Potemkin wrote:Okay, so you’ve finally accepted that the Romans started the whole thing.
But they didn't. You've can't deny it the Jews sure are good at selling the big lie.Look I'm no expert on Jewish history, but I know there were huge diaspora communities long before Bar Kokhba. As I say I'm not an expert so I can't say anything definitive but the Jews of Palestine may well have been a minority of the Jews in the world, before Herod's ass so much as touched the Judean throne. Judaism as we know it really begins with Josiah. He centralised the religion, tore down the high places. This was when the Deuteronomic law was created and the Deuteronomic history written. However Judaism was a total failure as a native religion.
Judaism was an aggressive, racist, genocidal, expansionist, militarist religion. Well what's wrong with that? The problem was that Judea was a tiny backwards shithole of a state that seemed to think it was a super power. They just kept losing. To the Babylonians, to Alexander, to the Seleucids and then twice to the Romans. When Jews had wise leaders and allied themselves with a great power they did well, but their God Yahweh had serious delusions of grandeur. Their God Yahweh, a celestial nobody seemed to think he was the creator of the universe. The Judeans were the ancient version of the Islamic State. Fanatical millenarism is all very well, but needs to be tempered with some level of realism, or it will all end in tears.
But while Judaism failed as a native religion, it proved absolutely brilliant as a diaspora religion. Its uncompromising separatism and superiorism stopped it from being assimilated. Its extreme racist superiorism, its emphasis on health and discipline of the individual, the loyalty of the individual to the Jewish community, but above all else its strong emphasis on literacy and the cultivation of the intellect allowed Jews to occupy a huge share of the non manual middle class positions in Ancient / Medieval societies. Under Christianity and Islam, where thinking for one self was a crime punishable by death, it thrived even better.