Ever since Sir James George Frazer’s (1854–1941) voluminous work, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (previously titled The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, in 1890), the erroneous belief that modern, particularly Western society could be divided along the lines of …
Three mass shootings in one week. The first two were clearly white supremacist terrorist attacks – in California at the garlic festival and Texas at an El Paso Walmart, respectively. But the third, at a Dayton, white hipster bar scene area known as the Oregon …
People who want to be the “Children of Israel” are usually those first to call real Jews “fake Jews.”
You can argue with them till you are blue in the face.
You can provide them historical and archeological proof, as well as – obviously – anthropological.
Nothing you do or say will change them.
Like all people narcissistically focused on themselves, they project their own insecurities and failings in personal identity on those they see who have knowledge and confidence in those same things.
As they saying goes: i am not what you say i am, you are what you say i am.
This isn’t just limited to Jewish stuff, my advisor and the woman who interviewed me for my PhD program was a well known Native American scholar (may her legacy be for a blessing) and i discussed at length her chairing of a dissertation on my father’s father’s Anigilohi Cherokee Melungeon community (another student’s dissertation who was also Melungeon). She had noted the irony in a class with me and the student doing that dissertation, that another student who was Latino who commented on spurious claims of Cherokee ancestry in America, was also making the same claims of their own even more distant Native ancestry.
My professor noted my own history and had me speak about the community then she went on about her own anthropological and historical research into it. She commented that “Just like you” Latinos, Melungeons are a tri-racial isolate and the documentation of Native identity in Melungeon communities is not only in the Dawes Roll, but predates it in centuries of case law where white Americans used the courts to rob land from Melungeon “White Indian Negros” who were considered like any other Native mixed community: not able to be legally enslaved – though acknowledged as mixed with Africans distantly as well in said case law – but also not afforded rights of white people. This gave rise to the first use of the term “Free Persons of Color” in American legal parlance.
Because of the humiliation of this calm, and honestly kind response from the scholar, the student apologized and explained they just didn’t know.
Face to face it is harder to hide from documentation and citation. Online juvenile personalities run wild and reject and deny any historical facts that do not conform to their undereducated assumptions about how the world and communities are.
From Trump and the Alt-Right calling documentation they disagree with “Fake News” to Black Hebrew Israelites calling actual Jews “fake Jews”, someone who projects this idea of fakeness upon others is usually very insecure about their own identity and origins.
As they saying goes: i am not what you say i am, you are what you say i am.
I should point something out for those who only romanticize everything from Native American cultures from a Leftist perspective. 1. Yes, Socialism and Communist thought were influenced by various Native American concepts, such as the spiritual inability for one to own property. This is why …
Is it permissible to put the blood or flesh of a pig in one’s mouth? Is it, for that matter, permissible to but any blood from another person or animal in one’s mouth, in that Judaism blanketly prohibits blood? The opinion of the Taz1 and many other …
There once was a group of people who had been pushed into a deep pit. For years and years they tried to climb their way out of this pit, but as one, two or more would get to the top, the thieves who pushed them into the pit in the first place stood waiting to push them back to the bottom.
One day enough of them decided to climb up all at once. They reasoned that “if we all climb up as one, we will outnumber the thieves, and we can thus over power them, even while some of us will surely be knocked back down.”
Having seen the cycle of these people climbing up, one, two or more at a time, only to be knocked back down, many onlookers saw the skirmish on the day that they all ascended from the pit. “What is the point of coming to their aid or even cheering them on” they said. “They will only be knocked back down like every day before. And besides,” the onlookers speculated, “what if the people who are in that pit are there for a good reason? What if they were pushed down there to protect us all? What if they are worse than the thieves who pushed them down? Perhaps we should be supporting the thieves!”
Finally, and to the great surprise of the onlookers, the plan succeeded and the people climbed out of the pit all at once. A long battle ensued, and the theives did push some individuals back down, again and again, but it was never nearly enough; since they had climbed up all at once. This is when the real battle began…
Some of the onlookers who had supported the thieves, fearing that the people of the pit would be worse than them, being opportunistic, started to cheer on the people who climbed up. Word spread, via some who had climbed up, that people pushed into other holes, by other thieves, could do the same. As other groups ascended to fight of the thieves who would push them down, these thieves grew more defensive and began throwing daggars at the people in the pits, hoping that this would cause the people at the bottom to argue that they should all stay in their place.
At this time, the opportunistic onlookers said “It is an inevitability that the same thing will happen at this pit that occurred at the other one. These people will get free and when all is said and done, they will have subdued the thieves who we hate as well, because these thieves prevents us from doing business in these areas successfully. We should come to the aid of the people climbing up, so that we can gain their favor, and so that they will replace these thieves, who we must bribe in order to do business here.”
So the opportunistic onlookers began shooting at the thieves but they could not tell which people were the thieves and which were the people who had just climbed out of the pit. The opportunistic onlookers only knew about themselves, how to identify people who looked like themselves, and communicate with people who talked like themselves. So in the course of their shooting, they killed many people who had climbed up out of the pit. They did, however, kill many of the thieves and more and more people managaged to climb from the pit, but the plan of the opportunistic onlookers, to garner their favor, did not work as planned. Still, they did not tell these opportunistic onlookers to go away, because as it turned out they were able to get free by means of these attacks.
In the end, many of those who arose from the pit ended up hating the opportunistic onlookers. Those who had called the people of the pit “worse than the thieves” were quick to say “We told you so!” rather than begging their forgiveness for the casualties they inflicted on the people they said they were trying to save.
This was their “self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Megillat Esther on Sexism and “Who is a Jew?” If you really paid attention to the Megillat Esther this Purim, they would have noticed a few important things about it. First is the fact that the work is extremely pro-Woman. The text literally mocks sexism at every turn. The sexist King …
In his letter to rabbi Yosef ben Ha’Rav Yehudah, Maimonides explained his belief that in the future “all of Israel will subsist on it alone” in reference to his Mishneh Torah, over even the Talmud, as the Jewish people “will ABANDON ALL ELSE BESIDES IT …
In Adebayo Oyebade’s “The Study of Africa in Historical Perspective” the author informs us of the history of Eurocentric presumptions of Africa’s lack of history and thus, lack of civilization (7). Oyebade emphasizes, however, that history in many parts of Africa was primarily preserved by way of oral tradition. It was only with the onset of European colonialism, as we will see, and the fear that these traditions were being lost, that we see an impetus for them being written down.
The European concept of Africa as a continent without civilization or significant achievement was a by-product of racist pseudo-science and self-justifying scholarship. (9) Margery Perham, a British political commentator, wrote that until the arrival of Europeans to the continent, Africa was devoid of writing and thus “without history.” (10) Such pseudo-intellectual scholarship emanated from Europe, but was hardly confined to it. In the United States, particularly the South, we find wide-spread examples of similar polemic. In Africa itself, many of the early-Modern period written works on African history were a by-product of colonialism. These works were written by the colonizers as an attempt to define the history of the subjugated and justify European custodianship, of sorts, of a “superstition-ridden people” who practiced “human sacrifice and cannibalism” (11).
British historian D.G.O. Ayerst explained colonialism as a “civilizing mission” of the European to Africa. This “Dark Continent” thinking continues today in a subtler guise, but as recently as 1963, we find British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper writing that “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at the present there is none” (ibid). Arguing against desegregation in the United States, Professor Henry Garret did not hesitate to call the history of Africa “blank” (ibid) with “no written language; no numerals; no calendar or system of measurement” (12).
African historians too, motivated by patriotism, began preserving much of the oral history in written form. More than ever, due to the permeation of European colonialism, it was feared that the oral tradition might be lost for the first time if not set to paper. African historian Samuel Johnson observed that the Yoruba knew well the history of England, Rome and Greece, but no longer knew anything of their own history (13).
Western academia, nevertheless, continued to undervalue many local histories. The systematic collection of source materials, the heavy reliance on oral tradition, and often a lack of critical evaluation and interpretation of reports made some of the early-Modern local African histories more ethnographical in nature. (14) The 1950s, however, saw a new phase in the decolonialization of both Africa and African history.
Academic historiography of Africa began to take shape as a credible pursuit. African historians applied critical methodologies, insisting on “thorough investigation of issues with a view to arriving at a creditable conclusion.” (14) This was largely the result of many Universities having been established in Africa. The formal teaching of these methodologies thus paved the way for African scholars to apply historiographical methods of critical scholarship to the collection and interpretation of African histories.
By the mid-1960s, a cemented curriculum of African history was finally established in African institutions. (15). The author comments that “unlike the ethnographic and superficial analysis of Africa by the European writers, and the non-critical, story-type accounts of the local chroniclers, the historical scholarship produced from the late 1950s has laid a proper claim to academic history.” (16)
Over the past few decades, African history has matured within the United States as well. Afrocentrism, often controversial, has emerged critiquing the “European hegemony in scholarship.” (18) Molefi Kete Asante regards the Eurocentric model as an “ideology that masquerades as a universal view.” (18) The author explains that the Eurocentric model frames the black historical experience “as a by-product of European culture” (19)
The centrality of Africa to the study of African history, however, is no longer an issue of contention or controversy. Since the 1960s, African historians can more or less, across the board, be regarded as “Africa-centric.” The disputes arise with regards to the focus – even fixation – of noted scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop on Egypt as a sort of “intellectual muscle” to Afrocentrism and African history. A comparison can easily be made between this and the focus on ancient Greece in European history. However, like Ancient Greece and Rome, most scholars content that there is no evidence for a purely “black African” Egypt, and that instead the evidence points to a culture of many hues, where the concept of “race” does not seem to have been so prominent, if extant at all (20).
The primary critique of Afrocentrism in African studies is that some of its conclusions are ideologically driven and thus, may at times, lack objectivity in a reactionary way to Eurocentric scholarship. Diop’s African Origins of Civilization is right to note the many early Egyptian depictions of rulers with an appearance that one might regard as “black” or sub-Saharan. His focus, however, seems to over-emphasized these while assuming the records of rulers and citizens with different features and even skin tone to be later, almost clearly demarcated additions to Egyptian society, which did not intermix. Scholars who reject the scientific validity of the concept of “race” have proposed criticisms, variations and amendments to Diop’s theory. Nevertheless, though assertions of a homogenously and ethnically “black” Ancient Egypt may over step some academic bounds, Diop’s – and related scholars’ – thesis, was important to the field, in that the centrality of Egyptian pollination of ideas and technologies to Ancient Greece had been greatly underemphasized by Eurocentric scholarship
The occurrence of Chanukah – coming on the 24th day of the month of Kislev – corresponds with approach of the winter solstice. The holiday brings a reminder that no matter how immersed in darkness we are, light will always return. As such, we need …