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  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by CivilDiscourse View Post

    And such racism isn't "enshrined" in the societal mores of the USA either. We can tell people that, and our problems will be over!
    Not any more, and so your point is?

    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by Gondwanaland View Post

    SO you got an answer and..... now do not want the answer? Is what you are saying here?

    I answered your question.
    No you didn't.

    You tell me that your views are supported by "actual historians" so produce those historians with the evidence I have just requested.

    Leave a comment:


  • Gondwanaland
    replied
    Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post
    Again that is not exactly what I asked you.

    I asked if "according to you anti-Semitism as we now understand that term, was to be found within societies throughout the Graeco-Roman world?" Emphasised for clarity

    You have repeated your allegation and also stated that your opinion is likewise held by "actual historians"

    Who are these historians?

    I would like some quotes from them where they provide evidence from across the Graeco-Roman world that anti-Semitism, as we now understand that term, was to be found within those societies and that those societies subjected Jews to institutionalised state and religious persecution and ostracism and that the institutionalised persecution and ostracism was premised solely on the fact that they were Jews. As was the case in Christian societies.

    You have yet to produce any evidence in support of your contention. All you have done is insist that your opinion is correct and beyond dispute.
    SO you got an answer and..... now do not want the answer? Is what you are saying here?

    I answered your question. If you're this braindead that you cannot grasp the answer, I don't see what else I can do for you.

    I'm also unsure why you think there needs to be 'institutionalized' anti-semitism for something to be anti-semitism. But as usual you're a libtard who thinks 'institutionalized' is some magic word. No such thing is required for anti-semitism to exist. To insist on that is to spit on every case of anti-semitism that doesn't meet your magical criteria.

    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by Gondwanaland View Post

    Leaving out the 'according to you' (because it's not according to me it's according to actual historians, of which you are not). then Correct, anti-semitism existed
    Again that is not exactly what I asked you.

    I asked if "according to you anti-Semitism as we now understand that term, was to be found within societies throughout the Graeco-Roman world?" Emphasised for clarity

    You have repeated your allegation and also stated that your opinion is likewise held by "actual historians"

    Who are these historians?

    I would like some quotes from them where they provide evidence from across the Graeco-Roman world that anti-Semitism, as we now understand that term, was to be found within those societies and that those societies subjected Jews to institutionalised state and religious persecution and ostracism and that the institutionalised persecution and ostracism was premised solely on the fact that they were Jews. As was the case in Christian societies.

    You have yet to produce any evidence in support of your contention. All you have done is insist that your opinion is correct and beyond dispute.

    Leave a comment:


  • Gondwanaland
    replied
    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    Dang. You beat me to it.

    She is saying that the anti-Semitism that Christians adopted from before their time automatically switched into a uniquely Christian endeavor. But OTOH the "Christian anti-Semitism" that the Nazis adopted remains Christian anti-Semitism even though it has features and basis's (economic for instance) that have nothing to with Christianity.

    It's the same inconsistency problem that keeps plaguing her and on which so many of her premises run afoul.
    Yep, some more of her usual special pleading.

    Leave a comment:


  • Gondwanaland
    replied
    Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post
    That is not what I asked.

    Let me repeat my question.

    So, according to you anti-Semitism as we now understand that term, was to be found within societies throughout the Graeco-Roman world?


    Have I understood you correctly?
    Leaving out the 'according to you' (because it's not according to me it's according to actual historians, of which you are not). then Correct, anti-semitism existed and was acted on before Christianity existed, including in the Graeco-Roman world.

    Like? This isn't even controversial. It's not some sort of new information. Any historian worth their salt knows this.

    But then I guess that's the problem. I'm talking to a person who claims to be a historian but is not. A person who thought that: 1. being born in the US makes it impossible for one to be Hellenistic, and 2. that using the term "Hellenistic Scholar" somehow means you are claiming the scholar is Hellenistic rather than the common use of the term to mean they are an expert in Hellenistic scholarship.
    Last edited by Gondwanaland; 12-07-2021, 01:10 PM.

    Leave a comment:


  • Esther
    replied
    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    Are you trying to make Gondwanaland jealous?
    I am trying to make him objective ha ha.

    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by Gondwanaland View Post

    Anti-semitism existed and was acted on before Christianity existed. Why is this so hard to grasp?
    That is not what I asked.

    Let me repeat my question.

    So, according to you anti-Semitism as we now understand that term, was to be found within societies throughout the Graeco-Roman world?


    Have I understood you correctly?

    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    Dang. You beat me to it.

    She is saying that the anti-Semitism that Christians adopted from before their time automatically switched into a uniquely Christian endeavor. But OTOH the "Christian anti-Semitism" that the Nazis adopted remains Christian anti-Semitism even though it has features and basis's (economic for instance) that have nothing to with Christianity.

    It's the same inconsistency problem that keeps plaguing her and on which so many of her premises run afoul.
    You have not addressed the ADL's anti-Semitic tropes.

    Perhaps the ADL is wrong as well.

    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by CivilDiscourse View Post

    So, Christians adopted the antisemitism that existed before it, making it christian anti-semitism and new/distinct from what it inherited it from. However, Nazi anti-semitism is christian anti-semitism because it came from christian sources.

    Is that your claim?
    The Graeco-Roman world did not institutionalise enmity towards the Jews. The Christian world did.

    That there was anti-Judaic feelings and, on occasion violence, in the Graeco-Roman is not disputed but it was not something promulgated by the state.

    The animosity in Rome towards the Jews stemmed from those Jewish rebels who had revolted not the entire Jewish people; although understandably Jews were regarded with suspicion and hostility [possibly in the same manner in which American Japanese were regarded following the events of 80 years ago today].

    Early Christians wished to distance themselves and their [Jewish] founder/deity from those rebellious Jews and so extended that hostility towards to all Jews while adding an additional theological gloss. Hence we get Justin Martyr gloating over the destruction of Jerusalem under Hadrian because the Jews had rejected the Christ.

    Once Christianity had the ascendancy from the early fourth century that antagonism and hostility was developed further still becoming institutionalised.


    Leave a comment:


  • rogue06
    replied
    Originally posted by CivilDiscourse View Post

    So, Christians adopted the antisemitism that existed before it, making it christian anti-semitism and new/distinct from what it inherited it from. However, Nazi anti-semitism is christian anti-semitism because it came from christian sources.

    Is that your claim?
    Dang. You beat me to it.

    She is saying that the anti-Semitism that Christians adopted from before their time automatically switched into a uniquely Christian endeavor. But OTOH the "Christian anti-Semitism" that the Nazis adopted remains Christian anti-Semitism even though it has features and basis's (economic for instance) that have nothing to with Christianity.

    It's the same inconsistency problem that keeps plaguing her and on which so many of her premises run afoul.

    Leave a comment:


  • CivilDiscourse
    replied
    Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post
    John G Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes Towards Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity, OUP, 1985, Part II Judaism and Judaizing Among Gentiles: Attractions and Reactions”




    Hardly. You do have an unfortunate tendency to make assumptions and assume that one sentence on a Wiki entry entirely vindicates your contentions.

    Firstly, that comment is not from Goodman. It is the Wiki article writer’s interpretation of Goodman.

    Secondly, here are some comments by Goodman in his Epilogue “The Origins of Anti-Semitism” from that same work. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilisations, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 2007.


    Much has been written on the origins of antisemitism in classical antiquity. Hatred of the Jews has been traced by some to Egypt in the third century BCE, by others to the propaganda against the Jews produced by Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century BCE. Some have emphasized the resentment aroused in neighbouring Greek cities by the expansionist policies of the Hasmonaeans in Judaea, others the separateness of Jewish communities in the diaspora which made Jews distinctive and therefore vulnerable as scapegoats. [...]
    The Romans were well aware that Jews were different in many aspects of their lifestyle and outlook, but they were used to ruling over strange peoples and revelled in the variety of their subjects. The presence of a Jewish community in Rome gave them opportunities to discover rather more about this nation than others, although they did not always understand what they saw. They thought that Jewish taboos against worshipping other gods than their own or engraving human images on coins were bizarre, but that they could easily be accommodated. [....] Jews were exotic in the eyes of Romans and the Roman state, and they were sometimes treated as despicable because they were a defeated nation, but they were not seen as dangerous or hostile.

    Such tolerance came under stress when revolt broke out in Jerusalem in 66 CE.... The initial Roman response was little more than a police action, a show of force, but it escalated in response to the disaster suffered by Cestius Gallus in his incompetent withdrawal after he had almost conquered the city. His loss of the equivalent of a complete legion at the hands of the inhabitants of an established province of the empire was without precedent and could not be kept quiet. Punitive action was required before other subjects of Rome tried to follow suit.
    [...]

    But in the long term the most significant development in the century after 70 was a by-product of the hostility of Rome to the Jews, the emergence of Christian antisemitism. Roman imperial power gradually disintegrated in the western Mediterranean and northern Europe from the beginning of the fifth century CE, and although the empire of New Rome, in Byzantium, continued far longer, it too fell in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks. But Rome's living legacy in Europe throughout the Middle Ages to our own times has been the institution and ideology of the Church, and in the eyes of some Christians, ever since the first generation, Judaism has been a religion that ought to have ceased to exist in the first century CE ...it was not by accident that some Christians began in the second century to distance themselves from Jews with language of increasing vitriol at the same time that similar terminology was being used in the centre of imperial power at Rome.

    The impetus for Christians to distance themselves from Jews after 70 was much more clear-cut. By that date many, probably most, Christians lived outside Judaea, and most of them had not been born Jews.... But, more crucially in the development of antisemitism, to gain credibility in the Roman world after 70 Christians needed not only to deny their own Jewishness but to attack Judaism altogether....if Christians were to defend their own good name and seek converts in a Roman world in which, after 70, the name of the Jews excited opprobrium, it was easier to join in the attack and agree with the pagans that the defeat of the Jews and the destruction of the Temple were to be celebrated as the will of God. [...] some Christians, like Augustine, made the even stronger claim that the miserable state of the Jews was testimony to the truth preached by the Church, and that it was necessary to preserve Jews in subjection, rather than convert them to Christianity, in order that observation of their parlous condition might strengthen the faithful...Of course the antagonism to Judaism found in many Christian writings of the second century was given a theological gloss. The Jews were those who had rejected Christ and suffered accordingly; in a more extreme form, the Jews were those who had killed him. The accusation is too familiar to appreciate readily how bizarre it is.[...] In any case, as during the second and third centuries Christian theological discourse took on a life of its own, attitudes towards the Jews hardened. By the time of Constantine, Christians took for granted that Jews were to be despised and shunned. The assumption was inherited by medieval Christendom from the Christian Roman empire, and has by no means wholly faded away in the modern world.

    My emphasis.

    All of which lends support to the argument that I have been making concerning anti-Semitism as we understand it today and Christianity.

    So, Christians adopted the antisemitism that existed before it, making it christian anti-semitism and new/distinct from what it inherited it from. However, Nazi anti-semitism is christian anti-semitism because it came from christian sources.

    Is that your claim?

    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    Sources please.
    John G Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes Towards Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity, OUP, 1985, Part II Judaism and Judaizing Among Gentiles: Attractions and Reactions”


    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    That opening paragraph is an eye-opener, wouldn't you say?

    It has been argued that European antisemitism has its roots in Roman policy



    Prepare for high winds as H_A begins her frantic and furious hand waving routine
    Hardly. You do have an unfortunate tendency to make assumptions and assume that one sentence on a Wiki entry entirely vindicates your contentions.

    Firstly, that comment is not from Goodman. It is the Wiki article writer’s interpretation of Goodman.

    Secondly, here are some comments by Goodman in his Epilogue “The Origins of Anti-Semitism” from that same work. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilisations, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 2007.


    Much has been written on the origins of antisemitism in classical antiquity. Hatred of the Jews has been traced by some to Egypt in the third century BCE, by others to the propaganda against the Jews produced by Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century BCE. Some have emphasized the resentment aroused in neighbouring Greek cities by the expansionist policies of the Hasmonaeans in Judaea, others the separateness of Jewish communities in the diaspora which made Jews distinctive and therefore vulnerable as scapegoats. [...]
    The Romans were well aware that Jews were different in many aspects of their lifestyle and outlook, but they were used to ruling over strange peoples and revelled in the variety of their subjects. The presence of a Jewish community in Rome gave them opportunities to discover rather more about this nation than others, although they did not always understand what they saw. They thought that Jewish taboos against worshipping other gods than their own or engraving human images on coins were bizarre, but that they could easily be accommodated. [....] Jews were exotic in the eyes of Romans and the Roman state, and they were sometimes treated as despicable because they were a defeated nation, but they were not seen as dangerous or hostile.

    Such tolerance came under stress when revolt broke out in Jerusalem in 66 CE.... The initial Roman response was little more than a police action, a show of force, but it escalated in response to the disaster suffered by Cestius Gallus in his incompetent withdrawal after he had almost conquered the city. His loss of the equivalent of a complete legion at the hands of the inhabitants of an established province of the empire was without precedent and could not be kept quiet. Punitive action was required before other subjects of Rome tried to follow suit.
    [...]

    But in the long term the most significant development in the century after 70 was a by-product of the hostility of Rome to the Jews, the emergence of Christian antisemitism. Roman imperial power gradually disintegrated in the western Mediterranean and northern Europe from the beginning of the fifth century CE, and although the empire of New Rome, in Byzantium, continued far longer, it too fell in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks. But Rome's living legacy in Europe throughout the Middle Ages to our own times has been the institution and ideology of the Church, and in the eyes of some Christians, ever since the first generation, Judaism has been a religion that ought to have ceased to exist in the first century CE ...it was not by accident that some Christians began in the second century to distance themselves from Jews with language of increasing vitriol at the same time that similar terminology was being used in the centre of imperial power at Rome.

    The impetus for Christians to distance themselves from Jews after 70 was much more clear-cut. By that date many, probably most, Christians lived outside Judaea, and most of them had not been born Jews.... But, more crucially in the development of antisemitism, to gain credibility in the Roman world after 70 Christians needed not only to deny their own Jewishness but to attack Judaism altogether....if Christians were to defend their own good name and seek converts in a Roman world in which, after 70, the name of the Jews excited opprobrium, it was easier to join in the attack and agree with the pagans that the defeat of the Jews and the destruction of the Temple were to be celebrated as the will of God. [...] some Christians, like Augustine, made the even stronger claim that the miserable state of the Jews was testimony to the truth preached by the Church, and that it was necessary to preserve Jews in subjection, rather than convert them to Christianity, in order that observation of their parlous condition might strengthen the faithful...Of course the antagonism to Judaism found in many Christian writings of the second century was given a theological gloss. The Jews were those who had rejected Christ and suffered accordingly; in a more extreme form, the Jews were those who had killed him. The accusation is too familiar to appreciate readily how bizarre it is.[...] In any case, as during the second and third centuries Christian theological discourse took on a life of its own, attitudes towards the Jews hardened. By the time of Constantine, Christians took for granted that Jews were to be despised and shunned. The assumption was inherited by medieval Christendom from the Christian Roman empire, and has by no means wholly faded away in the modern world.

    My emphasis.

    All of which lends support to the argument that I have been making concerning anti-Semitism as we understand it today and Christianity.


    Leave a comment:


  • Hypatia_Alexandria
    replied
    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    Indeed Feldman was born in Connecticut which is what you are seeking to use to hand wave him off as an expert.

    That's really a new low for you.

    And since you have been franticly Googling and trolling Wikipedia I guess it is okay to cite the latter concerning Feldman

    Source: Louis Feldman


    Louis Harry Feldman (October 29, 1926 – March 25, 2017) was an American professor of classics and literature. He was the Abraham Wouk Family Professor of Classics and Literature at Yeshiva University, the institution at which he taught since 1955.[1]

    Feldman was a scholar of Hellenistic civilization, specifically the works of Josephus Flavius. Feldman's work on Josephus is widely respected by other scholars.[2][3]


    Source

    © Copyright Original Source



    Hmm. "a scholar of Hellenistic civilization" Sounds like, in spite of being from Connecticut, that he might have a bit more command of the subject than a German hausfrau with delusions of being a professional historian.

    Moreover, yet again, here you are engaging in your typical games. You make no attempt to refute the fact that anti-Semitism can be traced for several centuries before the advent of Christianity -- and that shreds your fantasy that anti-Semitism is something the Christians came up with. Instead you dismiss an expert on the topic based upon the fact that he

    was not Hellenistic by the way but was born in Connecticut


    What's real interesting is that you acknowledge anti-Semitism occurring long before Christianity first arose when you wrote

    the traditional view that Antiochus's invasion of Jerusalem was prompted by his own anti-Semitic sentiments has been called into question


    but have chosen to disregard the evidence of pre-Christian anti-Semitism so that you could push your claim that anti-Semitism originated with Christianity.

    That's being incredibly intentionally dishonest.

    Of course, there is the chance that you just ran across that bit during your Googling in which case you're just an ignorant poser.


    My comment was simply in response to your [again] rather poor syntax.

    Antiochus has been accused of being "anti-Semitic". However, was he? If he was indeed anti-Semitic as we understand the term he would have crushed the Jewish faith from the moment he came to power. He didn't and the existence of the Hellenising group within Judaism illustrates that point. They were not abandoning their religion, they merely adopted some aspects of the Greek lifestyle. As is usually the case it was the more fundamentalist groups that took against such behaviour.

    You might also find the following of interest, it comes from Peter Schäfer’s introduction in his Judeophobia: Attitudes towards the Jews in the Ancient World, HUP, 1997

    The same is true for the persecution under Antiochus IV Epiphanes and the Maccabean revolt [167 BCE] . Hardly anyone would seriously argue any longer that the Antiochan persecution was triggered by anti-Semitic feelings on the part of the king or was anti-Semitic in character. Antiochus was idealized by his own and, even more so, by his successors' propaganda as the vanguard of Greek culture who "endeavoured to abolish Jewish superstition and to introduce Greek civilization,"and accordingly was demonized by contemporary Jewish literature as the personification of evil and religious hubris, but one has to distinguish carefully between his attitude and later interpretation. [My emphasis]


    Despite allegations by yourself and Gondwanaland, anti-Semitism [as we now understand that term] did not exist in the Graeco-Roman world. Unlike in the Christian world anti-semitism was not institutionalised in the Graeco-Roman world and Jews were not persecuted or reviled by the authorities simply for being Jews.


    In 2020 the ADL published a guide to explain the history of anti-Semitism and the various myths that have enabled it to endure for so many centuries. It listed the following anti-Semitic tropes:
    • Jews have too much power.
    • Jews are disloyal
    • Jews are greedy
    • Jews killed Jesus
    • Jews use Christian blood for religious rituals
    • The Holocaust didn’t happen
    • Anti-Zionism or delegitmization of Israel
    https://www.adl.org/news/press-relea...semitic-tropes

    Tacitus offers less than flattering observations about the Jews in his Histories but we need to remember that those are his opinions and while those opinions may well have been shared by others of the Patrician class or wider Roman society those opinions were not enshrined in state policy and promulgated by the authorities.

    However, all of the tropes provided by the ADL [with my earlier caveat on Tacitus' remarks] stem from the Christian [or post Christian] world.

    Leave a comment:


  • Gondwanaland
    replied
    Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post

    So, according to you anti-Semitism as we now understand that term, was to be found within societies throughout the Graeco-Roman world?

    Have I understood you correctly?
    Anti-semitism existed and was acted on before Christianity existed. Why is this so hard to grasp?

    Like? This isn't even controversial. It's not some sort of new information. Any historian worth their salt knows this.

    But then I guess that's the problem. I'm talking to a person who claims to be a historian but is not. A person who thought that: 1. being born in the US makes it impossible for one to be Hellenistic, and 2. that using the term "Hellenistic Scholar" somehow means you are claiming the scholar is Hellenistic rather than the common use of the term to mean they are an expert in Hellenistic scholarship.
    Last edited by Gondwanaland; 12-07-2021, 10:13 AM.

    Leave a comment:

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