All pay heed! The Lord, the Lord Jehovah, has given unto you these fifteen *tablet crashes* Oy.... Ten...Ten Commadments for all to obey! (Blue) Every culture, religion, and empire in history seems to have one glaring misconception that it just can't shake. Much like final exams and the common cold, it's an annoying and largely unavoidable fact of life. In the case of Judaism, the question isn't what's misunderstood, but rather what ISN'T misunderstood. Today we'll talk about Jewish history. That is, the history of both the Jewish religion and of the Hebrew people. But first, I need some disclaimers. And by some, I mean a LOT. Because like half of this video is gonna be disclaimers. Jewish history is another one of those histories that are hard to tell start to finish, because since we're talking about a people, not a state or an empire, everything is less solidly delineated, and more spread out. And we can't make any sweeping generalizations like "Oh yes and this is the period when they were fighting THESE people" "for likely asinine reasons. And of course OVER HERE," "there's the the *mumbles* period, when such and such was going on" "all throughout the land." No, we can't - we can't do that. We can't say those kinds of things. Judaism, as we'll see, isn't anywhere NEAR that simple. Much like any story of a people with a let's say, less that consistently habitable homeland, Jews, the Romani, you name it, their history gets pretty much subsumed into whatever larger power they're living under. And when big Jewish-specific events DO happen, they're usually pretty localized. You'll see my point as we go on, so, for real this time, let's get to it. So, breezing past all of that creation of the world stuff and avoiding the inevitable firestorm in the comment section, we wind up in 1000 B.C. with King David. Yes, actually yes, THAT David is the one we're talking about. According to the Jewish tradition, he set about uniting the 12 tribes of what later became known as Judea and Israel. Yay! He's like the guy who combined peanut butter and jelly...but in king form...but with 12 of them? Anyway! After him, his son Solomon builds the first big temple in Jerusalem, which survives for a good 400 odd years. And the temple society in this period was very specifically organized. There were several key pillars that kept everything running. For example: prophets, kings, the high court, the priests, and so on that all fit a specific purpose. So, say the prophets' job was to preach the will of God, and the king's job was then to make sure that the prophet's word became the law of the land. And this is great. Things go well, fun times are had, and then in 586 the Babylonians pull a Godzilla and wreck Jerusalem and the temple and then they pull a Patrick Star and (Patrick Star) "Push it somewhere else!" (Blue) "It" being the Jews, and "somewhere else" being mostly Babylon. This goes on for a brisk 70 years until the Achaemenid Persian emperor Cyrus the Great conquers Babylon and lets the Jews all go free, earning him the title of "messiah." Most notably the only non-Jew ever to be granted that title. That's play of the game right there. (Overwatch-esque announcer voice) "Play of the Game" [music] (Blue) Then after that, the Persians helped the Jews build a second temple in 516 because they're just that classy. In less classy Mediterranean news, the Persian Empire was later yoinked by Alexander the...gonna say, 6/10? Like, not GREAT, great, but PRETTY good, you know? Anyway, HE took over the Persian Empire, and his successors had a REALLY hot and cold relationship with the Jews One minute, they're compiling Greek translations of the Bible, the next, they're pillaging their towns. It's a give and take. Well, okay, fine. MOSTLY take. An example of the taking end of this that you're probably familiar with happened the 160s BC. The Greek Seleucid Empire had been slowly but surely injecting Greekness into the local cultures and Judaism was having an identity crisis as a result. In an effort to proverbially tighten the proverbial vice on traditional Judaism, the Emperor Antiochus IV outlawed non-Hellenic Judaism which....didn't go over especially well. In fact, it went over terribly, and it led to a revolt by the Maccabees known for their notoriously poor lamp oil supply, and their subsequently fortuitous lamp longevity. It's uh...Hanukkah. I'm, I'm talking about Hanukkah right now. The successful revolt against Greek dominion led to a semi-fruitful century of autonomous Jewish rule in basically Israel, which later ended in Roman occupation. This was more or less fine until it wasn't, as Roman eastward expansion resulted in increasingly harsh treatment of the Jews. Which seems to be something of a running theme at this point, and will admittedly continue to be so for the next 2000 years. In 70 AD they tried going 2 for 2 on revolts but wound up going 2 for 2 on getting their temple destroyed instead. So, in the aftermath of the Roman siege, and a non-negligible amount of murder, things weren't really looking up, as, to be honest, they generally tend not to in those situations. And it's about at this point that Jewish history enters its second phase, which is generally called the Diaspora. In other words, Jews living largely outside of Israel. Many Jews who weren't slaughtered were sold into slavery or otherwise relocated all around the Roman Empire. Which partially explains why there was such a broad distribution of Jews across Europe throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. There's also a sizeable migration eastward, but we'll talk about that in a bit. Basically, since Rome, and then leading up to the State of Israel became a thing in 1948, the Jews have been in pretty much a perpetual worldwide exile. That is ROUGH. Not only because you're disconnected from your homeland, but the people whose lands you ARE living in are liable to treat you like parasites. Which, historically, happened a LOT. Since the great de-templeing, Jews have been systematically oppressed on the basis that, "Well, this here's MY land, why should I share it with them? Why don't they just go back to where they're from?" "Because if they insist on staying with us, then we have every right to push them to the periphery and treat them like trash." And this is exactly what happened. Jewish ghettos were a thing long before the 20th century. Hell, Venice has literally had a place called Jew Island for CENTURIES. Which, speaking of, go look at Red's take on the Merchant of Venice for more on that. The "quieter" bouts of Jewish oppression generally looked looked a lot like this. Jews could go more or less where ever so long as they lived in the one corner of any given town where only the Jews lived. And because, at least in the case of Europe it was largely a Christian world, they generally had much fewer rights. This was all (buzzer) well and (buzzer) good until every so often the people in charge decide that they really don't like the Jews and go about giving them the boot. The most famous and protracted instance of this would be the Reconquista and subsequent Spanish Inquisition. Which, contrary to what Monty Python would have you believe, you really should come to expect on this channel by now. But, we're not there yet. In fact, we actually need back up a thousand years first, for MORE CONTEXT! Yay! Context is great, kids. The second major locus of Jewish population after the first one fell through was Babylon. In the centuries immediately after the Babylonian exile and especially following the Great Ganking of the Second Temple, a lot of Jews were kicking it in Babylon. They did a lot of codifying in the Middle Ages and had moved towards a civil structure not unlike the one in the olden days. This situation, good as it was, generally improved under Islamic rule, where Jews were afforded positions of economic and political prestige, and were free to practice their religion however they wanted. For the most part, the Islamic empires were pretty good about tolerance, so long as they were "people of the book," so to speak, and not pagans. This worked out well, because Judaism, unlike Medieval Christianity, had no problem being just one religion in the mix. This cultural blossoming reached its height in Medieval Muslim Spain, where Jewish living experienced a rare and much-deserved point of peace, during which culture and literature boomed. The famous figure that I'll talk about in a later podcast is my man Moses Maimonides. But for now, suffice to say that he is AWESOME. This neighborly relationship with the Muslims worked out great until the moment that it...um...well, didn't. See, when the Crusades started off and the Christians had their two century spanning Deus Vult FanFest, they saw how well the Jews and Muslims were getting along and sometimes treated the Jews as just as much an enemy as they did the Muslims, with some very slight exceptions. Synagogues were burned, people were slaughtered, all the stuff you've come to expect at this point from the Crusades and from the general depressing trend of Jewish history overall. The worst of it came during the Siege of Jerusalem in 1099, when basically the entire city was slaughtered and burned to the ground. Now that one wasn't BECAUSE they were Jewish, but murdering an entire municipality is you know, kind of a big deal. Following that, Jews were subject to routine massacres by various European powers. So, uh, not fun. That's what not fun is. By contrast, the more peaceful Europeans essentially saw Jews as little more than a convenient loophole by which to conduct moneylending, since Christianity prohibited the lending of money with interest, but Judaism didn't. There also was nothing stopping Christians from restricting Jews from owning property, farming, or otherwise eking out any other lifestyle but moneylending. Then, whenever they made too much money for the king's liking, he simply took it for himself and threw them out of the kingdom. Or made up some new law saying that Christians didn't need to pay debts owed to Jews. Basically, when Jews had created enough money by way of interest, the government would exercise their power to scoop it all up. And yes, this is where the stereotype of the money-hungry Jew originated. Which, you may note, is, considering the context, STAGGERINGLY unfair. To make a habit of legally pigeon-holing Jews into jobs that only involve handling money and to make a corresponding habit of TAKING all of their money doesn't make Jews obsessed with money. It just makes the person who wrote all of those laws an ass. The less pleasant Europeans, in this case, the Spanish, spend several shall we say, inquisitive centuries systematically oppressing and in some cases burning Jews and Muslims. Because as we've established on this channel, at strategic points in history Christianity tends to up and decide that it hates sharing the sandbox with ANYBODY. I mean, Islam, to be fair, was prone to doing some of the same things, but they're not the ones serially squashing Judaism right now so we're not talking about it. This all continued on in various forms in the following centuries up until the modern day, when, after genocide #1, 2, 3, 4, at LEAST 5, the Jews FINALLY have the State of Israel to call their home again. ...Kind of. That's it's own situation. Okay, so now that we have all of that, I'm going to take a step back from the history itself, and attempt to explain why I PERSONALLY think it is that Judaism and the Hebrew people evolved the way they did. This is by no means the final word on the matter, because, as we'll see, discussion and debate is CENTRAL to Judaism and there are no easy answers to ANYTHING in history. This is MY opinion that follows. It IS informed by the testimony of a few religious experts, but it's filtered by my own views on cause and effect and how history works in general. So it's ONE explanation that I happen to quite like amidst MULTIPLE viable options. Basically, take everything I say in the second have of this video with one metric Carthage of salt, because I very well could be wrong, and even still, it's quite impossible to have the final word on ANYTHING in ten minutes. But, since I feel like it's important to at least try to put a why to the what, I'll do my best to discuss it anyways and provide you with a model that you might not have considered before. I don't wanna change your mind, I just wanna get you thinking. So, with the history handled. Let's try to make sense of what Judaism really IS. And, to do that, I'm first going to talk about the Bible, specifically my take on WHAT it is and why I think that we even HAVE it. Now, the Hebrew Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament and Jews call the Tanakh or the written Torah, has three parts. One, the Pentateuch, two, the Navi'im, and finally three, the Ketuvim. When you take the Hebrew letters together because remember, Hebrew has no vowels, and make it an acronym, you get TNK, or Tanakh, which is the Hebrew word for Bible. Which, fun fact, is only called the Bible because of the Greek word biblion, which means book But it is switchable with the other Greek word for book which is bublion. I'm not kidding. We were THIS close to calling it "the Buble" If I had a time machine, there is no question that that would be the first thing on my list to fix. Okay, so that's the short of what the Tanakh slash Bible is, but why might it exist? It seems like a weird and somewhat pointless question to ask, since most major Western religions have some kind of big book where they write down all the rules, but that's actually the cool part here. Some scholars believe that for the longest time, the Hebrew people were an ETHNICITY first and foremost. A culture, really. And the religion that we call Judaism was just one part of that broader culture. As I explained earlier, the Hebrews have a full temple society with an ethnic identity and everything, but that all fell down during the destruction of the first temple in 586 BC by the Babylonians. And then insult was added to injury in 70 AD by the Romans. Since the world order that had been keeping the Hebrews going for millennia had briefly gone poof, and the rabbis sort of knew that they needed a replacement in case it happened again, which, spoiler alert, it did, they got to work codifying generations of culture into one book before all that infrastructure and tradition abruptly metamorphosed into jam. This, to me, is one reason why we have the Tanakh. Broadly speaking, it's a preservation of centuries of cultural identity that otherwise might have been completely lost. It's like the Hebrews wrote their own ethnography and then used it as a religious creed. And given just this ONE book, ONE BOOK, is tasked with keeping all of Hebrew society together and functioning, I would say it's been doing a damn good job. *Family Feud theme* (Blue) All righty now, we have surveyed 100 theologists. Top 5 answers are on the board. And the question is: Considering the possibility that the Bible exists as a substitute for a traditional cultural order, how might we best treat the literary content of the Bible itself? And the survey says: ALLEGORY! *clears throat* Um, uh, yes, that's right. So, most rabbis you'll talk to will tell you that the Bible works best as a loose allegory. And, I mean, thinking about it, if the goal in codifying generations of tradition is to preserve a social order, a detailed account of the movements behind the creation of the universe isn't the most important thing to include. UNLESS it's there to inform how people should be living their day to day lives. For instance, if you ask a Christian about the Garden of Eden story, they'll most likely tell you it's about sin. But then if you ask a Jew, they'll most likely tell you that it's about coping with exile, a theme that a LOT of Jews throughout history probably identify pretty strongly with. Especially the ones who lived right after the temple got ganked, you know? Also, if you ask a Christian about the Bible itself, they're likely to tell you that it's more or less written in one voice, so to speak. Most Jews, however, will tell you that the Bible demonstrates several DIFFERENT voices. Also, if you look at the specific details of the creation story itself, God isn't just making THINGS. He's going step by step to create a harmonic order to the world. Separating light from dark, land from water, ground from sky, day from night. But WHY is order so important? Why create that FIRST? Well, if you ask me, if you're part of a recently de-templed community, in search of a way to start again, creating order should probably be pretty high on your list. The very beginning of the Torah is all about starting fresh, and if you ask me, that's NOT an accident. I believe that like all great stories, the Bible was created to serve a specific purpose and really SAY something. And I think that purpose of providing life guidance is best served when it's read allegorically. Now, sidenote: With respect to my claim in my previous video about Ancient Egypt, that the historical evidence for Exodus doesn't really hold up, this allegorical approach solves a lot of the problems that arise from that too. Do I think that everything happened exactly as the Bible described? No, of course not. But there are plenty of ways in which a smaller population at perhaps a different point in time could have gone through the rough motions of Exodus, which then later inspired what became the story we know. Some people say it's the Hyskos, other people say other things, I don't claim facts either way. And that's why I think reading it as an allegory is important. That way, what matters most isn't what actually did or didn't happen, it's about how you interpret it in relation to living a good and just life. And what that story means to YOU. I obviously don't have any way of knowing what Exodus REALLY meant to the early Jews, but I DO think the story was crafted the way it was, and included in the Bible for a specific reason. Regardless of is factual grounding, Exodus has a deep emotional relevance to the Jewish people, and I think it's best to treat it more as a story than a history to respect that. Again, that's my OPINION, but I do hope you consider it. So the Torah has the written part, but it also has oral parts, and they're called the Talmud and the midrash. First, there's the Talmud, which is THE authoritative source for Jewish law. The Talmud is where you find ALL the rules, most of which come from the Mishnah, a law code written down in 200 AD. It's in the centuries following the Roman conflicts that a LOT of Talmudic law gets codified. Because remember, books are the next best thing to a functioning temple society, And the Jewish people were, at this point, rapidly running out of temples. So it makes sense to me that there was some kind of added vigor to the codification efforts post-Rome. The rest of the Talmud comes from the Gemara, which is commentary on the Mishnah. And, speaking of commentary, the second big component of the Oral Torah is the midrash, which is commentary and analysis on the Tanakh in both legal and non-legal contexts. It's a lot of commentary, I know. But that emphasis on ACTIVE participation in the texts lasts all the way through the modern day, where Jews of ALL walks of life actively discuss and debate the meaning of the Torah. You might remember in the Christianity video, I briefly touched on how debating the meaning of the Torah is surprisingly central to Judaism, in contrast to the word is final attitude found in some other religions. That's a lot of terms, I know, I know, it's a lot to take in. But what matters most is that you have an appreciation for how damn complex Judaism is. If Christianity can be more or less described as faith in Jesus, Judaism can be described as law. And law is complicated, so Judaism is complicated. And in case you haven't noticed from me talking for the past, what 20 minutes? Laws are DAMN IMPORTANT. I mean, what did Moses receive from God when he was way up there on the mountain? Rules. LAWS. Judaism, at the most fundamental level, is about laws and how to live. That's why nowadays you find what might seem like a surprising number of very CULTURALLY devout Jews who follow all of the traditions, but don't believe for a second that there's a God. To many Jews, the TRADITION and the LAW is far more important than the FAITH. For almost any other modern religion, that sounds like a brain-melting contradiction. But HALF of American Jews have doubts about God, compared to 10-15% for other religious groups in America. This is part of why I adamantly believe that Judaism is very much an ETHNIC identity first and and a religious one second. If religion, plain and simple was the only thing going on here, I'd see no explanation for this whatsoever. Bottom line here is that I have zero chance of saying all of the stuff that I would like to in this video, so I will take it as a BIG win if I've at least conveyed how tricky to fully understand and uniquely unusual this all is. So, yeah. Jewish history is hard to chronicle because it's so much more a history of a PEOPLE than of a STATE like Rome or even of multiple states in the case of Christianity or Islam. Hopefully, now you see why the stories of Exodus and Genesis, these stories of exile and of oppression, starting new after a crisis again and again, for CENTURIES, and simply wanting to lead fulfilling, lawful lives are not just central to Jewish FAITH, but Jewish HERITAGE. You know, now that I think about it, I wonder if the answer to all of this was written on that third tablet. These 15 *tablet crashes* Well, crap. And finally, as an ending piece for this video, there's a joke that I quite enjoy telling. So there are four rabbis. There's one, whose name we'll say is Jacob because sure, why not, whatever. And the other three, their names, their names don't matter. They're getting into an argument over the meaning of a passage in the, in the Bible. And Jacob says that he thinks it means this, but his three other friends say "No, oh, come on, don't be silly, it means THIS." So Jacob goes up to, you know, the mountaintop or whatever and says "Oh God if I am correct about, you know, your word, please send me a sign!" And then, you know, a couple of minutes later some storm clouds gather, and rain a little bit, and then they blow away. The other rabbis say "Pbbt, nothing. That's no sign. Yeah, right, like God's on YOUR side on this issue." And then Jacob goes back to the mountain again the next day and says, "Oh God, if I'm correct about your will and your word, please send me a BIGGER sign." And then storm clouds gather much more furiously this time, and then a lightning bolt strikes the ground in front of the three rabbis. And they say "Meh, no, we don't buy it." So, Jacob's losing his patience here a little bit and the very next day he goes up to the top of the mountain and he says "Oh God, if I am correct - " And then a BOOMING voice echoes out from the heavens "HE'S. RIGHT!" So the other three rabbis look over at Jacob, and then they say "Okay, so what? Now it's three against two."
