Simon Schama The Story of the Jews BBC 2 9pm.

Posted by celticman on Sun, 29 Sep 2013

I’ve watched two the four programmes shown so far. The final episode concludes tonight. I’ll need to catch the other two episodes on BBC iPlayer and I’ll probably buy the book. TV, of course, is accused of a great dumbing down, but I’m pretty dumb and I like things to be explained to me in ways that I can understand. Schama gets excited by ideas and it’s infectious. He shows that it seems to be some kind of historical rule that everyone from the Romans to the Czar of Russia, the Kings of Spain, France and England to the Mohammedians of the Middle East take time off from bashing each other in secular wars to give themselves a bit of time for Jew hating, Jew baiting, and the mass murder of these strangers in their midst.  I particularly liked Schama’s pained expression as he seemed to recall the debate played in front of the King of Spain before their mass expulsion that if there was a Messiah, where was the evidence? Ahem, people have been burned for less and at the time of the Grand Inquisitions being sent home, although for a people of the diaspora no such place existed, was almost like a get out of my jail card. Hitler has his own idea and seeing Schama return to the place of his forefathers Eastern European roots was a movement away from the overall arc of how many people had died, to a showing and not telling of who these people were and how their stories continued elsewhere. I too travelled back thirty years to an argument I had with a guy I sometimes shared a flat with that was convinced that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was due to him eating the wrong kind of vegetarian diet. Apparently Macrobiotics and not Jew hating would have been a more sensible step to make in the creation of a 1000 year Reich.  I remained non-committal to his committal. Not because of anything he’d said, which had its own kind of crazy logic, but because he was nineteen and  everything he stuffed into his mouth—apart from beer—was ripped straight from horses’ manure, with chewing optional, because macrobiotic people have four stomachs like a cow, but he was going bald. I asked myself a simple question: if macrobiotics couldn’t cure baldness, how could it cure history?   The Wizard of Oz was a Jewish creation, but somewhere Over the Rainbow I might understand. I’m hoping the final programme will explain how Israel, the Jewish homeland, can build a wall to separate them from the threat of the ostracised other and how the Jew has learned how to hate the same as but different from everybody else.   

Comments

Submitted by Ray Schaufeld on

Well if the last programme is on Israel I might maybe watch it. My parents met and got hitched on a kibbutz in the Negev desert and I have more relatives in Israel than in the Uk though I know little about them and I last was out there for a couple of weeks in 1977.

But if I thought Israel was a good place I would vote with my feet tomorrow and buy a one way ticket    Elsie

Submitted by andrea on

Thanks, Celtic - another one I'd have missed :)

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Submitted by andrea on

Just watched the first ep. Like Freud, I am a godless Jew, but found it fascinating nonetheless. Schama is very good, and his dialogue quite poetical.

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Submitted by Steve on

I am a non-Jew Zionist. I do believe Jews are exceptional, perhaps even the Chosen people... but I do not believe that we cannot criticize the Jews. Anyone can be criticized, even the Jews, No one is good. Only God is Good. Freud was an atheist, but there is a Christian or even orthodox Jewish understanding of Freud. If we posit that God created the superego in the soul as a prime mover, then the evolutionary basis of Freud goes away... and Freud becomes flipped upside down. Beside, if you believe in pure Freud, you are just left with the "id" because the superego is just a sublimation of the id and the ego is in the excluded middle. So the id can eventually eat up the superego, destroy the ego and then, you become the libido when you die which could explain evil old people.

 

Submitted by Steve on

I often notice with my wife who is Korean that she often feels that Jews are strange or she does not feel a "cointuitive affinity" with my Jewish acquaintances and friends. I don't know why this is and I know that many Jews are married to Asians and we share alot in common, but there is alot of Anti-Semitism in Asians. One reason that I can think of is that most Jews I know are very strongly opinionated and individualistic, but so are Asians if you really look at them, especially East Asians. I feel completely at home with Jews but I know that I am not a Jew. That was made clear to me when I donated to a synagoge years ago. I know that Jews are going through a very tough time, Jews being both a strongly differentiated and diversified race. Pater, I believe, was an anthropologist who looks at Jews from an anthropological perspective, but things have changed since the 70's or 60's when Pater wrote. Jews define beauty in a way that was thought unimaginable before. Before there was Barbara Streisand, now there is Natalie Portman, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Emmanuel Beart. Marilyn Monroe hid her Jewishness, but Jews nowadays are almost fully Americanized. I really don't think this is a good thing. There is a spirituality about Essene Jews or Hebrew Jews that is slowly disappearing. Of course, it is happening everywhere, but this is deeply unsettling. At the same time, I don't know if the current cultural climate can really produce a Genius... except God. No one can know everything or have a handle on "Reality" and what it actually is and where it is going. I reread Einstein recently and he stated that the relative isolation of the individual in which his personality and intellectual progress could proceed rather smoothly without having to deal with the wear and tear and fires of everyday life was what gave the European civilization an advantage over other civilization. It was Julia Kristeva who wrote in one of her books that the maniacal drive for truth is what differentiates the genius from others. I don't know if people have the time for that or people can even agree on what truth is. But if there is no truth, there really are no truths because truths come of of truth. Then, everything is subjective and our subjectivity is not necessarily the fruit of our experiences... it comes from a deep, biological past with the evolution of the human soul over time, from Plato to Derrida. But all these are essentially human constructs of mind or matter. Time cannot cause itself therefore it is an a priori form, but God is a synthetic a priori form who can construct a priori forms.  

 

Submitted by Steve on

I don't think Pater was his name, but he was a very famous anthropologist. Searched in Google but still could not find his name. Memory fails me. It's quite humbling to know how often memory fails me. I've often noticed lately that memory is a completely subjective and selective phenomena.