Awakeand Singh
SPNer
- Jan 9, 2012
- 78
- 107
If you go to Israel today, squarely in the Middle East/North Africa (separated by the Suez canal in the the 1860's), and look around you, you feel you are in Europe. The prevailing race, culture and lifestyle is overwhelmingly European.
Well, I've been living in Israel for over half my life. first of all, Israel is not in North Africa - but, Asia. Secondly, the nation consists of so very many national and ethnic groups, it's just about impossible to say where you "feel" you are. Shkunat HaBukharim in Jerusalem retains much of the character of the residents' native Bukhara, in Central Asia. The HaTiqva neighborhood in Tel-Aviv is still largely populated by Jews from Yemen. My own neighborhood boasts immigrant communities from former Soviet Georgia, India, Ethiopia, Iraq, Hungary, Russia, France, etc., as well as every imaginable mixture. If you "feel you are in Europe", it may have more to do with the advanced living standard, relative to that of the surrounding countries. Yes, it was brought about within the last 100 years by Jewish pioneers from Europe - although I hasten to mention that they found Jewish communities when they arrived; communities that had been here since the dispersion of the greater masses of Jews at the hands of the Roman conquerors.
Today the ethnic balance has tilted in favor of the Maghrebi and Mizrachi Jews (from North Africa and the Middle East, respectively). For this we can thank the Arab world, which made the lives of the centuries and millenia-old Jewish communities in their midst so miserable that emigration became the norm - as the remaining options were forced conversion to Islam or death (as Christian, Baha'i, and other communities who have long-resided in the Middle East and North Africa are experiencing today; ask the Sikhs of Afghanistan how welcome they feel in the land where they have lived for hundreds of years!).
It is no secret that the 'Hebrew' language used today is a modern construction reconstituted from ancient elements of a largely 'dead' language, dreamed up by one individual, a Russian named Ben-Yehudah, together with some other European jews. This language is vastly different from the actual tongue of the African Hebrews in Old Testament times.
A "largely 'dead' language", in that it hadn't been spoken, but it has most certainly been an active literary language (in which the majority of male Jews of every diaspora community have always been literate) from the very beginnings of the Jewish People. To the best of my knowledge, the only surviving language of an African Jewish community is Ge'ez, which is the liturgical language of the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, the overwhelming majority of whom were recently airlifted in two dramatic operations to the modern State of Israel. I have also heard that the Ibo of Biafra claim themselves to be descendants of the 10 lost Tribes of the ancient Northern Kingdom of Israel, but their claim is much more tenuous than that of the Beta Israel.
Similarly, the belief systems of contemporary, Rabbinical Jews is greatly changed from what was the living faith of the ancient residents of that region.
The practices have certainly developed, as they would need to have been adapted to an existence outside the Land of Israel, without the service of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. This adaptation process had already begun in the Babylonian exile, centuries before the Roman exile that ended Israel as an independent national entity, and it continues to this day - with rabbinic responsa from Israel and diaspora communities the world over contributing learned opinions, based on the Jewish People's original documents of nationhood (the Written Torah - also known as the Pentateuch, or, Five Books of Moses; and the Oral Torah, which was written down and redacted in Babylon and Israel - and popularly known as the Talmud). But the belief system is surprisingly consistent.
Truth is Truth.
Indeed, but Malcom X, along with the other Afro-centrists (some of whose support texts you have kindly listed above) define "history" as, "his story". Truth, taken in such a context, becomes something of an elusive commodity. Therefore, ... if you want to present your findings as theory, I've got no problem. If you're telling me it's, "The Truth",... Jio, I think you're skating on rather thin ice.
Well, I've been living in Israel for over half my life. first of all, Israel is not in North Africa - but, Asia. Secondly, the nation consists of so very many national and ethnic groups, it's just about impossible to say where you "feel" you are. Shkunat HaBukharim in Jerusalem retains much of the character of the residents' native Bukhara, in Central Asia. The HaTiqva neighborhood in Tel-Aviv is still largely populated by Jews from Yemen. My own neighborhood boasts immigrant communities from former Soviet Georgia, India, Ethiopia, Iraq, Hungary, Russia, France, etc., as well as every imaginable mixture. If you "feel you are in Europe", it may have more to do with the advanced living standard, relative to that of the surrounding countries. Yes, it was brought about within the last 100 years by Jewish pioneers from Europe - although I hasten to mention that they found Jewish communities when they arrived; communities that had been here since the dispersion of the greater masses of Jews at the hands of the Roman conquerors.
Today the ethnic balance has tilted in favor of the Maghrebi and Mizrachi Jews (from North Africa and the Middle East, respectively). For this we can thank the Arab world, which made the lives of the centuries and millenia-old Jewish communities in their midst so miserable that emigration became the norm - as the remaining options were forced conversion to Islam or death (as Christian, Baha'i, and other communities who have long-resided in the Middle East and North Africa are experiencing today; ask the Sikhs of Afghanistan how welcome they feel in the land where they have lived for hundreds of years!).
It is no secret that the 'Hebrew' language used today is a modern construction reconstituted from ancient elements of a largely 'dead' language, dreamed up by one individual, a Russian named Ben-Yehudah, together with some other European jews. This language is vastly different from the actual tongue of the African Hebrews in Old Testament times.
A "largely 'dead' language", in that it hadn't been spoken, but it has most certainly been an active literary language (in which the majority of male Jews of every diaspora community have always been literate) from the very beginnings of the Jewish People. To the best of my knowledge, the only surviving language of an African Jewish community is Ge'ez, which is the liturgical language of the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, the overwhelming majority of whom were recently airlifted in two dramatic operations to the modern State of Israel. I have also heard that the Ibo of Biafra claim themselves to be descendants of the 10 lost Tribes of the ancient Northern Kingdom of Israel, but their claim is much more tenuous than that of the Beta Israel.
Similarly, the belief systems of contemporary, Rabbinical Jews is greatly changed from what was the living faith of the ancient residents of that region.
The practices have certainly developed, as they would need to have been adapted to an existence outside the Land of Israel, without the service of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. This adaptation process had already begun in the Babylonian exile, centuries before the Roman exile that ended Israel as an independent national entity, and it continues to this day - with rabbinic responsa from Israel and diaspora communities the world over contributing learned opinions, based on the Jewish People's original documents of nationhood (the Written Torah - also known as the Pentateuch, or, Five Books of Moses; and the Oral Torah, which was written down and redacted in Babylon and Israel - and popularly known as the Talmud). But the belief system is surprisingly consistent.
Truth is Truth.
Indeed, but Malcom X, along with the other Afro-centrists (some of whose support texts you have kindly listed above) define "history" as, "his story". Truth, taken in such a context, becomes something of an elusive commodity. Therefore, ... if you want to present your findings as theory, I've got no problem. If you're telling me it's, "The Truth",... Jio, I think you're skating on rather thin ice.
they are quite unlike christianity and islam in this sense. 
