Unknown commented on "Trump, Jews, Tacitus"
There is no doubt that Jewish people have had a bad reputation at many times across many places, though it seems to me that in many cases the regular Jews were unfairly blamed for the wrongdoing of Jewish bankers and oligarchs.
I was recently looking through the long list of Jewish expulsions on Wikipedia, just trying to get a sense for why this pattern keeps happening.
It is a big topic and I barely scratched the surface but I came across an historical event that definitely confirmed that whether deserved or not, a bad reputation has followed Jewish people.
During the US Civil war in the 1860s, the celebrated Unionist General and later President Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order 11. Jewish people were ordered to leave or be expelled from the military district under his command, which comprised parts of Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky.
The order was never really enacted, though Jewish people were expelled from at least one town before President Lincoln became aware of it and forced Grant to rescind it about a fortnight later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._11_(1862)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant
The reasoning behind Grant's order was that Jews were predominant in the black market cotton trade.
It seems that despite the war, trade between the secessionist south and the north continued, but the US government only allowed certain, licensed people to engage in it and the attempt to control the trade failed and Grant claimed that most of those operating in the black market were Jews, but he knew they weren't the only people doing it.
As far as I could tell very few Jews were actually forced out of that area, but it did happen to a group of 30 or so women who did not seem to have anything to do with the cotton trade.
Reading between the lines they seemed to have been sex workers.
I have Jewish relatives, my Great Great Grandmother was Jewish but she assimilated culturally, her funeral was at St. Andrews church (in Hobart, Tasmania) and the whole thing was completely dropped by all who followed her.
I guess that 1/16th makes me biased against the whole "Jews are intrinsically evil" stream of thought but seriously I absolutely believe that all humans deserve to be judged and treated based upon who they are not what they are.
Zionism is a choice, it is an ideology, it is not an intrinsic part of anyone's identity and is worthy of precisely the same criticism as any other political movement.
The Zionist attempts to conflate Zionism with Jews and Judaism are fraudulent attempts to evade responsibility for their crimes, they are genuinely evil, so I think that it is unclear why Jewish people have enjoyed a bad reputation, but it is crystal clear why people oppose Zionism as an abhorrent supremacist movement and they are right to do so.
Unknown commented on "Jewish Expulsions? Parts of Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky."
ReplyDeleteYou ignore that jews were expelled from 100s of lands- BEFORE any zionism was 'founded'. Not over religion, but over .....