WHAT ARE THE DANGERS OF BEING JEWISH?

By Shlomoh Sherman
December 27, 2018


This essay was first published on QUORA in response to the question, WHAT ARE THE DANGERS OF BEING JEWISH? - https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-dangers-of-being-Jewish/answer/Shlomoh-Sherman?ch=1&share=4f6789f6&srid=hIb0&fbclid=IwAR3k0a2U_WWaG8uWI4JDV898ppX_xDEF2dF5JeuilKq6ijE5bAJEo59rp2Q

What are the dangers of being Jewish? answered by Shlomoh Sherman on QUORA

Answered 1:50pm December 27, 2018

Irv Weinberg got it right when he says that if you are different in any way from a larger majority, you are in danger of being feared, hated, persecuted, attacked and annihilated, which is what the Nazis attempted during the 1940s. Irv actually said “when you stay separate that is a danger’ but I paraphrased what he meant.

I have to laugh when I hear people say that being gay is a choice. Oh, so people actually join a lifestyle which puts them in danger of life and limb not to mention ostracisation in many cases. Don´t make me laugh more.

The only people that I can see as putting themselves in that kind of negative situation are people who chose to become Jewish.

History has shown us that as a disadvantaged minority, Jews have suffered mass expulsions, murders, inquisitions, and in the recent past, social exclusion. But as we have seen during the last 2 years, Jews are still the object of hateful violence. Social and financial success and assimilation and acculturation have not saved Jews from persecution, even in the 21st century.

America was always seen by Jews, and others, as being a place where all minorities are safe. But in the past few decades, we see safety eroding. Laws may have been enacted which prosecute so-called “hate crimes’ but these have not stopped visceral antipathy on the part of so-called white identity groups. Synagogues and churches and mosques are still attacked. Cemeteries are still desecrated. People are still being called angry names.

Orthodox Jews have a saying [in Hebrew]: SINA MISINAI. An idiomatic explanation is this. Since the Jewish People are to live by a set of standards expounded by God and Moses at Mount Sinai, the TORAH, which sets them apart from others religiously and socially, that the Sinai event generated hostile reactions on the part of nonJews. Israelites were hated in the past, not because they were Israelites but because they were enemies who went to war with Edomites, Ammonites, Moabites, Assyrians, and Babylonians. But with the coming of the Greek and Roman Era, Jews were hated and believed to be unfriendly, arrogant and chauvinistic just because they were TORAH observant Jews. And this was true even though during the days of the Roman Empire, Jews were much more engaged with gentiles, socially and in business than later during the Middle Ages.

Later, as Christianity and Islam evolved out of Jewish religious ideas, adherents of these religions saw Jews as obstinant infidels and dangerous religious competitors for converts. Hence, Jews were first socially suppressed by the Christian and Muslim Empires and later socially, financially and physically under attack by the successors of these Empires, even today.

The creation of the State of Israel, which was to have given safety to Jews, had the opposite effect. It spread antisemitism to areas of the world which had no Jewish populations and had no experience of Jews.

The answer to the question, What are the dangers of being Jewish?, is BEING JEWISH.


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