Between 1938 and 1945 the government of Nazi Germany killed approximately 6 million Jews. This, despite Holocaust deniers, is a fact. The Nazis, and much of the German population, wanted to rid itself, and the world, of Jews because they saw the Jews as a threat to Germany and "Aryan" Europe. The Jews were the ultimate "Other" in Germany and were seen as a threat and also an easy scapegoat for the Germans. This is, or was, all grade school stuff and was part of the education of anyone who had gone to school in the 1960s to the 1980s.
As readers of this awful blog are aware, this writer is a Christian and may have no business writing about Jewish matters. But since there is nobody standing behind him with a gun to his head to make him stop he will write something.
One finds one's self wondering if the Nazis had been a bit patient whether modern Jews would not have performed a sort of Holocaust on themselves.
Consider the fact that much of modern Judaism seems bound and determined to make themselves and their religion a fossil. To much of the Jewish world being a Jew is not to practice religious Judaism. It is not to wear a prayer shawl, a kippa, pray "Hear O' Israel.." in the morning, attend a synagogue weekly, or observe the holy days in any other way or sense of belief that the average Japanese attends a Shinto shrine on a festival day. There is no belief. There is a tradition or habit.
For many people who call themselves Jews being a Jew is a sense of ethnic identity that, in reality, is little stronger than an American who is one quarter Irish. The Jewish person may have a Passover meal, the 1/4 Mick will drink a lot on St. Patrick's Day. And when one asks both parties why they bother celebrating those days the answer will be something like, "Well, my grandfather did it, and it's good to carry on a tradition even if I don't believe what I'm celebrating", or in the case of the pretend leprechaun, wants an excuse to get drunk like his Granddad did while singing The Wild Colonial Boy.
Many contemporary American and European Jews are, by abandoning the practises and beliefs of their religion, eliminating themselves as Jews except in the sense of DNA. And that DNA does not make a Jew despite what the Nazis insisted in the days before DNA was known. That DNA only identifies, at the best, a Middle Eastern origin, and often shows instead of a pure line of Semitic genes, but Indo-European genes.
To be a Jew is to be a person who practises Judaism even in a casual way, and believes in the teachings of the Torah and Tanach. Judaism is a religion. It is not a race. Even in ancient days there were Jewish missionaries to traveled outside of Israel to make converts to Judaism among the Gentiles. It has been speculated that the ancestors of the Polish Jews were converts and not ethnic Jews.
But today many Jews have ditched their religion and the sense and teachings of their religion and have become secularists. One could say that they have become Sadducees. And in doing so they have abandoned, and even become contemptible of, the religion that they claim to adhere to. It's akin to a person who claims to be a Roman Catholic saying that the bread and wine are not the Body and Blood and that it's more religious and enlightened to sit in bed on a Sunday morn reading the L.A. Times.
The modern secular Jew, while identifying himself or herself as a Jew, works to eliminate Judaism in the name of being enlightened. He or her will say that the idea a Jewish homeland is stupid and silly and should be Muslim. And the modern secular Jew does not reproduce to the point of replacing his or her self in the name of planetary salvation. In other words, the modern secular Jew, who like Hitler and his minions hoped, is eliminating himself in a way that the Nazis could not foresee.
When a woman Reconstructionist rabbi is given more approval and attention by the mainstream press and the popular Jewish press than a Hasidic rebbe you know that it is all over for mainstream and orthodox Judaism. And the Nazis didn't do it. The mainstream secular Jews decided for some reason to commit the suicide that Hitler and company had hoped for.
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