Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Judaism is not a major player in the history of humankind

One of the most important and most beautiful values of Judaism is modesty. We would do well to take this value to heart when considering the religion's impact on humankind through the ages.

By 
Yuval Noah Harari
 






Though many Israelis are convinced that the history of the human race revolves around Judaism and the Jewish people, in truth, Judaism has played a relatively minor role in the annals of our species. Unlike such universal religions as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, Judaism is a tribal creed. It focuses on the fate of one small nation and one tiny land, and has little interest in the fate of all other people and all other countries. For example, it cares little about events in China or about the people of New Guinea. It is no wonder, therefore, that its historical role was limited.
It is certainly true that Judaism begot Christianity, and influenced the birth of Islam – two of the most important religions in history. However, the credit for the global achievements of Christianity and Islam, as well as the guilt for their many crimes, belongs to the Christians and Muslims themselves, rather than to the Jews. Just as it would be unfair to blame Judaism for the mass killings of the Crusades (Christianity is 100 percent culpable), so also there is no reason to credit Judaism with the critical Christian idea that all human beings are equal before God (an idea that stands in direct contradiction to Jewish orthodoxy).
The role of Judaism in the history of humankind is a bit like the role of Newton’s mother in the history of science. It is true that without Newton’s mother, we wouldn’t have had Newton, and that Newton’s personality, ambitions and opinions were likely shaped to a significant extent by his relations with his mother. But when writing the history of science, nobody expects an entire chapter on Newton’s mother. Similarly, without Judaism you would not have had Christianity, but that doesn’t merit giving much importance to Judaism when writing the history of the world. The crucial issue is what Christianity did with its Jewish legacy.
This idea may shock and annoy many Israelis, who are educated to think that Judaism is the central hero of human history. Israeli children usually finish 12 years of school without receiving any clear picture of global historical processes. Though they learn about the Roman Empire, the French Revolution and World War II, these isolated jigsaw pieces do not add up to any overarching narrative. Instead, the only coherent story offered by the Israeli school system begins with the Hebrew Bible, continuous to the Second Temple era, skips to various Jewish communities in the Diaspora, and culminates with the rise of Zionism, the Holocaust, and the establishment of the State of Israel. Most students leave school convinced that this must be the main plotline of the entire human story. For even when pupils hear about the Roman Empire or the French Revolution, the discussion in class focuses on the way the Roman Empire treated the Jews or on the legal and political status of Jews in the French Republic. People fed on such a historical diet have a very hard time digesting the idea that Judaism in fact had relatively little impact on the world as a whole.

'Yom Kippur,' by Isidor Kaufmann (before 1907). N/A
It goes without saying that the Jewish people is a unique people with an astonishing history (though this is true of most peoples). It similarly goes without saying that the Jewish tradition is full of deep insights and noble values (though it is also full of some questionable ideas and of racist, misogynist and homophobic attitudes). It is further true that, relative to its size, the Jewish people has had a disproportional impact on the history of the last 2,000 years. But when you look at the big picture of our history as a species, since the emergence of Homo sapiens more than 100,000 years ago, it is obvious that the Jewish contribution to history was very limited. Humans settled the entire planet, adopted agriculture, built the first cities, and invented writing and money thousands of years before the appearance of Judaism.
Even in the last two millennia, if you look at history from the perspective of the Chinese or of the Native American Indians, it is hard to see any major Jewish contribution except through the mediation of Christians or Muslims. Thus the Hebrew Bible eventually became a cornerstone of global human culture because it was warmly embraced by Christianity. In contrast, the Talmud – whose importance to Jewish culture surpasses that of the Bible – was rejected by Christianity, and consequently remained an esoteric text hardly known to the Arabs, Poles or Dutch, not to mention the Chinese and the Maya. Though Jewish communities that studied the Talmud spread over large parts of the world, they did not play a key role in the building of the Chinese empires, in the early modern voyages of discovery, in the establishment of the democratic system, or in the Industrial Revolution. The coin, the university, the parliament, the bank, the compass, the printing press and the steam engine were all invented by gentiles.
Ethics before the Bible
Israelis often use the term “the three great religions,” thinking that these religions are Christianity (2 billion believers), Islam (1.5 billion) and Judaism (15 million). Hinduism, with its billion believers, and Buddhism, with its 500 million followers – not to mention the Shinto religion (50 million) and the Sikh religion (25 million) – don’t make the cut. This warped concept of “the three great religions” often implies in the mind of Israelis that all major religious and ethical traditions emerged out of the womb of Judaism, which was the first religion to preach universal ethical rules. As if humans prior to the days of Abraham and Moses lived in a Hobbesian state of nature without any moral commitments, and as if all of contemporary morality derives from the Ten Commandments. This is a baseless and somewhat racist idea, which ignores many of the world’s most important ethical traditions.
Stone Age hunter-gatherer tribes had moral codes tens of thousands of years before Abraham. When the first European settlers reached Australia in the late 18th century, they encountered aboriginal tribes that had a well-developed ethical worldview despite being totally ignorant of Moses, Jesus or Mohammed. Indeed, scientists nowadays point out that morality has evolutionary roots, and that it is present among most social mammals, such as wolves, dolphins and monkeys. For example, when wolf cubs play with one another, they have “fair game” rules. If a cub bites too hard, or continues to bite an opponent that has rolled on his back and surrendered, the other cubs will stop playing with him.
In one hilarious experiment, the primatologist Frans de Waal placed two capuchin monkeys in two adjacent cages, so that each could see everything the other was doing. De Waal and his colleagues placed small stones inside each cage, and trained the monkeys to give them these stones. Whenever a monkey handed over a stone, he received food in exchange. At first the reward was a piece of cucumber. Both monkeys were very pleased with that, and happily ate their cucumber.

Aboriginal Australians. Had a well-developed ethical world in the 18th century, despite being ignorant of Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. Mark Graham, AP
After a few rounds, de Waal moved to the next stage of the experiment. This time, when the first monkey surrendered a stone, he got a grape. Grapes are much more tasty than cucumbers. However, when the second monkey turned over a stone, he still received only a piece of cucumber.
The second monkey, who had previously been very happy with his cucumber, became incensed. He took the cucumber, looked at it for a moment in disbelief, and then threw it at the scientists in anger, jumping and screeching. He’s no sucker. Equality and social justice were central values in capuchin monkey society hundreds of thousands of years before the prophet Amos complained about social elites “who oppress the poor and crush the needy” (Amos 4:1), and before the prophet Jeremiah preached, “do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow” (Jeremiah 7:6).
Even among Homo sapiens living in the ancient Middle East, the biblical prophets were not unprecedented. “Thou shall not kill” and “thou shall not steal” were well-known in the legal and ethical codes of Sumerian city states, pharaonic Egypt and the Babylonian Empire. A thousand years before Amos and Jeremiah, the Babylonian king Hammurabi explained that the great gods instructed him “to make justice prevail in the land, to abolish the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.”
Meanwhile in Egypt – centuries before the birth of Moses – scribes wrote down “the story of the eloquent peasant,” which tells of a poor peasant whose property was stolen by a greedy landowner. The peasant came before Pharaoh’s corrupt officials, and when they failed to protect him, he began explaining to them why they must provide justice and in particular defend the poor from the rich. In one colorful allegory, this Egyptian peasant explained that the meager possessions of the poor are like their very breath, and official corruption suffocates them by plugging the passage through their nostrils.
Many biblical laws copy rules that were accepted in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Canaan centuries and even millennia prior to the establishment of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. If biblical Judaism gave these laws any unique twist, it was by turning them from universal rulings into tribal codes aimed primarily at the Jewish people.
Jewish morality was initially shaped as an exclusive tribal affair, and remained so to some extent until the 21st century. The Bible, the Talmud and many though not all rabbis maintained that the life of a Jew is more valuable than the life of a gentile, which is why, for example, Jews are allowed to desecrate the Shabbat in order to save a Jew from death, but are forbidden to do so if it is merely to save a gentile (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma, 84:2).
Some Jewish sages argued that even the famous commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself” refers only to Jews, and there is no commandment to love gentiles. Indeed, the original text from Leviticus says: “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), which raises the suspicion that “your neighbor” refers only to members of “your people.”
It was only the Christians who selected some choice morsels of the Jewish moral code, turned them into universal commandments, and spread them throughout the world. Indeed, Christianity split from Judaism precisely on that account. While many Jews to this day believe that the so-called “Chosen People” are closer to God than other nations are, the founder of Christianity – Saint Paul the Apostle – stipulated in his famous Epistle to the Galatians that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
A Tibetan Buddha statue. Buddhism is among a handful of religions that have influenced billions, for better or worse. Vivek Prakash, Reuters
And we must again emphasize that despite the enormous impact of Christianity, this was definitely not the first time a human preached a universal ethic. The Bible is far from being the exclusive font of human morality (and luckily so, given the many racist, misogynist and homophobic attitudes it contains). Confucius, Laozi, Buddha and Mahavira established universal ethical codes long before Paul and Jesus, without knowing anything about the land of Canaan or the prophets of Israel. Confucius taught that every person must love others as he loves himself about 500 years before Rabbi Hillel the Elder. And at a time when Judaism still mandated the sacrifice of animals and the systematic extermination of entire human populations (the Amalekites and Canaanites), Buddha and Mahavira already instructed their followers to avoid harming not only all human beings, but any sentient beings whatsoever, including insects.
Jewish physics, Christian biology
Only in the 19th and 20th centuries do we see a truly extraordinary Jewish contribution to humankind as a whole – namely, the role of Jews in modern science. In addition to such well-known names as Einstein and Freud, about 20 percent of all Nobel Prize winners in science have been Jews, though Jews constitute less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population. But it should be stressed that this has been a contribution of individual Jews rather than of Judaism as a religion or a culture. Most of the important Jewish scientists of the past 200 years acted outside the Jewish religious sphere.
 Indeed, Jews began to make their remarkable contribution to science only once they had abandoned the yeshivas in favor of the laboratories.

http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.598450.1402574438!/image/1340176551.jpg_gen/derivatives/size_310x233/1340176551.jpg

How Germans handle terror - Pure reason - The Economist

It took rather long time for the public to caught on to the games politicians play and that involve human lives of their own compatriots. Slowly the paid and organised media facing tough competition from social media has been leaking information that exposes the dirty tricks the politicians unleash to keep their leash on power and on people. Most prominent is the media game are the Jewish media barons, who have made a big propaganda of Islamic terror. They teamed with the politicians who were not averse to stage terror incidents around the world through their willing or most of the time their black-mailed proxies, to hold an entire Muslim community of one billion people hostage to collective sin of terror and therefor fit for collective punishments. It would appear the US President Obama was the first to differentiate between the Muslim terror accused and the entire Muslim people as well as Islam as two separate subjects. Media did take the cue and now in Germany, we see such terror incidents are not creating the mass hysteria that the Jewish media was in the forefront to create out of lone wolf terror attacks. This is a big change. And time all those conspirators in paid media and social media are expose, so that general public heaves a sigh of relief from this organised scare-mongering that had a chain reaction as its ultimate goal.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

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http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21702718-face-rash-attacks-germans-are-staying-remarkably-calm-pure-reason

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In the face of a rash of attacks, Germans are staying remarkably calm




Jul 30th 2016 | BERLIN | From the print edition
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Germans, not panicking









ASK some Germans how people should react to terrorism and most would probably agree with the historian Herfried Münkler that the best attitude is heroische Gelassenheit: heroic calmness. Let other countries declare wars on terrorism and near-permanent states of emergency, they say; Germany’s dark history has taught it not to over-react. Sceptics used to reply that talk was cheap coming from Germany, which had been spared major incidents of the sort that have struck America, France, Turkey and other countries. That changed in the space of one week this month, when Germany suffered four very different attacks.
First, on July 18th, an Afghan refugee stabbed and axed four passengers on a train and another on a platform. Four days later a German teenager of Iranian descent went on a rampage in a shopping centre in Munich (pictured), injuring more than 30 people and killing nine before shooting himself. Two days after that, a Syrian refugee hacked a pregnant woman to death with a machete—“relationship troubles”, the police said. Elsewhere that night another Syrian refugee tried to enter a concert with a backpack of explosives. When he was barred, he blew himself up, injuring 15 others.
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Germans grew more jittery with each round of breaking news. There was a brief panic during the initial hours of the Munich rampage, as rumours spread on social media that three killers were on the loose rather than just one. Munich’s 2,300 police were inundated with 4,300 emergency calls, almost all of them false.
But Munich quickly recovered its poise. Under the hashtag #OffeneTuer (“#OpenDoor”), residents offered to accommodate anyone stranded for the night by the lock-down. Munich’s police spokesperson, Marcus da Gloria Martins, laboured tirelessly to sort fact from fiction. Mr da Gloria Martins, who wrote a thesis on crisis communication, ultimately became the country’s hero of the week. On a television talk show, he appealed to the audience and media: “Give us the chance to report facts. Don’t speculate, don’t copy from each other.” It was the biggest applause line of the night.
Most politicians heeded his advice, distinguishing carefully between the issues at play in different killings. The week’s worst disaster, in Munich, had nothing to do with Islamism. The 18-year-old gunman, David Ali Sonboly, had been bullied and suffered from depression, and had prepared his rampage for a year. He had read “Why Kids Kill” by Peter Langman, an American expert on school shootings. In 2015 he visited Winnenden, a town in Germany where a school mass shooting took place in 2009. He executed his attack on the fifth anniversary of the massacre by Anders Breivik on the Norwegian island of Utoya.
Mr Sonboly’s case opened many debates. He had played “Counter-Strike”, a violent computer game also favoured by other shooters. Should such games be banned? The consensus seemed to be no; that would curtail liberty and be unfair on the majority of players who never become violent. Should Germany deploy its army in domestic emergencies such as this? Some, including Bavaria’s interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, said yes. Others pointed to Germany’s Nazi-era history and remained wary.
Mr Sonboly had used a contraband Glock 17, the type of gun also preferred by the killers at Utoya and Winnenden. Should Germany’s gun laws be tightened? No, the consensus suggested; Germany already has some of the strictest laws in the world. Mr Sonboly had bought his gun illegally from Slovakia through the “dark net”, an encrypted portion of the internet. The weapon had been disabled for use as a stage prop; Mr Sonboly or someone else later restored it to shoot live rounds.
Public discussion of the other three attackers was equally mature. All were refugees from war-torn countries and probably traumatised. Two of them—the axeman on the train and the backpack bomber at the concert—acted in the name of Islamic State (IS). The former, an unaccompanied minor from Afghanistan, was only 17 years old. The latter, a Syrian nicknamed Rambo at his refugee centre, had been denied asylum and was to be deported to Bulgaria. He had already been in psychiatric treatment and twice tried to commit suicide.
Some worried that IS might have smuggled in terrorists amid the refugees who have arrived in Germany in recent years—about 1m last year alone. Germany is investigating 59 such cases, said Thomas de Maizière, the interior minister. (There are 708 other investigations into possible Islamist terrorist plots, involving more than 1,000 suspects.) But he cautioned that the vast majority of refugees are peaceful victims, rather than perpetrators, of terror. Most Germans agreed that refugees, especially the young and traumatised, should receive better counselling and supervision.
Only a few tried to make hay of the tragedies. During the Munich rampage, André Poggenburg, a leader of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party, tried to blame the open-door refugee policy of chancellor Angela Merkel—even before anyone knew who was shooting. “Our sympathy for the wounded and the bereaved, our disgust for the Merkelites and leftwing idiots who bear responsibility!” he tweeted. He earned immediate condemnation on social and broadcast media, followed by ridicule once it emerged that the shooter was German. Then the country went on being heroically calm.