Writing something new about the Jewish people is an almost impossible task, since almost everything has been said and in a thousand ways. However, the author cannot avoid expressing a series of personal reflections on this unique town.
In the first place, it is necessary to define if being a Jew is a matter of religion or race. Judaism is certainly very important to Jews, but there are also many Jews who consider themselves atheists and yet continue to consider themselves as such. In the same way it is difficult to consider the Jews as a race, considering that there are Jews belonging to all races, ethnicities and cultures.
Ultimately, we can assume, as Tracey R. Rich does in the magazine jewish linkthat Jews “refer to a group of people with a common history, a shared destiny, and the feeling that each member of the group is connected to the others.”
Without a doubt, it is surprising that after several diasporas the Jewish people maintained their identity and, settling in different countries, they did not stop being Jews and continued with their customs.
It is also worthy of interest that the economic progress of this town was almost always very high. There are several theories as to why this is so. In the first place, as they were not traditionally a farming town, they had to look for other ways of earning a living, which led them, for example, to trade. In the same way it used to be difficult for them to participate in the administration of the State. This idea is reflected in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Protestantism by Max Weber.
This economic progress and in other areas may also come from what some defend as the religiosity of the Jewish people, since, due to it, children read the holy books from a very early age, which perhaps makes them have a greater intellectual development.
Throughout history, there have been many Jews who have influenced different areas of knowledge and art, such as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Frida Kahlo, León Trotsky, Baruch Spinoza, Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, Calvin Klein, Levi Strauss, among others
Anti-Semitism has existed since time immemorial. There could be several main reasons. The first, of course, religious. For Christian believers, the moral responsibility for the death of Jesus Christ rests with the Jews. Undoubtedly, the political and economic power that Jewish communities tend to attain also makes them the target of envy and ambition for power, which makes them persecuted and expelled.
It is worth analyzing the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The expulsion was really a blackmail, since the Jews were offered the possibility of converting to Christianity and staying in Spain. According to various sources, there may have been 200,000 expelled Jews and 200,000 conversos, Jews converted to Christianity. According to anthropologist Mario Javier Sabán, at least 25% of Spaniards have Jewish origins.
The Nazi holocaust of World War II cannot go unmentioned. In addition to racist theories, the death of 6 million Jewish civilians was also influenced by the fact that they were accused of having harmed Germany during the First World War, boycotting its military actions. The Jewish holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany is one of humanity’s greatest tragedies.
More recently, the creation of the state of Israel is a fact never seen before. That a people has recovered its original land, after thousands of years, is incredible, although this, of course, has led it to antagonize the vast majority of the Arab people.
In short, rivers of ink have been written about the history of the Jewish people, but, in the humble opinion of the author of this article, more should have been written, since the facts surrounding this group, as we have defined it previously, are simply amazing.
