge cases, always looking for ways to circumvent.

Re: Why Jewish History Is So Hard to Write

#164

Post by golemiprague » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 2:22 AM UTC

jrumbut wrote: post #12

golemiprague wrote: post #4

There are much earlier archaeological artefacts including stone writing from much earlier than 457 B.C. This is the time after the destruction of the first temple by the Babylonians who dispersed the Jews around the area. Since then there were Jewish communities all over the middle east including in Egypt. I don't understand why the writer of the article is so baffled about this. Just as an example, the Merneptah Ste…

From other things I've seen from Schama I think he starts the book there because he is fascinated with the episode, not because he thinks it's the first solid evidence of Jews. He sees Elephantine as countering widely held beliefs about ancient Jewish life (that it was all in Israel, homogenous, etc), containing interesting analogues to the present day, and being an altogether interesting story. It can be more diffic…

I can understand why Schama start from there, it is the time where we have a lot of other sources except from the bible and archeological sights here and there. My grief was more with the article writer and the idea that anybody thought there were no Jewish life outside Israel at that time. It is pretty common knowledge, from the bible itself which mention the life of Jews in Persia in the book of Daniel to anybody who read the history of Jews. It is not news and not surprising, we all know that the Talmud was written in Babylon, that's why it is called the Babylonian Talmud. There is no "widely held belief" that Jews lived only in Israel after the destruction of the first temple.

Re: Why Jewish History Is So Hard to Write

#165

Post by staikken » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 4:27 PM UTC

reggieband wrote: post #136

bradfordarner wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to throw in an additional perspective of what I find fascinating about this topic. I don't think that all long lasting things are particularly interesting. Rocks have been around longer than the Jewish people but we don't celebrate that as extraordinary. It is considered perfectly natural. It is noteworthy when something is unnaturally long lasting; when other peoples/belief system were put under similar pressur…

Isn't that literally Suvivor bias? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Not if you include those that did not survive in your sample / analysis. From the link "concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not".