Today, December 11, 2019, President Donald J. Trump declared in an executive order that I, and my fellow Jews, are a nation. Judaism is a nationality.
Well, thank you very much, Mr. President. Your declaration will hopefully go a long way to help fight anti-Semitism, especially on college campuses. But, truth be told, all you did was to officially state a truth.
Jews are not a religious group. There is no word in Hebrew, by which I mean in the Bible/Torah/Old Testament, for “religion.” The word never appears. There is talk about “the People of Israel.” There is talk about goy and goyim, meaning “nation” and “nations,” but no talk about “religion,” or “religious.” The concept is nonexistent. “Religion” is a foreign concept to Jews. It is not a bad thing. It’s just not our thing.
I have searched the hundreds of books on my bookshelves, and in my Kindle, and have failed to find the book I know I read about the history of the Jews of France. The story, as I understand it, was really rather simply. Napoleon’s ministers went to him and told him that the Jews were a foreign nation living within France. That was unacceptable and, in keeping with the Inquisition, they should all be deported.
Napoleon, unlike the liberal media of today (I had to get one in!), wanted to check his facts. So he called together the leaders of the Jewish community and asked them if they were a people or a religion. Knowing that they would be deported if they said they were a people, they said they were are religion and, since then, Jews have been recognized, wrongly, as a religious group.
Using this new thing called Google that was invented by two Jews, I did a search for information on Napoleon and the Jews being declared a religious group and not a nation. The results were confusing, to say the least. In any event, the point is moot.
Religion is a belief. Christians believe that Christ was the Son of God. Catholics believe that Mary as a virgin. Muslims believe that Mohammed rose to heaven on a horse. God bless all of them. Believe what you want. For all I care, don’t believe in God. The bottom line is, if you take a blood test to check your DNA, it won’t be able to tell you what you believe, only what you are. So, for example, a DNA test can show that your are Jewish, British and Irish, French and German, and more, but not Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, or any other religion. Why? Because DNA shows nationality/race not religion. Your beliefs are not in your blood, but your nationality is. That’s the proof that Jews are a nation not a religion.
Want more proof? Think this is politics and not science? Well, Darwin didn’t care about politics. In Chapter VII of The Decent of Man, he writes, “…whilst Europeans differ but little from Jews, who belong to the Semitic stock and speak quite another language…” and references “The uniform appearance in various parts of the world of gypsies and Jews, though the uniformity of the latter has been somewhat exaggerated…” Sounds to me like he is referring to Jews as a people not a religion.
Of course, anti-Semites have long said that Jews are a race, albeit an inferior one. It’s rather pathetic the power that some people give to bigots. Just because human trash say something that happens to be true, does not mean it should be denied. Why liberals, and to the best of my knowledge they are the ones who do it, give such creatures so much power, is beyond my powers of comprehension (admittedly limited to begin with!). It has reached such a level of absurdity that even the “OK” symbol is now banned because “white supremacists,” who are superior to no one and nothing, use it. (Disgracefully, this nonsense is promoted by liberal Jews!)
So Jews are a nation, a race, not a religion. Never have been. Our contribution to humanity may have been monotheism, but I, personally, am more proud of the fact that we gave the world the first law book, the aforementioned Bible, along with its scholarly interpretation, The Talmud. That was the important contribution of the Jewish PEOPLE to the world; the idea of the rule of law.
But thank you, Mr. President, for your executive order and for your noble attempt to fight anti-Semitism. Only thing is, you didn’t declare us a nation, God beat you to it by a few millennia!
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Bruce Hurwitz, the Amazon international best selling author of The 21st Century Job Search and Immigrating to Israel, is an executive recruiter and career counselor. He has helped scores (thousands if you include attendees at his presentations) of people, including veterans, not only change jobs but, on occasion, change careers. Having successfully transitioned from academia to non-profits to the recruiting industry, he has been there and done that! A five-star rated speech writer on Fiverr, he is the host and producer of the live-interview podcast, Bruce Hurwitz Presents: MEET THE EXPERTS.
Employment Edification 