[Marxism] Jewish History

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wonder if some of the "go between" or "entrepreneurial" or
internationalist spirit of  Jewish culture is related to its origin in the
region which is between the ancient (first ?) points of settled
"civilization" at the Tigres-Euphrates and Nile Valley, such that they were
intermediaries there, along with other groups in that in between region.

Charles

^^^^^^


Slezkine has a name for such specialists. He calls them Mercurians and their
hosts Apollonians. In Greek mythology, Apollo is the god of livestock and
agriculture and hence of settled existence in general. Hermes--Mercury to
the Romans--is, by contrast, a trickster god who serves as "the patron of
rule breakers, border crossers, and go-betweens," i.e., less permanent types
who prefer to live by their wits. Rather than settling down and blending in,
the Mercurians seek the opposite goal: to keep themselves apart by
deliberately cultivating strangeness? strange customs, strange languages and
so on. Gypsies developed a variety of Romani and Para-Romani languages whose
chief purpose, non-Gypsies have long suspected, is to keep outsiders in the
dark. The Inadan gunsmiths and jewelers of the Sahara make themselves
incomprehensible to their Tuareg hosts by adding the prefix om- or the
suffix -ak to certain nouns. Jews have created a variety of languages out of
Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian, among others.
Although long regarded as a German dialect that they picked up crossing the
Rhine, Yiddish, according to one linguist, may actually be a more complex
"fusion language" composed of equal parts German, Hebrew, Loez (Judeo-French
and Judeo-Italian) and Slavic, a mélange whose overall purpose is similarly
communicative and noncommunicative--to facilitate communication within the
community, that is, while erecting a linguistic barrier around it. Jews
learned other people's languages, but other people rarely learned the Jews',
a one-way linguistic street that was not without its advantages


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