The Jews of Europe--a Brief Partial History of their Persecution and Survival

   

The Jews of Europe--a Brief Partial History of their Persecution and Survival

Very few of the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews of Andalusia in southern Spain would have survived the 1400s, after the expulsion from there of the Muslim Moors (during whose rule the Jews had flourished), without the main refuge they found, across the Mediterranean, in the Muslim-majority countries of North Africa and West Asia. 

 
A few of these Sephardim, also escaping by sea, found refuge instead in other places, including Protestant countries such as the Netherlands and England, where they congregated in cities like Amsterdam and London, contributing to the growth of business and finance there.
 
Very few of the mainly Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, who had settled in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe, would have survived the 1930s and 1940s in Europe had it not been for those same refuges in the Muslim majority countries across the Mediterranean (that had not been occupied by the German and Italian militaries) plus the refuge provided by the USSR--and the eventual liberation of the survivors in Eastern and Central Europe by the Soviet Red Army.
 
Some of the Ashkenazim of Central and SE Europe reached the Mediterranean ports of SE Europe via Yugoslavia and Greece, aided by the multiethnic, communist-led guerillas, based mainly in the Balkan mountains, fighting the German occupation.

This occurred even as the Croatian fascists in Yugoslavia were killing Serbs and were also handing over Jews to the Germans, much as the collaborating governments and groups had done in France and elsewhere in Europe. 

 

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We should note that the Anglo countries had shut their doors to all but a few select Jews during the Shoah or Holocaust that lasted from the 1930s to the end, in 1945, of WWII in Europe.  During this, millions of Jews were killed, along with Gypsies and others, while Slav prisoners were being worked to death.
 
Close to 3 million people were killed, during WWII, in the USSR alone, a number close to those killed in China.
 
However, had it not been for the existence of the USSR, in which they were protected, even more Jews would have been killed by the Nazis and their many collaborating governments and groups. 
 
It was the Soviet Red Army that fought the long, hard land war in Europe that eventually liberated all of Eastern Europe, including especially its surviving Jews, Gypsies, and other minority groups, took Berlin and drove deep into the rest of Germany, where they waited for their Anglo allies to arrive in the last stages of WWII in Europe. 
 
The main contribution of those allies to the fight against the Axis powers in Europe had been the aerial war, waged mainly out of Britain, against the Axis powers in Europe.
 
In sum, had it not been for the Arab, Turkish, and other Muslims, starting in the 1400s, and for the communists and socialists of Eastern and Southeastern Europe in the 1930s and 1950s, there would have been even fewer European Jews left.

 

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The history of mutual animosity, over many centuries, between Jews and at least European Christians, led sadly by the Catholic Church, is well known, as are the atrocities carried out by the European Christian crusaders against Jews and Muslims in Palestine and the rest of the Levant.
 
Shamefully, some Jews, both secular and religious, have been intent, over my lifetime, starting earlier, on doing to the natives of Palestine and adjacent areas what the Romans did to many of the Jews there long ago and what the Catholic Church in medieval times and the Nazis and others, in the 1930s and 1940s, did to the Jews of Europe—with the history of the pogroms in Europe bridging these two great expulsions and massacres of the Jews in that continent. 

I cannot do justice to the sad history of those pogroms in this brief outline.
 
The Jewish Zionists have been strongly supported in this settler colonial venture in Palestine by their Christian Zionist allies, beginning in Britain and later and currently in the USA. These believe that the Jews of Europe and elsewhere must be congregated in Palestine for Jesus to come there and convert the Jews to Christianity, with those resistant to this being cast into Hell.  

A strong "anti-semitic" (meaning anti-Jewish) prejudice has been present within parts of the Christian Zionist movement from its start in Britain and still remains strong among some of its members in the USA.  

One should note that the terms "semite" and "semitic" make sense, much like the term "Indo-European" only as a grouping of languages. Hebrew, along with Aramaic, Arabic, Amharic, Ge'ez, and various other languages, past and present, of Ethiopia, West Asia, and adjacent areas belongs to the Semitic family of languages. The speakers of all of these languages, just like the speakers of English, Hindi-Urdu, and Malay, are typically of many mixed genetic and cultural ancestries.

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Zionism was strongly resisted among Jews themselves, especially the religious Jews, until the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe. Sadly, some religious Jews have become some of Zionism's most extreme adherents. Others, along with many secular Jews in the USA, Europe, and elsewhere, remain strongly opposed to the creation and extension of a settler-colonial, apartheid Jewish state in Palestine and adjacent areas, at the increasingly lethal expense of the natives there, and to the detriment of Jews everywhere.

This occurred to the Jews in the countries of North Africa and West Asia, who had been living there for centuries and even millennia, speaking the local languages, who began facing resentment and violence after the Naqba or Palestinian Catastrophe in 1948, during which most of the natives of Palestine were expelled, being faced with widespread, organized, terrorist violence carried out by the well armed and organized Zionist militias there. 

The movement of many of these "Mizrahi" Jews from their ancestral lands to what had suddenly become Israel, and what they faced when they got there, has been chronicled by Israeli historians such as Avi Shlaim, who was born in Iraq but had to move with his family to Israel as a young boy.
 
Many of the natives of Palestine, be they Christian, Muslim, Samaritan Judaic, or other, might in fact be the closest descendants of the inhabitants of Palestine in ancient times, including the Jews who were not expelled later by the Romans, soon after the time of Jesus of Nazareth. They may also be still carrying the genes of the Canaanites and others who were there even earlier, along with those of the Arabs and others who arrived there later.
 
2025 December 15, Mon.
Berkeley, California
 
Note: This began as a reply to a nasty comment on Facebook by Jarod Keren. 

Varieties of Ignorance--and More

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Varieties of Ignorance--and More

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I) Varieties of Ignorance

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II) Deception and Engineered Ignorance 

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III) Ignorance of Ignorance

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I) Varieties of Ignorance

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Firstly, there is circumstantial ignorance. This is simply not knowing about something, from not having had access to that knowledge--for various reasons, including not having the chance or means or being denied acccess. We are all ignorant in this way. 

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Secondly, there is preoccupied ignorance--not having the time to know about something. 

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Thirdly, there is lazy, apathetic or disinterested ignorance--not bothering to know about something or not having the interest or inclination to know. 

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We are all also ignorant in this second way and this third way, to certain extents.

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Fourthly, there is willful ignorance. This is actively not wanting to know about something. Here too, all of us are ignorant to various degrees, some far more than others.

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Fifthly, there is zealot or proseletyzing ignorance. In this, we are not content with not knowing about something. We are determined that others should not know about that thing either, and do our best to make this so.

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IIA) Deception

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It is of course also possible to know about something--even be an expert about it--but not want others to know about it. 

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If we go beyond simply not wanting others to know the truth about something to trying to prevent them from learning it, what we are doing is hiding or obscuring the truth. 

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This can be done in several ways and with various degrees of effort and efficacy.

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IIB) Engineered Ignorance

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I had distinguished between the following types of ignorance, from which we all suffer (or benefit):

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1) circumstantial ignorance;

2) preoccupied ignorance;

3) lazy, apathetic or disinterested ignorance;

4) willful ignorance.

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Clearly these divisions are somewhat arbitrary. For example, the second type of ignorance may be seen as a special case of the first, while the fourth kind may be considered an extreme case of the third.

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I had also mentioned  a fifth kind of ignorance:

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5) zealot or proseletyzing ignorance.

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This is a rather harmful form of ignorance, from which most of us are hopefully free. Again, it may perhaps be considered a peculiar extension or outgrowth of the fourth kind. 

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I had then noted that we may also want others to remain ignorant about what we ourselves know. 

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I think we have all experienced this desire and acted on it--for example by lying or keeping quiet about some childhood (or adult) misdeed or fumble made by ourselves or someone we wanted to protect--or even something we or someone else did that might be innocuous or even "correct" in our eyes, but that might still incur the wrath of a parent, teacher, boss, spouse or other person(s). 

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But this kind of hiding and deception is not just a personal or local affair. It is also carried out on much wider scales. This happens, at various levels, almost everywhere. And this appears to have been going on for a very long time, with no end in sight.

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So it seems to me that there is perhaps a sixth form of ignorance:

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6) engineered or designed ignorance.

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Clearly, this is a special (but very important and distinct) variety of the first kind: circumstantial ignorance. In this special case, the circumstances for our ignorance have been engineered. They have arisen by design--that of some other folk. Or it could also be that we are the ones who have engineered the ignorance of some others.

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Many of us (in my generation and earlier) did not know how babies are made until we reached a certain age. This was probably by design. Our parents, other elders, teachers and others were willing to teach us some things, but avoided some others, considering us to be too young to learn about those "forbidden topics". 

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This may well have been to our benefit. We were perhaps being "protected" in a sense. Or it could simply have been that our parents, for instance, felt embarassed about discussing these things with us--just as most of us probably felt or still feel, about discussing them with our late or surviving parents, after we had eaten of that forbidden apple.

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But other cultures may not approach this matter in this way, and our cultures may also have shifted since then.

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In school, we learned many good things, quite a few of which we found useful later, beginning with the three R's. 

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But we never learned about other things that could well be equally or far more vital--such as basic personal finance or law.

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Was this an example of "engineered ignorance"? Were we kept in the dark about these two (and other basic survival) topics by design--not necessarily benevolent?

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I am not sure.

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III) Ignorance of Ignorance 

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This brings me to another, related topic: the awareness of ignorance.

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We may be ignorant about something, and aware that we are ignorant. Or we may be blissfully or harmfully unaware--ignorant--of our ignorance.

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The well known war criminal and conversational poet, Donald Rumsfeld, had once expressed this particular kind of awareness and lack of awareness in a nutshell.  

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I paraphrase: 

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"First, there are the knowns. Then there are the known unknowns. And then there are the unknown unknowns."

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2019, June 21

Brooklyn, New York

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