My father's lawyer is Jewish (here we go with the stereotypes). Alas, it's true. Great guy. He and my dad, who hails from the rustic region of Calabria, always got along great. A few years back he went to Rome to trace back the Eternal City's Jewish roots.
He may have to pack his bags and head to Calabria and Sicily now.
Lts of Jewish stereotypes are accurate, and for mnay reasons.
ReplyDeleteIf you go way back, banking was illegal in Europe. Lending at interest is "usury," a sin to Christians. The Knight's Templar began banking, lent to the Catholic Church so they could build up Rome, caused the Pope to go into debt, and then *shock* the Knights Templar were slaughtered as heretics. After that, the only people in Europe who were not forbidden to lend money were Jews, since they didn't have to follow Christian laws.
Add to this the stigma of being Jewish and a lack of career opportunities open to you if you were Jewish, and banking became a major part of Jewish culture.
Those who weren't good at banking often went into entertainment: singing, dancing, juggling, anything having to the with the circus. Because these professions did not discriminate (Jews and Roma often bonded over the persecution they shared at the hands of Christians), Jews tended also to flock to this profession.
Leap forward to late 19th and early 20th century Europe, and the bigotry turned into outright genocide (and not just during the Holocaust). Those who escaped and survived were usually those who could pay bribes or buy a ticket to America. These would have been the successful Jews. The middle and lower class Jewry were largely obliterated.
Today, you have the ancestors of the richest, smartest, and/or strongest Jews. In America, the mantra became "grow up to be a doctor or lawyer," so they did. Some stayed in the traditional fields (banking and entertainment) but many went into the much less maligned fields of medicine and law.
I still have no explanation for gefilte fish.
That's pretty much how I understood it.
ReplyDeleteIt's ironic that we stereotype and scapegoate Jews thanks to our own discrimination towards them over the centuries.
Of the three "great religions" I don't think there's much doubt as to which was most persectuted. Pogroms were a pretty standard thing.
It seems like it's always been Islam v. Christianity with the Jews in the middle. Although a creative conspiracy theorist will claim Jews are the ones who played them off each other for profit.
I love how the Jews are simultaneously blamed for capitalism and communism.
great religions
ReplyDeleteI shuddered there for a second. Sorry. I know you mean the three Abrahamic religions, but still. There's a handful of religions with way more more people in it than Judaism, so it doesn't really belong on a list of largest religions. Technically, the third on the list of most common answers to the question of religion is "none," but if you just go by actual religions, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism have more than Judaism. In fact, even if you counted every Jew who died in the Holocaust and assumed they had a half dozen kids, Judaism wouldn't even break the top 5.
Of course, I hate lists like this because they are so deceptive. It's not like Shi'ites, Sunnis and Sufi Muslims all get along, and we know there's more divisions in Christianity than there are stars in the sky (okay... well, not that many, but close). Even Judaism is splintered. I guess that kind of talk might wreck our simplified view of the world, eh?
Jews might have invented the Middle Man, thanks to their geographic position on the silk road, and Marx was technicallly Jewish (though he was actually an anti-semitic atheist). Maybe they should get credit for inventing both... sounds like a good Mel Gibson movie idea, anyway.
Yeah, it's a technicality. Mind you, Judaism spawned the top two religions in size.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, they have internal splinter groups.