a great thread on jewish history.

[mopinko]

i think i’m more familiar w jewish history than most. but there were surprises here.

1/ Why should Israel exist? It’s a “settler-colonialist” atrocity, right? Didn’t they just steal the Palestinians' land in 1948?

No. The truth is, no one knows more about getting genocided and kicked out of their homes than the Jews. I’m not a historian, but with all the heated Twitter conversation, I thought I’d read a book or two to have an informed opinion about Israel/Palestine and whose home the region is. Is Twitter’s portrayal of Jews as warmongers who stole the Palestinian’s land accurate? Or is this a selective, one-sided history?

It is wildly one-sided and ahistoric.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1759968878887579749.html?utm_campaign=topunroll

worth your time.

[marybourg]

1. Good on you for taking the time and trouble to do some research.

[mopinko]

4. not my research.

[Arazi]

2. I saw that this morning. Definitely worth the time

The Kremlin propaganda that’s been allowed to take hold has distorted reality for far too many. That thread lacks nuance and elides big parts but is decent pushback overall, for Twitter,

K&R

[WhiskeyGrinder]

3. lol what on earth

About 700 years later, Egypt saw them as a threat, then came in and enslaved them. Moses led a slave revolt (based) with the help of divine intervention, escaped, and after 40 years of exile they eventually conquered what we call Israel today. Pretty traumatic, right? Lol, we are just getting started.

This...is not history.

Brianna Wu, of all people, is not the person to go to for "Jewish" history (which turns out in this thread to be the history of Israel? kinda). What a mess.

[mopinko]

5. well, it's not a history book. it's xitter.

and compared to most of the crap posted there, this is downright scholarly.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

6. No, it's also crap.

[mopinko]

7. care to elaborate?

[LeftInTX]

9. They were enslaved in Egypt around 1200 BC.

Moses led them out of Egypt. Whether it was divine, is a different story.
Was Moses one guy or several guys?

Either way, they escaped Egypt and went to the land where Israel now is. I believe it was around the "West Bank" area, where Jerusalem was eventually established.

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. No, there's no archaeological or historical evidence at all that they were ever in Egypt

The Israelites (including Judah - whether the two kingdoms were ever actually united is not clear - that could have been just a way for one kingdom to claim the right to the throne of the other too) were probably a branch of the Canaanites, whose religion formed their different cultural identity. The idea of enslavement in Egypt and an exodus is an origin myth (like Joseph, Abraham and so on). Whenever it started, it's likely to have been emphasized when the leaders of Judah were forced to live in Babylonia (that bit of the Bible is historically true), and the idea of returning from captivity became a unifying hope.

[WarGamer]

10. She also used the debunked estimate of 1.1 million Jews killed by the Romans in the Siege.

Professor Schwartz of Columbia wrote in his book "The Cambridge History of Judaism":

According to the most responsible estimates, Palestine reached its maximum sustainable pre-modern population of approximately one million in the middle of the first century. Probably about half of this population was Jewish. However, Josephus claims that 1.1 million people died in the siege of Jerusalem alone, and 97,000 were enslaved (Bell. 6.420–1). These figures, especially the former, are clearly impossible. Furthermore, we may infer from the course of the Bar Kochba Revolt, two generations later, that even the district of Judea, where the damage from the Great Revolt was concentrated, retained a fairly large Jewish population. Undoubtedly many Jews were killed or enslaved, or died of disease or starvation during the siege, but it is difficult to go beyond such unsatisfactory generalizations. It may be speculated that casualty rates were higher in Judaea than in the other Jewish districts of the country, Galilee, Peraea, and Idumaea.

[Cha]

8. Mahalo Mo! 🕊️🕯️