About the Jewish Bible, Confusions about the Septuagint, and Why Jews have NO Old Testament

The Jewish Bible is correctly referred to as the Tanakh. Because there is a much larger world population who use the Latin term, Bible, to refer to the texts of the Christian religion, when most Jews see the word Bible alone, from someone who is not Jewish, and without the designation "Jewish Bible" or "Hebrew Bible" we realize that the odds are very great to near certain that it is referring to the scriptures of Christianity.  Most non Jewish speakers may think they're talking about the Jewish Bible when they are talking about their "Old Testament", but in fact, they are not speaking about the Jewish Bible.  I own books published by Jewish publishers in English that use the word Bible and of course, in those instances refer to the Tanakh, the Jewish Holy Scriptures (not the Christian adaptation/alteration named the Old Testament). To confuse matters more, and with their full intent to do so, seen some Christians call a Hebrew translation of their Old and New Testament a "Jewish Bible" and a "Hebrew Bible".   Rather than confusion or misunderstanding, the publishers of those texts are completely deceptive.  Still, it is often misunderstood in claim that Jews do not use the term "Bible".  As the following examples show, English speaking Jews, indeed use that term.





"Bible Tales For Very Young Children" by Lenore Cohen, published by the UAHC


"A Child's Bible" by Seymour Rossel , published by Behrman House


I have texts written by Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews that refer to our Tanakh as the Bible. Look at the title of this web site of the Torah http://bible.ort.org/books/torahd5.asp


And this one http://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/63255/jewish/The-Bible-with-Rashi.htm  This second link is to a genuine Jewish Bible that’s titled “The Complete Jewish Bible” ( rather than a very deceptive Christian Bible that uses Yiddish terms and Hebrew terms peppered through a new English translation trying to make Christianity look more Jewishy)





  Many English speaking Jews like me grew up calling the Tanakh simply “ The Bible”. English speaking Jews know what texts we refer to when we’re using that term with other English speaking Jews, the original Bible, the Tanakh.





Tanakh, is an acronym for the three sections of the Scriptures, the Torah (Pentateuch, first five books of Moses, Torah meaning teaching/law) the Neviim (Prophets) and Ketuviim (Writings or scriptures) I grew up using both terms in equal measure and interchangeably. As a child, even in discussion with Orthodox relatives, we often used the word Bible to discuss the Tanakh, and because we knew what texts we were talking about, in that context we knew it had nothing to do with the Christian Bible's "Old" or New Testament.  There isn’t any need to qualify or differentiate our Holy Scriptures from a replacement theology when Jews are reading and discussing our own Bible.





I also grew up knowing that when I heard a non-Jew say "The Bible" they were almost certainly referring to the *Christian Bible* and clearly NOT referring to the Holy Scriptures of Judaism, the Tanakh.




Tertullian, (155CE to 220CE) early in the third century CE named the Christian amended version of the Tanakh the "Old Testament" *specifically* to designate it as having been superceded and done away with in contrast to their "New", despite the assertion within its texts well over a dozen times from Genesis forward that it is an eternal testament (covenant).


There is no "Old Testament" to Judaism and while that term is offensive to adherents of Judaism, most Jews know that not many Christians appear to recognize or be aware of how or why that term and their adaptation is offensive. The Jewish people have the eternal testament (testament means covenant) of Torah. We have the Tanakh, the unaltered Jewish Bible. Another ancient name for the Tanakh is Mikra, meaning reading, because the scriptures were read aloud each week to the congregation.


While Christian theologians of past generations apparently had no problem recognizing and acknowledging that the Tanakh and their Old and New Testaments were from different texts translations with regard to what comprised the "Septuagint", it appears that in recent years, and only since I've been on the internet, have I seen people trying to obfuscate the fact that the Torah portion ALONE was the ORIGINAL Septuagint. The often repeated false claim is to refer to their entire Greek translation of their Christian Old Testament and claim it is a direct translation of Greek texts that Jews used!





The Christian Bible's Old Testament (it’s adaptation of Tanakh, never used by Jewish communities) reveals that in many places there are significant translation differences rendering the meanings of the passages quite different. Not only are the books rearranged so that the books are not in the order of Torah, Prophets and Writings, but Kings, Ezra and Nehemiah are divided. The Protestant Old Testament contains roughly the same books; the (Catholic, Latin)Vulgate has additional texts added to the canon that were originally written in Greek. The Greek Septuagint (meaning 70) originally referred to the Torah portion only, and in fact, that is the only portion that was claimed to be translated by 72 Jewish scribes. The rest of Tanakh was translated from the Hebrew to the Greek over the course of about 300 years and scholars cannot tell who or when exactly any of them were translated. Yet the common name of Septuagint is now generally applied to the whole Greek translation by Christians.



By the beginning of the first century CE, there were many *different Greek versions* of each text of Tanakh that appeared, some of them with less accurate Hebrew to Greek, and during this time, many other additional texts appeared being originally written IN Greek such as the books of the Maccabees. By the time of the beginnings of Christianity, some of these texts of Tanakh had become so changed through the Hellenization (introduction of Greek philosophic concepts through language translation) that they were no longer adherent to Torah precept. Their purpose had been to redefine and negate Judaism through assimilation of Greek beliefs.





The Hebrew Bible canon had been more or less "closed" since the time of Ezra/ Nehemiah around 423 BCE. Jewish scribes still penned what was going on in Jewish life in Judea and scholars and sages wrote and discussed how to apply Torah to their lives.


Some Jewish scholars indicate that if the Books of Maccabees (included in the Catholic Vulgate as a text of their Old Testament) had originally been written in Hebrew rather than Greek they may have been more readily accepted by Jews as Jewish texts.  Jews recognize those texts as a history of the miracle of the victory of the small band of rebels to defeat the largest world military power of the day. Another reason the Books of Maccabees did not take on a more prominent role as Jewish texts was that they focused more upon the military victory than upon the role that steadfast faith in God and God’s deliverance played in their fight for religious freedom to maintain faith in God exclusively.


However, since the Tanakh was long before already formed and closed, there has never been Jewish scholarly question that they could have become a part of the Jewish Bible.



****The Greek Septuagint called the Old Testament is not a Jewish document, but rather a Christian one. The original Septuagint, created 2,200 years ago by 72 Jewish translators, was a Greek translation of the Five Books of Moses alone. It therefore did not contain prophetic Books of the Bible such as Isaiah. The Septuagint as we have it today, which includes the Prophets and Writings as well, is a product of the church, not the Jewish people. In fact, the Septuagint remains the official Old Testament of the Greek Orthodox Church, and the manuscripts that consist of our Septuagint today date to the third century C.E. The fact that additional books known as the Apocrypha, which are uniquely sacred to the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church, are found in the Septuagint should raise a red flag to those inquiring into the Jewishness of the Septuagint.


The fact that the original Septuagint translated by Jewish scribes more than 22 centuries ago was only of the Pentateuch and not of prophetic books of the Bible such as Isaiah is confirmed by countless sources including the ancient Letter of Aristeas, which is the earliest attestation to the existence of the Septuagint. The Talmud also states this explicitly in Tractate Megillah (9a), and Josephus as well affirms that the Septuagint was a translation only of the Law of Moses in his preface to Antiquities of the Jews. Moreover, Jerome, a church father and Bible translator who could hardly be construed as friendly to Judaism, affirms Josephus' statement regarding the authorship of the Septuagint in his preface to The Book of Hebrew Questions.


In fact, Dr. F.F. Bruce, the preeminent professor of Biblical exegesis, keenly points out that, strictly speaking, the Septuagint deals only with the Pentateuch and not the whole Old Testament. Bruce writes, "The Jews might have gone on at a later time to authorize a standard text of the rest of the Septuagint, but . . . lost interest in the Septuagint altogether. With but few exceptions, every manuscript of the Septuagint which has come down to our day was copied and preserved in Christian, not Jewish, circles."*****





Important note: this asterisked portion is copy pasted from a writing authored by Rabbi Tovia Singer. Please note he also quotes a 20th Century Christian theologian who was considered one of the world's foremost experts on Bible history by Christians.



The accuracy of the words in the Hebrew Bible that is still used today were confirmed with the findings of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls contained at least fragments of each book and many complete scrolls of texts of the Tanakh (except the book of Esther the last book to be included in the canon) that match very well with the Tanakhs Jews use today. There were also many additional texts other than from the Holy Scriptures of Judaism discovered there. 

Because the texts of the Dead Sea scrolls are dated to cover a long period of time and also include texts that are rather heretical as well as holy, and many of the holy texts contain errors that would have rendered a scroll trayf (unfit) and only fit to be buried in a genizah, there are a number of Jewish scholars who have long recognized that rather than a place where a sect hurriedly hid their holy books before being attacked by Romans, it was a traditional place of burial for books containing the holy name of God in Hebrew.  These books were either 1) too worn for regular use or 2) had mistakes or errors or 3) were heretical and had idolatry within them to make them offensive for Jewish use, but because of the name of God within them, books that they could not dispose of in any other manner





The majority of the Dead Sea scroll Biblical texts were written in the Hebrew Language (approximately 90-95%) with Assyrian Block script. From this majority there are a few cases in which the scribes used Paleo-Hebrew (see for example 4QPaleoExodus).





Modern Hebrew is different from the ancient Paleo Hebrew, but the Hebrew of 2000 years ago is closer to modern Hebrew than the English of the 1700’s is to the English we speak today. In 70CE the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and expelled the Jews. The Romans did not expel the early Christians who refused to ally themselves with the Jews who revolted against Rome after a massacre of Jews by the Roman Governor that took place at the Temple. Twenty years later, there was a school established by the earliest rabbis and by scribes at Yavneh in 90 CE.  These earliest Rabbis rejected use of any of the Hellenized translations and books that the Greeks and Romans had attached *to* the Tanakh by apostates and Roman citizens who spread Romanized and Hellenized versions of scripture. The school established there was not some kind of convention to establish the canon, they were trying to preserve Tanakh intact and these sages also began to write down what had then been only "oral" Torah.



Currently, *some* Christian apologist scholars claim that this was when the Jewish Bible's canon was formed in response to Christianity in error ignoring that *their very own early church fathers' writings refer to the Jewish Holy Scriptures as a formed work already at the time of the writing of their New Testament*!  Most of the book of Daniel and portions of Ezra and a single sentence in Jeremiah are in Aramaic, a related language to Hebrew using Hebrew letters. All else in the Jewish Bible was written in Hebrew.



These earliest rabbis were concerned that without the centrality of the Temple and with the dispersion of Jews from Jerusalem, the Hellenist apologists and Romans would be successful to corrupt the Tanakh by altering it through mistranslation into Greek and adding pagan precepts. Religion and rule were inseparable and in order for the Jews to be a part of the Roman Empire they insisted upon assimilating concepts to undermine and negate the Jews as an eternal covenant nation. There is no doubt that all the texts admitted into the Prophets and Writings were already a part of the Tanakh long before the time of Jesus. Some of the texts that Judaism never considered as a part of Jewish scripture were early apologetic attempts to tie in Christian dogma to the Tanakh. Others that were condemned show that assimilation of religion was already long under way to eliminate the Jews as a people before the Roman conquest with pre-Christian attempts to Hellenize Judaism when Greece occupied the holy land.  


Both the Greek and Roman conquerors tried to assimilate the Jewish people out of existence through such methods. These texts known as Pseudepigrapha were largely written between 200 BCE and 100 CE and included great amounts of Greek philosophy.  



The Apocrypha (Greek, "hidden books") are Jewish books not considered part of the Holy Scriptures of Judaism.


Pseudepigrapha (Greek, "falsely attributed") was given to Jewish writings, which were attributed to authors who did not actually write them. Many people confuse the two terms and which books belong in each category. Neither Apocrypha or Pseudepigrapha have ever been a part of the Tanakh, or Holy Scriptures to Judaism. Those terms are important to understand when studying these and many related ancient texts.


Referring back to the noted Christian scholar, he also had this to say bout the Apocrypha, that have never been considered holy texts in Judaism, but that some Christians still try to use to make often quite absurd claims about Jewish belief:


""The books which they decided to acknowledge as canonical were already generally accepted, although questions had been raised about them. Those which they refused to admit had never been included. They did not expel from the canon any book which had previously been admitted. 'The Council of Jamnia was the confirming of public opinion, not the forming of it.'" (F. F. Bruce, The Books and Parchments [Old Tappan, NJ.: Fleming H. Revell, 1963], p. 98])


Here he is referring to a purported "Council of Jamnia" that Christians often portray as a parallel to their "Council of Nicea" that *established* the canon of the Christian texts.  What the "Council of Jamnia" was in reality, was a Jewish community of exiled scholars, sages, and teacher from Jerusalem and Judea who were permitted to have a school in Yavneh to teach the Torah.


This was not a place where Jews gathered to establish the canon.  The sages there simply did not permit the texts that had been written by Hellenized apostate Jews for the purpose of attempting to syncretize their Greek beliefs into Judaism and assimilating them, nor would they permit the Romanized versions that were then appearing as well.  They weren't Jewish holy texts and never had been considered texts holy in Judaism. 


This whole idea of a "Council of Jamnia" has even fooled some modern Jews, including me when I very first learned about it from a couple of comparative religion books, completely non Jewish .


Though I already knew that the canon had long been established before that time, when I first read about it, I didn't give it a second thought that it could have been a * meeting*  convened for the purpose of weeding out texts from the Tanakh that had been imposed by apostates and those wanting to assimilate Jews, UNTIL I started to investigate a little on my own to discover that even respected Christian theologians had for a very long time, known better, too. 





It was a school permitted of the exiled Jews who survived the Roman genocide of the Jews from Jerusalem, it wasn't a convention or “council” resembling the Council of Nicea in any way.  The Council of Nicea was an ecumenical meeting ordered by the Roman emperor Constantine of bishops of the church to form a consensus regarding Christian dogma once and for all among the competing sects. 





The school at Yavneh did not establish the Tanakh, that bit of business happened well over 500 years earlier, It was the Christian Bible, with its replacement theology doctrine and redefined and re-translated and rearranged versions of the Jewish texts that did not appear until after 90 CE and did not appear in anything resembling its current form until their Council of Nicea in 325 CE.

Who First Started Insulting Jews With "Non Messianic" to call all believing in Judaism?

Does anyone know who first coined the antisemitic and inflammatory insult displaying entitlement to remove the messianic belief from Judaism by calling all who adhere to Judaism, adherents of some nonexistent entity called "Non Messianic Judaism"?

I’m curious if the person who coined this term would openly admit to being the author of such a display of arrogant entitlement to try to negate a thousands of years old principle of Judaism.

I have only seen this term used by members of a particular group who follow the scriptures of a DIFFERENT religion than Judaism (New Testament) but claim to be Jews ("Messianic Jews")despite having no connection to the Jewish people according to the laws of the Jewish people (Torah). Their messianic belief isn't that of Judaism or the Jewish Bible.
A pretty new attempt that's increasing in use is to justify calling Jesus their “Jewish” Messiah, then openly insult all believers of the religion of Judaism by referring to Judaism as “Non Messianic”. They use this term to apply to Jewish believers (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Renewal) in attempt to negate God’s prophetic vision of the Davidic Messiah found within the Tanakh for Jews. In discussions with Jews around the world, and as evidenced by many questions, answers and comments in response to this insult being applied to Jews in Yahoo Answers, no one I’ve encountered appears to have seen this insult before a little less than a decade ago, so I am curious who began it, and where it was first used.

The term itself reads very clearly as attempt to display entitlement to REMOVE from Judaism one of the very principles OF Judaism. “Non” means without. Messianic refers to a belief in the concept of a Messiah. Messiah is the English translation of the Hebrew word mosiach, meaning an anointed ruler. The prophetic vision of the Davidic messiah of the Jewish Bible is that an anointed ruler descended from the house of David will rule from Israel with humility, mercy and justice and usher in world peace, universal brotherhood and universal knowledge and understanding of God.

It is clearly wrong to call Judaism or any Jewish believer “Non Messianic”. A Jew who is atheist or secular could perhaps be labeled this if they do not believe the principles of the faith of Judaism. The Christian Bible's redefined concept of Messiah is "non Jewish" or Non Torah compliant. Jews don't claim Christians have no messianic belief because their concept is incompatible with that of the Torah and Judaism. It is a DIFFERENT messianic belief. There is no separate movement or branch or sect of Judaism that uses a name of Messianic Judaism because all of Judaism remains messianic in belief. There is as little need to name a separate movement of Judaism monotheistic Judaism as all of Judaism believes that God does not incarnate into human form as the Torah states.

Judaism remains messianic and retains the Jewish Bible’s concept of the Davidic messiah. For adherents of another religion's scriptures to display entitlement to both hijack the name of the Jewish covenant nation and purport to negate the messianic belief of Judaism is arogant and insulting.

PLEASE do not answer or contact me with attempts to try to justify the USE of this insult. Answers that attempt to *justify hateful insults* will be appropriately reported as hate speech.

I do not invite inflammatory speech. I am asking for a very specific bit of information while I’m explaining to any non Jews who stumble upon this who may not have read Jewish forums or q and a forums asking about Judaism what has been going on in the past few years in escalation of antisemitic attacks upon Jews and Jewish communities.

***I am asking for informational/educational purposes if anyone knows exactly who it was that first coined the inflammatory insult of “Non-Messianic” to refer to all of Judaism. ***

In order to counter hate one must be informed of the methods employed to spread the irrational bigotries. As in ages past, terms and concepts foreign to Judaism were created to incite hate to Jews and specifically used concepts that were attempts to REMOVE from Jews, the laws that define us as a covenant nation people and that attempt to remove specific beliefs from Judaism or claim we do and believe things we don’t to incite hate.

Removing laws of self-determination was done to render the Jews impotent as a people, as were the various dispersions and exiles of Jews in history. Claiming Jews believe and do things we don’t justified those persecutions.
The notion of Jews as a race rather than membership determined by Jewish law, and the notion that “chosen people” implied superiority are two that are still spread on a daily basis

Therefore, I am NOT asking for anyone to justify any of those notions used to negate Judaism and the Jewish people. There IS no rational, logical justification to display entitlement to claim authority to remove a principle of faith/belief with an insulting term. I want to know who coined it to try to understand the methods of spreading antisemitism and to educate against bigotry.

The same principle applies for ANY religion or any people. There is no justification to create terms of entitlement to negate the core doctrines or histories for others.

The 13 Principles of Judaism compiled in a list by Maimonides existed since the receiving of the Torah and still exists intact today for Judaism. See the following for explanation of them
http://www.jewfaq.org/beliefs.htm
Jews are increasingly being insulted with the deceptive term “Non-Messianic” to address us. It is clearly insulting and an ad hominem attack to address individuals who have clearly demonstrated belief in Judaism as being “Non Messianic Jews”! Daily there appear questions and answers and more commonly, harassment and personal attacks under closed questions that insult Jews with this term. There are many dozens of instances of Jews being TOLD we are Non Messianic when the individual clearly knows better, or of others answering questions about Judaism with doctrines from the New Testament (texts outside of and antithetical to Judaism) in lieu of Tanakh and Judaism. The NT adherent will claim that all “other” Jews are “non Messianic” to justify labeling themselves Jews in violation of Jewish law, call Jesus the messiah of Judaism (as Christians believe), and justify their missionary attempts to proselytize to and insult Jews and Judaism for explaining actual Judaism.

Despite having first asked people to refrain from insulting Jews with this term and explaining to those who may have first adopted it in ignorance of Judaism that Judaism NEVER Abandoned belief in God's prophecies of the messianic age as detailed in the Jewish Bible’s messianic prophecies and that the term is nonsensical at best to apply to any believing Jew in the world, the use of the term has escalated and in direct response to Jewish objections from Jews around the world. The application of this insult is now most often accompanied by other egregiously antisemitic insults. It is very clear to all Jews I’ve discussed this with from every movement and from Jews in a dozen countries, that its use is a purposeful attempt to inflame and insult Jews and Judaism and misinforms people that Judaism doesn’t have a messianic belief.

It’s like calling someone of another religion who worships a different god, as “godless”. (Oops, these SAME people have done THAT, too when Jews say that Jesus/Yeshua is not God)

I now wonder how soon it will be before they come up with even more insulting terms. Will they soon create a new moniker to refer to all of Judaism as godless because we don’t believe Yeshua/Jesus was god incarnate? Will they then likewise try to justify this new term to claim that because we also didn’t abandon Torah's concept of the nature of God to adopt their religion’s scriptures redefined concept of the nature of God, that we don’t have belief in God either? Judaism is both messianic and monotheistic. No matter the different movements’ disagreements of how to honor the eternal law, the core of the eternal covenant is common to all of Judaism. The “gospels” of the New Testament (even if translated into Hebrew) are not scriptures of Judaism.

Judaism worships the monotheistic Creator and believing Jews will never permit this to be altered within Judaism, and for this reason...those who insist on redefining and negating Judaism but feel entitled to take on the name and identity of the Jewish people also appear to feel entitled to now tell us because we have refused to abandon the prophecy of the Davidic messiah and messianic age found within Judaism’s own Holy Scriptures of the Tanakh in lieu of the REDEFINITION of the “New Testament” that we don’t have a messianic belief.

If that isn’t insulting, what is?

As I’ve detailed before in other writings, it clearly isn’t hate or bigotry to note the differences between the doctrines of different religions as all comparative religion courses require and as is necessary to learn about what people of the world believe from their own perspectives. So when the world’s Jews repeat for the umpteenth time as we have for centuries, that the Christian religion’s Old and New Testaments and their redefined nature of God and nature and job of the Davidic Messiah are outside of an antithetical to Torah and Judaism we aren’t displaying hate to their right to believe different things in their very different religion.

*The Jewish people still refuse to accept that any other religion has a right to *remove any of the the principles of the faith of Judaism from the Jewish people or from our Holy Scriptures*.

If you don’t choose to believe in the laws and ethical precepts of Judaism....don’t believe them. You don't have entitlement to negate them for adherents of Judaism.

Insulting Judaism to call it "non Messianic" creates an unsolvable dilemma for them when they use that term to insult Judaism while claiming Jewish identity. They use it in attempt to NEGATE one of the principles of the religion of Judaism with a term that means messianic belief is NON existent in Judaism, and then try to replace it with the REDEFINED and Torah violating concept from the New Testament calling *it* "Messianic Judaism" when their messiah belief isn't from Judaism or the Jewish Bible.

If Judaism didn't have a belief in God's prophetic vision of the Davidic Messiah in the *eternal* covenant then the creators of their "NEW" covenant replacement theology wouldn't have had it to morph from an anointed king who brings universal brotherhood, peace and worship of God into an incarnate sacrifice for sin. Unwittingly, by the evangelical Christians' creating the purposely inulting term "non Messianic" to negate the religion of Judaism that still retains the belief in what God promised Israel..despite themselves, they've exposed with that one insult term alone, that their New Testament isn't of the eternal covenant of Torah/Judaism at all!

To claim entitlement to negate for another people defining aspects of their doctrine that makes them a people reveals contempt for them, not vice versa. And if there is anything that can be objectively shown about Judaism in the existence of Jewish history is that while empires have come and gone, the refusal of the Jewish people to alter or abandon God’s Torah has kept us alive as a people and shall continue to do so.

Am Yisrael Chai.

Thoughts on Cultural and Religious Identity Theft

Avoid this if you don't like armchair philosphy :) AND I preface this with warning it is long-winded rambling stream of consciousness thoughts combined with other things I've even written elsewhere. I've had this in DRAFT form unpublished for more than a year from the time I wrote what is below and only came upon it again today because of a new post I'd placed on a topic that touches on a little of this one, too. See http://mamaspajamaparty.blogspot.com/2012/05/christopher-columbus-and-jews.html
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This is all about spirituality and self-identity and being true to oneself while respecting other people. Every people and every person has a sense of purpose to existence or strives to find and fulfill one. It's an aspect of human nature. I'm not discussing or debating atheism vs theism or going to promote a pissing contest over whose religion or philosophy is "best", but I will talk about what people believe.

I think a spiritual void in modern civilization appears to lead many people who have have an identity void to feel entitled to appropriate the paths and identities of *others*. Taking on an identity not really your own isn't exclusive to the malicious, the huckster, the con, or the willfully bigoted troublemaker. People can be genuinely fooled in sincere acceptance and trust what they want to hear.

Yet, no matter the origin or motivation, in their so doing, rather than bringing them a sense of real identity and contentment of self-knowledge, it results in strife and escalates conflict.

In modern civilization, not just in the United States, the “melting pot” of so many different and conflicting cultures, histories, religions and philosophies there are many people living in a "spiritual vacuum".

**I specifically refer to people whose spiritual path, or sense of a spiritual nature is devoid of grounding in a sense of "self", a sense of who they are and who their people are and what their people's collective purpose and message is to the world through their own identity.**

I see this in so many different people who flit from one group, one religion, one identity to another. These people without a grounded center, a sense of *self in relation to others* often readily justify latching onto anything that fills that that void. This is how we live in a world where a science fiction author can create an idea that we’re all alien spawn and all women secretly want to abort their babies and all human problems stem from experiences while in your mother’s womb…and hundreds of thousands of other people can be gullible enough to believe it and where celebrities are spokespersons to promote it. ( the late L. Ron Hubbard, his Scientology and the Hollywood celebrities that follow it)

We live in a world where ethnocentrism isn't considered a virtue but it is still widely accepted in the manner it has taken on new forms. Rather than what more overt forms of this thinking inspired in the past, to try to eliminate peoples and religious or spiritual paths once claimed “inferior” by outright mass murder, the socially acceptable methods employed are assimilation, appropriation and identity theft. Fake Indian nations and groups are big business and show utter arrogance in their sense of entitlement to take ritual items, symbols, names and stories and misappropriate them for whatever purpose suited them. The "Black Hebrew Israelites" with their New Testament doctrine and racist ideology and the equally deceptively named "Messianic Judaism" in it's different forms based entirely on which Church is sponsoring them, displays extreme self-righteousness in their entitlement to claim Divine authority to either negate outright, or redefine Torah to mean things antithetical to Torah and Judaism.

All while claiming utmost love for the very people's whose history, spirituality and cultures they've hijacked and misappropriated very offensively.

Too many people who possess this spiritual void and lack of who and what they are are easy prey for the charlatan. They claim no responsibility for bad behavior to do so because they come from a paradigm that teaches "let the buyer beware" and that freedom means that you're free to do anything or say anything you want to say if you can say it is your "freedom of speech" to do so.

A more respectful way to live and actually honor any other group is to stop ignoring the ill effects such entitlement perpetrates. It is not respect that inspires groups or individuals to appropriate the identity, symbols, culture and history of another people and pervert those things by turning them topsy turvy, most often to impose beliefs that are offensive to and violate the laws of the authentic nation people.

The impostor groups also simultaneously declare great love and loyalty to the identity they claim while the words they use to speak of the original people display hatred and insult to the laws, ethics, values and the actual peoples whose identity they hijack.

While I'm only detailing a couple of different groups this applies to more than just the two I'll talk most about here.
The surviving Native American Indian nations and the Jewish covenant nation people have many different groups who openly display bigotry and hostility to the original nation peoples they will claim to *be* while they simultaneously corrupt and distort their histories, traditions, laws, and their different spiritual beliefs.

Other common experiences shared by these very different peoples:
Any individual or group that speaks out *against* the bigoted display of entitlement to hijack and remove the right of a people to maintain their own unadulterated history and laws, is then chastised as the bigot and condemned for their hatred at not being "tolerant". The commonly hurled deflection is to say you hate us because you don't want to give us the freedom to choose what to believe. This is also projection, but it is often effective to their co-religionists.

Sometimes the mention of love of all people or brotherhood is even brought up to deflect the misrepresentation of identity or history or belief.

The Europeans would not have survived on the shores of the foreign continents had it not been for the mercy/civilized assistance of it's native inhabitants who taught them how to find and cultivate foods. This was the case for both North and South America.

From farming methods of the Natives of the northeast that taught Europeans how to rotate crops to ensure soil fertility that when imported to Europe staved off famines that had regularly plagued parts of Europe for thousands of years, to the 5,000 year old weaving techniques of the Peruvians that were incorporated into textile making, to medicines (aspirin among a great many others) to systems of law (Ben Franklin and other "Founding Father's" directly credit) borrowed from the Iroquois, the Europeans were far behind in many areas thought to represent "civilization". Modern farmers still use an adaptation of the Iroquois "three sisters" system of corn, beans and squash that preserve soil fertility.

In a time when the very lives of early European astronomers were being persecuted for their "heresies" to declare the solar system to be heliocentric, the Incas and others had accepted and gone far beyond this in astronomical knowledge.

The native inhabitants of the Americas helped the very peoples who committed genocides. And the effort to eliminate them still exists, although rather than through outright murder, this is continuing through assimilation, discriminatory laws and other forms of socially acceptable bigotries that are even sometimes perpetrated in ignorance.


What can we do if we are genuinely caring for another but wish to learn about them and the wisdom that another people may have to share and not misappropriate?

There is a difference in sharing wisdom and culture with one another in the methods I illustrated and in misappropriating the identity and spiritual wisdom and life of other nations.

As humans who wish to know brotherhood and respect for one another we also hope to learn from one another. We can learn from many different First Nations Peoples..but they key is to let us learn what they want to TEACH us.

ASK rather than take. Some things can't belong to every person. Mixing the customs and religions of the different nations who still survive is not respecting them. Their ways belong to them.

Use that guide for any people, not just the different nations of the Americas.
Those precepts are what I wish people would also do for Jews. The world would be a much nicer place if people behaved in a way that simply respected the rights of peoples to be different from one another in their own purpose and path.
Jews are more open with our beliefs and practices than many Native peoples, but we are also accustomed to seeing this openeness abused in the same manner. We don't proselytize when we share to help dispel misinformation that leads to hate.

Perhaps if history and sociology courses included the topic of cultural and religious identity theft, tragedies of the past may be averted from repeating themselves in new forms.

If we can't learn this lesson, we are indeed doomed to keep repeating the history. The legacy of culture vultures, no matter which one's bones they're trying to pick clean, will ultimately doom the vultures, too.

Finding out who you are and where you belong may lead you to a path you might not have always chosen for yourself before you began a search to learn about the past of your ancestors, but if you don't know where you came from, it is certainly easier to get lost.

You may decide that the people you came from are not the people you wish to belong to now and your loyalties and path is elsewhere or you may decide that someone else strayed away from where you should have been all along. But if you decide to be a part of a particular people or path, you can't redefine their criteria for membership/citizenship to suit YOU, you are obligated to abide by their laws. If you don't meet their criteria for belonging, you haven't really found your people if that's the case.

Shalom y'all.

Christopher Columbus and Jews

I've been sent links to this news item by seven different Jewish friends from around the country this week: http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/20/opinion/garcia-columbus-jewish/index.html
While I always thank all my friends for sharing items of interest to Jews I have great misgivings as a Jew as to how these discoveries are being reported. I feel such a strong gut feeling that this will be used as new fuel for hate propagandizing. I think this will be claimed as evidence of Jews believing we have entitlement to do and say whatever we can for gain to justify abuse of other peoples. Please read on to see why I say this and share if you'd like with anyone else who you think might be find equal cause for concern.

I say this because how Jews react to this news is very important. This history of the atrocities Christopher Columbus perpetrated is likely as little known by many Jews as the possibility he is a Jew. Before Jews begin to embrace Christopher Columbus as some kind of Jewish hero whose mission was really to save the Jews in secret, we cannot ignore or dismiss that his journals and the history of others writings of his life and travels clearly reveal that he treated the indigenous peoples horrifically and was not living the ethics of Judaism in his encounters with them. If he had desire to save Jews as his own people, he did so demonstrating a worldview that came from being assimilated into the sense of entitlement prevalent among the empires of Europe of the day to abuse others and use the profits deriving from torture of others to save Jews at the expense of the lives of innocents. That is clearly not a Jew that Jews want to hold up as any sort of hero. I just now "Googled" a few key phrases and here is just one article that addresses his horrific treatment of a people he noted displayed innocence, beauty and generosity
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-kasum/columbus-day-a-bad-idea_b_742708.html
I hope this is not dismissed because if it is, this will make the Jews who hold him up as a hero (even in ignorance of his atrocities) to be just as lacking in compassion for others and WILL be used as additional "evidence" to support a current common propagandizing lie that the Jews do to the Palestinians like the Europeans did to the Indians. If Columbus is **embraced as a hero among Jews** that will be a massive feather in the cap of the Islamofacist propagandist.

There has already been far too much propaganda being spread by Islamofacists and their supporters to try to equate Jews and the State of Israel with lies that Israel treats Palestinian Arabs the same way the Europeans treated the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. An online Lakota friend informed me more than a decade ago they have even had people come to their tribal elders at both the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations in South Dakota and present lectures seeking their nation's support to speak out against the State of Israel with the lie that Israel was committing genocide to the Palestinians as the European and the U.S. government had long been doing to the Indians. Thankfully, he and others did not fall for this propaganda, but he said many of their younger people did. I was so shocked and at first I just couldn’t even believe anyone would fall for this. I then went to the Native American chat rooms of Yahoo and if any of the people there had seen anything like that. It gave me an even sicker feeling when several Indians of other nations replied that they had also "learned" about what Israel was doing to the Palestinians from people coming to their tribal gatherings.

So based upon this and what I have seen displayed in Yahoo Answers in the past 4 years, I cannot deny or dismiss the fact that they are the targets of propaganda for the purpose of legitimizing the lie that Jews treat Palestinians like the European invaders and the govts of countries in North and South America treats the Indians and feel entitled to do so.

It is interesting to know if Columbus was a Jew if for no other purpose than to set the history straight if the facts support this. It is just as important to make it equally clear and keep straight that his treatment of the indigenous people was not displaying the values, ethics, goals or beliefs of Judaism. He is no hero to the Jewish people. If he was a Jew he was a bad Jew.

Jewish history shows that Jews value getting the history right, no matter what it reveals. From what we show in our own Holy Scriptures, the Tanakh onward we've never shied away from the honest history about our own or calling out the bad Jews for being bad. Lessons are learned from understanding the good, the bad and the ugly...Jews don't need to be embracing him as a *Jewish hero* or a hero of any kind.

He did not embody the ethics of Judaism even if he did leave money to the poor as a Jewish custom or wished to keep some aspects of Jewish heritage and connection. If he was indeed a Jew, he definitely wasn't one of our good guys.

That needs to be in the news, too.

=====================EDIT=====================
I thought the following email I received a short time ago from a young man had enough interesting points to share here. He doesn't have a blogger account to post this himself under comments. He gave me permission to share his email here. This is from my friend "Feivel" as I will identify him by screen name, a 24 year old Orthodox Jewish Israeli American studying to be a Rabbi. He brought up some interesting points especially regarding Tomás de Torquemada (1420–1498), prominent leader of the Spanish Inquisition and the liklihood that Columbus fled as a Jew....then RETURNED to Spain.

Here is what he had to say:
"I have heard before that he was Jewish or a converso but you didn't hear this before the real nature of the man came about. When he was "the hero" no one said he was Jewish now that his legacy is being looked at honestly, he is all of a sudden a converso.

I have seen or read about some of that evidence and dots in his will as a way for his sons to say Kaddish? I doubt that. He left money to a Jewish man. Ok. That does not mean he was Jewish. Two Jews paid for the Armada? Well, ok but Isabella would NEVER have given him the green light if he was Jewish or even remotely suspected of it and if it it so obvious to scholars today then it would have been REALLY obvious to church officials back then who would have imprisoned his family upon seeing the will (which the church would have seen).
I think you are right. It is a way to not bash Columbus's reputation (he doesn't need any help in that category as his actions do that themselves) but a way to bash us.
Torquemada had the queens ear (110%) and if he had even hinted that he thought Columbus was a converso then Columbus would not only have not been given money and a green light but he would have been thrown in prison and maybe executed. They would have searched for and found the will with the "Jewish symbol" on it. That would have been enough.
I just don't put much stock in the fact that he was Jewish but I will admit that Simon Weisenthal's assertion that he was Jewish.....makes me not totally discount it...
I have the utmost respect for Weisenthal and his research so I keep an open mind. Clearly there were thousands of people who chose Catholicism over death or expulsion and a guy like Torquemada going against a guy like Columbus, expulsion would not have been an option I fear. So how can he keep it sooo secret in his own time but in our time its "obvious". If he was going to find a new homeland, then why sail back to Spain where he knew persecution might still await him. If he was found to be Jewish after the expulsion, hero or not, he would have been executed (probably quietly). Whatever we do, unless my time frame is off, we MUST put Torquemada in the picture and he was so evil and so vicious that he would not have allowed Columbus to live. Historical records have it that Torquemada could actually enter the king and queen's chambers without knocking and it is recorded that he stormed in one day and berated them when they contemplated allowing the Jews to remain in Spain or at least a few Jews. They listened to him and did as he "commanded". An odd position for a "simple priest" and oddly, of course, he himself was by Jewish law, Jewish. His maternal grandmother was a converso.
So I think you are 110% correct. To "accurse" Columbus of being Jewish or a Marrano is really going to be used as another tool in the arsenal of the anti-Semite.

My guess is that his being Jewish would have been further removed than Torquemada's heritage would have been and your blog is also right in that we do need to understand history accurately. IF he was a converso or a marrano (which seems to be the actual theory) then I would be interested in how he pulled off staying hidden and not in Torquemada's crosshairs.

IF he was a converso then he was a heretic. If he was a marrano then....well, that's a little more fuzzy but certainly he would have outwardly indicated belief in the trinity which is something most of us would die before we did (or at least I think I would but having never been faced with that dilemma who knows). I cannot imagine worshipping a false deity. We are commanded to preserve life at all cost but obviously there are exceptions and that is the major one. So claiming him as "one of our own" is not something I would do with any relish and would have to say if he was then he was an apostate and therefore, we can distance ourselves from him.

I will say that I think the motivation most people have in researching him is scholarly (as opposed to the "hitler was Jewish" thing that is going on now) but I think their conclusions are coming too quick and based on too little evidence."



ANOTHER EDIT:

For those who have doubts as to the evidence to show that Christopher Columbus was a brutal slave trader and responsible for the enslavement, torture and genocide of at least three million people he wrote were innocents, read this essay and note it's references.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/15026955/Thief-Slave-Trader-Murderer-Christopher-Columbus-and-Caribbean-Population-Decline
==============================================
Other references of his own words
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/columbus1.asp
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/01-col.html
http://www.ushistory.org/documents/columbus.htm
http://earlyamericas.wordpress.com/anthology/columbus-letter-from-the-fourth-voyage/

Strange Cruelties: The Spanish Slaughter The Natives, West Indies, c. 1513 Bartolome de las Casas
details the Spanish treatment of the native peoples

I received the following little fable today from a friend.

A horse fly found himself in a barn with several horses and cows present. There was manure everywhere for him to consume. This was exciting and he ate and ate and ate beyond his limit. With his abdomen protruding he tried to fly away and could not become airborne. He thought to himself, I am a fly and I know how to fly. About that time he saw a shovel in the corner of the barn. He thought I’ll climb up to the top of that shovel and leap off as I am a fly. Surely, if I get airborne I'll fly away. He did exactly this and leaped. He went straight down and splatted on the ground below.

The moral of the story:

Never fly off the handle when there is a possibility you are full of shit.

First Hummingbird of Spring

For me, Spring doesn't officially arrive until I see the first male hummingbird of the season, scoping out the territory to find a nesting spot for the soon to arrive females.

I failed to get a photo of him today, but will keep the camera ready to post one soon.

I didn't used to put out my hummingbird feeders until April and years ago might not see the first one until the second week of April, but in the past 2 years, I've discovered they need to be up at least by the last week of March if I want to get those early arrivals.
So, I post this for anyone else who is thinking about hanging a hummingbird feeder and who lives in the Southern U.S. They're HERE! Time to put out the feeders!

Hamentashen

That photo is of some Hamentashen my son and I delivered to friends tonight. As you can see, while they may not be quite as picture perfect in appearance as *some* recipe site photos I’ve viewed, I guarantee that if you follow the directions I give here, you’ll have people asking you for the recipe, too.
What I share here is based upon the very basic recipe I discovered more than 20 years ago in a Chabad Jewish Calendar. They still have this same recipe posted in their current calendar. If you have access to one, you can see this is very close to it, but I’ve made a few important clarifications and tweaks to make it even better. I’ve noted them primarily with parenthesis or asterisk or detailed explanation. This is NOT the same recipe I’ve seen on the Chabad website and that recipe isn’t nearly as good as their OLD CLASSIC recipe you’ll find on the calendar. I don’t like the recipe they have on the Chabad kids site, and it doesn’t even have the amount of flour correct. So be careful.
The first time I tried making hamentashen on my own I had an awful time. It was a MESS. My kitchen was a mess, I was a mess and the hamentashen was, too. The recipe I used wasn’t as good as this one and the dough never did taste as good. I’ve used several other recipes over the years. Some used apple juice, lemon juice, and vanilla extract, butter or other ingredients. I don’t use any of those anymore. The best tasting and most consistently praised dough is the one I share here.

Sometimes the mess of making hamentashen can be half the fun, and it’s been a family thing since my son began helping me when he was 2. Now he can make hamentashen as good as mine (He says better!)

With every other recipe, my dough was either too sticky or too dry or I couldn't get the sides to stick or my fillings were too runny or too much and oozed out or made the sides open, or despite using the required temperature setting and time indicated, I baked them too long and the bottoms were too dark. Or when I glazed them with just beaten egg alone as the Chabad recipe called for, the glaze was too hard and just too shiny.

So after more than 30 years of trial and error, here is the method I use to make Hamentashen
Ingredients:
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/3 cup vegetable shortening
3 extra large eggs * original recipe didn’t note size of egg but it IS important
1/2 cup orange juice (through trial and error I believe it’s best if you can use fresh squeezed juice from Texas sweet oranges..and it really does make a difference)
4 cups unsifted *all purpose flour*
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
You’ll also need one more egg for later on in the recipe.
For the filling: The original recipe I started from said 2 pounds mohn filling ..I never measure how much I actually have to start with but it’s at least one can of prepared poppyseed filling and then other things as the whim strikes me or my family as to what we want to try inside!
Traditional filling is poppyseed (mohn) or prune or apricot fillings. Other common fillings include any fruit pastry or pie filling or combinations with chopped or crushed nuts. There are some recipes to make your own poppyseed filling or almond filling, but I choose not to go to that much trouble. I use the Solo brand that is available at Kroger and their almond filling alone and in combination with other ingredients.
This is the first year I've not made blueberry hamentashen. Since my son was 2, it was one of his favorites.
It requires a THICK blueberry pie or pastry filling or add
blueberries to anything thinner or it makes a mess and tries to open
the hamentashen while baking.

This year the chocolate chip/walnut/almond pastry filling has proven to be the favorite. I also enjoyed mixing strawberry preserves with the almond pastry filling.
The first batch I made with the chocolate chips was with white and
dark chocolate chips (and the white chocolate melts better) so you
can get away with just both of those. Then I ran out of the white chocolate and decided to just use dark chocolate chips and crushed walnut. I only made about a dozen of those and they were tasty but I felt needed more moisture since the chips didn’t melt enough so I added the Solo brand almond pastry filling and created a new family favorite. It was a perfect texture and the blend of flavors is yummy.
You can experiment with many different fillings before you find what you like best but you must at least try the traditional poppyseed hamentashen! They all taste excellent dunked in a cold glass of milk. Oh, I’m getting ahead of myself..back to the recipe.
Now here is how you put it all together:
In a large bowl mix sugar, oil and shortening to creamy texture together. Then scramble up 3 extra large eggs in a separate bowl, add to sugar/oil/shortening mix then add the 1/2 cup orange juice. Mix these ingredients until you have a very creamy smooth texture. Next, add the 4 cups flour, the baking powder and the salt. Mix all of those ingredients to form the dough. Now, another tweak to make a better dough to work with is to divide it into at least two sections, put in a covered container and refrigerate for a MINIMUM of an hour. You can make your dough one day and refrigerate the dough overnight to finish baking the next and that’s fine, too.
Next, spread out a sheet of wax paper on your work surface. Lightly flour the paper and take one of your portions of chilled dough and lightly flour to roll it out with
a rolling pin about ½ a centimeter thin. Using a drinking glass or mug as a dough cutter, cut a circle (about 3 inches across is the size glass I use). Then
place a dollop of the filling into the middle of each circle. If you
put too much in, they will either tend to open or the contents spill
out while baking. For us old fogeys to get an idea of the proportion of filling to put on the dough circle, think of an old 45 record..and the center label section and you'll get an idea of the proportion of filling to the dough. Think of the filling as the label. If you’re not old enough to get a mental image of a 45 record, the original recipe says 1/2 to 2/3 tsp but that's just a guideline. In those pictured above, I believe I used closer to a whole teaspoon of filling. Then pinch up the sides tightly to make a triangle.

The original calendar Chabad recipe tells to put them on greased cookie sheets. I don't do that. I use aluminum foil on my cookie sheet and take each batch off the sheet by lifting the whole foil and setting them to the side to cool and then
place more foil on for the next batch :) I've never had them stick to the foil.
I often make 2 or 3 'sets" of dough as I did yesterday with 2 batches of dough. While I'm rolling, cutting and filling the next dozen hamentashen on a sheet of aluminum foil, the first set is baking.

The very last step before you put them into a preheated 350 degree oven: take
that last egg and beat that with 1 tablespoon of water until it is fluffy then brush it over each hamentashen for a light glaze.

The recipe says bake approximately 20 minutes and it is important to pay attention to that word approximately.

I discovered a long time ago that for my oven and this recipe, it takes exactly 18 minutes...20 minutes is too long for my oven. Experienced bakers know that altitude and humidity and other factors also may make a difference and will learn to adjust recipes for that, too. I recall that across town with a different oven I always baked them 21 minutes. So it is important to pay close attention that "ovens may vary".

When the bottom is slightly golden, they're done. Don’t overcook them.

The Chabad calendar recipe said it yields 4 dozen hamentashen. I’ve never managed to make that many out of it. With the 3 inch diameter glass I use to cut the dough I get anywhere from 36 to 40 hamentashen, not 4 dozen. Yesterday I made 75 hamentashen from 2 batches of dough.

Making hamentashen with kids is a very fun thing to do. It can still be fun as they grow older and then it becomes a family tradition. Many small Children LOVE to roll the dough and cut it and get sticky icky with all the fillings. It is also a longstanding tradition for children to deliver baskets and trays of hamentashen to friends, neighbors and shut-ins. Son and I delivered the tray of 18 hamentashen pictured above to some friends across town this evening. When I can, I prefer to give 18 rather than a dozen because Jews often give gifts and donations in multiples of 18, which is called "giving chai". Since Purim is a celebration of the fact we survived an attempt to eliminate us, the 18 hamentashen is my way of focusing on Judaism honoring LIFE itself.
Shalom y’all.

Enjoy!

EDIT: I forgot to mention that sprinkling confectioner's sugar over the top is also a nice added touch. Obviously, I also forgot to buy some to sprinkle on the hamentashen I made yesterday!

SECOND EDIT:
I received the following today in my email:
Top Ten Reasons for Celebrating Purim
by Kenneth Goldrich

1. Making noise in shul is a MITZVAH!!
2. Levity is not reserved for the Levites
3. Nobody knows if you're having a bad hair day. You can tell them
it's your costume
4. Purim is easier to spell than Chanukah, I mean Hanukah, I mean,
KHanukah, I mean Chanuka, I mean the Festival of Lights.
5. You don't have to kasher your home and change all the pots and
dishes.
6. You don't have to build a hut and live and eat outside (but you
could volunteer to build a new Purim booth for next year's Carnival)
7. You get to drink wine and drink wine and drink wine and you don't
even have to stand for Kiddush (I guess you can't!)
8. You won't get hit in the eye by a lulav
9. You can't eat hamantaschen on Yom Kippur
10. Mordecai - 1 ; Haman - 0 !!!!

Kashrut

What Will Matter?

Ready or not, some day,
it will all come to an end.
There will be no more surprises;
no minutes, hours, or days.
All the things you collected,
whether treasured or forgotten,
will pass on to someone else.
Your wealth, fame, and temporal power
will shrivel to irrelevance.
It will not matter what you owned
or what you were owed.
Your grudges, resentments, frustrations,
and jealousies will finally disappear.
So, too, your hopes, ambitions, plans, and to-do lists will expire.
The wins and losses, that once seemed
so important, will fade away.
It won't matter where you came from
or what side of the tracks you lived, at the end.
It won't matter whether you were beautiful
or brilliant.
Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.
*****************

So, what will matter?
How will the value of your days be measured?

****************
What will matter is not what you bought,
but what you built;
not what you got, but what you gave.
What will matter is not your success,
but your significance.
What will matter is not what you learned,
but what you taught.
What will matter is every act of integrity,
compassion, courage or sacrifice that enriched,
empowered, or encouraged others
to emulate your example.
What will matter is not your competence,
but your character.
What will matter is not how many people you knew,
but how many people will feel a lasting loss
when you're gone.
What will matter is not your memories,
but the memories that live in those who loved you.
What will matter is how long
you will be remembered,
by whom, and for what.
Living a life that matters
doesn't happen by accident.
It's not a matter of circumstance but of choice.
Choose to live a life that matters.
***
author unknown

THANK YOU CAKE CITY (WHO OBTAINED THIS FROM HER FRIEND SALLY)

Refuting Fallacious Debate and History Revisionism

I can't link to IT from here until the question closes, but If you're reading this here now, it is likely you arrived via my "EDIT" link asking you to read my response to the playground taunts that I have nothing I could say to refute them.

This post is made to address ad hominem, and other fallacious debate techniques used to try to circumvent objective evidence that I gave in an answer to a baiting question on an online question and answer forum.

I realize I might just be giving a bigot the jollies with this by a page devoted to address one notorious Jew hating disrupter. However, he is one who joins others that long ago hijacked a section of the internet to promote war mongering and hate propagandizing. My values do not permit me to remain silent to that. I also hope this will help at least a few people understand a complex situation a little better once they can clearly see common methods of propagandizing and abuse being employed by those who want to hijack efforts to peace in the Middle East and in the World at large.

While I am addressing the words of only one known Jew hater’s comments, note the techniques he uses aren’t unique to him and this isn’t the only topic his methods of propagandizing are used to support. He makes false allegations, twists what someone else said then demands his perversion be justified by the person falsely accused, project bigoted ideation and canards, make unsubstantiated claims and then demand proof for everything the other person said while either providing no evidence to substantiate his claims or giving references that if actually read, discredit his own claim. He is certainly not going to like this post today. Those methods are becoming increasingly commonplace online. Another thing that such people depend upon is to only appeal to others with a similar irrational bias. These methods always fail to convince objective thinkers. His methods are not focused on that sort of person, anyway. They focus on people who are ignorant on a topic and do not have the time or inclination to investigate for themselves.
They may or may not refer to a claimed source, to support some of their claims, but upon investigation, the objective reader discovers that *is* their Achilles' Heel. The easiest way to discover how duplicitous they are is to go to their claimed sources and read what is actually written in context. This is another reason why you might see the most detailed answers I give on controversial issues such as bigotry to Jews and the efforts to eliminate Israel, and *especially* if they are well referenced with scholarly sources, with the most thumbs down. They want to hide the fact that their own words led to the discovery of just how egregious they lie.

I have not even begun to address this particular question and one user’s attacks upon my answer yet. In addition, since I first wrote down an address to all his attacks and asked people to email me for them at the q..He added another attempt to deflect with escalated deceptiveness by perverting another user’s answer, too.

With that particular user, the correct answers that he’s most likely to try to discredit by method I call..baffle with bullshit..are either answers that max out the space allotted or are very long. He chooses those specifically because he knows that the person he is attacking must remove some of the information that he did not want seen in the first place to address his false charges. It is a form of moving the goalpost. Then he will give a list of nonsensical misrepresentations or false claims as charges against the correct answer and claim the person *cannot* refute them. It is only SPACE that doesn't permit refutation in those instances as he certainly knows.

To the answer that called me out..I copy paste (his misspellings and all) and then address them… I don’t claim to be a good writer myself, so excuse my grammar boo boos. His comments are in quotes followed by my response after a <
You may note that I’ve written most of this as if addressing HIM since I first typed most of this rather stream of consciousness when he first made the charges in case he actually writes to me. I won’t hold my breath waiting because I know he knows I can refute lies with evidence.
I also emailed much of this to the asker, unsolicited. Prior to my posting this and a link at the q, only two readers wrote to me to see what I had to say to his charges. I emailed them draft versions of this. The response was as expected. :)

Now to eviscerate the fallacious debate techniques that were there to try to discredit my answer:
“Does that mean there is no sch thing as Metis? Cajuns? Celts?" < Strawman…easily knocked over.. The people who comprise “Palestinian” identity in history are many different ethnicities, nations and peoples. If he wants to talk about who was historically called Palestinian, he’s going to have to admit that it didn’t refer to Arab Muslims in any exclusive manner and in almost all instances of historical reference, it was speaking exclusively of the indigenous Jews. He’s even given historical evidence throughout his claimed refutation that the Jews are the indigenous people referred to as Palestinian, as I wrote, and as the Mark Twain reference HE gave a little further on to support that mark Twain referred to the Palestinians…he omits that Mark Twain was talking about Jews when he said it! . Also a little farther on, the Jew hater’s comments also gave evidence to support continual Jewish presence by referencing the “Palestinian Talmud. “ A term used in English that was coined as a later reference for the texts titled “תַּלְמוּד יְרוּשָׁלְמִי‎, Talmud Yerushalmi, often Yerushalmi for short. HIS claim is to insinuate that “Palestinian Talmud” is the title, when that certainly isn’t the case. Objective evidence proves that beyond doubt.
In addition, the Palestinian Orchestra was a completely Jewish orchestra that existed prior to the formation of the State of Israel. I could keep going on and on, but why? Palestinian wasn’t the identity of any ONE people, although the world at large always equated it with Jew..and that’s another reason why for centuries, the non-Jews who were also living in the region didn’t like it.
"If they really wanted peace they would give up their farms and homes and leave" (paraphrasing) What kind of logic is that? So if Arabs occupy Israel, when did this happen? < He certainly is not paraphrasing me or any answer I could find there. He has pulled that one completely out of his tuches. He’s right, that’s not logical and it is only his illogical claim. Next..he says, “if Arabs occupy Israel”. Arab refers to an ethnicity now, and while Arabs most certainly “occupied“ and conquered many lands in the Middle East, this ethnicity and language has now permeated the region for a long time among many different peoples. There are more than a million and a half Arab Jews in Israel whose families were expelled from Arab lands and were taken in as citizens, not kept as political pawns and permanent refugees.
“Can you point to a period in time when the entire population was removed and Arab introduced?” < Can YOU point to anyone’s claim that the entire population was removed? Your desperation to obfuscate is glaring like a spotlight here. http://www.imninalu.net/myths-Arabs.htm No one said the entire population was removed…another straw man and other fallacies …this link will help the uninformed learn of the ancient history and expansion of the Arab empire. Different peoples living in the ancient Levant have come and gone and largely due to the conquest of various empires and either extermination, expulsion or assimilation. This doesn't obfuscate that the homeland of the Jews is Israel or remove the archaeological evidence and continual Jewish presence however meager at times, despite ALL efforts to remove Jews completely.

“Why is the Cohanim genetic marker MORE prevalent in Palestinians then any Jewish group?”< “Palestinians” as I’ve shown, historically WERE Jews, Cohenim genetic markers are not found in any non-Jewish group more than in any Jewish group. Many Jews that it is found in are Palestinian..you’re using fallacious debate technique. I don’t care to pull out all the genetic studies, but will note that your claim even notes that there is ancient genetic evidence of the Cohenim..tHe Jewish people present in the region. Thanks.
“For your claim to be correct you must have an answer to these.@mama pajama Mark Twain's book "Innocents Abroad" was written in the nineteenth century- it refers to Palestinians- the indigenous inhabitants.” < Yes, it most certainly does, and thanks you for noting that he recognized the Jews as the indigenous peoples. Many sites reference his writing about the Holy Land and how few people inhabited it http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Arabs_in_Palestine.html
He mentions some places as entirely devoid of people, which some modern Palestinians claim their families had large communities and had owned at the time, too. So, who is right Mark Twain or the claims of the “refugees”?
"Seven Pillars of Wisdom" by TE Lawrence speaks of the Palestinians. < Of course, a British citizen would use the British term to refer to all inhabitants of British Mandate Palestine. Doesn't TE "Lawrence of Arabia" also refer to some of the individual peoples by their nation names?
“Khayr al-Din al-Ramli was a Muslim scholar who lived in Ramla in the seventeenth century; he wrote of "Palestine" and "Palestinians". < NOT QUITE.. This cleric famous for his fatwas briefly referenced the Roman province of Palaestina Prima, or as it was known in the early Islamic period, Jund Filastin, one of several sub-provinces of the Unmayad and Abbasid Caliphate province of Syria , organized soon after the Muslim conquest of Syria in the seventh century. I searched Islamic sites for several hours and could find no quote claiming he called himself Palestinian in this writing. That was one of your claims attacking the OTHER person’s answer.

Misleading using Muslim references is just as disrespectful to Islam as your lies about Jews.

“ In fact could you provide an example of a Palestinian humiliated because the British called them "Palestinian"? in fact I just bet you won't.” < The claim I made was that they continually charged that the term was created to humiliate them. They did this for a very long time. Here is only one of the quotes that aren’t difficult to find at all if you bother to look. Here you go..a complaint to the British rejecting the very term Palestine.
"There is no such country as Palestine. 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria. 'Palestine' is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it". - Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, Syrian Arab leader to British Peel Commission, 1937
I’ve got more..and some even delivered at the UN..so..it is very clear that you lost your bet.
What did I “win”? I am not clear what you wagered. I won’t hold my breath waiting for you to admit it.

“Even being referred to a "Palestinian" was so humiliating, then why would a JEWISH writer (Philo) refer to the "Jews of Palestine" in FORTY CE (BEFORE the fall of Jerusalem and Bar Kokhba revolt under Hadrian.” < Philo was a Hellenized (Greek) Jew. When you quote that he said “Jews of Palestine” he notes that Jews were OF the region! You’ve shot your own lie in the foot. Therefore, you admit that Jews were of the larger region the Greeks called Palestine. There goes the lie that Jews are foreign to the region.
Then you twist both my words and history. Philo didn’t live during the British Mandate and wasn’t issued the ID card that the different Arab nations complained was so humiliating and humiliating because they didn't want to be mistaken for the Jews who had historically been referred to for so long as Palestinian, some of them ( as I gave evidence already) falsely even claimed Jews created the term!
The term 'Palestine' is derived from the Philistines. In the fifth century BCE the Greek historian Herodotus used the term Palaistine Syria (= Philistine Syria) to refer to the whole region between Phoenicia and the Lebanon mountains in the north and Egypt in the south. (While the exact meaning intended by Herodotus is debated, later *Greek* writers certainly used 'Philistine Syria' in this very broad sense.) The Greeks felt a great kinship to their ancient kin, the Philistines. Greece was the HOMELAND of the Philistines and they even shared the same religious practices as archaeological evidence exists to support!
Palestine wasn’t the name of a country or an indigenous people to the region, it was the name referred to a region by Greek and Roman conquerors.
Until the early part of the twentieth century, the word Palestinian simply referred to the inhabitants of the region, whether they were Arab, Muslim, Jew, Samaritan, Christian or Druze. Moreover, even they did not use the term widely. Only since 1948 has the term come increasingly into use to refer to all the non-Jewish inhabitants.
Just as the modern term “ARAB WORLD” was only coined in the 20th century by the 21 members of the “ARAB LEAGUE” to designate their member countries and to promote a political goal and strategy for the conquest of a form of empire, so too, was the term “Palaistine Syria” applied to a REGION that comprised many countries/kingdoms/ and peoples who all had their OWN names for their own lands and countries.
　
“Why would they refer to the "PALESTINIAN" Talmudh if it were so insulting? A good refutation to Thomas McCall's claim can be found here http://www.churchhistory101.com/century1-palestine.php “
< I can’t also help but notice that you ignored the objective physical evidence of the Arch of Titus in Rome and the coins they designated as capturing JUDEA. The massive amounts of objective archaeological evidence in museums in Israel and around the world stand as testimony revealing who is “manufacturing” history to try to HIDE the evidence of history. Actually if you read that link, the claim that Thomas McCall is wrong isn’t refuted at all there. They simply refer to the earlier use of “Palaistine Syria “by the *Greeks* who refer to their term of conquest. The term didn’t refer to native peoples, but was a name given to the region by conquerors. This is clearly noted at his OWN website reference if you read. He also ignores that no archaeological evidence exists to support that people IN the region used the term at that time, but that other names WERE used in archaeological evidence.

Thankfully, the objective reader sees these things.

“But I know none of this means anything to "Mama pajama" who will just ignore the facts and refuse to acknowledge or refute.” < Easy taunt to make when my Answer already maxed out the space permitted. It is the FACTS that you are so obviously desperate to obfuscate. Did you forget that that not everyone is desperate to project hate, or too lazy to look for themselves?
“My purpose is to show the facts and pose this question "If the Zionist position is so strong, why must they manufacture history to belittle an entire people?" < This is perhaps the most topsy turvy claim made…and one that anyone reading can now see crystal clear that your accusations and question are obviously the fallacies...as the objective physical evidence has proven once AGAIN. The only people who are being “belittled” under that question are your unfounded, irrational charges and insults to the Jews, and by those who are in utter denial of overwhelming objective physical evidence. It is those who wish to negate the existence of another people and their entire history who “manufacture” a collective Arab identity as “Palestinian” existing thousands of years for peoples who rejected such a thing until the Arab nationalistic movement of the 1960s. You must assume that all readers will be too lazy to read references.
Next time you think that by posing so many fallacious claims as taunting charges and then assert because they weren’t addressed in the q, they .prove the person you’ve trolled can’t address them..Don‘t forget that there will always be at least a FEW people who are interested in actually discovering the truth. Truth will out.
That’s *always* going to be your Achilles’ Heel…and honest answers always your enemy. Seek help for your obsessive desire to project the behaviors you openly display without hint of conscience, onto others. Professionals can help if you seek it.
Here is much more of the evidence you claimed I couldn’t “produce”
http://www.imninalu.net/myths-Arabs.htm
See my references here:
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110521103725AA1LFrV
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100303171017AADaIdW
Note that in Roman usage the name Judea applied to the whole country, to all of Israel. In fact, the Province of Judea and the earlier Kingdom of Judea ruled by Herod, a client king of Rome, included Samaria, Galilee, the Golan Heights, and the east bank of the Jordan River. Sometimes, as in several verses of the Christian New Testament, Judea is used in a narrow sense together with Samaria as separate regions. Nevertheless, this was a reflection of Jewish usage, not Roman. Jews sometimes used Judea to translate Judah [Yehudah], the ancient southern kingdom of the Israelites after the split of the monarchy.
　
PalestineThis place name, connected with the Philistine population, is first found in the classical [Greek] sources in Herodotos [5th century BCE]. It was introduced as the official name for the region by the Romans after the events of 132-5 [CE], deliberately counterposing it to the official name Iudaea, traditionally used up to that time, in the setting of a series of repressive actions. As such it is often rejected in Jewish circles who prefer "Land of Israel." Yet another ACTUAL Historian in addition to Thomas McCall, Elsa Laurenzi < also not Jewish btw
The BCE sources were affirmation of the Hellenist connection to the origin of the Philistines…that Aegean seafaring people who occupied five coastal city-states and vanished as a people, long before Christianity began.
The Province of Judea and the earlier Kingdom of Judea ruled by Herod, a client king of Rome, included Samaria, Galilee, the Golan Heights, and the east bank of the Jordan River. Sometimes, as in several verses of the Christian New Testament, Judea is used in a narrow sense together with Samaria as separate regions. But this was a reflection of Jewish usage, not Roman. Jews sometimes used Judea to translate Judah [Yehudah], the ancient southern kingdom of the Israelites after the split of the monarchy.
Here is more to refute the lies with objective evidence:
http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_early_palestine_name_origin.php
I have *much* more, but I think I have already made the points.
And because this is already so long, for those of you who want to see those medieval and antique maps he claims doesn’t exist….use the search terms “antique maps of the holy land”, map of Judea and Samaria in the middle ages, “antique map of Judea” “antique map of Samaria”. There are even links where you can purchase maps from the 15th -19th centuries clearly showing those terms he said didn’t exist on maps…but being so old they are a bit pricey..$450 and up. I don’t link them because I’m not trying to sell what they offer…I just told you how you can go find for yourself with a few clicks of a mouse, what he said doesn’t exist.
For him to rationalize his hate, I am sure none of the overwhelming mountains of objective evidence exists.
I pity such overwhelming hate that blinds people to evidence.
Last admonition to the Jew hater: Seek help for your hate. You may then desire to seek peace.
Shalom y’all.

Happy Chanukah!

I know I'm a little late to post a Chanukah greeting, considering that tonight is the 7th night.



Do you have any idea how hard it was to find a Jewish Zebra?

Best of Answers

I've answered many hundreds of questions about Jewish identity with variations of an essay that derived from a lesson plan I'd used long ago with teens. Some of them had many more outside references listed than did others. At some, I used Jewish history sites; others showed references to secular historical evidence, international linguistic scholarly references, and to web sites of different respected Rabbis. At others I detailed the history of the false notion of Jews as a race and used award winning Biology web references.
The photo there is of one of my answers to the question of Jewish identity that someone nominated to Yahoo and Yahoo Answers chose to feature as a Best of Answers. While all the information in it is correct and contains much of the information I provide elsewhere, if *I* were going to choose one of the thousands of times I've answered this question asked on a daily basis, I would have chosen one of the better referenced answers I'd posted many times.

Here is a link to the above question: http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101027162339AAi9CII
Here is a link to another of the many hundreds of times I have answered this question:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AgEGzRemtJg1A2CbyhoQKfPty6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20111020175125AAigOTe
I might be back later with more.