This question of whether today's Jews are the same as ancient Jews or demonstrably descended from Abraham is an especially weird vector of attack designed, I assume, to hit specific points in certain theologies. But why would evangelicals care about the results of DNA tests?
@slooperbia50068 Do you remember how I raised it? I would guess in the context of challenging Gans's ahistorical understanding of Jews and Judaism. But did I ever question the continuity through Jewish history?
@slooperbia50068 Continuity of Jewish community and traditions.
@slooperbia50068 For Gans, what is the difference between Jews of 1000BC, 500 BC, 100AD, 600AD, 1500 AD, etc.--not to mention Iraqi Jews vs. German Jews vs. Sephardic Jews, etc. Would not all this be mere irrelevant details?
@slooperbia50068 No, I mean targeting American Christians, especially evangelicals, supportive of Israel.
@slooperbia50068 Well, that was to be expected.
@slooperbia50068 I'll put it this way: Gans is capable of sentences like "Jews believe...," "all Jews know...," "Judaism is...," and I'm not. Even more, these are by far his preferred sentence type.
@slooperbia50068 To speaking of Jewish texts, Jewish rituals, history, etc. "Jews discovered monotheism," for Gans. This is ahistorical. We can trace, through Jewish texts and practices, novel relations between the divine and humans, for which "monotheism" is a sloppy, popularizing label.
@slooperbia50068 For me this all comes back to the legal system--that is *the* institution specifically designed to arrest mimetic contagion. It may be that the juridical requires renovation and innovation.
@slooperbia50068 Extensive systems of self and reciprocal reference.
@slooperbia50068 Transgeneration transmission of traditions means continuity and "sameness" even while those traditions are remade. The same texts, studied in at least similar ways, for acouple of thousand years. It was never a problem for Jews from different ethnicities and traditions to marry,
@slooperbia50068 engage in business, study each others' legal and torah commentaries, etc. It's just that there's not one big Jew who is the real Jew behind all the different Jewish communities.
@slooperbia50068 The "book" itself is just the ongoing record kept of the covenant--as long as that's continually renewed there is enough sameness.
@slooperbia50068 I don't understand either but maybe it doesn't need to be understood. It can just be left to be.