Talk:Jews/Archive 4

message: That thing is a HIDEOUS EYESORE, as well as taking up a ridiculous amount of space at the top of the article. Can anything be done to make this thing less obnoxious? - David Gerard 11:56, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree fully, why is this "box" necessary at all??? All the information is stated clearly in the article and it actually creates the mis-impression that the small "sub groups" are more important than they are in reality, when they are basically totally irrelevant in the greater scheme of things in many ways. IZAK 12:46, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: This sort of thing can be put into a table in the body of the article - David Gerard 13:03, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)

text: The data is useful and relevant - the presentation is problematic in this article because it's a huge burnt-orange blob at the top of the article taking up too much width. I suggest that in this particular article it could be presented otherwise, e.g. as a section, with an HTML comment in the text explaining why this was done - David Gerard 11:07, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text:  I think that is reasonable, since this article doesn't follow Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups at all. By the way, it might be worth someone having a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups and Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups Template: I suspect there would be a lot of relevant ideas for extending and improving the present article. -- Jmabel 16:46, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)
* Jmabel:Since YOU are the creator of Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups it would seem that you have your own "axe to grind" in your unrelenting drive to eventually squeeze this article on Jew into YOUR criteria and views on "ethnicity". I suspect that is why you ask that "someone" do it for you so that this way you would avoid taking all the flack that would ensue were you to do it on your own arbitrarily. In the meantime you nonchalantly introduce the "box" and "formulae" such as at Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups Template: Hoping that everyone (via a few "someones") will "fall for your bait" and just do your manipulative intellectual bidding. So PLEASE cut out the efforts you are expanding ever so subtly to swing the "Jew" article YOUR way in your determination to create an absolute SCHISM (or "divorce")---for lack of better words--- between JEWS and JUDAISM, which go together. (Only for the purposes of management of information was the subject matter of Jew dealt with separately from Judaism, it was not meant as a signal to rip the two apart body, limb, and soul, as the underlying connection and essense is understood to always remain.) You cannot just reduce the Jewish people to a "Semitic" sub-group as per your example on Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups no different to other similar groups of "13-15 million people". You would NOT be doing either the Jews or anyone else a favor were you to succeed as you would only in effect be neutering and negating the unusual uniqueness of the Jews and their totally out-of-proportion significance to the human race, world history, and and most of all religion which you do not seem to value as much as you aspire to seek out obscure "tribal" connections to the Jews who have virtually no real or meaningful connections with the Jews as both a nation or a culture. You are "defining ethnicity down" to the "lowest common denominators", when this article is MORE about ethnicity in the sense of NATIONALITY from the Greek ethnos which means NATION, and not mere vague "TRIBES" or "SECTS" to be studied by sociologists and academic statisticians alone. This is NOT an article about Jewish genetics ! --->If that is what interests you then fill that up with all the type of details you seem to find important ! For the sake of fairness to the impartial readers of Wikipedia, the issues revolving around Jew are far weightier and are of a profounder nature than you would make it appear were you to have your way in the end using YOUR definitions of "ethnicity" which do not always match with JEWISH views of "ethnicity". IZAK 06:57, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

text: The Jew article is basically fine, I am not criticizing it, even though it describes things with which I do not personally agree, yet for the sake of presenting things as they are, I do not attempt to tamper with most of it, provided they are truthful and fit into standard definitions of the subject. The arguments I presented about the Karaites were not "mine" I did not invent them or conjure them up. I was conveying the classical view of that movement and its adherents as it has been maintained for centuries by almost all scholarly opinions in Jewish learning. What I was objecting to was the writer's presentation of them as being more significant or influential than they are when in fact all they are is just a tiny fringe group that has long ago seen the end of its own following/s. The writer also sought to project Karaites as Jews, when in fact there have always been many sects of Karaites and some of them have insisted adamantly that they are NOT Jews.  YOU say: "Ethnicity and nationality are not simply matters of genetics. They are equally a matter of culture and identity. If this article is not where to take up these matters, where do you think they should be?" shows that you do not give enough credence to the root soil from which Jews grew as a nation, which is not mere "ethnicity and culture" but almost purely from their religious roots in their faith in Judaism. Again I say, the need to talk about Jew as distincty from Judaism is not to say that from here on forwards the Jew is "divorced" from Judaism (thereby creating a "SCHISM" between the two) and let the ethnic and cultural debate and definitions reign supreme. On the contrary, as this article shows (and I did NOT write the Reform or Conservative and many other views at all), debating the status, DEFINITIONS, the ethnicity of Jews is largely done within the parameters of how the different religious streams, Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, and how in the internal debates in the State of Israel both a "Jew" and "Judaism" is defined, which is what the article does do (...until now at least...). What you are attempting to do is to go outside these bounds and bring in new criteria that would fly in the face of anything accepted thus far. So, the place for this? It's right here, on the "TALK" page where it belongs, as any and all changes on the Jew page are obviously taken very seriously and monitered by many people on Wiki out of a desire to create a balanced NPOV. (By the way, once you start getting into those little ethnic groups from Africa etc which have a pathetic handful of people, you may as well start little sections about "The Jews of Moscow" or the "Jews of California" or the "Jews of Hollywood" or "Jews of Britain" etc where SIGNIFICANT numbers live/d...where will it end...?) IZAK 10:26, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Ethnicity box

message: *Jmabel:It is not just a "Wikipedia" phenomenon, but the definition of just who is and isn't a Jew is a maddening topic that's been around for thousands of years and we are not about to put the issue to rest here, whichever way you slice things. To define Jews as members of an "ethnicity" is an arbitrary assumption that we work with here, but in reality because Jews have been spread over all the continents and have lived among all the racial groups and within hundreds of varying non-Jewish ethnicities so that many of them have even become EXTERNALLY identifiable with their host non-Jewish ethnicities and cultures. This article on Jew starts off by saying: "A Jew is either a follower of a certain religion (Judaism) or a member of a certain ethnicity (adj. Jewish). Judaism is a complex combination of a religion and a non-exclusive ethnic group". This last-mentioned item takes note of and links to another one paragraph link/article : "A non-exclusive ethnic group is an ethnic group with a means for people from other ethnic groups to obtain ethnic status within it. Possibly the first such group documented in history was that of the Habiru. Others have included the Jews and the Cossacks, but in modern times sovereign countries like the USA, may also be proposed as attempts to establish a new ethnic identity." So this itself makes it difficult to define Jews in pure "ethnic" terms. Of course the bottom-line reason that Jews are so open to others joining them is beacause it is Judaism itself, which based on the Torah's commands welcomes and accepts converts who then instantly lose their previous ethnic and cultural connections and become accepted Jews. The reverse also works, as Jews leave the fold, and given enough time and efforts at eradicating their links with Judaism, become part of a different culture, ethnicity and religion, as happened with the evolutions of the early Jewish Christians moving away from first Judaism and finally away from any ethnic and cultural links to Jews themselves. This is not an easy subject to fit into a "box" of any kind. IZAK 02:25, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: [[non-exclusive ethnic group]]

message: Jmabel:Since the non-exclusive ethnic group link mentions the Habiru (who together with the Cossacks , the USA and Jews are lumped together in what was called a Melting pot society in the good ol' USA--although I doubt the "Cossacks" were as welcoming as the US immigration officials on Ellis Island...) it's worth seing what that paragraph/link says: "Habiru and the Hebrew: When the Tell el-Amarna archives were translated, some scholars eagerly equated these Apiru with the Biblical Hebrews (`BRY in the consonant-only Hebrew script). Besides the similarity in the names, the description of the Apiru as nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes attacking cities in Canaan seemed to fit the Biblical account of the conquest of that land by Hebrews under Joshua except that the Habiru core was originally Hurrian not Hebrew. Scholarly opinion remains divided on this issue. Many scholars still think that the Hapiru were a component of the later peoples who inhabited the kingdoms ruled by Saul, David, Solomon and their successors in Judah and Israel. If the Habiru were the proto-Hebrews, a Hurrian origin would offer strong support for this since many Hurrian cultural themes appear in the bible. Many Biblical proper names (individual, group and place names, as well as the popular -ya name-ending) that have no satisfactory Semitic etymology, can be demonstrated to perhaps descend from Anatolian or North Syrian (Hurrian) onomastics testifing that these names may have entered Hebrew directly from Hurrian. For example, David is explained from Dudya (beloved of Ya where Ya is the Hurrian divinity) a Hurrian Habiru name later used as Solomon's coronation epithet and many of David's wandering Hebrews also possess Hurrian Habiru names (e.g. Nihiri). There have been also theories relating the Habiru to the Biblical personages of Eber and Abraham.  However most scholars agree that these theories are based purely on religious beliefs and are without historical foundation." So here again we see the already very early difficulty in defining the Jews/Hebrews as eitherbeing part of or NOT being part of even something that sounds so "Hebraic" as "Habiru"/"Hebrew". This ties in with the broader issue of whether Jews do or don't really fit into the Semitic people, as the "so-called "habirus" weren't "Semites" and as later Jews from Poland or Germany often times were more blond than the Germans, and the Falashas are as African as any other of Africa's people, likewise with the Jews of India who seem more Indian than "semitic". Which leads us back to the bottom-line common denominator that it is Judaism that defines the Jew. IZAK 02:46, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Habiru]]

message: This page (minus the talk bit) is now the first hit when searching google for the word jew.
Google's explanation: 
Much better that those jewwatch.com twits.   -Nickls 16:44, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Google search for "Jew" 

message: What is with the continual efforts to add multiple Chabad/Lubavitch external links to the article? I haven't seen anyone argue a reason there should be more than one, they just keep adding 'em. This time, I took the liberty of deleting, as others have done in the past. -- Jmabel 23:49, Jun 14, 2004 (UTC)
*Jmabel: The answer is simple: You are dealing with fanatical "Messianists" known as the Meshichistim and they are  splattering links to the MESSIANIC sections of Chabad all the time (as if this will help the Rebbe get up from the dead sooner.) The ONLY decent "MAINSTREAM" Chabad link that should be here is:  http://www.chabad.org/  IZAK 03:29, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Chabad/Lubavitch external links

message: I've just removed a reference to the Good Samaritan parable in the "Samaritans and Christians" section. I think the author misunderstands the parable (understandable if he's Jewish - even some Christians miss the point). He states that "the Samaritans were a suspicious cult that practiced secret forbidden rites, rejecting rabbinic Judaism" - this view (or rather, a less specific "Samaritans were bad people") is also taken by the Christian version, the point of the parable being that even "bad people" can do good deeds. Thus a differing view of Samaritans in general does not exist between Christianity and Judaism.
:Additionaly, the Samaritans rejected all forms of Judaism (The sect of the Saducees, the Essenes,etc.) that were around at that time, not just Rabbinical Judaism.--Yoshiah ap 22:03, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Good Samaritan

message: The Reform position on "patrilineal descent" was inaccurately presented.  For more details see this link: http://www.shamash.org/lists/scj-faq/HTML/faq/18-index.html Jayjg 18:12, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarified Reform position on patrilineal descent 

message: To begin an article with
:Dog describes an animal that barks.
is not as good, to say the least, as to begin with
:A dog is an animal that barks.
And if one must write about the word dog rather than about the animal itself, one should italicize the word.  That is the reason for my recent edit of the opening sentence of this article. Michael Hardy 23:06, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: However, this raises the issue of objectification. Until after mid-century,it was not uncommon to describe a Jewish or black woman as a "Jewess" or "Negress." I knew one very proud Jewish woman who self-described that way, but you would never use a term like that today—it's like describing the female of an animal. Times and language, meaning and intent change. -- Cecropia | Talk 17:38, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)

text: IZAK: I am saying that I believe Michael meant no harm, and it is very difficult to converse with people in an open fashion if you have to "walk on eggs." I think it may have been better to say that "using 'dog' is an unfortunate comparison because that has been used by such as Nazis as a pejorative against Jews." As to the use of the term Jew itself, I think it should be altered or deemphasized since, even in a nonpejorative sense, it has been used to separate Jews from general society: in Germany, if you were Chistian, you were a "German," if you were Jewish, you were a "Jew." Same in Poland and how many others countries I don't know. -- Cecropia | Talk 19:35, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Usage nitpicking

message: I deleted this paragraph from the intro:
Paradoxically, as a pejorative, the appellation Jew is sometimes used in cultures where prejudice exists against Jews to describe a non-Jew (gentile) who has so-called "negative qualities" that the culture falsely attributes to Jews, which is often rooted in unconscious anti-Semitism.
I don't think a paragraph describing the use of the word "Jew" as an insult belongs in the intro paragraph, which should be describing what a Jew IS, not the crass semantic habits of a few anti-Semites.  Put this paragraph in the page on anti-Semitism or further down in the article if you insist, but not in the intro. Mbeki 00:28, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: "Jew" as an insult