Explaining the conquered, from the perspective of the conqueror; the problem with studying Judaism from Western academic sources.
An open letter to John Green.
@sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog
Having recently posted the Judaism video in your Crash Course Religions series, I expect your inbox is currently flooded with nonsense and worse. I certainly don't blame you for turning off the comments on the video.
I do hope, however, that, rather than assuming every message you receive this week is the sort of toxic vitriol which inevitably spews forth every time someone on the internet mentions Jews, you (or an employee) are reviewing these messages to see how the subjects of your video are responding to it.
While I certainly would not claim to speak for the entire Jewish community, I can bring a report from my own social circle of Jews from a variety of religious backgrounds, and I am sorry to say, it's not positive.
I hope you will forgive my less-than-conciliatory tone, but I am tired of pretending that the sort of misrepresentation, misinformation, and omissions found in this video are innocent mistakes.
This will not be a point-by-point refutation of every error in the video, partly because I know of at least one such post that is already being written, but mostly because such an effort would represent significantly more attention and energy than this video deserves.
Instead, I intend to focus on the deeper issues from which all these errors stem.
The first issue is the very existence of this video in this series.
It certainly is not impossible to discuss Judaism in a series on religion, but doing to in a way that is accurate and not offensive requires addressing the ways Judaism does not actually fit the standard modern understanding of religion.
Because the answer to "What Does it Mean to Be Jewish?" as the video is titled, is not actually about holding any specific set of beliefs, or even about observing the halacha (Jewish laws and practices), according to the standards of one's movement.
Judaism is, first and foremost, a Nation, not in the modern sense of the nation-state, but in the ancient sense. It is about shared community, shared culture, and shared heritage.
What one might call the Jewish religion is therefore better understood as the beliefs and practices Jews have developed and passed down, rather than the thing which makes a person a Jew.
A person who was born and raised in a Jewish community who does not believe in or practice any aspect of Torah or Talmudic law is a Jew. A person without such ties who begins observing Jewish traditions without going through any recognized conversion process is not a Jew.
Any video or essay on the Jewish religion which does not include such a disclaimer, as your video does not, is fundamentally flawed to its very core.
It became unfortunately clear why you made this mistake (and many others) once I looked at your source sheet.
(Linked here; this is the source sheet for the full series, with the sources on this video beginning on page 17).
You credited your subject matter experts, fact checker, and series advisory board at the end of your video rather than including them on the source sheet. The decision to simply list their names rather than providing a link to biographies or mentioning any other biographical information means that it was difficult to be certain which of the, for example, multiple Jennifer Burgess, MA Phds was the fact checker for the video, but from the most likely candidates I was able to identify, several had academic expertise in religion and culture, but none specifically or primarily in Judaism, nor was I able to identify any who are Jews.
I also found it notable that none of your experts was a rabbi.
Another glaring omission was any of the multiple introductions to Judaism written by actual Jewish experts. Instead, you seem to have chosen to form your basic understanding from Encyclopedia Britannica articles and built from there.
You are clearly aware that My Jewish Learning and other Jewish sources exist, since you used them as supplementary sources. So why use the Britannica articles on Jacob, Abraham, Tanakh, rabbi, synagogue, torah, Numbers, antisemitism, Zionism, talmud and midrash, sabbath, Orthodox Judaism, diaspora, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Beta Israel, when My Jewish Learning has pages on every one of these subjects written by Jewish experts?
If you don’t see the problem, let me ask a related question: For your video on Indigenous religions, did you rely on Western academic sources? Or did you make an effort to learn about Indigenous traditions from Indigenous sources?
(There were aspects of your sources for several other videos which raised red flags for me, but I will leave any deeper analysis to members of those communities.)
If the matter is still unclear, I fear it is because you fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between Christianity and the West, Islam and the Arabic world, and Judaism and the Jews.
(Contrary to what the Britannica told you, there is, in fact, a long and bloody history of antisemitic oppression in the Muslim world. But I suppose it’s easy to ignore this, when one’s video does not acknowledge the existence of the Mizrachi or Maghrebi Jews who lived in the MENA region for a millennium before the first Muslim conquest and endured their rule until they were expelled en mass in the 20th century.)
These three groups are often described as one of your sources does: Three Religions, One God. But this framing is flawed, to say the least.
Firstly, it ignores or outright denies the existence of other Abrahamic religions–contrary to PBS’s claims, the Druze are their own culture and religion, and not Muslims. Second, it serves to exaggerate similarities between the three cultures and obfuscate or downplay differences.
But most importantly, this framework fundamentally misrepresents the relationship between the three.
Your source posits that “Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were all born in the Middle East and are all inextricably linked to one another.”
While not strictly untrue, this framing implies that the three traditions exist more or less as equals, with Judaism happening to be the oldest.
In fact, Christianity and Islam are both fundamentally built on the conquest and colonial appropriation of Jewish history and texts.
Christianity, it is well known, grew out of a Jewish Messianic sect in the late Second Temple era. But often ignored is the fact that the religion was not fully codified until three centuries later–longer than the entire history of the United States.
By this time, the vast majority of Christians and Christian leaders were not Jews. Jewish practices had largely been expunged in favor of influences from the culture of Rome, which had by this point destroyed the Temple and scattered the inhabitants of Judea throughout their empire as slaves.
The Church fathers still taught that Jesus had fulfilled the Jewish messianic prophesies and, when Jews protested, the Church declared that Jews were fundamentally dishonest and could not be trusted to explain their own beliefs.
This claim persisted throughout Christian history, and is not confined to Catholicism. Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism, is also known in Jewish history as the author of “On The Jews and Their Lies.”
The origins of Islam are different in some ways.
Muhammad was not Jewish, nor was his inner circle made up of Jews.
But this, too, was a relationship of conquest. While building their caliphates, Muhammad and his successors slaughtered and enslaved entire communities of Jews, all while claiming that Muhammad's arrival was foretold in Jewish texts.
When Jews insisted that no references to Muhammad and his prophesies could be found in the Tanach, early Muslim leaders insisted that such references must have been lost; perhaps accidentally, but perhaps not. They cautioned their followers against relying on the teachings of Jews who, they claimed, “changed their scripture and distorted it, and wrote the scripture with their own hands and said, 'It is from Allah,' to sell it for a little gain.” (Sahih al-Bikhari 7363, Book 96, Hadith 90)
Once again, the Jews cannot be trusted about their own texts and beliefs.
(None of this is to say that all Christians and Muslims are antisemitic. But the history exists, and just as it is impossible to not be racist in the United States without acknowledging and reckoning with the history of racism, so too is it impossible to not be antisemitic within the cultures Christians and Muslims have built without acknowledging and reckoning with the history of antisemitism.)
This history, you may object, is important, but not relevant. You are not looking at Judaism from a Christian or Muslim perspective, but an academic one.
But the Western world and Western academia were founded by Christians and the children of Christians, and are subject to their prejudices and blind spots.
Contrary to the claims in this video, antisemitism is not and has never been confined to the ignorant and superstitious masses. These beliefs have always been held by rulers and the educated, passed down from teacher to student at the hightest level.
Indeed, Hitler and Stalin both murdered millions of Jews for entirely non-religious reasons.
And your video, Mr. Green, along with your list of experts and sources, betrays the same prejudice underpinning both Christianity and Islam: We must rely on outsiders to explain what Judaism is and what Jews do and believe, because we cannot trust what the Jews have to say about themselves.
Truthfully, Mr. Green, I don’t expect you to read this letter. Even if you do, I’m sure you’ve already explained to yourself why I am being unfair to you and your video.
It is the end of October, 2024, and I have long since lost any trust that self-proclaimed progressives will ever question the assumption that you understand Jews better than we could ever understand ourselves.
But if you are reading this with an open mind, or if anyone else is, my request–-my demand-–is simple.
Stop listening to other people talk about us, and start listening to us.
