Sunday, April 24, 2011

Where Does the Word "Jew" Come From?

[Master Kung, Confucius, said that before there could be right rule there had to be right naming of things]

In Hebrew, our people are called Yehudim, after our country Yehudah. When the Romans came, they called our country Judea and its people Judeans. We were expelled from our country after two long wars of rebellion against the Romans, in the year 70 CE and again in 135.

The refugees in the Roman Empire were called Judeans. Over the centuries Roman Latin morphed into other languages and each of the new European languages adopted new words for the Judeans. German preserves much of the original spelling in calling us "Jude" and plural "Juden". Spanish calls us "Judio" and "Judios". Dutch is "Jood". Russian is "Yoodei". In each, both the sense and sound of "Judean" is preserved.

It is a meaning worth considering. The homeland of the Jews, even the right to a homeland of the Jews, can be, and was, debated at great length. But can one really debate what is the homeland of the Judeans?

But the long, long antisemitic tradition of denying and obscuring our right to our homeland was not to be brushed aside so lightly.

The lands of Judea and Samaria were called by their proper names on maps and in common usage until the 1980's. At which time they somehow became the West Bank. When I first heard of the West Bank, it took me a while to figure out what it referred to. it is a strange term. It means the western bank of the Jordan River.

The "West Bank" includes cities such as Qalqilya and Ramallah that are some fifty miles from the Jordan. It is as though San Francisco were said to be on the South Bank of the Russian River fifty miles north, or Boston to be on the East Bank of the Hudson. It is an entirely modern and invented phrase. There is no West Bankian people, no West Bankian language, no history of West Bankia, no tradition of West Bankian life under the British or the Romans or the Ottomans.

It is hard not to believe that expression was invented precisely to avoid calling Judea and Samaria by their actual names. And a moment's thought shows why one would want to do that.

If the headline reads, "Jews invade West Bank, Build Settlements", it is easy to be convinced that it is an atrocity and an aggression and that the settlements must be illegal encroachments on the rights of the West Bankians.

It would be ever so much harder for Arabs, leftists, and journalists to keep a straight face while protesting if the headline read, "Judeans return to Judea". Which is precisely why the name was changed.

Remember every time you see the phrase "West Bank" that you are being lied to, being manipulated for someone else's political agenda, an agenda that doesn't do well if things are called by their real names.


18 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:28 PM

    I am learning. Keep it coming. RD

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  2. Anonymous3:54 AM

    I agree Kessler. The Jews have their title deeds clearly recorded in the Old Testament some 3,000 years ago. The Muslim ingrates however, only started taking over Palestine around 1,500 years ago. Similarily I welcome the return of the Native Americans to the entirety of the Continental United States and of the Greeks to modern Anatolia.

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  3. In the United States Native Americans are free to build homes and live wherever they wish. Similarly Greeks are free to build homes and live wherever in the modern republic of Turkey they choose.

    But if Judeans do the same thing in Judea, bigoted drunken little Irish wankers like Anonymous start going on about 'settlers' and 'apartheid'.

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  4. And not that Anonymous is the least interested in facts other than where his next Guinness is coming from, but the facts are quite otherwise. Judeans continued to live in our country, admittedly in reduced numbers, from Roman times down to our own. Moreover there were very few Arabs in the Holy Land when the first censuses were done in the 1870's. Mark Twain was there and described the country as desolate and almost without population. Similarly the entourage of officials and journalists who accompanied Kaiser Wilhelm I on his visit in the 1870's describe a land almost without population.

    It was generally understood that the ill-advised Turkish tax on olive trees had ruined the sole source of livelihood and the few remaining inhabitants had generally left the country by the middle of the 19th century.

    The population of Palestine did not increase significantly until the Judean immigrations of the last quarter of the 19th century led to the beginning of economic actiivity. That new economic activity attracted large numbers of economic immigrants from Syria and Egypt.

    Ironically the immigration of the Judeans and their slow transformation into the new national group of the Israelis caused the immigration of Arabs and called into being their nemesis-nationality, the Palestinians. Just as most Israelis are descended from immigrants, so too are most Palestinians.

    As to numbers, Judeans have outnumbered Muslim Arabs in Jerusalem from the first census in the 1870's down to today. Second most numerous were the various Christians. Muslims were third.

    The first censuses show a mixed population, of which no group formed a majority. There were large numbers of Greeks, Armenians, Turkmens, Kurds, and Assyrians. Soon these were all outnumbered by Syrian, Egyptian, and Judean immigrations.

    Palestine was merely earlier in its Islamization than Europe.

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  5. And where did the word "Goy" come from? Actually it is a combination of two words, Gentile and Oy. Whenever a Jew would see a non Jew coming, he would say "Gentile...Oy!" and eventually they blended together into goy.

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  6. And not many people know that the native homeland of the Gentile is a country called Genitalia.

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  7. Admirer of Fascism9:46 AM

    I think the Israeli policy is enlightened. They've learned from the precedent set by the United States. First annex the land of natives. Then provide them a 'reservation'. When your own population and economy improves, gradually encroach on the native 'reservations' so that the natives give up hope and begin to resort to alcoholism, suicide and mental illness.

    The difference is, of course, that the Palestinians still maintain their struggle.

    We will crush them, eventually.

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  8. In spite of Christie being an ignorant yahoo, his remark here is apt in certain areas. For example the Native American inhabitants of what is now Utah, the Utes, were primitive people who lived by hunting and gathering in the mountains. The lowlands were barren deserts where they did not venture. The first American settlers, the Mormons, built coffer dams and irrigation ditches to cultivate the lowlands, lands the Utes did not and could not use and where they did not live and still do not live.

    Proximity to Mormom settlements brought the Utes access to medicine and Western goods like iron, woven cloth, and building materials.

    Utes, although initially decimated by diseases, are now more numerous than their pre-Contact ancestors. They have large areas reserved to them and are now safe from the Apache and Comanche raids that made their ancestors' live precarious. Like other Native Americans, their incomes have been greatly augmented by the development of tribe-owned casinos.

    Fortunately, the Utes never developed the xenophobic madness of killing every outsider they encounter that led the neighboring Comanches to near-extinction. The modern Palestinians have the the same shortcoming as the Comanches and it is leading to their progressive territorial restriction.

    For example, had the Palestinians been willing to live in peace with the Judeans, they would have been able to live freely anywhere is what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. Had they been willing to live in peace with the Judeans and accepted the UN Partition in 1947, they would have had half of the territory of the Mandate as theirs. When they refused about a sixth of their land went to the Judean state, the other five-sixths was annexed by the Jordanian Arabs and the rest by the Egyptian Arabs.

    But of course, Christie isn't interested in facts. Bigots never are.

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  9. I got distracted by turning aside to heap well-deserved abuse on the drunken lout Christie. The rest of the analogy is that the Judean immigrants bought wastelands that the few Arab inhabitants owned but did not use. And then with immense toil the Judeans converted those wastelands into citrus groves and other productive uses.

    Whereupon, the sellers convinced themselves that the land had been more valuable than they had been paid for.

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  10. Admirer of Fascism3:30 PM

    I believe the wisdom in your parallel is thus; We should have ensured the extermination of the Utes, just like the commanche. Only then would the forces of prosperity and commerce triumph.

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  11. Christie, condemning the Americans for what we could have done but didn't, is like accusing you of growing up, sobering up, or getting a job.

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  12. Anonymous3:10 PM

    Well what you did do was give the natives various reservations (On their own ancestral land) Then when you discovered natural resources you encroached on these lands, broke agreements, and generally sent them somewhere else.

    It doesn't surprise me terribly that you wish to exterminate the Palestinians because they happen to be 'in the way'. Or maybe you can rationalise it by saying that knocking down their villages and erecting settlements in their stead is justified, because Jews are clearly a superior 'race'.

    I admire the audacity of such sentiments, especially considering the history of the Jewish people. I suppose irony is not your strongpoint.

    Why can't you just be reasonable? Most reasonable people think the settlements in the west bank are an abomination and completely destroying any chance of peace in the region? Why can't you assume that those who think what is happening in Palestine do so out of genuine frustration with what the Israeli's continue to do on annexed territory? Don't you see how frustrating it is having to be on the side of medieval nutters (Hamas), rather than the modern, liberal democracy that is Israel? (With the exception of all that settlement building in other people's lands, of course.)

    I want to be pro-Israeli, but how on earth can I do so if it continues to build on other people's lands, and continuously gives two fingers to the international community?

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  13. And do you understand how frustrating it is to talk to people who believe whatever nonsense they read in the leftist press and have no actual knowledge of the situation, just unshakable opinions based on nothing but conventionality?

    "Most reasonable people" means the general body of opinion in Europe, which for some reason or other the Judeans don't seem to trust. Why would that be?

    In this instance could it be because Anonymous is now playing the Good Cop dodge and thinking we have gone amnesiac on his racist rants against Israel and against Judeans generally. That is what European leftist "reasonableness" consists in -- a pretense of fairness as the thinnest of veneers over the raw visceral racism inherited undimmed over the centuries from the Middle Ages.

    Again, Anonymous, I ask you what demonstrations denouncing the murder of the Fogel family did you attend in Dublin? But of course that is unfair -- you couldn't go because there weren't any. Nor any in any European capital.

    And you do realize that you prefaced your appeal for reasonableness with a groundless and libelous accusation of genocide?

    So how could we not trust you to be reasonable, fair, and honest?

    So if you will accept it in the kindly sense in which it is intended, I spit and then defecate on you and your pretense of not being a visceral ignorant racist. Your racism stems from the place it always stems from -- compensating for your personal inadequacy. It is no coincidence that you are such a persistent antisemite racist and that you are also a drunken unemployed and unemployable lout, despised by all. No coincidence at all. 'Twas always thus.

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  14. Anonymous1:33 PM

    LOL. You always were an excellent internet troll. Is that why you are an ageing unmarried loner, living alone in a huge house, humourlessley passing off the years in a strange combination of bitterness and boorishness?

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  15. So far from being a loner, I am quite popular. There seems to be a demand for smart funny educated charming single men with independent incomes. As to ageing there is no argument. But then again, so are you, Christie. The difference is that I am not wallowing in resentment of my self-inflicted failure and inadequacy. Nor am I a drunken lout and parasite.

    Not only am I not humorless, I can even spell it, which you cannot you illiterate dolt.

    I am not the least bitter. I have a golden life and enjoy every moment of it. As to which of us is a boor, who but a boor would vandalize a rented house?

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  16. Anonymous8:56 AM

    I think you'll find that the crazy Berkely PHD bitch wrecked your house.

    Also: LOL.

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  17. Nick Danger12:13 AM

    Box Score:

    Jack: +9
    Anonymous/Admirer of Fascism/Christie: -5
    Harvey: +2

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  18. Christie, is it really your position that a Berkeley organic vegan New Age nutcase smoked hundreds of cigarettes on the porch and then threw the butts in the bushes? After stubbing them out on the front of the house?

    And stuck gumwads on the furniture in parts of the house she was never in.

    Christie, in addition to being a liar about denying being a racist bigot, you are also just a liar.

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