Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger: “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative November 22, 2022,
*Thanksgiving was initially celebrated in November 1621 by William Bradford, the leader of the “Mayflower” and the Governor of the Plymouth Colony.
*He enhanced his appreciation of the Bible – and especially the Five Books of Moses – in Leiden, Holland, where he found refuge from religious persecution in England, where he heavily interacted with the Jewish community.
*Bradford and the other 102 passengers perceived the 66-day-voyage in the Atlantic Ocean as a reenactment of the Biblical Exodus, the departure from “the Modern Day Egypt,” the perilous “Modern Day Parting of the Sea” and the arrival to “the Modern Day Promised Land” and “the New Israel.”
*Governor Bradford announced the celebration of Thanksgiving by citing Psalm 107, which constitutes the foundation of the Jewish concept of Thanksgiving, thanking God for ancient and modern time deliverance.
*Bradford was, also, inspired by the Jewish holidays of Pentecost (Sha’vou’ot in Hebrew) and Tabernacles (Sukkot in Hebrew), which highlight the importance of gratitude, and commemorating Thanksgiving for the harvest, the legacy of Moses (e.g., the Ten Commandments), the centrality of the family, and the deliverance from persecution in Egypt to liberty in the Land of Israel.
*The epitaph on the tombstone of Bradford in the old cemetery in Plymouth, Massachusetts begins with a Hebrew phrase – “God is the succor of my life” (???? ??? ???) – as befits the person who brought Hebrew to America. He aimed to make Hebrew an official language, suggesting that reading the Bible in the original language yields more benefits.
*The Hebrew word for Thanksgiving’s central dish, turkey, is Tarnegol Hodoo (?????? ????), which means “a chicken from India,” but also “a chicken of gratitude/Thanksgiving.”
*Thanksgiving was proclaimed a national holiday in 1863, by President Abraham Lincoln, as a means to heal the wounds of the Civil War.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2003.3.4.79#:~:text=Whatever%20happened%20in%201621%2C%20the,it%20a%20day%20of%20thanksgiving.
The Pilgrims were British. the Arutz article says they interacted with British Jews to a great extent. Which is why I clarified that there were minimal or NO Jews in England then, and those with whom they met on the Continent were few, and unsettled.. Not that the poster needed to be told as he most likely knew. Besides I had detailed it all a day ot two ago, for all to see.
Does anyone need to be told that Thanksgiving is a US holiday and that it is not a Canadian celebration???. This is “info’ at a standard that is surprising coming from an always previously normally intelligent person.
Perhaps as is often implied,, it is meant to be insulting in a clumsily covert way that is easily seen for what it it.
“teaching your grandmother to suck eggs” is at genius level compared to the post I refer to, which is about at “imbecile level”. (around 40 !Q)
For the American Left, Thanksgiving is about betrayal and genocide of Native Americans. Columbus Day has already been replaced with Native American Day in a number of places.
@Edgar True but irrelevant as is often the case. Thanksgiving is not a British or by extension, Canadian holliday – you live in Canada, right? It’s a uniquely American national holiday declared by Lincoln during the Civil War as a unifying holiday. When I was in school, I learned in grade school that the Puritans escaped England to have religious freedom they, in turn denied others, but I was only taught about their persecution of the Antinomians not of the Jews! We were taught little or no European history, you might be shocked to learn. And, needless to say, nothing about Canada.
Though it’s now being universalized like Valentines Day.
Google just asked me if I wanted to decorate my home page with Native American art. 😀
It’s actually more effective to say the Jews are the Indians.
But American leftists blame the book of Joshua for American genocide against American Indians from Cotton Mather on. I was always amazed at how people doing hasbara when talking to pro-Palestinian Americans would try to draw parallels when American leftists, like leftists everywhere, START from hatred of America as rooted in the original sin of racism/colonialism/slavery/genocide.
“The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 and the Puritans who founded Boston in 1630 saw themselves as authentic successors to the ancient Hebrews. New England was to be their New Jerusalem, a society based on the covenant between God and Abraham. Just as Moses had led the Jews out of Egypt, through the wilderness and into the promised land of Canaan, John Winthrop had led the Puritans out of a corrupt church in England to the wilderness of New England, where a pure church and polity could be re-established. By their own account, biblical Jews inspired the Puritans’ vision and aspirations.
Yet, New England’s Puritans were less than hospitable to Jews they actually found among them. The Connecticut colony they founded offers a clear example of the contradiction between their high regard for biblical Jews and their reluctance to have real-life Jews as neighbors.
According to historians David Dalin and Jonathan Rosenbaum, the Puritans’ goal in creating Connecticut was largely spiritual. “The opportunity to establish a ‘city on a hill,’” they write, “in which the values of the Puritan community would remain forever enshrined provided the central appeal [to build new towns] for all the heirs of the Mayflower.” Connecticut colony’s 1662 royal charter declared that “the Christian faith is the only and principal end of this plantation.” The Puritan or Congregational Church became the official, or “established,” form of worship. In 1708, the Puritandominated legislature granted limited toleration to Anglicans, Quakers and Baptists, and in 1727, as a concession to the English Crown, Anglicans were permitted to build their own churches and hold services openly.
As Dalin and Rosenbaum note, however, Jews were lumped “with heretics, Catholics [and others] to whom it was illegal to give food or lodging under the early legal codes of Hartford and New Haven.” The royal charter explicitly denied Jews the right to build synagogues, worship as an assembled group, purchase land for a cemetery, vote or hold public office. It is no surprise, then, that only a handful of Jews resided in Connecticut during the years of Puritan domination. The first reference to a Jew in Connecticut is to one “David the Jew,” who was arrested and fined by a Hartford court in 1659 for illegal peddling. A more telling case is that of Jacob Lucena, identified as “Jacob the Jew” in court records, who in 1670 was charged, in a manner reminiscent of 2Oth-century Southern lynch mobs, with the crime of being “notorious in his lascivious dalliance and wanton carriage and proffers to several women.”
Lucena was found guilty of the charge and fined 20 pounds sterling, an astounding sum for those times. Two days later, the court reconsidered and, in its mercy, reduced the sum to 10 pounds. Still unable to pay, Lucena pleaded with Asser Levy of New Amsterdam, one of the original 23 Jews who landed there in 1654, to come to Connecticut to plead his case. “As a token of respect for said Asser Levy,” the court once again halved the fine. Lucena paid it and quickly fled Connecticut.
Despite the ban on an organized Jewish community, a handful of Jews continued to migrate to Connecticut. By the time of the American Revolution, the east end of Hartford’s State Street was referred to as “Jew Street,” indicating that there was a hearty band of Jewish residents who lived and worked together in the colony’s capital. Jews also resided in Branford, Woodstock, Stamford, Norwalk and New Haven. In 1818, a state convention adopted a new constitution for Connecticut, which disestablished Congregationalism as the state’s official church and allowed Jews the right to vote and hold public office. The freedom to form congregations and worship publicly, however, was still limited to Protestants.
By the 1840s, conditions finally were ripe for change. Given their First Amendment rights, the middle-class, German-speaking Jewish immigrants in Hartford and New Haven would not tolerate religious discrimination. In May 1843, a petition was introduced in the General Assembly on behalf of the Jews of Hartford and New Haven asking for an amendment to the state constitution so that they might form synagogues and worship openly. The Assembly’s Judicial Committee turned down the request but recommended legislation, rather than a constitutional amendment, to grant Jews religious rights. In June, the legislature enacted a bill providing “that Jews who may desire to unite and form religious societies, shall have the same right, powers and privileges which are given to Christians of every denomination.”
By the fall of 1843, a minyan was meeting in various private Hartford homes. In 1856 using a bequest from Judah Touro of New Orleans, the congregation, which took the name Congregation Beth Israel, built the first synagogue in Connecticut. After 220 years, Puritan resistance to Jewish life in Connecticut was laid to rest.”
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-rights-in-early-connecticut
The Thanksgiving Celebration, was devoid of Jews. Those Puritans used our Jewish Torah to glorify their own beliefs, but banned Jews from their Colony. They were major “replacement” Goyim, and to them Jews were only to be used and discarded..
They had NO association with Israel; there was NO Israel but only scattered groups of Jews living under threat of banishment at any moment, Their association was with the Torah.
In England they had NO intercommunication with Jews as there were NO Jews officially in England then . They had petitioned Oliver Cromwell, who called a Directors meeting .He voted YES but was outvoted and the ban stayed. To this very day NO official permission has been given to Jews to live in England. the 1290 Herem has never been lifted.
The first Jews to creep back under cover were Flemish wool merchants, who were the major dealers in wool, England’s primary export ,on which the whole country depended .’.Eventually, for business reasons they built small warehouses along the Thames, the dealers lived in them, first, for a few days, later, for weeks, months etc, and then brought in their families. All surreptitiously, but to which the English turned a blind eye. They NEEDED the wool business to flourish.
By then the licentious king Charles 2 was ruling and too busy chasing women to bother. So that’s how there are British Jews today.
This has been well documented.