You may throw a Godwin point as introduction, it doesn't change the fact that some groups indeed doesn't integrate well into France. And this is despite billions of welfare money given for housing, free education, free access to health, etc.
You mentioned Gypsies, well I read scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago in the towns of my region, until people discovered a tendency of their purses to disappear. Yes, the same exact complains that some French have nowadays. At some point facts are facts, and victimization doesn't work. For the record, a lot of other nationalities blended without issues within two generations (Portugese, Polonese, Vietnamese, etc.)
Everywhere in Europe that welcomed Jews, their neighbors attacked them whenever the Plague came around, blaming them for poisoning wells. To be blunt, if that hadn't happened, the Jews would have probably disappeared into the general European population by the 15th Century. So you are supporting the point that village rumors led to a situation of permanent exclusion for Gypsies.
> To be blunt, if that hadn't happened, the Jews would have probably disappeared into the general European population by the 15th Century
That seems like a bizarre claim... If anything the attacks, discrimination etc. would have encouraged assimilation. Voluntary conversion to Christianity wasn't particularly uncommon either (forced violent conversion also occurred). Even when national governments started expelling their entire Jewish populations staying and getting to keep all of your property ussually was an option. Yet most chose to leave rather than convert.
Yes, converted Jews might have faced discrimination and even violence (this depended a lot on the willingness to abandon your old customs and practices and varied hugely based on time and place, but seemingly became a bigger issue at the very end of the middle ages) but ussually they managed to more or less fully assimilate in a few generations.
I see where you're coming from, because it sounds logical to someone who isn't part of an oppressed minority. But for the past 2500 years, religious Jews have felt threatened by the real possibility that less religious Jews would succumb to the easy life of assimilation that came with Helenization, Romanization, Germanization, etc. There is indeed a core that won't succumb to conversion in exchange for a place in the prevailing society, which is why Jews still exist in societies that have made it the slightest bit difficult for Jews to integrate.
But contrast that with, for instance, Kaifeng[0]. The biggest fear of Jewish believers is that they will encounter a society like America or China which swallows their talents whole and integrates them fully.
Put another way, it is a fear right now in segments of the Jewish community that without antisemitism, Jews would cease to exist. And there is a truth to this borne out by history. In Jewish communities it is practically taken for granted that if we had been treated equally, most of us would have given up our identity ages ago.
Have you considered that perhaps if the idea of integration itself is considered abhorrent by a culture then that culture will very rarely be accepted anywhere?
Or to put it another way: if everywhere one goes smells like feces, maybe one should check their own boots
They want the benefits of being part of the community without being part of the community
I am making the point - and I'm not the first to make it - that the lack of acceptance is the driver. From the outside of an ostracized community, it might make sense that people would choose to quit that community to avoid ostracization. Some few do. But the majority will cling more tightly together as a result of the external pressure.
For an example, take a look at the history of the Cagots in France, who were (are) ethnically identical to other French but due to their psychological treatment and ostracizatìon were forced into tight communities for survival.
This can happen to any arbitrary group of people sufficiently singled out for any reason. A similar case exists in Japan. Then if that group remains together for fear of the abuse they receive, the broader population says "they want to be separate".
Also, your shit on boots metaphor is highly offensive, but I'm answering you as if you aren't a bigot. Sometimes the reason people end up as bigots is that no one treated them with respect and gave them complete answers.
Cagots didn't really have an option of assimilating besides moving to a different region, that's what was special about them. Jews on the other hand ussually would do reasonably fine after converting. Of course it varied a lot by location/period and belonging to a group or a specific community was very important in premodern societies. You'd lose your entire support network and while you might be lucky enough to live in a place were other Christians wouldn't be throwing rocks at you you'll probably never be fully accepted (your grandchildren etc. might).
It's not inversion, but not going for a root cause far enough. You are of course right. Jews were not allowed to pursue most/all "honorable" professions.
Jews were merchants engaging in transactional relationships with farmers, which in an agragian society instills a level of hatred due to being fundamentally opposite to the reciprocal relations that farming neighbours participate in.
Jews were not allowed to own land or engage in trades. What they did have was an ethnic/family presence across national boundaries, which placed a few of them in a unique position to negotiate on behalf of their lords and kings. This led to a condition where a small fraction of Jews became essential to European diplomacy, and subsequently became movers of money. That plus the Christian ban on moneylending and the need for liquidity nonetheless.
Those wealthy "court Jews" largely converted to Christianity and assimilated, leaving their poorer brethren to die in pogroms and the Holocaust, while serving as the proof of blame for Jewish conspiracy at the same time.
I only learned recently about usury and the relationship with Jewish groups and their own history. The interplay between local powers needing money at different periods... It was all very fascinating. Especially how simple moral principles (lending for interests) could ripple so far.
Funnily enough it's not even that hard to 'become aware'. Start with the Wikipedia page on the Second World War, for instance, for a blockbuster entry to the topic.
The single most marginalised group of people in the West since antiquity have been the Jews (with the Romani a close second). Pretty much every European power has evicted, massacred, initiated pogroms, or otherwise persecuted Jews. The trend continues today.
Anyone who says 'anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism' is antisemitic, because that's denying a group of people their homeland or Urheimat. That is classic genocide, by the way.
> The single most marginalised group of people in the West since antiquity have been the Jews
Jewish people have generally been treated abominably for the last 2000 years, but surely he most marginalised groups don't even exist any more, because they were wiped out entirely.
> because that's denying a group of people their homeland
History is full of peoples who left or were kicked out of some original homeland. Jewish people are not special in that regard. My ancestors left Saxony about 1500 years ago to conquer an island, and kicked the inhabitants out to the periphery. That's more recent than the expulsion of the Jews 2000 years ago.
I think Israel should exist in the sense that it already exists so let's favour the status quo. But clearly we've learned that it's a completely stupid way to found new countries. Let's not make more ethnostates in other random parts of the world where people already live. We tried it, it turned out that it makes a mess.
Your last sentence makes no sense. Not every Jew identifies as Israeli and by claiming that Israel represents all Jews on this planet you are taking away their agency.
Think about how stupid what you wrote is in the context of a hypothetical second Jewish country that also claims to represent all Jews.
It is as crackpot as saying Switzerland, Austria and Germany all represent all Germans.
They didn't say that one country represents all Jews, they said Jews have a right to their homeland. You made the point that Germans have 3 homelands, and really I suppose you could add Alsace and the Sudetenland and Gdansk and some bits of Denmark if you were ambitious about creating more living space. Does the existence of any of those take away from the agency of people who identify as German?
Perhaps you mean that Germany and Austria have no right to exist, because Germanic tribes are just recent migrants there in the last 2000 years who came from the Urals or something? But wouldn't that be denying agency and stripping identity from the people who actually live there now?
The Germanic Urheimat is in North Germany / Southern Scandinavia, not the Urals, and separated from proto-Indo-European on the order of 4000 years ago, not 2000 years ago.
> But wouldn't that be denying agency and stripping identity from the people who actually live there now?
Indeed, that's why the founding of Israel was so problematic. Living somewhere 2000 years ago does not trump the rights of the people who lived there for the last 2000+ years. If we are to be consistent, Berlin must be returned to the West Slavs, London to the Celts, and so on... it's nonsense.
In the West we have (at least) started to acknowledge the crimes of colonialism and the various wars of conquest over the centuries. For us it is not existential, to acknowledge that what the British did during the slave trade is not existential. But for Israel it is, so many Israelis have to just pretend that the founding of Israel was perfectly just and fair, when it so obviously was an act of total lunacy when looked at through today's eyes. Please note, I do support the continued existence of Israel, because I favour the status quo, but its founding was an act of monumental stupidity.
That is not what I said; this is a strawman. I said, 'Jewish people deserve sovereignty over their ancestral homeland' (i.e. Zionism). This is completely orthogonal to 'Israel represents all Jewish people'.
That being said...
> It is as crackpot as saying Switzerland, Austria and Germany all represent all Germans.
I don't think that's crackpot at all. What's wrong with an ethnic state representing its people's and diaspora's interests? Why do you think countries today issue their citizens with passports? Why do some countries give even non-citizens a fast-track path to citizenship or at least an indefinite multiple-entry visa, provided they're of a certain ethnicity?
A plurality of countries today are ethnic states, by the way, including essentially every European state. I am very happy to say that the German-speaking part of Switzerland, Austria, and Germany absolutely represent Germans as a whole.
As an addendum: printed on the inside front cover of my A1 German textbook was a map of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Make of that what you will.
So many people would have "rights to their ancestral homeland" then.... History is full of conquest and expulsions and genocide. Arabs and Celts were both driven out of what is now my country, at points over a millennium ago. Shall their descendents be entitled to claim part of it as an ethnostate for themselves? Of course not, for that would be ridiculous.
Having colonial powers create an state in a place where people already lived, and which did not consent to its creation, was a terrible terrible idea that led to tremendous suffering a loss of life over the past 75 years. Acknowledging this is not antisemitic.
a (French) collective of Jews who oppose Zionism on anti-colonial grounds. I don't personally agree with them (my own views are more accurately summed up here:
https://arielche.net/Lydie.html
)
but I do think that it is possible to have a logically coherent worldview that says "Jews are to be respected and treated like any other human, but the state of Israel should not exist".
Personally, I don't believe that, I believe the state of Israel should exists, although I believe that bombing your neighbors is actually a piss-poor approach to national security, and honestly buying off the Palestinians by building them schools and hospitals is a lot cheaper in the long run than killing them with expensive jet fighters, but I don't go around accusing every anti-Zionist of anti-semitism.
I know some anti-Zionists personally, and they're what I'd call humanist, who believe the basic idea that, to quote Jefferson, "all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,... life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
The opposite. Money lenders were non-christians, because Christians were forbidden from charging interest. It is also easier to excommunicate a money lender if they aren't a fellow Christian, so the arrangement was actually to the benefit of Christians.
What you are doing is "affirming the consequent". Most Jews were working normal jobs (obviously excluding the ones they were legally barred) like everyone else.
not all jews though. Most of them were, I believe, middle class workers. You can see that from the meaning of their last names in the places they originate from.
Sorry but I don't even need rumors about gypsies, as a kid some were schooled during months of winter, and they were .. surprisingly creative when it comes to harming you (and I'm being polite here). I know gypsy culture is also bringing beautiful music, and some are hard working people touring the country during the summer, but really you don't need to go far to have evidence of issues still existing to this day.
If you did, then you would know that it is not about race, it is about culture. Gypsy culture is extremely toxic and more akin to gangs than to normal society.
Do you like violent drug gangs? If not, why? Are you racist to them?
I'm saying it was an anonymous story, lacking verifiable detail, spread in a public forum. Whether it's your personal truth or not is irrelevant to the fact that it's a rumor by definition.
Are you scared of definitions? Do you feel like dictionaries are written to gaslight you? Don't blow it out of proportion.
> And this is despite billions of welfare money given for housing, free education, free access to health, etc.
This assumes those things help one integrate. The Unites States notably doesn't have these things to the same degree that countries in Europe do. This means immigrants in America need to work. And work is a strong forcing function for socialization and integration.
> You mentioned Gypsies, well I read scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago in the towns of my region, until people discovered a tendency of their purses to disappear.
America also just have way fewer refugees. Seems like it's around 60k a year, so less than 0.02% of the population per year. Sweden, for example, has had around 26k refugees per year (the last 10 years), which is around 0.2% of its population. At its peak Sweden almost took on a full 1% in one year.
Of course it's easier to integrate a magnitude fewer refugees, and there will be less issues overall.
The illegal migrants coming to the US know they have to work if they wish to eat. Meanwhile, coming to Sweden has been just a ticket to easy life, where you get free housing and money, but will be probably excluded from the job market unless you learn the language and get several years of education.
So, in practice the two phenomena are very different.
It sounds from your comment that you are from Europe, but if you visit the US, you should travel to the south, find some white conservatives, and discuss black people. They will make astonishingly similar points to the ones you brought up, you'll find you and they have a lot in common.
For what it's worth, I'm a nonwhite immigrant living in a Deep South state, with experience living in more liberal coastal metropolitan areas. You will find that whites and blacks are much better integrated with each other in the south, and that racism runs deeper up north. For example, it's widely known among black professional athletes that the most racist city to play in is Boston.
> scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago
Yeah, that doesn't sound legit. Any general sentiment from that time period is lost, and the best your scholar can do is project the lens of the present onto sources from the past. To be fair, all histories are done that way.
That's not true. The best scholars can do is figure out the lens the past sources were using, given the historical record about the time period. Take for example contemporary scholarship and the historical Jesus. It's now understood Jesus was a 2nd Temple apocalyptic Jew. Something nobody is today, since 2nd Temple Judaism and it's sects were replaced by Rabbinic Judaism, and Christianity went in it's own direction.
You mentioned Gypsies, well I read scholarly work stating that they were warmly welcomed 4 centuries ago in the towns of my region, until people discovered a tendency of their purses to disappear. Yes, the same exact complains that some French have nowadays. At some point facts are facts, and victimization doesn't work. For the record, a lot of other nationalities blended without issues within two generations (Portugese, Polonese, Vietnamese, etc.)