1. Notes on what this Anti-Semitism Thread is about?

Can we acknowledge there is anti-Semitism and then investigate what keeps it going? Now I am not assigning a blame but wish to see if there's a collective responsibility, or can I undo my part in it?

I don't know if I can find understanding better than anyone else. And I don't know if the few people reading this site would make any difference if I did.

Many Jewish people are very creative and add to our society in the arts and sciences.  Other Jewish people are found in high places of world power, (financial, political, etc. etc.). They lead us in certain ways, but also world conflict must be directly connected to these power centers, both with Jewish and with non-Jewish leaders.

We also know parts of the Bible and Talmud treat violence and dishonesty in a way that most societies no longer subscribe to.  Do many Jewish people believe in, and/or act in these overall anti-social ways?  Do they have the personal freedom not to do it? 

We generally believe what we can find out about the things that we are not a party to, the leaders and the events.  But what we can find out is only what we have been told.  There are various sources, but many are discredited by the few sources with a major voice.  We call that condition our victimhood, that the powerful are “controlling the masses” with their rhetorical propaganda.  True, they are telling us things.  The other side of it is that we are believing them.  (If we don’t believe them, maybe they “sanction” us.  Which could take on several levels of severity.)

The loudest voices are telling us the strongest story.  Many people have adopted that story, for whatever convenient reason.  Maybe it is a story that has been building for a very long time.   If that story leads to violence and conflict, (no need to over-think that, it is right in our face), then we have to tell a new story to ourselves, and to whomever will listen.  Hopefully we can tell it in a convincing enough way, that even those who adopted the conventional views, will take it into consideration.

How to do that?

Some believe it is best to find all the inconsistencies, distortions, cover-ups and lies in the conventional story, and expose them.  Some old foundations do have to be deconstructed.  But to get lost into finding every last one, often based on tenuous evidence, only incites disrespect from those who have grown to believe in them. It is more divisive.

We want to defuse hate, but are we building it?  Maybe we don’t care, if we are convinced that we found a “truth”.  We will expose it, and let the chips fall where they may.  That is really not good enough to claim we are not part of anti-Semitism.

Will I find a way that is different, to arrive at more understanding?  I don’t know, but I am not setting out to uncover more damning evidence, and find more and more fault.  Nether am I trying to exonerate anyone. I will look at what appears.

What holds societies and civilizations together are their common beliefs and behaviors.  It was aptly said on the site, Third Paradigm that “anti-Semitism” represents the tendency to criticize or resist Jewish social cohesion, while “racism” represents the attempt of white Gentiles to maintain a similar social cohesion of their own.  But social cohesion on what basis? Hopefully not based on diminishing another group. There’s more to it than cohesion.

Where are those old beliefs and behaviors now?  Do they get transferred to the next society, or are they gone and lost forever?  In most civilizations it is likely we don't even know what those stereotypes were.  They're not left as monuments to be unearthed.  Some cultures had writing, but it is not all that direct. Jewish writing was also preserved by Christian societies.

Primary written sources are usually like the beam of a searchlight, illuminating small, isolated regions within an otherwise overwhelming sea of darkness. Every historical narrative is ultimately held captive by a few written remains. Careful researchers know that they must navigate such artifacts with caution and hesitation. They must work with no illusions, knowing that their writing relies on historical products indicative of the spirit of a very small elite, representing the very tip of an iceberg of an illiterate society, that has melted away and can never be fully recreated.

The most ancient discernable beliefs might have traversed 4,000 years from people who were said to be Jewish.  There is a lot of writing about it but it is unclear how many people were reading it.  There was also an oral tradition. What were the majority of people like?  I guess that we are saying the Jewish people are a bridge-culture spanning the millennia, so their stereotypes are still alive and active. Christians in part, kept the flame alive.

Jewish people may have been loving and considerate among themselves, but the rest of the world they held in disdain or worse.  The Bible and the Talmud (especially in the book of Joshua), claim they killed off many populations.  What purpose was served by the cultivation of burning hatred toward these indigenous populations, and why was this troubling and strange story of mass extermination told in the first place?  There is no other group from all of the ancient world carnage, that has boasted of its deeds or offered theological or moral justifications for the annihilation of an entire population, merely in order to steal their land.

Did this really happen or is it a myth?  I believe there is no archeological evidence supporting it.  Fieldwork has provided increasingly decisive evidence that the Exodus from Egypt never happened, and that the land of Canaan was not suddenly conquered during the period identified in the Bible. These scholars are finding it reasonable to assume that the horror stories of mass murder were fabrications. It now appears likely that the local inhabitants, who underwent a long and gradual process of transition from nomadic life to agricultural work, evolved into an autochthonous mixed population of Canaanites and Hebrews that later gave rise to the two kingdoms: the large kingdom of Israel and the small kingdom of Judea.

But why were these killing stories told?  Is the binding force of the Jewish faith a hatred of the outer world?  What does this do to the people who recite it?

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Something traced from the long-ago past strikes us as powerful. (Why won’t it go away)? But why do we believe in that? People all throughout the ages wanted to control and they did just that. Some of them were Jewish, and by far the most of them were not. So this part is traced far back, I say SO WHAT? It is active in the present, and must be dealt with in the present.

Now something controls our governmental processes and our legal system, so it can’t be easily dealt with in a law-abiding way. Worse, it controls our information channels, and profiles each one of us, so we don’t even know what we want. What does that have to do with 4,000 years ago and the then prevailing practice of genocide, used by all ancient warrior societies?

That is not going to be my starting point. For the general world population, we have formidable problems. Who even says we can solve them? The world always has been controlled by the few, and now some myth of democracy convinces us to take them on. There may be methods, let’s find them. But is that method to cast blame on a collective we call “the Jews”? I THINK WE ARE MISSING THE POINT.

I see it as a side story that plays right into the hands of the controllers. What do they care if we spend our time to fight with one group or another? Divide and conquer is what they do in all corners of the world. We should really join with Jewish people (and everybody else), to find a way to increase all human rights.

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This site is called the Library for Conciliation.  It has clear objectives to present an understanding that will engender world cooperation, or at least world cohabitation.  Another site could be called the Library for Discovering Culpability, or the library for assigning blame.  We don't deny that people are "doing things", and that there is culpability.  But we don't see that as the best way to wind-it-down.  Here we are trying to discover something more about it.

In fact, most of the Internet is in the business to build hostility, by either direct, or through subtle ways.  Subtle ways might mean still using a language that contains division and metaphors of force, coercion, captivity, superiority and black and white.  Maybe there is "black and white".  That is not our emphasis though.

There is a long list of expulsions presented in post 2.  I have no idea of who compiled the list or for what purpose.  The sources presented seem authoritive, but many of the links are broken.  Those expulsions are not the point of my exploration.  If they are true, other people grew not to like Jewish people.  That is a demonstration of anti-Semitism.  We're not saying it's disserving or not, but there must be some reasoning behind it. 

Why?

I could make up several reasonable possibilities.  Clearly, you recognize a group as different only by a different stereotype of behavior, (if not the color of their skin).  Evidentially, that different behavior is judged as unacceptable.  On that basis it’s simple.

I will look for some balanced texts about it.

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