Jews

On the fundaments of fantasy

razib — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:04:28 +0000

On the fundaments of fantasy

Fantasy-nerd in-chief at The New York Times, Ross Douthat points me to an essay, Why is there no Jewish Narnia? As others have pointed out there are plenty of Jewish fantasy writers, including perhaps the most prominent mainstream fantasist today, Neil Gaiman. But this part caught my attention:

...and whether it is called Perelandra, Earthsea, Amber, or Oz, this world must be a truly alien place. As Ursula K. Leguin says: "The point about Elfland is that you are not at home there. It's not Poughkeepsie."

Amber refers to Roger Zelazny's Amber series. Roger Zelazny's father was an immigrant from Poland, Joseph Frank Zelazny. I can't figure out whether Joseph Zelazny was Catholic or Jewish, but I think one can't assume he was necessarily a gentile. Earthsea refers to Ursula K. Le Guin's fantasy world. She was born Ursula Kroeber, her father being the prominent cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who grew up in New York City's German Jewish community. Of the few secondary worlds the author names, turns out several may have been created by people of Jewish background.

As to whether fantasy is fundamentally a Christian-Pagan genre or whatever, I really doubt it. Martha Wells' Wheel of the Infinite draws on the medieval Khmer Empire to create her secondary world. R. Scott Bakker in his dark series which begins with The Prince of Nothing synthesizes Muslim, Hindu, Mediterranean and Northern sources in generating his secondary world. In fact, the primary action focuses on a civilization which to a great extent is analogous to a medieval Mediterranean commonwealth of states, but the religion is clearly derived from Hinduism, not Christianity. You can get really obscure if you want, Dennis Jones' The Mask and the Sorceress has most of the action occurring in a society which seems to reflect the sensibilities of Bronze Age Minoan Crete. Jones' prose and the plot are pedestrian, but the world is novel precisely because it isn't out of central casting. I could give many other examples. The dominant backdrop in fantasy is surely one of medieval Northern settings, with a synthesis of Christian and pre-Christian elements, but it isn't that hard to find secondary worlds which differ if you want something unfamiliar.

The basic elements of modern fantasy can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Ramayana. The Odyssey and the Iliad to boot. You combine a mythic background, rich and multi-textured, with an appealing plot and flat characters. Why did Tolkien produce works which were so strongly inflected by the North? Because he was a philologist whose bread & butter were works such as Beowulf! What do you expect him to produce? Is Christianity fundamentally more comfortable with the pagan than Judaism, as the author above asserts? I doubt it. The basics of Northern fantasy draw from a rich peasant cultural folk tradition which the Christian church ignored at best, and attempted to suppress at worst. The tradition was most robust in the regions which were Christianized last, so that relatively thick cultural memory remained from which to draw during the 19th century Romantic revival of national traditions. It is notable that Ireland in particular in the British Isles preserved its own mythic tradition; I chalk this up to the indigenous origins of Christianization, so that the culture-bearers of the past were not superseded by missionaries who dismissed the indigenous stories as being part & parcel of the pagan intellectual edifice. Tolkien was in part trying to create an Anglo-Saxon mythic cycle from fragments such as Beowulf and Scandinavian analogs. The Irish have no need of reconstruction. Culturally the Jews are very distant from their peasant origins, and naturally much more detached from their pagan past than Northern Europeans. For the past 1,000 years Ashkenazi Jews have been an urban minority, as insulated from the world of faerie as Christian priests. No wonder that Jewish authors, such as Neil Gaiman, draw upon Northern motifs. How popular is urban fantasy as a distinct genre anyway?

Personal background's influence is pretty clear when you look at the novels of someone like David Anthony Durham. His Acacia series is set in a secondary world where populations and societies which are black loom larger than is the norm in fantasy. Black cultures exist in many fantasy worlds, but only as part of the distant background (or, as in the case of Tolkien, as part of the southern hordes who fought for the Dark Lord). Perhaps it is coincidental, but Durham is one of the few black fantasy writers. Similarly, Brandon Sanderson's work is partly reflective of his Mormonism.

Sanderson, Stephenie Meyer and Orson Scott Card are one of a large contingent of Mormon fantasy and science writers. Why so many? I have no idea. I'm sure I could make some stuff up about Mormonism's affinity for the fantastical and unbelievable.

razib Thu, 03/04/2010 - 16:04

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Culture

Fantasy

Jewish

Jews

I was pretty sure that article was less about Jewish fantasy writers and more about popular fantasy inspired by Jewish themes. Gaiman and others are Jewish, sure, but their fantasies have only passing references to Judaism.

I personally think there's a bit of embarrassment involved. Either their too secular to care, or they see Biblical allegories as too easy or hackneyed.

Is it possible also that superheros are the Jewish equivalent?

Superman and Spiderman were both made by Jews. As were the X-Men. Of Batman's two creators, one was Jewish and most of the well known Batman villains have Jewish creators.

yes. but he starts:
Tolkien and Lewisâs gentility would hardly bear comment were it not for the fact that they are not isolated examples in this regard, but only the most well-known figures within an entire literary genreâperhaps the only such genreâin which Jewish practitioners are strikingly rare. I cannot think of a single major fantasy writer who is Jewish, and there are only a handful of minor ones of any note. To no other field of modern literature have Jews contributed so little.

Hemlock,
What would be Jewish themes that are not already in the shared common tropes of fantasy? What would make fantasy more Jewish.

relatively thick cultural memory

That might have something to do with it. I think fantasy literature has to carefully straddle a line between the familiar and the alien in order to achieve popularity, and thus large amounts of successful fantasy literature are based on extant myths and distorted history.

While you could draw from practically any cultural or mythical tradition as such a source for fantasy literature, success probably comes most easily to works that draw on the background that is already shared by the largest group of potential readers - thus, works drawn from Non-European traditions might not necessarily be less numerous to begin with, they might just reach huge popularity more rarely (in Europe and the U.S.).

Our culture is steeped in Jewish fantasy. Beginning with Genesis.

How different is the pattern in Sci-Fi?

Impressionistically not too different I don't think. I can think of Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison and Charles Stross (incidentally and appropriately the author of a fantasy series named the Merchant Princes about a clan of sliders who use their ability to run a trade network).

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Interesting article, although it does seem rather muddled, as WEingrad seems to conflate a putative dearth of Jewish Fantasy authors (a very dubious notion, as many have pointed out) with an absence of Tolkienesque type "high fantasy." A few observations:

1. Tolkien was motivated by some of the same ethnic-nationalist yearnings that underlie WEingard's desire for an explicitly Jewish High Fantasy genre. Tolkien was disturbed by the lack of a purely English mythological cycle.Although there was a British mythology (Arthur, Merlin, etc) readily at hand, that was not the same thing. LOTR, then, was ,at least to some degree, conceived as a remedy to this lack.

2. Without Tolkien, it is rather hard to imagine High Fantasy in its current shape, as many of his precursors lacked his interesting combination of English patriotism (not British) and fervent religiosity. To see just how different Anglophone high fantasy might have been without the massive shadow of Tolkien, simply read the works of Dunsany, Eddison, and James Branch Cabell (an American, but still). A high fantasy tradition built upon the framework provided by such men would have been quite different in tone, although certain tropes would have remained.

3. For a glimpse of this alternate world of HF, take a look at Poul Anderson's THE BROKEN SWORD and FRitz Leiber's FAFHRD AND THE GRAY MOUSER series, with Anderson's romance being, perhaps, the more telling of the two, as it draws upon the same Northern materials as does Tolkien's work, only in a vastly different key.

5. What about C.S. Lewis in my non-LOTR world? Although influential, Lewis has never been the genre-shaper that Tolien was and is. For that matter, as a children's author, he is nit really part of the HF field. His peers are Baum and Carrol, not Tolkien and Eddison.

True razib, I believe that's overstated. Jews are just used to looking at the top of almost any list of academic pursuits and seeming themselves. However, it's less the case with literature, especially popular literature, regardless of genre. Popular fiction writing, while not disreputable, is not a career that Jewish communities emphasize. As with fine art, sports, and other talent heavy careers, popular fiction is seen as career where success is more elusive, and therefore an atypical career choice. That, and long-form written fiction, especially fantasy, is almost completely absent from the Jewish tradition.

Adela, you could (back-)explain most tropes as Jewish, but having characters, events, and teachings that are all intimately tied to Judaism... there isn't much of that. If there were a fantasy story based on those of Shabbatai Tzvi or Masada, it would be instantly recognizable to many Jews. These types of stories aren't non-incidentally employed in popular literature.

Why so many mormon fantasy and science writers, you ask? Why so many mormon olympians or why so many mormon inventors?
television - Philo Farnsworth
electric traffic light - Lester Wire
odometer - William Clayton
headphones - Nathaniel Baldwin
hearing aid - Harvey Fletcher
audiometer - Harvey Fletcher
stereo sound - Harvey Fletcher
video games - Nolan Bushnell
transistor radio - Marvin Harris
modern word processor - Alan Ashton (WordPerfect) [Read the history online]
CD/DVD technology - Robert B. Ingebretsen (plus other physicists, engineers and computer scientists at Brigham Young University and the University of Utah)
electric guitar - Alvino Rey
department store - ZCMI, world's first dept. store, started by Brigham Young
fry sauce - Don Carlos Edwards
scrapbooking - [Source: CNN]
Zip drive - Iomega
repeating rifle ("Browning rifle") - Jonathan Browning
automatic shotgun (and many more firearms) - John Moses Browning
NetWare (Network Operating System) - Drew Major
condominums - Keith Romney
women's buttonless one-piece bathing suit - Rose Marie Reid (patent #2,535,018)
photopermeable swimsuit - Rose Marie Reid (for full-body tanning)
flatbed scanner
DOOM, Quake, Civilization, Age of Empires, etc. - Sandy Petersen
artificial heart - Robert K. Jarvik (inventor/doctor) & Barney Clark (first recipient)
heart bypass machine used in open heart surgery - Homer R. Warner
numerous patents for beam-surface processes (in free-electron lasers) - Norman Tolk
Slurry (aqueous) explosives - Melvin Cook (Nobel Prize winner)
tetrahedron press - William Hall
synthetic diamonds - William Hall
Sorenson video codec - James L. Sorenson

There you have it, Mormons are very intelligent.

I think that a lot of fantasy has a Volkisch-nationalist undertone which is uncomfortable for Jews. Tolkein and CS Lewis are examples. Jews have an institutionalist "nostalgis" for old Jerusalem, etc., but any other past than that has been worse for Jews than the present, even considering Hitler.

You got me there Ryan, if mormons invented scrapbooking and the buttonless swimsuit they must be intellegent. Why don't you try wearing your magic underwear on your head, I think you need more divine protection there.

I was gonna add my two cents about how I recently realized how jewtastic Clark Kent and Lois Lane are (I think that's pretty cool), but this thread is starting to smell a little icky.

Speaking of the non-peasant nature of Ashkenazi Jews in European history, this Phil Weiss thread seems relevant:
http://mondoweiss.net/2010/02/my-wife-and-i-have-an-intellectual-disagr…
Steve Sailer must be on the same wavelength as Phil, since he mocked Tarantino for making the French Jewish family from "Inglourious Basterds" dairy-farmers.

That does leave a question for me though. Regular readers know that cities have long been population sinks. Cochran & Harpending have said that Jews were urban and segregated into middlemen occupations long enough for significant evolutionary adaptations, and with the richest having the most kids. There was also a boom in the Ashkenazi population around the 19th century, when for the first time they outnumbered Sephardim. Why didn't their population shrink like that of other urbanites?

I believe the essay in question was primarily looking at the lack of Jewish themes in fantasy literature, rather than the authors' genealogies.

One of the comments above makes an interesting point - perhaps "Jewish fantasy" indeed flowered in the superhero genre, for Superman is certainly replete with Jewish themes, iconography and allusions. Perhaps that is because its creators grew up steeped in their Jewish culture and did not seek to distance themselves from it.

And traditional Jewish folk stories of the shtetl have enough "natural" or at least small town elements to them, (to wit the many stories of Rebbes wandering deep dark forests alone) to say Ashkenazi Jews are just too urbanized to write Jewish fantasy.

I suspect the fact that mysticism is such a carefully guarded discipline in Jewish thought, to preserve its strong monotheistic emphasis, has more to do with it. (In general, Jews don't want people dwelling on opposing dark and good forces - there is only one Force. The theological nuances and complexities that arise from doing so are usually reserved for trained Kabbalists and Chassidic Rebbes.)

Roger Zelazny was born of Catholic parents, raised Catholic, and later declared that he had lapsed and belonged to no organized religion whatsoever. He remained that way for the rest of his life.

Not Quite Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Menorah (With Apologies to Wallace Stevens)

sastyk — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:39:47 +0000

Not Quite Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Menorah (With Apologies to Wallace Stevens)

Note: Tonight is the sixth night of Chanukah, the night we remember Judith hacking off Holofernes' head by eating cheese (yes, there is a reasoning behind that strange statement), and I really had planned to write a post about that. But it is also Isaiah's sixth birthday and deep in the grading nightmare for the husband and the night before we get up at 4am to butcher the turkeys (and if anyone is looking for a free-range, heritage turkey for the holidays in the greater Albany/Schenectady area, email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com) and I'm just not feeling innovative. So here's an old piece that I run every year. Happy Chanukah!

1. The Shammash (this is the candle one uses to light all the others)

Among the snowy houses
There was only one
Candle lifted to light another.

The essential message of Chanukah is anti-assimilationist. The Jews were ordered to assimilate into pagan society, including eating pagan foods and worshipping pagan gods, and the Maccabees resisted - while many other Jews acceeded. Their tiny and overmatched force won a long war against terrible opposition. It is a reminder, that every revolution starts with a "No," a refusal to bow down, to accept the loss of identity into the mass culture. We too can and must begin with a "No," or a series thereof, in which we decline to participate in the consumer culture and the destruction of justice. The changes we are undertaking are a revolution. And our hope of transforming the world is precisely the same as that of the Maccabees - faint, and yet we must succeed, so we will.

2. The First Candle.

I said three brachot
Because
On first nights, we begin again.

There are two traditional brachot, or blessings, for the Chanukah candles that are said every night. But on the first night, we add a third blessing, the schecheyanu. This prayer translates as "Thank You G-d for sustaining us and bringing us to this particular moment." It is a prayer that Jews say whenever they do something special for the first time in a long time - the first time they see flowers bloom, or celebrate a new holiday in the cycle, come together with family they have been parted with or put on a new item of clothing. It is reminder that life is cyclical and seasonal, and that this is our natural state. We are supposed to experience joy and pleasure when new things come to us, and then put them aside, until they come again in their own time and season. It is easy to forget in our society that cyclical life is what creates much of our joy. It is no pleasure to eat strawberries when you can have them every day. There is no way to separate feasts from ordinary days if you eat each day the way our ancestors feasted. It is not loss to live simply and in tune with the seasons, but a gain.

3. Second Candle

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman igniting fire
Are one.

In our prayers, Jews not thank G-d for the light itself, but for giving us the job of lighting the candles ourselves. We are grateful for being given an act, a route to meaning, a way of doing good. I do not expect all (or even most) of those who read this to be Jews or even theists, but this is worth considering even if you aren't. Perhaps we should be more grateful for honorable work, for the chance to do good by our own hands.

For Jews, it isn't that G-d didn't make the light, it is that G-d was generous enough to share the labor of creation with us. In the stories, we are made in G-d's image, and so how could we not find satisfaction in creation? Whether you believe that or not, it says something that deep in our collective narrative is our need to do something that matters, work that creates something and is worth doing. In the end, everything we create for ourselves, instead of buying, strengthens us. It makes us more. Or maybe more like
G-d.

4. Third candle

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The child singing
Or the silence after.

Even if you don't celebrate Christmas, it is easy to get caught up in the orgy of buying and spending. One of the arguments against doing so for us is that we've tried very hard not to overstimulate our kids. We want to keep the focus on the singing, and praying, friendships and special foods, and generally, we do. When we add too much more, it often ends with a child in tears or conflicts, because as nice as things are, too much is simply too much.

The difference between children and adults, is that children often know when enough is enough, and simply stop going forward. We adults often don't know when to stop. We keep raising the bar to what makes things "special" when we should be lowering it. Instead of more gifts, and more events and special foods and things, perhaps we should ask ourselves "If the ritual, and the beauty of it, and our time with each other isn't enough, why not? How have we failed?"

5. Fourth Candle

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know,too,
That Light is involved
In what I know.

Why do I insist on bringing G-d into this at all? Why not simply talk about how to dip your own candles, or why we shouldn't buy giant plastic menorahs? I bring G-d in because G-d among other things represents the limits of our knowledge, the things that exceed our grasp no matter how hard we reach. There are plenty of other good ways to articulate that we are not omniescient - this is mine and I do not insist that it apply to others.

But however we come to the notion of limits, particularly to the notion that what we do always, always has unintended consequences, often harmful, we must begin to recognize it as a central part of human actions. Jews have the concept of pe'ah, the marginal parts that are the transition between the self and G-d - the hair that some Jews leave uncut, the margins of the field we are commanded to leave for the poor to glean, they all derive from this same root concept, that the edgees of ourselves are not solely our own, and our own interests are not always paramount there. Perhaps we need a secular equivalent, one that would enable us to grasp the inevitability of cost to others when we are excited by this new thing or another. Perhaps we need a secular theology of limits, one in which we see the spaces where our interests conflict with one another not as sites of trouble, but as a place for us to be greater than we are.

6. Fifth Candle

When the candles burn down and flicker
The light pools
In intersecting circles with the light
From my neighbor's tree.

If anti-assimilationism is the central message of the history of Chanukah, we should remember that we are not the only people who celebrate the restoration of the light. If there is a single work to be done in the next decade, it is to build community in every sense of the word. We need not assimilate, in fact, we should not, because we cannot afford to lose any more diversity. But we cannot close the doors on one another.

It is always easier to build community with people who are like you, with the same values and the same ideas, maybe people from the same family, or with the same experiences, and there is nothing wrong with that. But we have lived the last decades as though the people we cannot see, the people downstream from us, out of sight or in other nations, do not matter. So at the same time that we strengthen the ties with those who are like us, we absolutely must strive to create a new recognition of the other, a new way of connecting, of at a minimum, doing no harm, and just possibly, joining some of our pools of light.

7. Sixth Candle

He rode over the coutryside
In a mighty coach
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook the shadow of his equipage
For darkness.

The original form of this poem was written before the invention of the SUV . The SUV, is, among other things, a graphic symbol of our fears - we buy them in part because they are big, and seem (however falsely) to be secure, and to make us powerful when we are doing a scary thing, racing metal machines at each other at high speeds. The SUV is a bad guy, the public face of greed for many environmentalists, but it is also an easy target that masks some basic truths.

Push all of us environmentalists hard enough and you'll find the things we are not willing to give up, even though they are not unadulterated goods. We aren't willing to give up our job serving some appalling corporation or our investments in the same, because doing so would mean giving up our insurance or hope of retirement. We aren't willing to let go of our appliances because we're afraid we couldn't manage without them. We are not willing to have fewer children, because we fear we might be alone someday. We are all afraid of the dark, and sometimes the dark is cast by the shadow of our equipage, the literal and metaphorical stuff we carry around with us. Let us remember, that even the driver of the SUV is often merely afraid - just like us. So there is hope.

8. 7th Candle

The candles are flickering.
The latkes must be frying.

One of the traditional festival foods of Chanukah is the latke. It is a simple enough concoction - shredded potatoes, eggs, salt, onion, fried in copious oil. For poor Jews in the northern hemisphere, they were fancy enough to be celebratory (all that oil to remind us of the miracle of the lamp, and eggs that must have been carefully saved up since the hens laid only little in the dark season), but simple enough to be accessible even for those who had little to spare.

In the same sense, the traditional food of the sabbath was sweet bread, rather than a large roasted animal. It was not always possible to have meat, but one hoped that everyone could have bread, and that the bread could be especially soft and sweet. Many Jews keep kosher, which means we separate milk and meat, and after eating meat, we wait a while before eating milk. It was commanded that our sabbath bread must always be pareve (that is, containing neither meat nor milk, and thus edible by anyone), lest an unexpected guest who had just eaten a meat meal arrive at our dairy sabbath and not be able to partake. No one, under any circumstances, must be denied access to the basic staple food of our culture, Jewish law tells us. The same principle holds in our culture. We must find a way to make access to staple foods a basic and universal right. We must ensure that no one is ever excluded from our table.

9. 8th Candle

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow
The menorah sat
On the windowsill

The deepest miracle of Chanukah is not the miracle of the oil, a story that was added to the text later, or the miracle that a small force overpowered a great one. Nor is it even the miracle of the return of the sun cycle or our power to make light in darkness. Or rather it is all those things. But it is also something else.

At Passover, in the spring, we sing the prayer, "Dayenu" which means "it would have been enough." Thus we tell ourselves that it was a wonderful miracle that G-d led us out of Egypt, but it would have been enough if he had not, if he had only given us the Sabbath, or the Torah, or merely our lives. And too, here is the real miracle of Chanukah. It would have been enough if the Maccabees had only resisted, but not succeeded. We would have endured, and gone on, and resisted again and again for as long as it took.

It would have been enough, had the oil in the temple menorah lasted only the one day we could have expected. We would have prayed imperfectly, and our prayers would have been heard.

It would have been enough, had we never discovered the modern miracle of the oil, and had we never created our industrialized society. We had enough.

I do not know if we still have enough, or if, in our rush to delight in our modern miracle we have caused such harm to the earth we were given that we cannot restore it. But as things change, and we concentrate on what is now lost, let us not forget that it is not the miracle of the oil that mattered most, but the ordinary miracle of sufficiency. It would have been enough had the sun only returned, and with it, the spring. But we were also granted the opportunity to light the candle, to sing the hymn, to stand in the circle, to express our gratitude, to reach out to the other, to share a meal, to give a gift, to do good work and to praise our world. And it may be enough.

Chag Sameach,

Sharon

sastyk Wed, 12/16/2009 - 08:39

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Orrin Hatch Kicks "Dreidel Song" Butt

sastyk — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:56:40 +0000

Orrin Hatch Kicks "Dreidel Song" Butt

I realize this has nothing to do with energy, food or environment, but it amuses me, so a brief hiatus from relevance will be taken. As y'all know (or don't) Chanukah starts this weekend, and the household is awash in preparations, many of them involving glue sticks and song.

During the course of my life, I've had several candidates for the "Most nauseating holiday song award" - before my conversion to Judaism, I was an avid advocate of "The Little Drummer Boy" whose sicky sweet rumpapumpumming went on an awfully long time and seemed to be a favorite for covers by artists I already couldn't stand. Later on, I came to feel that "O Christmas Tree/O Tannenbaum" narrowly edged out the little drummer on the grounds that bad in two languages got extra points.

Once I converted, however, and had children, I realized that all my prior distastes had been a small thing to the song most people do not officially know as "I had a little fucking dreidel" (kudos to my friend Alexandra for properly and permanently renaming it for us one afternoon.) The thing is, most people know 30 or 40 Christmas songs, and some of them are lovely, so you can reasonably hope that in an afternoon at the mall, or watching your kids sing in some holiday concert, you will get some beautiful Christmas music. But the evil Dreidel song is the *only* Chanukah song that most non-Jews know, (except perhaps now Adam Sandler's Chanukah song, which they do not sing at children's concerts - pity that) and is probably the only Chanukah song many secular Jews ever heard more than once (a friend of mine observed that during his childhood they always sang Chanukah songs at school - but songs *no one* had ever heard of, certainly none of the Jewish kids.) Moreover, it is on every Chanukah album, even the good ones, and it sucks. Oh, how deeply it sucks.

But there is a new candidate for worst Chanukah song ever - and funniest Chanukah video. Apparently Mormon senator Orrin Hatch wrote a deeply sincere Chanukah song as a gift to the Jewish people. It is horrifyingly bad, and the video of him actually singing is pretty unbelievably funny.

Eight Days of Hanukkah from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Because I am an official representative of the Jewish people, I should express my gratitude to Hatch. And in a sense, I am grateful - because now I will go back to my kids singing the dreidel song and stop begging them to "please, sing some other Chanukah song, any other Chanukah song, please, for the sake of your mother's sanity." I will now be much more careful and add more caveats to my pleas.

I appreciate Hatch's kind intentions, and on behalf of the Jewish people, I express my gratitude, while hoping that he has also enclosed a gift receipt somewhere. But I'm sure we'll find a use for it somehow.

Ok, what's your nominee for absolute worst holiday song?

And to prove further that the Dreidel song isn't as bad as the Hatch video, here's Erran Baron Cohen's also very funny (but intentionally) and musically interesting version. I still don't like the song though (I can't embed the video, since embedding is disabled).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHjpsmd_oXo

Sharon

sastyk Wed, 12/09/2009 - 09:56

Tags

humor

Chanukah

Jews

Without a doubt, I hate "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" more than any other Christmas song, not least because it is too often sung by shrill voiced children who sound like they're half-way through methadone treatment. But the sappy lyrics, which parsed out, are all about conditional love and acceptance, suck pretty badly too. And if shrill children aren't bad enough, adults singing such an idiotic song sound even worse.

For reasons that are entirely opaque to me, The Little Drummer Boy often makes me tear up. No other song does this, and I'm not even a believer. Can't explain it.

I was kind of expecting Hatch to break out an old school rap on that biz-atch.

Oh Senator Hatch - haven't the Jews suffered enough?

Have to disagree. Hatch's song is nowhere near as bad as Dreidle. Hatch's song is anonymous pap. Dreidle pisses me off, sort of like "It's a Small World" at Disneyland. Funny about the description at the end of the video of the song as 'hip-hop'. I'm a Jew who loves Christmas music, from classical to traditional to the jazz and pop standards. There's no holiday music of any sort that compares with the beauty, fun, and variety of Christmas music.

Hate, hate, hate Little Drummer Boy! Go away or your drumsticks will be going where the sun don't shine.

True story: I knew a rabbi once who had to be taken to the ER. She's in the ambulance, and they're trying to get her to stay coherent and all, and the conversation went like this:

EMT: What's your name?
Rabbi: _________
EMT: And where do you work?
Rabbi: I'm a rabbi.
EMT: A rabbi!? HEY! I know a Jewish song!
And he sang the Driedel song ALL THE WAY TO THE HOSPITAL.

Following this episode, the rabbi firmly requested that the driedel song NEVER be sung in her synagogue again.

Personally, though, I vote for "Little Drummer Boy". That thing gets in your HEAD. In all it's many, horrid, electronicized versions...

We discussed it over supper, Little Drummer Boy is definitely the worst holdiay song. Especially because so many music artists seem compelled to include it on their Christmas albums. Even the great Emmy Lou Harris sings it and even HER version stinks. We also agreed with Sharon that Dreidl was dreadful. Runners up: anything sung by those godawful chipmunks, All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth, and Feliz Navidad (which I loath and despise, maybe even more than LDB). That said, Happy Holidays everyone,
Lorna

Holly Jolly Christmas is at the top of my blech list at present, and such tepid "winter holiday" hits as Susie Snowflake and Frosty the Snowman, the latter of which my son insists should be, given the logic of magical objects, Frosty the Possessed Hat.

I have heard some really shitty Chanukkah songs in my day, and I have to say, this one ain't so bad. I actually thought MC Hatch did a pretty good job.

As far as X-Mas music goes, the alpha and omega is Christmas in Hollis by Run DMC.

Clearly you need to suffer through Komar and Melamid's epic composition "The Most Unwanted Song". They identified the elements of musical compositions most hated by the greatest number of people, which include things like opera, rap, sad cowboy songs, children singing tunelessly, sappy r&b duets, commercial jingles, and holiday songs, and combined them ALL in to one 25-minute piece, in some really interesting (but not interesting for 25 minutes) ways. for instance, rap sections are delivered by a classical soprano in operatic style (really) interspersed with children singing tuneless holiday jingles for every possible holiday that all sound the same and all end with the same commercial plug. So that every High Holidays, now, I cannot get out of my head:

"Yom Kippur, Yom Kippur
Self-reflection and atonement
Yom Kippur, Yom Kippur
Do all your shopping... at WALMART!"

Although I sometimes get lines mixed in from:

"Ramadan, Ramadan
Lots of praying and no breakfast
Ramadan, Ramadan
Do all your shopping... at WALMART!"

It's so painfully wrong it's fascinating.
There's a link to where you can actually, if you wish to, hear this amazing work of violence at the bottom of the following article: http://boingboing.net/2008/04/17/25-minute-compositio.html

Actually besides Sandler's the only one I knew was Peter, Paul and Mary's "Light One Candle."

And I hope you're not alluding to/hating on the awesome Bing/Bowie rendition of "The Little Drummer Boy"/"Peace on Earth."

FYI, "O Christmas Tree"'s even worse in French (like most of the thankfully few xmas carols in French I've been subjected to)!

My all-time 'unfavourite' is "I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus' for it's sheer nasty knowingness and sacharine tune, but I have to say, here in Australia, when Christmas shopping is frequently done in 40 degree Celcius heat, there's something particularly irritating about hearing about sleigh-bells, snow, deep midwinters, and white Christmases, particularly sung in the accents of people who've never had the experience of having the Christmas confectionary melt before you get it home. It doesn't make me feel love towards my fellow human of any creed.

Dreidel is exactly like Small World! Brilliant comment, Jon. Awful, truly evil songs!

At this very moment, my son is practicing Dreidel on his violin. (He is also learning Maoz Tzur and Hanukkah, O Hanukkah--as well as a really beautiful niggun from the _Eight Tales for Eight Nights_ book.) My husband will not let our son play it when he is home....

Yike. I do find the Hatch production pretty icky-slick.

For any not aware- the Mormons refer to non-Mormons as- Gentiles. And they did go looking for a nice desert to wander in. There are some interesting fantasies there.

The drummer is bad (my wife calls it the "little f#@%$@ot drummer boy) but my absolute most hated has got to be 12 days of Christmas, will it never end!!!!... its like a Christmas version of 100 bottle of beer on the wall.

My favorite that I post to my blog every Christmas eve is The Christians and the Pagans by Dar Williams

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_KiHRHwaAs

I like Drummer Boy but not too often. I get really tired of all the zillion versions of the same 3, not 4, christmas songs, "Let it Snow", "Sleighride" and "Jingle Bell Rock"
"Baby it's cold outside" I really dislike that last one.

As for channukah songs, I learned a couple in school chorus but "Dreidel" is not one of them.

Peace to All,
Shamba

My personal unfavorites are "The Twelve Pains of Christmas" or whatever the bitter little ditty is called ("The first thing at Christmas that's such a pain to me/Is finding a Christmas tree") and "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer." I'd be happy to avoid them for the rest of my life.

Winter Wonderland. The story is just so annoying. I can't stand the line about the snowman and Parson Brown. I mean, the snowman IS in town, dag nab it!!!

Little Drummer Boy is annoying when done with tons of percussion (as it is asking for). I've heard some very warm accoustic versions done that have made me rethink that one.

Baby Its Cold Outside also gets on my nerves. NO, lady, leave the creepy guy trying to get you to stay in his house!!!!!

Oh, no no no no no.

The WORST holiday song EVER??

"Honky the Christmas Goose", by Canadian hockey star Johnny Bower.

"Honky, Honky the Christmas goose was so fat that he was no use..."

Seriously - YouTube it.

Runner-up for the worst one is "The Cat Carol" - song about a cat dying outside on Christmas Eve because no one let her into the house. Just gets one right into the holiday spirit!!

Ah yes. My 9 year old came home from her school's "Holidays around the World" celebrations (public school at its best right there) singing the dreidel song over and over and over and over.

The dreidel song kicks total motherfucking ass!! You dreidel-haters are all fucking meshugga.

Hands down, for me anyway: Blue Christmas as sung by Elvis Presley. *SHUDDER!!!*

Frighteningly enough, I can usually deal with the original twangy, semi-country style version. Not Elvis' version, though. The only cure for it is "Carol of the Bells" as done by Trans Siberian Orchestra. *grin*

Ok, when I came to science blogs, they told me that I would be one of the few theists, and that I would be one of a comparatively small number of women and and folks who training was in some field outside the sciences. I definitely felt I could deal with this. But if PhysioProf represents the larger Science blogs writership, I may have to leave...I'm sorry, I can't hang around with a bunch of driedel song lovers. That's too much to ask.

;-).

Sharon

Ok, took me a while to dig this out, but HERE, Sharon, and all- is THE holiday song you've been craving.

http://www.sixteenfeet.com/music/audio/holiday-schmedley

The only cure for it is "Carol of the Bells" as done by Trans Siberian Orchestra. *grin*

I love that one!

And wow, I hadn't expected to see Sixteen Feet referenced outside of Swarthmore...

I actually kind of like Little Drummer Boy when it's sung straight. What annoys me is anything that's been pop/sexy-ified. "Sleigh Ride" played normally is a rather pleasant tune, though it gets old fast. "Sleigh Ride" crooned love-song-style is just weird.

When I worked retail one Christmas season, corporate mandated that we play *one* CD, on repeat, for 12 hours a day, Thanksgiving to New Year's. For whatever reason, "Wonderful Christmastime" by Paul McCartney was on it *twice*.

That was 15 years ago and I never ever want to hear that song again.

Hey, Swatties get around. :-)

Actually Sharon; I think the top song for Chanukah really truly should be "White Christmas".

No, not kidding. Grinning, but not kidding. It was written by - Irving Berlin, for crying out loud, who was, of course Jewish.

Actually that's been given as a reason for the song's slow take-off; there were a few folks out there who thought Berlin had no business writing a Christmas song- or understanding the non-religious aspects of Christmas so well. So some singers/ radio stations/bands wouldn't play it- until it became so outrageously popular.

Why not!? :-) Or alternatively someone could write "all I want for Chanukah is my two front teeth." Your choice!

I really can't stand "I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus," for same the reasons listed by quatrefoil. Also dislike "All I want for Christmas." And the lyrics of Rudolph, which praise some appalling values, although I do find the turn catchy. But I love most Christmas music -- including Oh Christmas Tree and The Little Drummer Boy, when sung straight, even though it doesn't make any sense and is saccharine. Makes me teary, too -- rather in the way of those damn McDonald's Christmas ads on TV. Drives me nuts that I'm so susceptible to being emotionally jerked around. For which reason I'm deeply grateful never to have heard the cat carol mentioned above. I wonder if ear plug sales go up this time of year?

Oh, gee... thanks. The mention of retail corp. mandated Christmas music reminded me of something that I've obviously tried HARRRRRD to repress: Mannheim Steamroller's truly god(s)-forsaken renditions of pretty much every Christmas song ever. *shudder!!* The first Christmas I worked retail was at a bead store, and that was the ONLY disk they had. Over and over, for the ENITRE MONTH. For those of you unfamiliar, it is over-produced electronic .... well, anything else would be truly judgmental and I know people who actually like the stuff. Suffice to say that it was enough to drive me nearly to drink. On the job. I will seriously leave the room/store/wherever if I hear it again.

I too am glad that I never heard that cat carol -- how awful! It's bad enough that the Peter, Paul, and Mary song about the old woman and the little boy sharing their tiny resources (Christmas Dinner) makes me bawl every single time. Every. Time.

I don't have any unfavorites (though for years I hated nearly all holiday music), but the best holiday songs EVAR are Christmas at Ground Zero and The Night Santa Went Crazy, both by Weird Al Yankovic.

I am suprised CPP does not advocate the South Park version of the drediel song.

I heard the dreidel song for, I believe, the first time last night. Yes. I can see why you hate it. :-)

Worst holiday song ever? Well, I usually turn out the Muzak kitsch that flows through the department store speakers, so I'm not up on the latest nominees for worst Christmas song. I dislike secular Christmas music as a whole; in fact, I find that the local classical music station is a better source for religious Christmas music than just about anywhere else, since they tend to play the best of the western music tradition.

So I don't have a particular candidate for worst, although many of the secular tunes the other comments here have mentioned, like "holly jolly Christmas" are pretty good choices.

At any rate, have a blessed holiday season, whatever holiday(s) you're celebrating.

I taught I have a Little Driedle to my son's public school grade 3 class this year, but I brought about 15 more verses that I found here: http://ot006.urj.net/dreidl.htm. My favourite verse is:

I have a little dreidel, I made it from cement And now our lovely hardwood floor has a nasty dent

Lots of laughs in class.

The variations in the song are as numerous as the variations, it seems, in the dreidel itself, but often more numerous than the spellings, though not as numerous as the amusing unfortunates who cannot get the song out of their heads. We are awaiting a rumored Hollywood movie -- "Attack of the Dreidels", but have yet to track down the source.

Ashkenazi Jews are more European in ancestry

razib — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:14:59 +0000

Ashkenazi Jews are more European in ancestry

Dienekes posted some abstracts of the ASHG 2009 meeting. This one is in the category of facts we assumed but weren't totally sure of:

Abraham's children in the genome era: Major Jewish Diaspora populations comprise distinct genetic clusters with shared Middle Eastern ancestry

Here, we present population structure results from compiled datasets after merging with the Human Genome Diversity Project and the Population Reference Sample studies, which consisted of 146 non-Jewish Middle Easterners (Druze, Bedouin and Palestinian), 30 northern Africans (Mozabite from Algeria), 1547 Europeans, and 653 individuals from other African, Asian, Latin American, and Oceanian populations. Both principal component analyses and multi-dimensional scaling analysis of pairwise Fst distance show that Jewish populations form a cluster clearly distinct from all major continental populations. The results also reveal a finer population substructure in which each of 7 Jewish populations studied here form distinctive clusters - in each instance within group Fst was smaller than between group, although some groups (Iranian, Iraqi) demonstrated greater within group diversity and even sub-clusters, based on village of origin. By pairwise Fst analysis, the Jewish groups are closest to Southern Europeans (i.e. Tuscan Italians) and to Druze, Bedouins, Palestinians. Interestingly, the distance to the closest Southern European population follows the order from proximal to distal: Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Syrian, Iraqi, and Iranian, which reflects historical admixture with local communities. STRUCTURE results show that the Jewish Diaspora groups all demonstrated Middle Eastern ancestry, but varied significantly in the extent of European admixture. There is almost no European ancestry in Iranian and Iraqi Jews, whereas Syrian, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi Jews have European admixture ranging from 30%~60%. Analysis of identity-by-descent provides further insight on recent and distinct history of such populations. These results demonstrate the shared and distinctive genetic heritage of Jewish Diaspora groups.

Remember that Fst is measuring variation, so more between group variation naturally indicates population substructure. The distinctiveness of Ashkenazi Jews is probably what I might term the "Iceland Effect", no matter your original genetic profile shutting off gene flow for centuries will naturally result in a random walk into unique territory which can't be explained simply as a combination of the founding population (in the case of Ashkenazi Jews I assume it was Middle Easterners and Europeans).

Related: How Ashkenazi Jewish Are You?

razib Fri, 09/04/2009 - 09:14

Tags

Hahahaha. The WNs are going to love this one.

Does anyone remember the paper that was published a few years back, showing how closely related the Palestinians were to the native Jewish population, that was yanked after publication because of the political furor it caused?

It is nearly certain the Pashtuns and even the Kurds are of migrating Jewish descent/related and that millions of Jews from the diaspora were forced or willingly convert to Islam as it swept through the Middle and Southwest Asian regions.
There are descendants of merchant Jewish groups in Kashmir.

all obviously false.

There is almost no European ancestry in Iranian and Iraqi Jews, whereas Syrian, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi Jews have European admixture ranging from 30%~60%.

Dienekes is of the opinion that the European DNA in Ashkenazi and Sephardim originites from Greek/Anatolian converts to Judaism and women of said ethnic groups who were taken as brides during the Hellenic Age when Judaism was proslytist (hence Jews cluster between Greeks and Armenians). The Greco-Anatolian conversion would explain most of the 60% of Ashekenazi European DNA.

But my question is which Middle Eastern ethnic group were the original Jews (ie, the remaining ~40% of Ashkenazi DNA) closest to?

Is the remaining 40% most similar to Kurds, Armenians, Syrians, Lebanese?

Anyone want to take a stab at it?

But my question is which Middle Eastern ethnic group were the original Jews (ie, the remaining ~40% of Ashkenazi DNA) closest to?

why wouldn't you think jews are closest to levantine people originally? they were levantine by reputation. i assume persian jews have admixed some with mesopatamian and iranian peoples, just as the yemeni jews resemble yemenis to some extent.

why wouldn't you think jews are closest to levantine people originally?

They certainly could be. My uncertainty comes from the fact that I've always thought Ashkenazi and non-European Jews such as the Persian Jews don't really resemble Lebanese and Syrians, but perhaps the Ashkenazi appear non-Levantine due to Greek/Anatolian admixture.

Just my observation.

My uncertainty comes from the fact that I've always thought Ashkenazi and non-European Jews such as the Persian Jews don't really resemble Lebanese and Syrians, but perhaps the Ashkenazi appear non-Levantine due to Greek/Anatolian admixture.

i don't know. i have arab friends who are confused for jewish regulary of levantine origin. but in any case, as you said, ashkenazi jews have a lot of non-mid eastern admixture. additionally, they've been a distinct population for ~1000 years at least. finally, re: persian jews, my understanding is that they're a branch of the old iraq jewish community, both derived from the sassanid era jewish community extremely numerous in southern mesopotamia. mesopatamia was a semitic domain throughout the sassanid period (and before), with large arab populations already by the time of the islamic conquest, so the admixture to iranian jews might not be ethnic persian.

I'd guess that the European admixture among the Ashkenazi Jews is more Italian than anything else: but we'll see soon.

For Syrian Jews, Greek?

I'm not sure I'm getting it right: does it say that Syrian Jews are more Europeanised than Non-Jewish Syrians, or just more than Mesopotamian Jews?

toto,
I think the abstract only compares European admixture among the Jewish populations.

I would be curious to see if there is a high Jewish genetic profile among Greeks. Historical evidence seems to indicate that when Christianity spread out of the Levant it was mostly to Hellenized Jews and then to Greeks who joined them. Since these Jews were effectively cut off from their ethnic brothers, I would suspect that they passed into the Greek whole.

Don't be a Jew

gregladen — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:00:20 +0000

Don't be a Jew

Joseph and Mary, and Little Joe and Mary, and Grinker and I, sat around the table where most of the dinner had been laid out. Additional bits and pieces of the dinner would be brought out as needed shortly, but now it was time to pray.

So we held hands and bowed our heads, and Mary led a prayer to Jesus for the bounty we were about to receive and stuff, and we all said Amen and were about to dig in, when Mary interrupted with a tone of voice and a hand signal that made everyone stop with their forks in mid air.

"We have a new tradition we'd like you to participate in," she said. Her husband glanced at her with an obvious lack of understanding. I guessed he had forgotten about the new tradition and was going to keep his mouth shut for the moment.

"We now read a special bible passage at every dinner, to reinforce the children's learning." As she said this, she reached behind her and pulled a bible off a side table, and opened it to a previously marked page.

"Rich, I wonder if you would read this aloud for us?"

What can you do? Hey, even to this day, as a practicing atheist with an activist agenda, I'll read bits and pieces of the bible at whichever Jewish holiday it is that my in laws do that at. Nobody thinks anything of it. Surely, there was a bit of irony here, in that they picked Grinker, who is Jewish, to read from the New Testament, but whatever. What harm could that be, right?

"Oh, OK," Grinker said after he took the book. "No problem."

And so Grinker read the text, and a few sentences in it became clear that this was one of those bible passages that had a lot to say about the Jews. The Jews were bad, the Jews could not be trusted, the Jews needed to convert, and so on and so forth. I don't remember the passage, it was probably from Matthew or maybe one of those especially anti-Semitic bits from John. When it was over, Grinker was, to me, visibly disturbed by having been asked to read this, and possibly even disturbed that such offensive rambling was even part of a 'religious' text that he was undoubtedly unfamiliar with. But he kept a smile on his face and this was not brought up again. Joseph himself looked rather embarrassed as well. It was now obvious to us that Mary had created this ruse of a bible reading after saying grace. She lied, and she offended a guest. She was dissing the Jew, or at least, dissing his presumed religion. A victory, I suppose, would have been if Grinker asked to be baptized at the next possible opportunity.

It is true that there was a great deal of variation across the missionaries in their beliefs as well as their practices. Those who were less radical about the religion and more involved in the work they were doing, however, had to keep up the front of being devout. This was, essentially, a cult and they had to maintain a certain level of adherence to doctrine. It is always the case, internationally, that pilots are treated differently. They do not follow the same rules as other people, they are left more on their own, yet when they break certain rules they are punished more severely. For instance, a pilot who is caught bringing any kind of materiel, no matter how innocuous, across a border without proper papers, may lose his licence or at least his job. This was the case with a pilot who would bring VHS tapes of recent movies from town to town in Zaire and back to Belgium, rotating them among a group of people who shared ownership in them. So it was also true with the missionary pilots. They kept more to themselves, and although they would always pray before takeoff (and sometimes during the flight) they were more pragmatic and appeared less religious than the other missionaries.

The Africans who partook in the mission life, living on these compounds, also varied in their level of indoctrination. One man that I ended up working with quite a bit had been a long time resident of one of the mission stations, and had the status of "teacher." But on the side he was a trader in black market goods, and had served as a mercenary as well as being a soldier in Idi Amin's army. These were all things that got him in trouble with the mission once they discovered them. He was required to move off station, though his wife and children could remain if they wanted to.

For every white missionary on a mission station, there are probably several dozen Africans, but judging from what I've seen in the more remote stations that were not really full communities, or the urban stations that were satellites to the larger extended 'villages,' the ratio of African to Foreigner needed to sustain the middle class lifestyle the missionaries enjoyed was perhaps as low as six to one. The duties of the African workers included cooking (though "madam" was the actual cook, there were many cooking related tasks to carry out, including of course cooking for the staff), cleaning, maintaining equipment like the generators, serving as a guard, rebuilding roofs, teaching Madam, Master and the children a local language, and so on.

I do not know many details of the system, but I got the impression that these workers were being observed and to some extent tested on a regular basis, and if as individuals showed themselves to be literate, devout, and well behaved, they would be asked (allowed?) to do "pastoral work." This meant going among the masses visiting the sick, reading bible passages to people, and so on.

Most important is this: The Africans were taught a version of the religion that was the most strict of all. Different Americans, Brits, Australians and so on would come and go, with different levels of involvement in the religious aspects of the mission. Pilots were pilots who happened to be protestant. Electricians and other technicians were experts on needed services but not necessarily particularly religious. If the missionaries were the Pilgrims, the others were the crew on the Mayflower that made the voyage happen. But the interface between the community of missionaries and the African community was primarily Madam, and to a lesser extent Master (or "Bwana") and at this interface only the strictest teachings were carried out. As a result, the Africans who carried out the pastoral work were the most conservative of all members of the communities, and when these individuals rose to prominence now and then, their conservatism had an influence.

About 15 years ago, the English Anglican church, which has missionized in this manner since the days of Livingstone, held the first international meeting in many years, and at that meeting the number of African born, African trained bishops who were of this highly conservative ilk was larger than any other faction of bishops. At that meeting, the bishops voted all sorts of policy changes and moved the Anglican church, worldwide, towards a position of modern conservatism that would be envied by the board of directors at Oral Roberts college.

The chickens. They came home. And roosted.

gregladen Sat, 06/27/2009 - 06:00

Tags

Actually it was 11 years ago (the Lambeth conferences are held every 10 years). The Lambeth conference last year was boycotted by a large number of the African bishops (notably Ugandan and Nigerian) on various grounds including that many US Episcopalian bishops were heretical (or worst). It is entirely possible the Anglican Communion is splitting; it might only be a matter of which side keeps the Archbishop of Canterbury and therefore the name 'Anglican Communion'.

The southern and central African bishops seem to be on average more liberal (or at least less concerned about American and Canadian church policies on women and gays), most notably now retired archbishop, Desmond Tutu.

I love these little glimpses into a world I know little of.

Now it all makes sense. Religions get crazier when isolated.

You know, for some time it's been pretty clear what's been going on in postcolonial Africa -- the people in charge of the worst countries were either the biggest thugs and suckups for or the craziest opponents of the colonials. I don't think I'd ever quite twigged as to why, but this explains a lot.

Greg you are a fine storyteller, with good stories to tell. Thank you for this.

And now these are the ones who are lying about condoms in the midst of an AIDS crisis.

Erp:

Thanks for the expansion and clarification. I was totally glossing the Anglican church situation. In fact, the situation in each country has to be examined separately. For instance, I'm pretty sure that missionaries have been relatively rare in Tanzania, but Malawi is essentially a missionary culture of the late 18th century remixed slightly and served up by almost everybody in the country. (Which makes this Madonna thing interesting in ways that the press has totally missed).

I'm not sure how common missionaries are in Tanzania; I do know my aunt spent 15 years or so (1950s and 60s) there as a doctor first in the colonial service and for a short time with the government of the newly independent country (my grandfather becoming ill forced her to return to Britain). She didn't talk much about it and she died some years ago but she often worked in somewhat remote regions and there are some very nice thank-you notes from the locals from districts that she had been in. She was an atheist like most of the family (including me).

Forget, please, "conservatism." It has been, operationally, de facto, Godless and therefore irrelevant. Secular conservatism will not defeat secular liberalism because to God both are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and thus predestined to failure. As Stonewall Jackson's Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:

"[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today .one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth."

Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).

John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com
Recovering Republican
JLof@aol.com

PS â And âMr. Worldly Wisemanâ Rush Limbaugh never made a bigger ass of himself than at CPAC where he told that blasphemous âjokeâ about himself and God.

Re: "one of those especially anti-Semitic bits from John"

Honestly, I think it's crazy talk to say that the Christian gospels are anti-Semitic. If I reported that the Israelis won the 400 metres at the Olympics, only a complete idiot would take me to mean that each individual Israeli participated in the race, and likewise only a complete idiot could read a Bible and interpret "the Jews said this", "the Jews did that" as blanket references to all Jews.

I don't hold John or any other gospel writer responsible for not foreseeing the rise of such lunacy in later centuries.

You don't disagree that the lunacy has arisen and certain parts of the gospels are often used to attack Jews (barring those who have converted to Christianity). Greg's post had a classic example of this type of attack or why else do you think the missionary had a Jewish guest read that particular bit?

Adrian: I didn't say what you said I said. I made reference to specific anti-semetic references. I was not generalizing but rather referring to specific things that are recorded in the bible that can be looked up and evaluated.

Now, there are two things you can call me on but you blew your chance. One is obvious, is an outstanding issue, and I chose to ignore it for the sake of keeping it simple. I used the term "anti-semetic" as it is often used in reference to anti-Jewish statements in the bible. This is appropriate because that is what anti-Semetic means, in English. And we are speaking English.

However, some have tried to make the argument that the proper term is Anti-Jewish because that is actually what these statements were. Had you called me on that, I would have agreed, pointed out the anti-semetic/anti-Jewish conflation in modern English, and that'd be it.

The other thing is the verity of all of it. There is almost nothing in the New Testament that is believably associated with anything anybody says it is associated with. It could all be a bunch of low level science fiction for all we know.

I heard that Jesus told somebody that SF didn't pay enough and that the real way to make money was to start a religion.

Or maybe that was Hubbard. Same dif.

Greg, I did not accuse you personally of anything much, beyond not thinking about what you were writing just there. My target, the complete idiots I referred to, were people such as those missionaries.

I think you erred in saying that the Christian gospels contain anti-Semitic references. I think you wrote that without thinking about what you were (probably inadvertently) implying, which is that the dead guys who wrote the gospels somehow bear responsibility for the anti-Jewish prejudice of some of their readers.

Being anti-semitic, in English, means taking the view that Jews as a group are less deserving than other human beings. References to groups of Jews doing bad things, such as may be found throughout the Christian gospels, are not anti-Semitic because they do not insinuate that Jews in general are party to such behaviour.

@Adrian

Honestly, I think it's crazy talk to say that the Christian gospels are anti-Semitic....I don't hold John or any other gospel writer responsible for not foreseeing the rise of such lunacy in later centuries.

If the Gospels had all been written at the time Jesus had actually lived, I might agree. But they were written long after Jesus was dead by groups trying to distinguish themselves as more righteous than traditional Jews.

If you read the Gospels the order they were written, you can actually see the portrayal of traditional Jews getting progressively worse. Just look at the different versions of Jesus appearing before Pontius Pilate. In the earliest written Gospel (Mark), Pilate is portrayed as kinduv a dick who's just following procedure. By the last written Gospel (John), Pilate has morphed into a tragic hero doing everything he can to keep the bloodthirsty throngs from murdering an innocent man, ultimately refusing to sentence Jesus to die. The Gospel writers set the stage for the lunacy in later centuries.

I have no idea how to use blockquotes here.

Enclose both blockquote and /blockquote with the less-than and greater-than symbols (shifted comma and period). Other systems use [ and ] the same way.

Be careful using the less than symbol in ordinary text. Things will sometimes disappear.

1 < 2 > 3 There is a 2 inside the brackets between the 1 and 3.

@StephanieZ: When you say you heard that Jesus told someone that SF didn't pay enough, I thought you were going to suggest that if there were a Religious Gay Fund in San Francisco, the mormons wouldn't have won the votes in California to deny homosexuals the civil rights they clamor for.

Again, a fascinating snapshot.

I've had some interesting conversations about Francophone vs Anglophone Africa, but I've never thought about the differences between places based on their missionary legacy (or lack thereof). My personal knowledge is second hand, but from the primary sources at least.

Tanzania is regarded as quite a good place to do work (scientific field work). The British colonial history left a cultural legacy with some real positives from my POV (certainly negatives too of course). Competence/merit are often valued over mere rank or seniority. Honest work is valued and there is an "honor" angle to actually doing what you said you would. Also, superficial social/custom differences seem to be more of a matter of amusement than offensive.

In contrast, the fracophone countries seem much less, well, British I guess. Status is basically the most important thing, and that comes with rank (degrees, honors, or whatever even if they aren't actually relevant or even honestly earned) and mere seniority. In a village, the normal way to get work done is to convince (pay) the chief and use his authority (which often involves an implicit or even explicit threat of retribution if people don't actually do what they promise.) It isn't just the villages either... the scientists and doctors we've worked with are stuck in the same rank based system (some willing, some chafing under it with their actual talents going unrewarded.)

Caveat: exceptions are the rule of course.

I wonder what folks assessment of places with a 'missionary' vs a more secular (civic colonial) culture are?

Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).

So? Why hasn't my country collapsed, then?

Why haven't at the very least the atheistic Czechs succeeded in turning their country into another Somalia?

I had no idea conservatives were postmodernist reality-deniers these days...

Adrian: The degree of actual anti-Jewish feeling among the Jews who were supposed to have been followers of christ, and the nature of the actual things they said, is all up for interpretation. I think you are right about what you say, and now I'm getting your point more clearly and pretty much agree with it. Most of the remarks that I know of are part of a larger 300 year long conversation in which people where quite vehemently disagreeing with each other and disliking each other to the point of killing each other now and then. You could not really be "antisemetic" in those days in any way that you could be now, except near the very end of this period or over subsequent centuries.

But as Jose points out, the gospels are probably where we see the ultimate formation of early antisemitism.

Adrian,

There are bits in the New Testament which are regularly used to tease (ha!ha!) to bully and generally to give a hard time to Jews - this is a fact.

These actions do depend upon the precise sect and its practices. They also depend on which of the multiple translations they choose and, remember, no-one at all knows what the original said.

It is not necessary to proclaim a political philosophy such as Hitler's in order to speak and behave in an anti-semitic manner - as any Jew would tell you if you troubled to ask!

One of the main traditions of evangelicals in those days was to find Jews and convert them. It was something I ran into all the time.

sorry, 'those days' = the time of the OP was written, not the times the NT was written.

Greg, I'm sorry if I over-reacted a bit, but that'd be because cynicism (as in the habit of attributing the worst possible motives by default) bugs me, and I tend to react to perceived examples of it from the gut. :-)

Jose's points are interesting, though without further evidence I take them with a grain of salt.

The chickens. They came home. And roosted.

Greg, perhaps more than you realize. African groups are now establishing churches and missionary organizations in the US for the purpose of converting liberal and non-Christians. If the rise of evangelicals into the middle class had offered us the hope of any relief from their insanity, the African churches are now there to pick up the slack.

Travc@19

Zanzibar being one of them?

and likewise only a complete idiot could read a Bible and interpret "the Jews said this", "the Jews did that" as blanket references to all Jews.

Unfortunately, a lot of complete idiots read the Bible.

More!

Thank you for the great post!

Reason for late joining - your Christmas from Hell post pointed to a post that pointed here.

The chickens. They came home. And roosted.

Having grown up as an MK (and having had to do the "dress up and smile for the church folk" thing when my parents were carrying out the special kind of begging/speaking tour required every few years in order to maintain our modest lifestyle), the most surreal thing that ever happened to me was when my grown-up atheist self was door-stepped by a Bible-wielding, deadly serious, Nigerian JW missionary.

It will be even more surreal, however, when the next Nigerian I meet turns out to be doing the field work for a thesis on "Kinship in crisis: geographical mobility and stress on family networks in a European culture."