some meandering context required for this question, for which i apologise. Iâm also sorry if this is just an inappropriate question. ss/anon if u can.
I (Asian) grew up upper class in Hong Kong, an incredibly international city, which meant that much emphasis was placed in my education on English and global affairs. I consume(d) more English than Cantonese content, most of which was American. Despite that, my social circle was still overwhelmingly asian.
Which meant that i gained a passing theoretical knowledge of anti-black, anti-indigenous raciam in america. I also internalised some anti black racism in the American form presumably from the American movies/tv shows i was consuming, which i had to work on
All that to ask: what is anti semitism like today/can you explain anti semitism? From my perspective, it makes no sense. It doesnât come across strongly in media, or I wouldâve picked it up. Jews are also mostly White? ethnically indistinguishable? Look the same is what im trying to say. Religious stereotypes cant be it given how secular america/the world is, and the factually true ones (lawyers etc) are positive. jews also seem fairly assimliated.
Hm. Ok. So let's start on the basics. Jews are a global ethnoreligious minority. There about about 15 million of us left on the planet, at .2% of the global population. About half of us live in Israel, which means that diasporic Jews kind of have to care about what's going on over there. but don't tell any DSA babies; this type of information makes them projectile vomit while spewing excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the original Russian and shotgunning beer with Rama Duwaji.
Archaeological, textual, and genetic studies indicate that this ethno-religious group originated in the Central Judean hill country, near present day Jerusalem. Over centuries those early Israelite tribes merged with surrounding Canaanite groups, and slowly developed hegemony over the Southern Levant, as well as--by the 6th century BCE--a form of monotheism.
Now the Levant is a very valuable piece of land as it connects Western Asia to Europe and Northern Africa via the Med, so empires have always wanted it; the Egyptian and Hittite Empires were fighting over it before the Israelites rose as a distinctive group, and the cosmological documents of the Jewish people demonstrate successive empires attempting to capture that piece of land. But when empires do that, they're not like, super enthusiastic about letting the indigenous populations stay, so boom diaspora. this would happen multiple times before Joshua of Nazareth rolled up to yell at the temple Boomers.
So, diaspora. We diasporad out to surrounding empires. Now, ancient governments are a lot like modern governments, in that conformity of ideology and belief are important to maintain official control of the populace. Jews got this memo pretty earlier and many of us preferred not to die, so we assimilated as a means of survival, while maintaining our ethno-religious identity. but, that's never enough. because while maintaining our religion, its laws, its Textual Stuff, we're still believing differently than the majority. Not only that, but we're believing differently in concert with one another over political lines.
So now we're challenging to authority, and untrustworthy. those dynamics showed up VERY early in the game. you know the Purim holiday? That holiday is about a piece of historical fiction written Before Christ about how our insistence in maintaining our culture and beliefs in diaspora WHILE assimilating threatens those in power. and then those in power decide to do a genocide, and sometimes don't if we're hot enough.
the enduring ties between far flung diasporic communities, and our insistence upon maintaining our ethnoreligious beliefs, practices, and culture is a threat to any government which relies on ideological homogeneity. which, most governments still do. but, when a ruler says that they are descended from gods, or are a god, or were appointed by god/the grace thereof, or are protected by god, or whatever, our desire to keep doing our own thing is dangerous and unholy. and we keep existing beyond and across political borders while doing it.
this makes some people jumpy. including yourself. but we keep doing it: assimilating, while maintaining our shit and transnational cultural ties. that makes people jumpier. because after all the millennia of expulsions and ethnic cleansings and genocides and lynch mobs shouldn't we have stopped by now? but we haven't, so that must mean we cant be trusted? or maybe we made a pact with satan?
there's your anthropological response. i haven't had my breakfast or caffeine yet and my period just rolled up two weeks fucking early and i have a million things on my to do list and my insurance has decided that my chronic migraines aren't bad enough to keep supplying me with goddamn nurtec, so it's a bit less polished and edited multiple times than my usual responses of this nature.
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