–David Silverman, President of American Atheists, joins David to discuss his hypothesis that Judaism is only a religion and not a race or ethnicity
–On the Bonus Show: Louis’ dog-sitting nightmare, The logical next step in environmental destruction, Abramovich invests in a fascinating Israeli startup, more…
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Broadcast on June 17, 2014
Comments
I remember that I had to do an presentation about the origin of the people of Africa when I was in High School. It blews my mind. That was 26 years ago. I came out of it with the conclusion that there is no pure race, it confirmed to me that I should never care about races and I feel really sorry for those who hold so tight on those race concepts.
In fact doing researches for this presentation, I found out that a lot people in Africa are descendant of Jews. For sure, after the crusaders entered Jerusalem, many had to flee the region. Some went to hide in the South of Africa. They are called Lemba today. They were part of the priest class and were said to be carrying the “Arch of the Covenant” with them – the one no one can find today. I also learn that the Songhais – a tribe from West Africa that today converted to Islam – are Jews. I don’t remember when they got there, but it might been long before the crusaders’ time under some other circumstances. Also it seems that many of those migrating jews interbred with many coastal bantu tribes and gave birth to many other tribes. Another account from the oral tradition even claims that Jews might have originated in Africa and migrated to the north and that how they ended up populating the East of Africa and the Sinai region. For sure, the Lembas and Songhais have been confirmed to be Jew descendants.
So it is not hard to see that while many abandoned their Judaism while in exile, some other tribes might have joined the religion as certain folks claim.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8550614.stm
The biological construct seems pretty flimsy to me considering race is a social construct. But as a social construct I see Judaism very much as both a race and ethnicity.
I’m surprised to hear from Silverman that Anti-Semites say that Judaism ISN’T a race, considering I’ve heard only the opposite. That when Jews have children those are Jews, that there is no distinction between reform/conservative/atheist/orthodox/ashkenazi/sephardim/mitzrahi because they’re all Jews and they paint with a large brush. They don’t give a crap about the religiosity or beliefs of the Jew. It’s just a matter of blood. That’s what I always hear from Anti-Semites.
It seems to me that there are only two kinds of people who actually give a damn whether Judaism is a race/ethnicity:
1. Jews. Jews prostelytize to other Jews and generally regard each other as Jews regardless of religious affiliation. They think Jews are a race/ethnicity.
2. Anti-Semites. As I said above, I’ve always heard them talk about Jews as a race/ethnicity that needs to be cleansed and destroyed, not as a religion.
If the only people that care about the issue say treat Judaism is a race/ethnicity, then it seems to me that that is the case, as it is a social construct. As long as Jews are targeted by their blood by Anti-Semites, for instance, then Jews regardless of religious/diaspora affiliation have common solidarity.
Interesting. I’ve always regarded Jew and Jewish as the ethnicity, and Judaic or Judaism as the religion, commonly associated with the ethnicity. I have long argued the conflation of Jew and Judaic, by non-Jews or non-Judaic people, or Jews or Judaic people, is confusing and counter productive. The further common conflation of Zionist with Jews or Judaic people is also counter-productive, leading the mis-categorisation of political movements as religious only. The same is occurring with Arab and Muslim, and even Jihadist.
This was unbearable to watch. One person is just telling the other to go look it up and throwing that anti-semites use the same argument as the other person, like that somehow destroys his position. I am not taking a stance in this but hitler was right about smoking tobacco being bad, i guess if we use his argument it must be wrong, sigh. The anti-semites are irrelevant to this argument. David Silverman was interesting but seemingly unprepared.
just as an addendum, The guy who was basically saying look up it, look it up didn’t present a lot of data on the subject himself and the information he did provide, he didn’t cite his sources or give exact figures. the only thing he did that was close to this was cite a list of names of people who agree with him. He sounded like a Young Earth Creationist doing so to validate his position.