I thought I would have a weekly posting revisiting Jewish history.
Wars between the Jews and Romans: Simon ben Kosiba (130-136 CE)
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Menu There is no diplomatic solutionIsrael should declare three nos;
no to nuclear Iran, no to two-state solution, no to bi-national state
no to nuclear Iran, no to two-state solution, no to bi-national state
The participation of representatives of occupied peoples in the militaries of their oppressors is not remarkeable. Conscription and military service was not all that elevated from slavery in the service of empires. Consider the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire.
Whatever the virtues or failures of Jewish martial values, all we need to remember is that the Jews have never had any martial ambitions beyond what they say G_d promised them. And G_d never promised them anything like the whole world, mostly just a small scrap of land. Both Christian and Muslim martial traditions have been parades of cruelty and barbarism with designs on all of human existence, even to this very day.
The Jewish martial tradition that most excites the imagination of the people of the world, both their friends and their enemies, is the passion to defend ones self and ones people, independently and stripped of both the need and the ability to appeal to greater human powers.
It has proven itself to be possible against the Greeks. And now, it proves itself again, rising from the ashes of obscene murder, destruction and injustice. If it can endure and preserve the future of the people and nation it defends, the world must change. It will have no choice.
Whenever you hear it asserted, warmonger, that it’s “disproportionate” that there are so many more casualties to the enemy than to Israelis, you must tell these imbeciles to wipe the crocodile tears off their faces, and ask them,
“Nu, and you’d feel better, ken ayin hara, if MORE Israelis died? — this would be more satisfactory, in your view?
“Maybe Tzahal shouldn’t shoot so straight?
“Maybe Magen David Adom shouldn’t be so quick on the scene?
“Maybe Jewish medical personnel should be less efficient at saving lives?
“(Well, that WOULD redress the ‘imbalance,’ wouldn’t it?)”
And in current day conflicts the ONLY reason why the Israelis are getting a bad rap is because there wasnt enough casulties on the Israeli side…so once again the world turned its back on the Jew. In Deut it states that the Jewish people must first try to make peace with its enemy before going to war. That has already been done.
Yes, about three and-a-half, actually.
Had they been able to hold out just a little while longer, they might well have kept their sovereignty.
— Contemplate, for a moment, how THAT would’ve altered history…
Brushfire wars were breaking out all over the empire among other captive peoples beginning to take heart from the demonstrated endurance of Judean spunk.
Had enough such conflicts been permitted to burst into full flame, the Empire could not have sustained the outflow of resources & manpower needed to suppress them all at the same time — and might well have cracked, or even dissolved, under the strain.
Imagine the Empire ending — or breaking into its constituent (and mutually rivalrous) parts — three centuries earlier than it in fact did…
I understand where you are coming from Yamit. The Jews were hit much like the Titanic. They were educated affluent wealthy. By the time they realized the conspiracy against them it was too late. Dont BLAME THEM. Dont become like the enemy.
I’m reminded of how Avi Lieberman said of Israelis, “We are not cultured. We are a boorish people.”
Hence the European and American view of the Israeli Jew as unsophisticated.
What an excellent thread, Yamit.
I’ve noticed many American Jewish men are a little on the effeminate side.
Boorish Israeli Jewish men must be something to behold after witnessing the American-Jewish version.
Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote in his 1946 Reflexions sur la question juive, published two years later in English under the title Anti-Semite and Jew, a work he later admitted to have written without reading one Jewish book. Sartre’s reflections on the “Jewish question” and, in particular, his essentialist (and some might say racist) remarks on the Jewish character have elicited various responses since they were published. Some implicit and some overt, some mild and some passionate. It appears that Sartre has cut the Jews off from their past; he has consciously permitted himself to accept the anti-Semite’s stereotype of the Jew. His disagreement with anti-Semitism reduces itself to arguing that these Jewish traits…are not so bad. Sartre is transformed in the third part of his essay into the antisemite against whom he rails in the first part.
Sartre’s essay, which sought to combat European antisemitism, seems, rather ironically, to have perpetuated a number of its stereotypes, including those of the Jew’s “obstinate sweetness” and passionate hostility to violence, stereotypes
that may arguably be seen as the modern equivalent of the Jew’s alleged effeminacy. Since medieval times, and especially in the early modern era, it had been widely asserted that Jewish men menstruate monthly, a charge that has been perceptively interpreted as suggesting implictly that “Jewish males . . . are, in effect, no longer men but women, and the crime of deicide has been punished by castration. Other scholars have linked the charge of male menstruation with the truncated (and thus less virile) phallus of the circumcised Jew.
Nice Jews went like sheep to the gas chambers!!
The most renowned Jewish Warrior in Spain was born in 993 – Samuel HaLevi, the son of Joseph. In Arabic, he was known as Ismail ibn Nagrel’a, and became known to the Jews as Samuel Ha’Nagid (the ruler).
As a youth in a privileged family in Cordoba, Samuel received a thorough education in Jewish law, religion, and culture, as well as the Koran, Muslim culture and Arabic calligraphy.
When the Berbers sacked Cordova in 1012, Samuel escaped to Malaga, in the kingdom of Granada, where he opened a spice shop. The shop was situated near the home of Abu alKasim ibn al-Arif, the vizier to king Habbus son of Maksan, of Granada. A servant of the vizier hired Samuel to write letters to the vizier, who was away at the capital for some time. The vizier was so impressed with Samuel’s writing that, upon coming back to Malaga, he hired Samuel as a personal secretary.
A biographer of Samuel Ha’Nagid reports “After some time the vizier… became mortally ill, and King Habbus, who came to visit him, said to him: ‘What shall I do? Who will advise me in the wars which encompass me?’ ‘I have never advised you,’ he answered him, ‘out of my own mind, but at the suggestion of this Jew, my secretary. Take care of him, and he will be as a father and a minister to you. Do whatever he advises you, and God will help you.'”. Whatever the reality of this exchange, Samuel Ha-Levi indeed became vizier to the king of Granada by approximately 1020.
Samuel’s wisdom in Jewish matters earned him the position of Nagid (ruler) of the Jewish community in 1027. He wrote poetry and composed an important religious work called “Hilchot Ha’Nagid”. Throughout his life he worked tirelessly on behalf of Jewish communities in Spain, in Northern Africa, Egypt, Sicily, Babylon, and Jerusalem – donating money and books to schools and individuals engaged in Jewish study.
When the king died in 1038, Samuel survived a power struggle between the king’s sons and retained his position as king’s vizier. By many reports, the new king, Badis, indulged only his own pleasures and left the government of the kingdom of Granada to Samuel Ha’Nagid.
Samuel skillfully steered Granada through eighteen years of virtually continuous warfare, personally leading the important campaigns. He died in battle in 1055 or 1056 CE.
Long after the death of Mohamed, after Islam had become a world religion, during the upheavals of the Crusades, Jewish mountain warriors in Arabia continued as valuable allies. Benjamin of Tudela, traveling in the 12th century wrote about the Hashishim (the Arab warriors feared by the Crusaders):
[They] live on high mountains, and worship the Old Man of the land of the Hashishim. And among them there are four communities of Israel who go forth with them in war time. They are not under the rule of the king of Persia, but reside in the high mountains… and none can overcome them.”
A few years after Islam overran North Africa and the Middle East, in the later seventh century, the Berber Jewish Warriors of North Africa learned of the oppression of the Jews in the Visigoth Christian kingdoms of Spain. In an attempt to rescue them, a Berber Jewish army invaded Spain in aproximately 694 CE. The invasion was unsuccessful. Instead, a Moorish, Muslim army defeated the Visigoths in Spain a few years later (711 – 715 CE). Under Moorish rule, the Jews of Spain were liberated and returned to their rightful position in Spanish society.
The Bar Kochba revolt was an appalling tragedy, but one of which we can be proud. For nearly 4 years the Jews held out against the most powerful military force in the known world.
But it is not true that that waas the last Jewish military force before 1915. I recommend
Benjamin of Tudela’s account of the Jewish warriors of Arabia in the 12th Century.
Yamit. I disagree with you that Jews are not NICE. Of coarse there are those who are ruthless but why would The Creator choose a people who are not Nice? It goes against the grain for a Jew NOT to be nice. Thats one reason why we get had alot. However Jews are not suppose to be nice to evil and thats the difference. Be as wise as the serpent but as harmless as a dove. And when The Creator gives the green destroy the enemy of NICE. Practise self defense and be NICE to our family. We NEED it!
A club of club-wielding Jews
Samson Blinded
Absence of riches is not poverty, and absence of arrogance is not humility. One need not be humble in order to avoid arrogance. Self-respect is a positive attitude.
“Don’t be afraid to say that the Jewish way of life is inherently better than any other. Jews are more ethical because we adhere to more ethical prohibitions. Judaism is about strength—social and moral. Only a strong society can expel deviants for every moral offense. Only a strong society unrelentingly executes and otherwise punishes those who threaten its moral integrity and ritual purity. Only a strong society exterminates Amalek.
Strength inhibits assimilation. For American Jews, in the 1967 war “we won,” but in the peace process “they are giving the land away.” The Diaspora identifies with strong Israel, and dissociates from the weak.
I fell in love with Nietzsche the moment I read him praising the crowd of club-wielding Hebrews.” Read full essay Here