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'''Jewish history''' (or the '''history of the Jewish people''') is the [[history]] of the [[Jews]], and their [[Judaism|religion]] and [[Jewish culture|culture]], as it developed and interacted with other peoples, religions and cultures. Although Judaism as a religion first appears in Greek records during the [[Hellenistic period]] and the earliest mention of [[Land of Israel|Israel]] is inscribed on the [[Merneptah Stele]] dated 1213–1203 BCE, religious literature tells the story of [[Israelites]] going back at least as far as c. 1500 BCE. The [[Jewish diaspora]] began with the Assyrian conquest and continued on a much larger scale with the Babylonian conquest. Jews were also widespread throughout the Roman Empire, and this carried on to a lesser extent in the period of Byzantine rule in the central and eastern Mediterranean. In 638 CE the Byzantine Empire lost control of the Levant. The Arab [[Rashidun Caliphate|Islamic Empire]] under [[Caliph Omar]] conquered Jerusalem and the lands of [[Mesopotamia]], [[History of Syria|Syria]], Palestine and Egypt. The Golden Age of Jewish culture in Spain coincided with the [[Middle Ages]] in Europe, a period of [[Al-Andalus|Muslim rule]] throughout much of the [[Iberian Peninsula]]. During that time, Jews were generally accepted in society and Jewish religious, cultural, and economic life blossomed.


A '''meme''' ({{IPAc-en|ˈ|m|iː|m}} {{respell|MEEM|'}})<ref name="cream">{{Citation |last=Dawkins |first=Richard |authorlink=Richard Dawkins |title=The Selfish Gene |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1989 |edition=2 |isbn=0-19-286092-5 |page=192 |url=https://books.google.com/?id=WkHO9HI7koEC&pg=PA192 |quote=We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of ''imitation''. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to ''meme''. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word ''même''. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.}}</ref> is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture".<!-- a quote needs an introduction--><ref>[http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meme Meme]. ''Merriam-Webster Dictionary''.</ref> A meme acts as a unit for carrying [[culture|cultural]] ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to [[gene]]s in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to [[Selection (biology)|selective pressures]].<ref>{{harvnb|Graham|2002}}</ref>
During the Classical Ottoman period (1300–1600), the Jews, together with most other communities of the empire, enjoyed a certain level of prosperity. In the 17th century, there were many significant Jewish populations in Western Europe. During the period of the [[European Renaissance]] and Enlightenment, significant changes occurred within the Jewish community. Jews began in the 18th century to campaign for emancipation from restrictive laws and integration into the wider European society. During the 1870s and 1880s the Jewish population in Europe began to more actively discuss immigration back to Israel and the re-establishment of the Jewish Nation in its national homeland. The Zionist movement was founded officially in 1884. Meanwhile, the Jews of Europe and the United States gained success in the fields of science, culture and the economy. Among those generally considered the most famous were scientist [[Albert Einstein]] and philosopher [[Ludwig Wittgenstein]]. A large number of [[Nobel Prize]] winners at this time were Jewish, as is still the case.<ref name="Jewish Nobel Prize Winners">{{cite web|url=http://www.jinfo.org/Nobel_Prizes.html|title=Jewish Nobel Prize Winners|work=jinfo.org}}</ref>


Proponents theorize that memes are a [[viral phenomenon]] that may evolve by [[natural selection]] in a manner analogous to that of [[biological evolution]]. Memes do this through the processes of [[genetic diversity|variation]], [[mutation]], [[competition]], and [[heredity|inheritance]], each of which influences a meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that [[fecundity|propagate]] less prolifically may become [[extinction|extinct]], while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) [[mutation|mutate]]. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.<ref name="Kelly">{{harvnb|Kelly|1994 | p. 360}} ''But if we consider culture as its own self-organizing system — a system with its own agenda and pressure to survive — then the history of humanity gets even more interesting. As Richard Dawkins has shown, systems of self-replicating ideas or memes can quickly accumulate their own agenda and behaviours. I assign no higher motive to a cultural entity than the primitive drive to reproduce itself and modify its environment to aid its spread. One way the self organizing system can do this is by consuming human biological resources."</ref>
In 1933, with the rise to power of [[Adolf Hitler]] and the [[Nazi party]] in Germany, the Jewish situation became more severe. Economic crises, racial anti-Semitic laws, and a fear of an upcoming war led many Jews to flee from Europe to Palestine, to the United States and to the Soviet Union. In 1939 [[World War II]] began and until 1941 Hitler occupied almost all of Europe, including Poland—where millions of Jews were living at that time—and France. In 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the [[Final Solution]] began, an extensive organized operation on an unprecedented scale, aimed at the annihilation of the Jewish people, and resulting in the persecution and murder of Jews in political Europe, inclusive of European North Africa (pro-Nazi Vichy-North Africa and Italian Libya). This [[genocide]], in which approximately six million Jews were murdered methodically and with horrifying cruelty, is known as [[The Holocaust]] or ''Shoah'' (Hebrew term). In Poland, three million Jews were murdered in [[gas chambers]] in all concentration camps combined, with one million at the [[Auschwitz]] concentration camp alone.


A field of study called [[memetics]]<ref>{{harvnb |Heylighen|Chielens|2009}}</ref> arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an [[evolutionary model]]. Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that academic study can examine memes [[empirical]]ly. However, developments in [[Functional neuroimaging|neuroimaging]] may make [[empirical]] study possible.<ref name="mcnamara">{{harvnb|McNamara|2011}}</ref> Some commentators in the social sciences question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units, and are especially critical of the biological nature of the theory's underpinnings.<ref>Gill, Jameson (2011). Memes and narrative analysis: A potential direction for the development of neo-Darwinian orientated research in organisations. In: Euram 11 : proceedings of the European Academy of Management. European Academy of Management.</ref> Others have argued that this use of the term is the result of a misunderstanding of the original proposal.<ref name="misunderstanding">{{cite journal | last1 = Burman | first1 = J. T. | year = 2012 | title = The misunderstanding of memes: Biography of an unscientific object, 1976–1999 | url = | journal = [[Perspectives on Science]] | volume = 20 | issue = 1| pages = 75–104 | doi = 10.1162/POSC_a_00057 }} (This is an [[open access]] article, made freely available courtesy of [[MIT Press]].)</ref>
In 1945 the Jewish resistance organizations in Palestine unified and established the Jewish Resistance Movement. The movement began attacking the British authority. David Ben-Gurion proclaimed on May 14, 1948, the establishment of a [[Jewish state]] in [[Eretz Israel]] to be known as the [[State of Israel]]. Immediately afterwards all neighbouring Arab states attacked, yet the newly formed IDF resisted. In 1949 the war ended and the state of Israel started building the state and absorbing massive waves of hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over the world. Today (2016), [[Israel]] is a [[Parliamentary system|parliamentary democracy]] with a population of over 8 million people, of whom about 6 million are [[Israeli Jews|Jewish]]. The largest Jewish communities are in Israel and the [[American Jews|United States]], with major communities in France, Argentina, Russia, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and [[History of the Jews in Germany|Germany]]. For statistics related to modern Jewish demographics see ''[[Jewish population]]''.


The word ''meme'' originated with [[Richard Dawkins]]' 1976 book ''[[The Selfish Gene]]''. Dawkins's own position is somewhat ambiguous: he welcomed N. K. Humphrey's suggestion that "memes should be considered as living structures, not just metaphorically"<ref name="Humphrey">{{harvnb|Dawkins|1989 | p = 192}}</ref> and proposed to regard memes as "physically residing in the brain".<ref name="TEP">{{Citation |last=Dawkins |first=Richard |authorlink=Richard Dawkins |title=The Extended Phenotype |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1982 |isbn=0-19-286088-7 |page=109}}</ref> Later, he argued that his original intentions, presumably before his approval of Humphrey's opinion, had been simpler.<ref>Dawkins' foreword to {{harvnb|Blackmore|1999}}, p. xvi</ref> At the New Directors' Showcase 2013 in Cannes, Dawkins' opinion on memetics was deliberately ambiguous.<ref name="Hits">[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFn-ixX9edg Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors' Showcase 2013]</ref>
==Time periods in Jewish history==
The history of the Jews and Judaism can be divided into five periods: (1) ancient Israel before Judaism, from the beginnings to 586 BCE; (2) the beginning of Judaism in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE; (3) the formation of [[rabbinic Judaism]] after the destruction of the [[Second Temple]] in 70 CE; (4) the age of rabbinic Judaism, from the ascension of [[Christianity]] to political power under the [[emperor Constantine the Great]] in 312 CE to the end of the political hegemony of Christianity in the 18th century; and (5), the age of diverse Judaisms, from the French and American Revolutions to the present.{{sfn|Neusner|1992|p=4}}


==Etymology==
<imagemap>
File:Chronology of Israel eng.png|center|760px
default [[Jewish history]]
rect 658 156 833 176 [[Aliyah|Periods of massive immigration to the land of Israel]]
rect 564 156 647 175 [[Jewish diaspora|Periods in which the majority of Jews lived in exile]]
rect 460 156 554 175 [[Land of Israel|Periods in which the majority of Jews lived in the land of Israel, with full or partial independence]]
rect 314 156 452 175 [[Temple in Jerusalem|Periods in which a Jewish Temple existed]]
rect 196 156 309 175 [[Jewish history]]
rect 26 102 134 122 [[Book of Judges|Shoftim]]
rect 134 102 265 121 [[Books of Kings|Melakhim]]
rect 146 83 266 104 [[Solomon's Temple|First Temple]]
rect 286 83 418 103 [[Second Temple of Jerusalem|Second Temple]]
rect 341 103 392 121 [[Zugot]]
rect 393 103 453 121 [[Tannaim]]
rect 452 102 534 221 [[Amoraim]]
rect 534 102 560 121 [[Savoraim]]
rect 559 103 691 121 [[Geonim]]
rect 691 102 825 121 [[Rishonim]]
rect 825 100 940 120 [[Acharonim]]
rect 939 94 959 120 [[Aliyah|Aliyot]]
rect 957 65 975 121 [[Israel]]
rect 940 62 958 94 [[The Holocaust]]
rect 825 62 941 100 [[Jewish diaspora|Diaspora]]
rect 808 61 825 101 [[Alhambra decree|Expulsion from Spain]]
rect 428 62 808 103 [[Dispersion of the Jews in the Roman Empire|Roman exile]]
poly 226 82 410 82 410 92 428 92 428 61 226 62 [[Ten Lost Tribes|Assyrian Exile (Ten Lost Tribes)]]
rect 264 82 284 122 [[Babylonian captivity]]
rect 283 103 341 121 [[Second Temple of Jerusalem|Second Temple period]]
poly 26 121 17 121 17 63 225 63 226 81 145 82 145 101 26 101 [[Chronology of the Bible|Ancient Jewish History]]
rect 58 136 375 146 [[Chronology of the Bible]]
rect 356 122 373 135 [[Common Era]]
desc none
</imagemap>


The word ''meme'' is a shortening (modeled on ''gene'') of ''mimeme'' (from [[Ancient Greek]] {{lang|el|μίμημα}} {{IPA-el|míːmɛːma|pron}} ''mīmēma'', "imitated thing", from {{lang|el|μιμεῖσθαι}} ''mimeisthai'', "to imitate", from {{Lang|el|μῖμος}} ''mimos'', "mime")<ref>''The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'': Fourth Edition, 2000</ref> coined by British evolutionary biologist [[Richard Dawkins]] in ''[[The Selfish Gene]]'' (1976)<ref name="cream"/><ref>{{harvnb|Millikan|2004|p=16}}; [https://books.google.com/books?id=YphlBwpbJCUC&pg=PA16 Varieties of meaning]. "Richard Dawkins invented the term 'memes' to stand for items that are reproduced by imitation rather than reproduced genetically."</ref> as a concept for discussion of [[evolution]]ary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, [[catchphrase]]s, fashion, and the technology of building arches. <ref name="selfish">{{harvnb|Dawkins|1989 | p = 352}}</ref>
==Ancient Jewish history (c. 1500 BCE – 63 BCE)==
{{Main|Origins of Judaism}}


== Origins ==
===Ancient Israelites (to 586 BCE)===
{{Main|The Exodus|Conquest of Canaan|History of ancient Israel and Judah}}
{{Religious text primary|date=May 2010}}
[[File:Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn 079.jpg|left|thumb|200px|[[Moses]] with the [[Tablets of Stone]] (1659 painting by [[Rembrandt]])]]
[[File:Map Israel Judea 926 BC-fr.svg|thumb|200px|Kingdoms of Israel and Judah in 926 BCE]]


[[File:Richard dawkins lecture.jpg|175 px|left|alt=|thumb|[[Richard Dawkins]] coined the word ''meme'' in his 1976 book ''[[The Selfish Gene]]''.]]
The history of the early Jews, and their neighbors, is mainly that of the [[Fertile Crescent]] and east coast of the [[Mediterranean Sea]]. It begins among those people who occupied the area lying between the [[Nile]], [[Tigris]] and the [[Euphrates]] rivers. Surrounded by ancient seats of culture in [[Egypt]] and [[Babylonia]], by the deserts of [[Arabia]], and by the highlands of [[Asia Minor]], the land of [[Canaan]] (roughly corresponding to modern Israel, the Palestinian Territories, Jordan and Lebanon) was a meeting place of civilizations. The land was traversed by old-established trade routes and possessed important harbors on the [[Gulf of Aqaba]] and on the [[Mediterranean]] coast, the latter exposing it to the influence of other cultures of the Fertile Crescent.{{citation needed|date=February 2012}}


The word ''meme'' originated with [[Richard Dawkins]]' 1976 book ''[[The Selfish Gene]]''. Dawkins cites as inspiration the work of geneticist [[L. L. Cavalli-Sforza]], anthropologist F. T. Cloak <ref>Cultural microevolution, 1966. Research Previews 13: (2) p. 7-10. Also presented at the November, 1966 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.</ref> and ethologist J. M. Cullen.<ref>Is a cultural ethology possible? Hum. Ecol. 3, 161-182. Cullen, J. M. (1972).</ref> Dawkins wrote that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission — in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.
According to the [[Tanakh|Jewish sacred writings]], which became the [[Hebrew Bible]], Jews are descended from the [[Israelites|ancient people of Israel]] who settled in the land of Canaan between the eastern coast of the [[Mediterranean Sea]] and the [[Jordan River]]. Ancient Hebrew writings describe the "Children of Israel" as descendants of common ancestors, including [[Abraham]], his son [[Isaac]], and Isaac's son [[Jacob]]. Religious literature suggests that the nomadic travels of the [[Hebrews]] centered on [[Hebron]] in the first centuries of the second millennium BCE, apparently leading to the establishment of the [[Cave of the Patriarchs]] as their burial site in Hebron. The Children of Israel consisted of twelve tribes, each descended from one of Jacob's twelve sons, [[Reuven]], [[Simeon (Hebrew Bible)|Shimon]], [[Levi]], [[Judah (Bible)|Yehuda]], [[Yissachar]], [[Zevulun]], [[Dan (Bible)|Dan]], [[Gad (son of Jacob)|Gad]], [[Naftali]], [[Asher]], [[Joseph (Hebrew Bible)|Yosef]], and [[Benjamin|Benyamin]].


[[File:Kilroy was here (re-drawn).gif|thumb|right|"[[Kilroy was here]]" was a [[Graffiti|graffito]] that became popular in the 1940s, and existed under various names in different countries, illustrating how a meme can be modified through replication.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://articles.latimes.com/2000/mar/05/books/bk-5402 |title=Kilroy Was Here - Los Angeles Times |publisher=articles.latimes.com |date=2000-03-05 |accessdate=2013-12-06}}</ref>]]
[[File:Figurine from Egypt of semitic slave (2).jpg|thumb|A Semitic slave. Ancient Egyptian figurine. [[Hecht Museum]]]]
Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a [[self-replication|replicator]]. He hypothesized that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples. Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behavior. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the [[cultural evolution|evolution of culture]] to the natural selection of genes in biological [[evolution]].<ref name="selfish"/>
Religious texts tell the story of Jacob and his twelve sons, who left Canaan during a severe famine and settled in [[Land of Goshen|Goshen]] of northern Egypt. While in Egypt their descendants were said to be enslaved by the government led by the Egyptian [[Pharaoh]], although there is no independent evidence of this having occurred.<ref>{{cite web|title=Were Jews ever really slaves in Egypt, or is Passover a myth?|url=http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/were-jews-ever-really-slaves-in-egypt-or-is-passover-a-myth-1.420844|work=Haaretz}}</ref> After some 400 years of slavery, [[YHWH]], the [[God in Judaism|God of Israel]], sent the Hebrew prophet [[Moses]] of the tribe of Levi to release the Israelites from bondage. According to the Bible, the Hebrews miraculously emigrated out of [[Egypt]] (an event known as [[the Exodus]]), and returned to their ancestral homeland in Canaan. This event marks the formation of Israel as a political nation in Canaan, in 1400 BCE.{{citation needed|date=May 2015}}


Dawkins defined the ''meme'' as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation and replication, but later definitions would vary. The lack of a consistent, rigorous, and precise understanding of what typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in debates about [[memetics]].<ref name="machine">{{harvnb|Blackmore|1999}}</ref> In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the [[DNA#History of DNA research|discovery]] of the [[DNA#Biological functions|biological functions]] of [[DNA]]. Meme transmission requires a physical medium, such as photons, sound waves, touch, taste or smell because memes can be transmitted only through the senses.
However, archaeology reveals a different story of the origins of the Jewish people: they did not necessarily leave the Levant. The archaeological evidence of the largely indigenous origins of Israel in Canaan, not Egypt, is "overwhelming" and leaves "no room for an Exodus from Egypt or a 40-year pilgrimage through the Sinai wilderness".<ref name="autogenerated99">{{cite book |author=Dever, William G. |title=What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? |publisher=Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company |year=2002 |isbn=978-0-8028-2126-3}}p. 99</ref> Many archaeologists have abandoned the archaeological investigation of Moses and the Exodus as "a fruitless pursuit".<ref name="autogenerated99"/> A century of research by archaeologists and Egyptologists has arguably found no evidence that can be directly related to the Exodus narrative of an Egyptian captivity and the escape and travels through the wilderness, leading to the suggestion that Iron Age Israel—the kingdoms of Judah and Israel—has its origins in Canaan, not Egypt:<ref name="Finkelstein 1994">{{cite book|last=Finkelstein|first=Israel and Nadav Naaman, eds.|title=From Nomadism to Monarchy: Archaeological and Historical Aspects of Early Israel|publisher=[[Israel Exploration Society]]|year=1994|isbn=978-1-880317-20-4}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|title=A Dictionary of Archaeology|publisher=Wiley Blackwell|isbn=978-0-631-23583-5|url=https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zmvNogJO2ZgC&pg=PA313&dq=%22Iron+Age+Israel%22+origins+in+Canaan,&hl=en&ei=hThOTZaRK8uZhQe_vqWoDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&sqi=2&ved=0CDsQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22Iron%20Age%20Israel%22%20origins%20in%20Canaan%2C&f=false|author=Ian Shaw|edition=New edition (17 Feb 2002)|authorlink=Israel, Israelites|author2=Robert Jameson|editor=Ian Shaw|page=313}}</ref> The culture of the earliest Israelite settlements is Canaanite, their cult-objects are those of the Canaanite god [[El (deity)|El]], the pottery remains in the local Canaanite tradition, and the alphabet used is early Canaanite. Almost the sole marker distinguishing the "Israelite" villages from Canaanite sites is an absence of pig bones, although whether this can be taken as an ethnic marker or is due to other factors remains a matter of dispute.<ref>{{cite book |title=Biblical Peoples and Ethnicity: An Archeological Study of Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, and Early Israel, 1300–1100 B.C.E. |last=Killebrew |first=Ann E. |year=2005 |publisher=Society of Biblical Literature |location=Atlanta |isbn=978-1-58983-097-4 |page=176 |accessdate=August 12, 2012 |url=https://books.google.com.au/books?id=VtAmmwapfVAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=editions:E_0ITux90BoC&source=bl&ots=ZbHvlojozi&sig=k_TUBAfTCRazGbRI19MSqTHF6fg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=c4coUNuOG6GziwLEtIH4Bw&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false}}</ref>


Dawkins noted that in a society with culture a person need not have descendants to remain influential in the actions of individuals thousands of years after their death:
According to the Bible, after their emancipation from Egyptian slavery, the people of Israel wandered around and lived in the [[Sinai desert]] for a span of forty years before conquering Canaan in 1400 BCE under the command of [[Joshua]]. While living in the desert, according to the Biblical writings, the nation of Israel received the [[Ten Commandments]] at [[Mount Sinai]] from [[YHWH]], carried by Moses. This marked a beginning for normative Judaism, and contributed to the formation of the first Abrahamic religion. After entering Canaan, portions of the land were given to each of the twelve tribes of Israel. For several hundred years, the [[Land of Israel]] was organized into a confederacy of twelve tribes ruled by a series of [[Biblical judges|Judges]]. After that, notes the Bible, came the Israelite monarchy. In 1000 BCE, the monarchy was established under [[Saul the King|Saul]], and continued under King [[David]] and his son, [[Solomon]]. During the reign of David, the already existing city of [[Jerusalem]] became the national and spiritual capital of Israel. Solomon built the [[Solomon's Temple|First Temple]] on [[Mount Moriah]] in Jerusalem. However, the tribes were fracturing politically. Upon his death, a civil war erupted between the ten northern Israelite tribes, and the tribes of [[Tribe of Judah|Judah]] ([[Tribe of Simeon|Simeon]] was absorbed into Judah) and [[Tribe of Benjamin|Benjamin]] in the south. The nation split into the [[Kingdom of Israel (Samaria)|Kingdom of Israel]] in the north, and the [[Kingdom of Judah]] in the south. Israel was conquered by the [[Assyria]]n ruler [[Tiglath-Pileser III]] in the 8th century BCE. There is no commonly accepted historical record of the fate of the ten northern tribes, sometimes referred to as the [[Ten Lost Tribes of Israel]], although speculation abounds.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.science.co.il/Israel-history.php |title=Brief History of Israel and the Jewish People |publisher=Israel Science and Technology Directory |accessdate=August 12, 2012}}http://www.science.co.il/Israel-history.asp</ref>


<blockquote>But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea...it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. [[Socrates]] may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as [[George C. Williams|G.C. Williams]] has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, [[Leonardo da Vinci|Leonardo]], [[Copernicus]] and [[Guglielmo Marconi|Marconi]] are still going strong.<ref name="The Selfish Gene 30th Anniversary Edition section on survival">{{cite book|last1=Dawkins|first1=Richard|title=The Selfish Gene 30th Anniversary Edition.|date=2006|publisher=Oxford University Press, UK|location=Oxford|isbn=9780191537554|page=199|edition=3rd|accessdate=}}</ref></blockquote>
===Babylonian captivity (c. 587 – 538 BCE)<!--[[Exilic]] redirects directly here.-->===
{{Main|Babylonian captivity}}
[[File:Tissot The Flight of the Prisoners.jpg|thumb|left|250px|Deportation and exile of the [[Jew]]s of the ancient [[Kingdom of Judah]] to [[Babylon]] and the destruction of Jerusalem and [[Solomon's temple]]]]
After revolting against the new dominant power and an ensuing siege, the Kingdom of Judah was conquered by the [[Neo-Babylonian Empire|Babylonian army]] in 587 BCE and the [[First Temple]] was destroyed. The elite of the kingdom and many of their people were exiled to Babylon, where the religion developed outside their traditional temple. Others [[History of the Jews in Egypt|fled to Egypt]].
After the fall of Jerusalem, [[Babylonia]] (modern day Iraq), would become the focus of Judaism for more than a thousand years. The first Jewish communities in Babylonia started with the exile of the Tribe of Judah to Babylon by [[Jehoiachin]] in 597 BCE as well as after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE.<ref name="Translation 1981, pg. 95"/> Many more Jews migrated to Babylon in 135 CE after the [[Bar Kokhba revolt]] and in the centuries after.<ref name="Translation 1981, pg. 95"/> Babylonia, where some of the largest and most prominent Jewish cities and communities were established, became the center of Jewish life all the way up to the 13th century. By the first century, Babylonia already held a speedily growing<ref name="Translation 1981, pg. 95"/> population of an estimated 1,000,000 Jews, which increased to an estimated 2 million <ref name="Solomon Gryazel p. 137">[Dr. Solomon Gryazel, "History of the Jews - From the destruction of Judah in 586 BC to the present Arab Israeli conflict", p. 137]</ref> between the years 200 CE - 500 CE, both by natural growth and by immigration of more Jews from the Land of Israel, making up about 1/6 of the world Jewish population at that era.<ref name="Solomon Gryazel p. 137"/> It was there that they would write the Babylonian [[Talmud]] in the languages used by the Jews of ancient Babylonia—[[Hebrew]] and [[Aramaic]].


== Memetic lifecycle: transmission, retention ==
The Jews established [[Talmudic Academies in Babylonia]], also known as the [[Geonim|Geonic Academies]], which became the center for Jewish scholarship and the development of Jewish law in Babylonia from roughly 500 CE to 1038 CE. The two most famous academies were the [[Pumbedita Academy]] and the [[Sura Academy]]. Major yeshivot were also located at [[Nehardea]] and Mahuza.
{{See also|Diffusion of innovations}}<!-- Similar process, although memes are not necessarily "innovations". Sections "Process" and "Rate of Adoption". -->


Memes, analogously to genes, vary in their aptitude to replicate; successful memes remain and spread, whereas unfit ones stall and are forgotten. Thus memes that prove more effective at replicating and surviving are selected in the meme pool.
After a few generations and with the conquest of Babylonia in 540 BC by the [[Achaemenid Empire|Persian Empire]], some adherents led by prophets [[Ezra]] and [[Nehemiah]], returned to their homeland and traditional practices. Other Jews did not permanently return and remained in exile and developed somewhat independently outside of the Land of Israel, especially following the [[Muslim conquest]]s of the Middle East in the 7th century CE.{{citation needed| date=February 2012}}


Memes first need retention. The longer a meme stays in its hosts, the higher its chances of propagation are. When a host uses a meme, the meme's life is extended.<ref>{{cite web|last=Heylighen|first=Francis|title=Meme replication: the memetic life-cycle|url=http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMEREP.html|work=Principia Cybernetica|accessdate=26 July 2013}}</ref> The reuse of the neural space hosting a certain meme's copy to host different memes is the greatest threat to that meme's copy.<ref>{{cite web|last=R. Evers|first=John|title=A justification of societal altruism according to the memetic application of Hamilton's rule|url=http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Conf/MemePap/Evers.html|accessdate=26 July 2013}}</ref>
===Post-exilic period (c. 538 – 332 BCE)<!--"Post-exilic period", "Post-Exilic period", "Post-exilic", "Post-Exilic", Postexilic, "Pre-exilic period", "Pre-Exilic period", "Pre-Exilic" and "Pre-exilic" redirect here-->===
{{main|Second Temple Judaism}}
[[File:Jerusalem Modell BW 3.JPG|thumb|right|250px|Model of the [[Second Temple of Jerusalem]]]]
Following their return to Jerusalem after the return from the exile, and with Persian approval and financing, construction of the [[Second Temple]] was completed in 516 BCE under the leadership of the last three Jewish Prophets [[Haggai]], [[Zechariah (Hebrew prophet)|Zechariah]] and [[Malachi]].


A meme which increases the longevity of its hosts will generally survive longer. On the contrary, a meme which shortens the longevity of its hosts will tend to disappear faster. However, as hosts are mortal, retention is not sufficient to perpetuate a meme in the long term; memes also need transmission.
After the death of the last Jewish prophet and while still under Persian rule, the leadership of the [[Jewish people]] passed into the hands of five successive generations of [[zugot]] ("pairs of") leaders. They flourished first [[Yehud Medinata|under the Persians]] and then under the Greeks. As a result, the [[Pharisees]] and [[Sadducees]] were formed. Under the Persians then under the Greeks, Jewish coins were minted in Judea as [[Yehud coinage]].{{citation needed|date=February 2012}}


Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means).
===Hellenistic period (c. 332 – 110 BCE)===
Memes can replicate vertically or horizontally within a single biological generation. They may also lie dormant for long periods of time.
{{Main|Hellenistic Judaism}}
In 332 BCE, the Persians were defeated by [[Alexander the Great]] of [[Macedon]]. After his demise, and the division of Alexander's empire among his generals, the [[Seleucid Kingdom]] was formed.


Memes reproduce by copying from a nervous system to another one, either by communication or [[imitation]]. Imitation often involves the copying of an [[observation|observed]] behavior of another individual. Communication may be direct or indirect, where memes transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or a [[Sheet music|musical score]]. Adam McNamara has suggested that memes can be thereby classified as either internal or external memes (i-memes or e-memes).<ref name="mcnamara" />
Greek culture was spread eastwards by the Alexandrian conquests. The Levant was not immune to this cultural spread. During this time, currents of Judaism were influenced by [[Hellenistic philosophy]] developed from the 3rd century BCE, notably the [[Jewish diaspora]] in [[Alexandria]], culminating in the compilation of the [[Septuagint]]. An important advocate of the symbiosis of Jewish theology and Hellenistic thought is [[Philo]].


Some commentators have likened the transmission of memes to the spread of [[infectious disease|contagions]].<ref>{{harvnb|Blackmore|1998}}; "The term 'contagion' is often associated with memetics. We may say that certain memes are contagious, or more contagious than others."</ref> Social contagions such as [[Bandwagon effect|fads]], [[Hysterical contagion|hysteria]], [[copycat crime]], and [[copycat suicide]] exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas. Observers distinguish the contagious imitation of memes from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate (rather than socially learned) behaviors.<ref name="defmeme">{{harvnb|Blackmore|1998}}
===The Hasmonean Kingdom (110 – 63 BCE)===
</ref>
{{Main|Hasmonean dynasty}}
A deterioration of relations between hellenized Jews and orthodox Jews led the Seleucid king [[Antiochus IV Epiphanes]] to impose decrees banning certain [[Judaism|Jewish religious rites and traditions]]. Consequently, the orthodox Jews revolted under the leadership of the [[Hasmonean]] family (also known as the [[Maccabees]]). This revolt eventually led to the formation of an independent Jewish kingdom, known as the [[Hasmonaean Dynasty]], which lasted from 165 BCE to 63 BCE.<ref>See:
* [[William David Davies]]. ''The Hellenistic Age''. Volume 2 of Cambridge History of Judaism. Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN 978-0-521-21929-7. pp. 292–312.
* Jeff S. Anderson. ''The Internal Diversification of Second Temple Judaism: An Introduction to the Second Temple Period''. University Press of America, 2002. ISBN 978-0-7618-2327-8. pp. 37–38.
* Howard N. Lupovitch. ''Jews and Judaism in World History''. Taylor & Francis. 2009. ISBN 978-0-415-46205-1. pp. 26–30.</ref> The Hasmonean Dynasty eventually disintegrated as a result of civil war between the sons of [[Salome Alexandra]], [[Hyrcanus II]] and [[Aristobulus II]]. The people, who did not want to be governed by a king but by theocratic clergy, made appeals in this spirit to the Roman authorities. A Roman campaign of conquest and annexation, led by [[Pompey]], soon followed.{{citation needed|date=February 2012}}


[[Aaron Lynch]] described seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "thought contagion":<ref name="lynch">{{harvnb|Lynch|1996}}</ref>
==Roman rule in the land of Israel (63 BCE – 324 CE)==
{{main|Judaea (Roman province)|History of the Jews in the Roman Empire}}
[[File:Roberts Siege and Destruction of Jerusalem.jpg|thumb|300px|[[Siege of Jerusalem (70)|Siege and Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans]] (1850 painting by [[David Roberts (painter)|David Roberts]])]]
[[File:Arch of Titus Menorah.png|250px|thumb|The sack of Jerusalem depicted on the inside wall of the [[Arch of Titus]] in [[Rome]]]]


# ''Quantity of parenthood'': an idea that influences the number of children one has. Children respond particularly receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas that directly or indirectly encourage a higher birthrate will replicate themselves at a higher rate than those that discourage higher birthrates.
Judea had been an independent Jewish kingdom under the [[Hasmonean]]s, but was [[Siege of Jerusalem (63 BC)|conquered by the Roman general Pompey in 63 BCE]] and reorganized as a client state. ([[Roman expansion]] was going on in other areas as well, and would continue for more than a hundred and fifty years.) Later, [[Herod the Great]] was appointed "King of the Jews" by the [[Roman Senate]], supplanting the Hasmonean dynasty. Some of his offspring held various positions after him, known as the [[Herodian dynasty]]. Briefly, from 4 BCE to 6 CE, [[Herod Archelaus]] ruled the [[Tetrarchy (Judea)|tetrarchy of Judea]] as [[ethnarch]], the Romans denying him the title of King. After the [[Census of Quirinius]] in 6 CE, the [[Judaea (Roman province)|Roman province of Judaea]] was formed as a satellite of [[Roman Syria]] under the rule of a [[prefect]] (as was [[Roman Egypt]]) until 41 CE, then [[Procurator (Roman)|procurators]] after 44 CE. The empire was often callous and brutal in its treatment of its Jewish subjects, see [[Anti-Judaism#Anti-Judaism in the pre-Christian Roman Empire|Anti-Judaism in the pre-Christian Roman Empire]]. In 66 CE, the Jews began to revolt against the Roman rulers of Judea. The revolt was defeated by the future Roman emperors [[Vespasian]] and [[Titus]]. In the [[Siege of Jerusalem (70)|Siege of Jerusalem]] in 70 CE, the Romans destroyed much of the Temple in Jerusalem and, according to some accounts, plundered artifacts from the temple, such as the [[Menorah (Temple)|Menorah]]. Jews continued to live in their land in significant numbers, the [[Kitos War]] of 115–117 CE nothwithstanding, until [[Sextus Julius Severus|Julius Severus]] ravaged Judea while putting down the [[Bar Kokhba revolt]] of 132–136 CE. 985 villages were destroyed and most of the Jewish population of central Judaea was essentially wiped out, killed, sold into slavery, or forced to flee.{{citation needed|date=September 2008}} Banished from Jerusalem, except for the day of [[Tisha B'Av]], the Jewish population now centred on [[Galilee]] and initially in [[Yavne]]. Jerusalem was renamed [[Aelia Capitolina]] and Judea was renamed [[Syria Palestina]], to spite the Jews by naming it after their ancient enemies, the [[Philistines]].{{citation needed|date=February 2014}} Jews were only allowed to visit Aelia Capitolina on the day of [[Tisha B'Av]].
# ''Efficiency of parenthood'': an idea that increases the proportion of children who will adopt ideas of their parents. Cultural [[separatism]] exemplifies one practice in which one can expect a higher rate of meme-replication—because the meme for separation creates a barrier from exposure to competing ideas.
# ''Proselytic'': ideas generally passed to others beyond one's own children. Ideas that encourage the [[proselytism]] of a meme, as seen in many religious or political movements, can replicate memes horizontally through a given generation, spreading more rapidly than parent-to-child meme-transmissions do.
# ''Preservational'': ideas that influence those that hold them to continue to hold them for a long time. Ideas that encourage longevity in their hosts, or leave their hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, enhance the preservability of memes and afford protection from the competition or proselytism of other memes.
# ''Adversative'': ideas that influence those that hold them to attack or sabotage competing ideas and/or those that hold them. Adversative replication can give an advantage in meme transmission when the meme itself encourages aggression against other memes.
# ''Cognitive'': ideas perceived as cogent by most in the population who encounter them. Cognitively transmitted memes depend heavily on a cluster of other ideas and cognitive traits already widely held in the population, and thus usually spread more passively than other forms of meme transmission. Memes spread in cognitive transmission do not count as self-replicating.
# ''Motivational'': ideas that people adopt because they perceive some self-interest in adopting them. Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted memes do not self-propagate, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with memes self-replicated in the efficiency parental, proselytic and preservational modes.


== Memes as discrete units ==
===The diaspora===
{{Main|Jewish diaspora}}
The Jewish diaspora began with the Assyrian conquest and continued on a much larger scale with the Babylonian conquest, in which the Tribe of Judah was exiled to Babylonia along with the dethroned King of Judah, [[Jehoiachin]], in the 6th Century BCE, and was taken into captivity in 597 BCE. The exile continued after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE.<ref name="Translation 1981, pg. 95">[מרדכי וורמברנד ובצלאל ס רותת "עם ישראל - תולדות 4000 שנה - מימי האבות ועד חוזה השלום", ע"מ 95. (Translation: Mordechai Vermebrand and Betzalel S. Ruth - "The People of Israel - the history of 4000 years - from the days of the Forefathers to the Peace Treaty", 1981, pg. 95)</ref> Many more Jews migrated to Babylon in 135 CE after the [[Bar Kokhba revolt]] and in the centuries after.<ref name="Translation 1981, pg. 95"/>


Dawkins initially defined ''meme'' as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of ''imitation''".<ref name="selfish"/> John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favorable or unfavorable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change".<ref name="wilkins">{{citation |last=Wilkins |first=John S. |title=What's in a Meme? Reflections from the perspective of the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology
Many of the Judaean Jews were sold into [[slavery]] while others became citizens of other parts of the [[Roman Empire]].{{citation needed|date=February 2012}} The book of [[Acts of the Apostles|Acts]] in the [[New Testament]], as well as other [[Pauline epistles|Pauline]] texts, make frequent reference to the large populations of [[Hellenistic Judaism|Hellenised Jews]] in the cities of the Roman world. These Hellenised Jews were affected by the [[diaspora]] only in its spiritual sense, absorbing the feeling of loss and homelessness that became a cornerstone of the Jewish creed, much supported by persecutions in various parts of the world. The policy encouraging [[proselytism]] and conversion to Judaism, which spread the Jewish religion throughout the [[Hellenistic civilization]], seems to have subsided with the wars against the Romans.
|periodical=Journal of Memetics |publication-date=1998 |volume=2 |url=http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/}}
</ref> The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating [[chromosome]].


While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become [[Quantization (physics)|quantized]] or that "[[atom]]ic" ideas exist that cannot be dissected into smaller pieces. A meme has no given size. [[Susan Blackmore]] writes that melodies from [[Ludwig van Beethoven|Beethoven]]'s symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty involved in delimiting memes as discrete units. She notes that while the first four notes of [[Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven)|Beethoven's Fifth Symphony]] ({{Audio|Beet5mov1bars1to5.ogg|listen}}) form a meme widely replicated as an independent unit, one can regard the entire symphony as a single meme as well.<ref name="machine"/>
Of critical importance to the reshaping of Jewish tradition from the Temple-based religion to the rabbinic traditions of the Diaspora, was the development of the interpretations of the Torah found in the ''[[Mishnah]]'' and ''[[Talmud]].''


The inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to quantifiable key units is widely acknowledged as a problem for memetics. It has been argued however that the traces of memetic processing can be quantified utilizing neuroimaging techniques which measure changes in the connectivity profiles between brain regions."<ref name="mcnamara"/> Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a [[gene]] has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every [[phenotype|phenotypic]] feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures. To illustrate, she notes evolution selects for the gene for features such as eye color; it does not select for the individual nucleotide in a strand of [[DNA]]. Memes play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.<ref name="machine"/>
===Late Roman period in the Land of Israel===
{{Further|History of the Jews in the Land of Israel}}
{{unreferenced section|date=February 2012}}
In spite of the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt, a significant number of Jews remained in the Land of Israel. The Jews who remained there went through numerous experiences and armed conflicts against consecutive foreign occupiers. Some of the most famous and important Jewish texts were composed in Israeli cities at this time. The completion of the ''[[Mishnah]]'', the system of ''[[niqqud]]'', and the compilation of the ''[[Jerusalem Talmud]]'' are examples.


The 1981 book ''Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process'' by [[Charles J. Lumsden]] and [[E. O. Wilson]] proposed the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic [[memory]]. They coined their own word, "[[culturgen]]", which did not catch on. Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term ''meme'' as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book ''[[Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge]]'', which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the [[Natural science|natural]] and [[social sciences|social]] sciences.<ref>{{harvnb|Wilson|1998}}</ref>
In this period the ''[[tannaim]]'' and ''[[amora]]im'' were active, [[rabbi]]s who organized and debated the Jewish [[oral law]]. The decisions and opinions of the ''tannaim'' are contained in the [[Mishnah]], [[Beraita]], [[Tosefta]], and various [[Midrash]] compilations. The [[Mishnah]] was completed shortly after 200 CE, probably by [[Judah haNasi]]. The commentaries of the ''amoraim'' upon the Mishnah are compiled in the ''[[Jerusalem Talmud]]'', which was completed around 400 CE, probably in [[Tiberias]].


==Evolutionary influences on memes==
In 351 CE, the Jewish population in [[Sepphoris]], under the leadership of [[Jewish revolt against Gallus|Patricius]], started a [[Jewish revolt against Gallus|revolt]] against the rule of [[Constantius Gallus]], brother-in-law of Emperor [[Constantius II]]. The revolt was eventually subdued by Gallus' general, [[Ursicinus (Roman general)|Ursicinus]].
Dawkins noted the three conditions that must exist for evolution to occur:<ref name="conscious">{{harvnb|Dennett|1991}}</ref>
# variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements;
# heredity or replication, or the capacity to create copies of elements;
# differential "fitness", or the opportunity for one element to be more or less suited to the environment than another.
Dawkins emphasizes that the process of evolution naturally occurs whenever these conditions co-exist, and that evolution does not apply only to organic elements such as genes. He regards memes as also having the properties necessary for evolution, and thus sees meme evolution as not simply analogous to genetic evolution, but as a real phenomenon subject to the laws of [[natural selection]]. Dawkins noted that as various ideas pass from one [[generation]] to the next, they may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the ideas themselves. For example, a certain culture may develop unique designs and methods of [[tool]]-making that give it a competitive advantage over another culture. Each tool-design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological [[gene]] in that some populations have it and others do not, and the meme's function directly affects the presence of the design in future generations. In keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes. Consequently, a successful meme may or may not need to provide any benefit to its host.<ref name="conscious"/>


Unlike genetic evolution, memetic evolution can show both [[Darwinism|Darwinian]] and [[Lamarckism|Lamarckian]] traits. Cultural memes will have the characteristic of Lamarckian inheritance when a host aspires to replicate the given meme through inference rather than by exactly copying it. Take for example the case of the transmission of a simple skill such as hammering a nail, a skill that a learner imitates from watching a demonstration without necessarily imitating every discrete movement modeled by the teacher in the demonstration, stroke for stroke.<ref>{{harvnb|Dawkins|2004}}</ref> Susan Blackmore distinguishes the difference between the two modes of inheritance in the evolution of memes, characterizing the Darwinian mode as "copying the instructions" and the Lamarckian as "copying the product."<ref name="machine"/>
According to Jewish tradition, in 359 CE [[Hillel II]] created the [[Hebrew calendar]] based on the [[Moon|lunar]] year. Until then, the entire Jewish community outside the land of Israel depended on the calendar sanctioned by the [[Sanhedrin]]; this was necessary for the proper observance of the Jewish holy days. However, danger threatened the participants in that sanction and the messengers who communicated their decisions to distant communities. As the religious persecutions continued, Hillel determined to provide an authorized calendar for all time to come.


Clusters of memes, or ''[[memeplex]]es'' (also known as ''meme complexes'' or as ''memecomplexes''), such as cultural or political doctrines and systems, may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes. Memeplexes comprise groups of memes that replicate together and coadapt.<ref name="machine"/> Memes that fit within a successful memeplex may gain acceptance by "piggybacking" on the success of the memeplex.
In 363, shortly before launching his campaign against the [[Sassanid Empire]], [[Julian the Apostate|Julian II]], the last [[Imperial cult (ancient Rome)|pagan]] Roman Emperor, allowed the Jews to return to "holy Jerusalem which you have for many years longed to see rebuilt" and to rebuild the Temple. But, Julian's campaign against the Persians failed and he was [[Julian the Apostate#Death|killed in battle]] on June 26, 363. The Temple was not rebuilt.
As an example, John D. Gottsch discusses the transmission, mutation and selection of religious memeplexes and the theistic memes contained.<ref>[http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2001/vol5/gottsch_jd.html "Mutation, Selection, And Vertical Transmission Of Theistic Memes In Religious Canons"] in ''Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission'', Volume 5, Issue 1, 2001. Online version retrieved 2008-01-27.
</ref> Theistic memes discussed include the "prohibition of aberrant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, castration, and religious prostitution", which may have increased vertical transmission of the parent religious memeplex. Similar memes are thereby included in the majority of religious memeplexes, and harden over time; they become an "inviolable canon" or set of [[dogma]]s, eventually finding their way into secular [[law]]. This could also be referred to as the propagation of a [[taboo]].


==Middle Ages==
==Memetics==
{{Main|Jews in the Middle Ages}}
{{Main|Memetics}}


The discipline of memetics, which dates from the mid-1980s, provides an approach to [[evolutionary model]]s of cultural [[information transfer]] based on the concept of the meme. [[Memeticist]]s have proposed that just as memes function analogously to [[gene]]s, memetics functions analogously to [[genetics]]. Memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in [[population genetics]] and [[epidemiology]]) to explain existing patterns and transmission of [[culture|cultural]] ideas.
===Jews of Babylonia (219 CE – 1250 CE)===
{{Main|History of the Jews in Iraq}}
After the fall of Jerusalem, [[Babylonia]] (modern day Iraq), would become the focus of Judaism for more than a thousand years. The first Jewish communities in Babylonia started with the exile of the Tribe of Judah to Babylon by [[Jehoiachin]] in 597 BCE as well as after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE.<ref name="Translation 1981, pg. 95"/> Many more Jews migrated to Babylon in 135 CE after the [[Bar Kokhba revolt]] and in the centuries after.<ref name="Translation 1981, pg. 95"/> Babylonia, where some of the largest and most prominent Jewish cities and communities were established, became the center of Jewish life all the way up to the 13th century. By the first century, Babylonia already held a speedily growing<ref name="Translation 1981, pg. 95"/> population of an estimated 1,000,000 Jews, which increased to an estimated 2 million<ref name="Solomon Gryazel p. 137"/> between the years 200 CE and 500 CE, both by natural growth and by immigration of more Jews from the Land of Israel, making up about 1/6 of the world Jewish population at that era.<ref name="Solomon Gryazel p. 137"/> It was there that they would write the Babylonian [[Talmud]] in the languages used by the Jews of ancient Babylonia: [[Hebrew]] and [[Aramaic]]. The Jews established [[Talmudic Academies in Babylonia]], also known as the Geonic Academies ("Geonim" meaning "splendour" in Biblical Hebrew or "geniuses"), which became the center for Jewish scholarship and the development of Jewish law in Babylonia from roughly 500 CE to 1038 CE. The two most famous academies were the [[Pumbedita Academy]] and the [[Sura Academy]]. Major yeshivot were also located at [[Nehardea]] and Mahuza. The Talmudic [[Yeshiva]] Academies became a main part of Jewish culture and education, and Jews continued on establishing Yeshiva Academies in Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, and in the centuries later on to America and other countries around the world where Jews lived in the Diaspora. Talmudic study in [[Yeshiva]] academies continue today with the establishment of a large number of Yeshiva academies, most of them located in The United States and [[State of Israel|Israel]].


Principal criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as [[sociology]], [[cultural anthropology]], [[cognitive psychology]], and [[social psychology]]. Questions remain whether or not the meme concept counts as a [[philosophy of science|validly disprovable]] scientific theory. This view regards memetics as a theory in its infancy: a [[protoscience]] to proponents, or a [[pseudoscience]] to some detractors.
These Talmudic [[Yeshiva]] academies of Babylonia followed the era of the [[Amoraim]] ("expounders")—the sages of the Talmud who were active (both in the [[Land of Israel]] and in Babylon) during the end of the era of the sealing of the [[Mishnah]] and until the times of the sealing of the Talmud (220CE – 500CE), and following the [[Savoraim]] ("reasoners")—the sages of Beth midrash (Torah study places) in Babylon from the end of the era of the Amoraim (5th century) and until the beginning of the era of the [[Geonim]]. The Geonim (Hebrew: גאונים) were the presidents of the two great rabbinical colleges of Sura and Pumbedita, and were the generally accepted spiritual leaders of the worldwide Jewish community in the early medieval era, in contrast to the [[Resh Galuta]] (Exilarch) who wielded secular authority over the Jews in Islamic lands. According to traditions, the [[Resh Galuta]] were descendants of Judean kings, which is why the kings of [[Parthia]] would treat them with much honour.<ref>[מרדכי וורמברנד ובצלאל ס. רותת "עם ישראל - תולדות 4000 שנה - מימי האבות ועד חוזה השלום", ע"מ 97. (Translation: Mordechai Vermebrand and Betzalel S. Ruth ''The People of Israel: The History of 4,000 Years, from the Days of the Forefathers to the Peace Treaty'', 1981, pg. 97)</ref>


==Criticism of meme theory==
For the Jews of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the yeshivot of Babylonia served much the same function as the ancient [[Sanhedrin]]. That is, as a council of Jewish religious authorities. The academies were founded in pre-Islamic Babylonia under the Zoroastrian Sassanid dynasty and were located not far from the Sassanid capital of Ctesiphon, which at that time was the largest city in the world. After the conquest of Persia in the 7th Century, the academies subsequently operated for four hundred years under the Islamic caliphate. The first gaon of Sura, according to [[Sherira Gaon]], was Mar bar Rab Chanan, who assumed office in 609. The last gaon of [[Sura]] was [[Samuel ben Hofni]], who died in 1034; the last gaon of Pumbedita was [[Hezekiah Gaon]], who was tortured to death in 1040; hence the activity of the Geonim covers a period of nearly 450 years.
An objection to the study of the evolution of memes in genetic terms (although not to the existence of memes) involves a perceived gap in the gene/meme analogy: the cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selection-pressures neither too great nor too small in relation to mutation-rates. There seems no reason to think that the same balance will exist in the selection pressures on memes.<ref>{{harvnb| Sterelny|Griffiths|1999}}; p.333
</ref>


Luis Benitez-Bribiesca M.D., a critic of memetics, calls the theory a "[[pseudoscience|pseudoscientific]] [[dogma]]" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of [[consciousness]] and [[Sociocultural evolution|cultural evolution]]". As a factual criticism, Benitez-Bribiesca points to the lack of a "code script" for memes (analogous to the DNA of genes), and to the excessive instability of the meme mutation mechanism (that of an idea going from one brain to another), which would lead to a low replication accuracy and a high mutation rate, rendering the evolutionary process chaotic.<ref>
One of principal seats of Babylonian Judaism was [[Nehardea]], which was then a very large city made up mostly of Jews.<ref name="Translation 1981, pg. 95"/> A very ancient synagogue, built, it was believed, by King Jehoiachin, existed in Nehardea. At Huzal, near Nehardea, there was another synagogue, not far from which could be seen the ruins of Ezra's academy. In the period before Hadrian, Akiba, on his arrival at Nehardea on a mission from the Sanhedrin, entered into a discussion with a resident scholar on a point of matrimonial law (Mishnah Yeb., end). At the same time there was at Nisibis (northern [[Mesopotamia]]), an excelling Jewish college, at the head of which stood Judah ben Bathyra, and in which many Judean scholars found refuge at the time of the persecutions. A certain temporary importance was also attained by a school at Nehar-Peḳod, founded by the Judean immigrant Hananiah, nephew of [[Joshua ben Hananiah]], which school might have been the cause of a schism between the Jews of Babylonia and those of Judea-Israel, had not the Judean authorities promptly checked Hananiah's ambition.
{{Citation
| last = Benitez Bribiesca
| first = Luis
|date=January 2001
| title = Memetics: A dangerous idea
| journal = Interciencia: Revista de Ciencia y Technologia de América
| volume = 26
| issue = 1
| pages = 29–31
| publisher = Asociación Interciencia
| location = Venezuela
| issn = 0378-1844
| url = http://redalyc.org/pdf/339/33905206.pdf
| format = PDF
| accessdate = 2010-02-11
| quote = If the mutation rate is high and takes place over short periods, as memetics predict, instead of selection, adaptation and survival a chaotic disintegration occurs due to the accumulation of errors.
| postscript = .
}}
</ref>


British political philosopher [[John N. Gray|John Gray]] has characterized Dawkins' memetic theory of religion as "nonsense" and "not even a theory... the latest in a succession of ill-judged Darwinian metaphors", comparable to [[Intelligent Design]] in its value as a science.<ref>{{cite news| url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/mar/15/society | location=London | work=The Guardian | first=John | last=Gray | title=John Gray on secular fundamentalists | date=2008-03-15}}</ref>
===Byzantine period (324 CE – 638 CE)===
{{Main|Jews of Byzantium}}
Jews were also widespread throughout the Roman Empire, and this carried on to a lesser extent in the period of Byzantine rule in the central and eastern Mediterranean. The militant and exclusive Christianity and [[caesaropapism]] of the [[Byzantine Empire]] did not treat Jews well, and the condition and influence of diaspora Jews in the Empire declined dramatically.


Another critique comes from [[semiotic]] theorists such as Deacon<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Deacon | first1 = Terrence | authorlink = Terrence Deacon | year = | title = The trouble with memes (and what to do about it)". | url = | journal = The Semiotic Review of Books | volume = 10 | issue = | page = 3 }}</ref> and Kull.<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Kull | first1 = Kalevi | authorlink = Kalevi Kull | year = 2000 | title = Copy versus translate, meme versus sign: development of biological textuality | url = | journal = European Journal for Semiotic Studies | volume = 12 | issue = 1| pages = 101–120 }}</ref> This view regards the concept of "meme" as a primitivized concept of [[Sign (semiotics)|"sign"]]. The meme is thus described in memetics as a sign lacking a [[Sign (semiotics)#Triadic signs|triadic]] nature. Semioticians can regard a meme as a "degenerate" sign, which includes only its ability of being copied. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs.{{Clarify|date=February 2009|reason=This last paragraph could be better explained. I'm familiar with the subject but was confused. "Triadic nature" "degenerate sign" the article would benefit from clarification of these terms. This may not be the proper place to put this but I don't know, if there is a discussion page for this article.}}
It was official Christian policy to convert Jews to [[Christianity]], and the Christian leadership used the official power of Rome in their attempts. In 351 CE the Jews revolted against the added pressures of their Governor, [[Constantius Gallus]]. Gallus put down the revolt and destroyed the major cities in the Galilee area where the revolt had started. Tzippori and Lydda (site of two of the major legal academies) never recovered.


Fracchia and Lewontin regard memetics as reductionist and inadequate.<ref>
In this period, the Nasi in Tiberias, Hillel II, created an official calendar, which needed no monthly sightings of the moon. The months were set, and the calendar needed no further authority from Judea. At about the same time, the Jewish academy at Tiberius began to collate the combined Mishnah, [[braitot]], explanations, and interpretations developed by generations of scholars who studied after the death of [[Judah HaNasi]]. The text was organized according to the order of the Mishna: each paragraph of Mishnah was followed by a compilation of all of the interpretations, stories, and responses associated with that Mishnah. This text is called the ''[[Jerusalem Talmud]].''
{{Citation
| doi = 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2005.00305.x
| last = Fracchia
| first = Joseph
| author2 = [[Richard Lewontin|R C Lewontin]]
|date=February 2005
| title = The price of metaphor
| journal = History and theory
| volume = 44
| issue = 44
| series =
| pages = 14–29
| publisher = Weleyan University
| issn = 0018-2656
| jstor = 3590779
| quote = The selectionist paradigm requires the reduction of society and culture to inheritance systems that consist of randomly varying, individual units, some of which are selected, and some not; and with society and culture thus reduced to inheritance systems, history can be reduced to "evolution." [...] [W]e conclude that while historical phenomena can always be modeled selectionistically, selectionist explanations do no work, nor do they contribute anything new except a misleading vocabulary that anesthetizes history.
| postscript = .
}}
</ref> Evolutionary biologist [[Ernst Mayr]] disapproved of Dawkins' gene-based view and usage of the term "meme", asserting it to be an "unnecessary synonym" for "[[concept]]", reasoning that concepts are not restricted to an individual or a generation, may persist for long periods of time, and may evolve.<ref name=pNASmayr>{{cite journal |last1=Mayr |first1=Ernst |year=1997 |title=The objects of selection |journal=Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |volume=94 |issue=6 |pages=2091–2094 |publisher= Stanford University's HighWire Press® |doi= 10.1073/pnas.94.6.2091|url=http://www.pnas.org/content/94/6/2091.full |archiveurl=http://www.webcitation.org/6L9TOiSj0 |archivedate=November 15, 2013 |pmid=9122151 |pmc=33654}}</ref>


==Applications==
The Jews of Judea received a brief respite from official persecution during the rule of the Emperor [[Julian the Apostate]]. Julian's policy was to return the kingdom to Hellenism and he encouraged the Jews to rebuild Jerusalem. As Julian's rule lasted briefly from 361 to 363, the Jews could not rebuild sufficiently before Roman Christian rule was restored over the Empire. Beginning in 398 with the consecration of [[St. John Chrysostom]] as [[Patriarch]], the Christian rhetoric against Jews continued to rise; he preached sermons with titles such as "Against the Jews" and "On the Statues, Homily 17," in which John preaches against "the Jewish sickness".<ref>Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen, ''John Chrysostom: The Early Church Fathers'' (London, 2000), p. 113, 146.</ref> Such heated language contributed to a climate of Christian distrust and hate toward the large Jewish settlements, such as those in [[Antioch]] and [[Constantinople]].
Opinions differ as to how best to apply the concept of memes within a "proper" disciplinary framework. One view sees memes as providing a useful philosophical perspective with which to examine cultural evolution. Proponents of this view (such as [[Susan Blackmore]] and [[Daniel Dennett]]) argue that considering cultural developments from a meme's-eye view—''as if'' memes themselves respond to pressure to maximise their own replication and survival—can lead to useful insights and yield valuable predictions into how culture develops over time. Others such as Bruce Edmonds and Robert Aunger have focused on the need to provide an empirical grounding for memetics to become a useful and respected [[scientific discipline]].<ref>
See {{citation |url=http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2002/vol6/edmonds_b_letter.html |last=Edmonds |first=Bruce |publication-date=September 2002 |volume=6 |issue=2 |title=Three Challenges for the Survival of Memetics |work=Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission |accessdate=2009-02-03}}
</ref><ref>
{{harvnb|Aunger|2000}}
</ref>


A third approach, described by Joseph Poulshock, as "radical memetics" seeks to place memes at the centre of a [[Eliminative materialism|materialistic]] [[theory of mind]] and of [[personal identity]].<ref>{{harvnb|Poulshock|2002}}
In the beginning of the 5th century, the [[Emperor Theodosius]] issued a set of decrees establishing official persecution against Jews. Jews were not allowed to own slaves, build new synagogues, hold public office or try cases between a Jew and a non-Jew. Intermarriage between Jew and non-Jew was made a capital offense, as was a Christian converting to Judaism. Theodosius did away with the [[Sanhedrin]] and abolished the post of [[Nasi (Hebrew title)|Nasi]]. Under the [[Emperor Justinian]], the authorities further restricted the civil rights of Jews,<ref>Cod., I., v. 12</ref> and threatened their religious privileges.<ref>Procopius, ''Historia Arcana'', 28</ref> The emperor interfered in the internal affairs of the synagogue,<ref>Nov., cxlvi., Feb. 8, 553</ref> and forbade, for instance, the use of the Hebrew language in divine worship. Those who disobeyed the restrictions were threatened with corporal penalties, exile, and loss of property. The Jews at Borium, not far from Syrtis Major, who resisted the Byzantine General [[Belisarius]] in his campaign against the [[Vandals]], were forced to embrace Christianity, and their synagogue was converted to a church.<ref>Procopius, ''De Aedificiis'', vi. 2</ref>
</ref>


Prominent researchers in [[evolutionary psychology]] and [[anthropology]], including [[Scott Atran]], [[Dan Sperber]], [[Pascal Boyer]], [[John Tooby]] and others, argue the possibility of incompatibility between [[modularity of mind]] and memetics.{{citation needed|date=December 2010}} In their view, minds structure certain communicable aspects of the ideas produced, and these communicable aspects generally trigger or elicit ideas in other minds through inference (to relatively rich structures generated from often low-fidelity input) and not high-fidelity replication or imitation. Atran discusses communication involving religious beliefs as a case in point. In one set of experiments he asked religious people to write down on a piece of paper the meanings of the [[Ten Commandments]]. Despite the subjects' own expectations of consensus, interpretations of the commandments showed wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus. In another experiment, subjects with autism and subjects without autism interpreted ideological and religious sayings (for example, "Let a thousand flowers bloom" or "To everything there is a season"). People with autism showed a significant tendency to closely paraphrase and repeat content from the original statement (for example: "Don't cut flowers before they bloom"). Controls tended to infer a wider range of cultural meanings with little replicated content (for example: "Go with the flow" or "Everyone should have equal opportunity"). Only the subjects with autism—who lack the degree of inferential capacity normally associated with aspects of [[theory of mind]]—came close to functioning as "meme machines".<ref>{{harvnb|Atran|2002}}</ref>
Justinian and his successors had concerns outside the province of Judea, and he had insufficient troops to enforce these regulations. As a result, the 5th century was a period when a wave of new synagogues were built, many with beautiful mosaic floors. Jews adopted the rich art forms of the Byzantine culture. Jewish mosaics of the period portray people, animals, menorahs, zodiacs, and Biblical characters. Excellent examples of these synagogue floors have been found at Beit Alpha (which includes the scene of Abraham sacrificing a ram instead of his son Isaac along with a zodiac), Tiberius, Beit Shean, and Tzippori.


In his book ''The Robot's Rebellion'', [[Keith Stanovich|Stanovich]] uses the memes and memeplex concepts to describe a program of cognitive reform that he refers to as a "rebellion". Specifically, Stanovich argues that the use of memes as a descriptor for cultural units is beneficial because it serves to emphasize transmission and acquisition properties that parallel the study of [[epidemiology]]. These properties make salient the sometimes parasitic nature of acquired memes, and as a result individuals should be motivated to reflectively acquire memes using what he calls a "[[Neurathian bootstrap]]" process.<ref>{{cite book|last=Stanovich|first=Keith E.|date=2004|accessdate=|title=The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin|edition=1st|publisher=University Of Chicago Press|isbn=0-226-77089-3|pages=}}</ref>
The precarious existence of Jews under Byzantine rule did not long endure, largely for the explosion of the Muslim religion out of the remote Arabian peninsula (where large populations of Jews resided, see [[History of the Jews under Muslim Rule]] for more). The [[Muslim]] [[Caliphate]] ejected the Byzantines from the Holy Land (or the [[Levant]], defined as modern Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria) within a few years of their victory at the [[Battle of Yarmouk]] in 636. Numerous Jews fled the remaining Byzantine territories in favour of residence in the Caliphate over the subsequent centuries.


==Religion==
The size of the Jewish community in the Byzantine Empire was not affected by attempts by some emperors (most notably Justinian) to forcibly convert the Jews of Anatolia to Christianity, as these attempts met with very little success.<ref>[[George Alexandrovič Ostrogorsky|G. Ostrogorsky]], ''History of the Byzantine State''</ref> Historians continue to research the status of the Jews in Asian Minor during the Byzantine rule. (for a sample of views, see, for instance, J. Starr ''The Jews in the Byzantine Empire, 641–1204''; S. Bowman, ''The Jews of Byzantium''; R. Jenkins ''Byzantium''; Averil Cameron, "Byzantines and Jews: Recent Work on Early Byzantium", ''Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies'' 20 (1996)). No systematic persecution of the type endemic at that time in Western Europe (pogroms, the stake, mass expulsions, etc.) has been recorded in Byzantium.<ref>''The Oxford History of Byzantium'', C. Mango (Ed) (2002)</ref> Much of the Jewish population of [[Constantinople]] remained in place after the conquest of the city by [[Mehmet II]].{{citation needed|date=November 2013}}
{{See also|Evolutionary psychology of religion}}


Although social scientists such as [[Max Weber]] sought to understand and explain [[religion]] in terms of a cultural attribute, Richard Dawkins called for a re-analysis of religion in terms of the evolution of self-replicating ideas ''apart from'' any resulting biological advantages they might bestow.
Sometime in the 7th or 8th century, the [[Khazars]], a [[Turkic peoples|Turkic tribe]] (who for some three centuries [c. 650–965] dominated the vast area extending from the Volga-Don steppe lands to the eastern Crimea and the northern Caucasus), seem to have converted to Judaism. The completeness of this conversion is unclear. There had been a Jewish population in the [[Crimea]] since the Hellenistic era, and the conversions may have been reinforced by Jewish migrants entering the region, who had emigrated from areas of Byzantine rule.
{{quote|As an enthusiastic Darwinian, I have been dissatisfied with explanations that my fellow-enthusiasts have offered for human behaviour. They have tried to look for 'biological advantages' in various attributes of human civilization. For instance, tribal religion has been seen as a mechanism for solidifying group identity, valuable for a pack-hunting species whose individuals rely on cooperation to catch large and fast prey. Frequently the evolutionary preconception in terms of which such theories are framed is implicitly group-selectionist, but it is possible to rephrase the theories in terms of orthodox gene selection.|[[Richard Dawkins]]|''[[The Selfish Gene]]''}}


He argued that the role of key replicator in cultural evolution belongs not to genes, but to memes replicating thought from person to person by means of imitation. These replicators respond to selective pressures that may or may not affect biological reproduction or survival.<ref name="selfish"/>
Perhaps in the 4th century, the [[Kingdom of Semien]], a Jewish nation in modern [[Beta Israel|Ethiopia]] was established, lasting until the 17th century.


In her book ''The Meme Machine'', [[Susan Blackmore]] regards religions as particularly tenacious memes. Many of the features common to the most widely practiced religions provide built-in advantages in an evolutionary context, she writes. For example, religions that preach of the value of [[faith]] over [[evidence]] from everyday experience or [[reason]] inoculate societies against many of the most basic tools people commonly use to evaluate their ideas. By linking [[altruism]] with religious affiliation, religious memes can proliferate more quickly because people perceive that they can reap societal as well as personal rewards. The longevity of religious memes improves with their documentation in revered [[scripture|religious texts]].<ref name="machine"/>
<gallery>
File:Roman. Mosaic of Menorah with Lulav and Ethrog, 6th century C.E.jpg|''Mosaic of Menorah with Lulav and Ethrog'', 6th century C.E. [[Brooklyn Museum]]
File:Beit Alpha.jpg|Mosaic pavement of a synagogue at [[Beit Alpha]] (5th century)
File:ZodiacMosaicTzippori.jpg|Mosaic in the [[Tzippori Synagogue]] (5th century)
File:Hammat Gader.JPG|Mosaic pavement recovered from the [[Hamat Gader]] synagogue (5th or 6th century)
</gallery>


[[Aaron Lynch]] attributed the robustness of religious memes in human culture to the fact that such memes incorporate multiple modes of meme transmission. Religious memes pass down the generations from parent to child and across a single generation through the meme-exchange of [[proselytism]]. Most people will hold the religion taught them by their parents throughout their life. Many religions feature adversarial elements, punishing [[apostasy]], for instance, or demonizing [[infidels]]. In ''Thought Contagion'' Lynch identifies the memes of transmission in [[Christianity]] as especially powerful in scope. Believers view the conversion of non-believers both as a religious duty and as an act of altruism. The promise of [[heaven]] to believers and threat of [[hell]] to non-believers provide a strong incentive for members to retain their belief. Lynch asserts that belief in the [[Crucifixion of Jesus]] in Christianity amplifies each of its other replication advantages through the indebtedness believers have to their [[Redeemer (Christianity)|Savior]] for sacrifice on the cross. The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious [[sacrament]]s, and the proliferation of symbols of the [[Christian cross|cross]] in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes.<ref name="lynch"/>
===Islamic period (638 – 1099)===
{{Main|History of the Jews under Muslim rule}}
In 638 CE the Byzantine Empire lost control of the Levant. The Arab [[Rashidun Caliphate|Islamic Empire]] under [[Caliph Omar]] conquered Jerusalem and the lands of [[Mesopotamia]], [[History of Syria|Syria]], Palestine and Egypt. As a political system, Islam created radically new conditions for Jewish economic, social, and intellectual development.<ref>Ehrlich, Mark. ''Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture, Volume 1''. ABC-CLIO, 2009, p. 152.(ISBN 9781851098736)</ref> [[Caliph Omar]] permitted the Jews to reestablish their presence in Jerusalem–after a lapse of 500 years.<ref name="Bashan, Eliezer 2007">Bashan, Eliezer. ''Encyclopaedia Judaica''. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik. 2nd ed. Vol. 15. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007. 419.</ref> Jewish tradition regards [[Caliph Omar]] as a benevolent ruler and the Midrash (Nistarot de-Rav Shimon bar Yoḥai) refers to him as a "friend of Israel."<ref name="Bashan, Eliezer 2007"/>


Although religious memes have proliferated in human cultures, the modern scientific community has been relatively resistant to religious belief. Robertson (2007) <ref name=Robertson2007>{{citation |author = Robertson, Lloyd Hawkeye|year=2007 | title=Reflections on the use of spirituality to privilege religion in scientific discourse: Incorporating considerations of self |journal = Journal of Religion and Health | volume = 46|issue=3 |pages=449–461 |doi = 10.1007/s10943-006-9105-y}}</ref> reasoned that if evolution is accelerated in conditions of propagative difficulty,<ref name=Dennett1995>{{citation |last = Dennett|first= Daniel C.|year=1995| title=Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the meanings of life|publisher = Simon and Schuster|location=New York}}</ref> then we would expect to encounter variations of religious memes, established in general populations, addressed to scientific communities. Using a memetic approach, Robertson deconstructed two attempts to privilege religiously held spirituality in scientific discourse. Advantages of a memetic approach as compared to more traditional "modernization" and "supply side" theses in understanding the evolution and propagation of religion were explored.
According to the Arab geographer [[Al-Muqaddasi]], the Jews worked as "the assayers of coins, the dyers, the tanners and the bankers in the community".<ref name=SKatz/> During the [[Fatimid]] period, many Jewish officials served in the regime.<ref name=SKatz>{{cite web |url=http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~samuel/presence.html |title=Continuous Jewish Presence in the Holy Land |author=Joseph E. Katz |year=2001 |publisher=EretzYisroel.Org |accessdate=August 12, 2012}}</ref> Professor [[Moshe Gil]] documents that at the time of the Arab conquest in the 7th century CE, the majority of the population was Jewish.<ref>Moshe Gil, ''A History of Palestine: 634–1099''</ref>


==Memetic explanations of racism==
During this time Jews lived in thriving communities all across ancient Babylonia. In the Geonic period (650–1250 CE), the Babylonian Yeshiva Academies were the chief centers of Jewish learning; the Geonim (meaning either "Splendor" or "Geniuses"), who were the heads of these schools, were recognized as the highest authorities in Jewish law.
In ''Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology'', [[Jack Balkin]] argued that memetic processes can explain many of the most familiar features of [[ideology|ideological]] thought. His theory of "cultural software" maintained that memes form [[narrative]]s, social networks, metaphoric and [[metonymy|metonymic]] models, and a variety of different mental structures. Balkin maintains that the same structures used to generate ideas about free speech or free markets also serve to generate racistic beliefs. To Balkin, whether memes become harmful or maladaptive depends on the environmental context in which they exist rather than in any special source or manner to their origination. Balkin describes racist beliefs as "fantasy" memes that <!-- may? or must? -->become harmful or unjust "ideologies" when diverse peoples come together, as through trade or competition.<ref>{{harvnb|Balkin|1998}}</ref>


==Architectural memes==
===Jewish Golden Age in early Muslim Spain (711 – 1031)===
In ''[[A Theory of Architecture]]'', [[Nikos Salingaros]] speaks of memes as "freely propagating clusters of information" which can be beneficial or harmful. He contrasts memes to [[Pattern language|patterns]] and true knowledge, characterizing memes as "greatly simplified versions of patterns" and as "unreasoned matching to some visual or mnemonic prototype".<ref>[[Nikos Salingaros]]: ''Theory of Architecture'', chapter 12: ''Architectural memes in a universe of information'', ISBN 3-937954-07-4, Umbau-Verlag, 2006, 2008, pages 243 and 260</ref> Taking reference to Dawkins, Salingaros emphasizes that they can be transmitted due to their own communicative properties, that "the simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate", and that the most successful memes "come with a great psychological appeal".<ref>Salingaros, 2008. pp. 243–245.</ref>
{{main|Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain}}
The Golden Age of Jewish culture in Spain coincided with the [[Middle Ages]] in Europe, a period of [[Al-Andalus|Muslim rule]] throughout much of the [[Iberian Peninsula]]. During that time, [[Jews]] were generally accepted in society and Jewish religious, cultural, and economic life blossomed.


Architectural memes, according to Salingaros, can have destructive power. "Images portrayed in architectural magazines representing buildings that could not possibly accommodate everyday uses become fixed in our memory, so we reproduce them unconsciously."<ref name="Sal08">Salingaros, 2008. p. 249.</ref> He lists various architectural memes that circulated since the 1920s and which, in his view, have led to contemporary architecture becoming quite decoupled from human needs. They lack connection and meaning, thereby preventing "the creation of true connections necessary to our understanding of the world". He sees them as no different from [[antipattern]]s in software design – as solutions that are false but are re-utilized nonetheless.<ref>Salingaros, 2008. p. 259.</ref>
A period of tolerance thus dawned for the Jews of the [[Iberian Peninsula]], whose number was considerably augmented by immigration from Africa in the wake of the Muslim conquest. Especially after 912, during the reign of [[Abd-ar-Rahman III]] and his son, [[Al-Hakam II]], the Jews prospered, devoting themselves to the service of the [[Caliphate of Cordoba]], to the study of the sciences, and to commerce and industry, especially to trading in silk and slaves, in this way promoting the prosperity of the country. Jewish economic expansion was unparalleled. In [[Toledo, Spain|Toledo]], Jews were involved in translating Arabic texts to the [[Romance languages]], as well as translating Greek and Hebrew texts into Arabic. Jews also contributed to botany, geography, medicine, mathematics, poetry and philosophy.<ref name="weiner">[https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Sephardim.html Sephardim] by Rebecca Weiner.</ref>


==Internet culture==
{{Quotation|Generally, the Jewish people were allowed to practice their religion and live according to the laws and scriptures of their community. Furthermore, the restrictions to which they were subject were social and symbolic rather than tangible and practical in character. That is to say, these regulations served to define the relationship between the two communities, and not to oppress the Jewish population.<ref name="lewis">Lewis, Bernard W (1984). ''The Jews of Islam''</ref>|}}
{{Main|Internet meme}}
{{see also|List of Internet phenomena}}


An "Internet meme" is a concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the [[Internet]], largely through Internet-based [[E-mail]]ing, [[blog]]s, [[Internet forum|forums]], [[imageboard]]s like [[4chan]], [[social networking site]]s like [[Facebook]], [[Instagram]] or [[Twitter]], [[instant messaging]], and [[video hosting service]]s like [[YouTube]] and [[Twitch.tv]].<ref name="usatoday">{{cite news |url=http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-07-28-ebay-weirdness_x.htm|publisher=USA Today|first=Karen |last=Schubert|title=Bazaar goes bizarre|accessdate=2007-07-05|date=2003-07-31}}</ref>
'Abd al-Rahman's court physician and minister was Hasdai ben Isaac ibn Shaprut, the patron of Menahem ben Saruq, Dunash ben Labrat, and other Jewish scholars and poets. Jewish thought during this period flourished under famous figures such as Samuel Ha-Nagid, Moses ibn Ezra, Solomon ibn Gabirol [[Judah Halevi]] and [[Moses Maimonides]].<ref name="weiner" /> During 'Abd al-Rahman's term of power, the scholar [[Moses ben Hanoch|Moses ben Enoch]] was appointed [[rabbi]] of [[Córdoba, Spain|Córdoba]], and as a consequence [[al-Andalus]] became the center of [[Talmud]]ic study, and [[Córdoba, Spain|Córdoba]] the meeting-place of Jewish savants.


In 2013 Richard Dawkins characterized an Internet meme as one deliberately altered by human creativity, distinguished from Dawkins's original idea involving mutation by random change and a form of Darwinian selection.<ref name=Wired20130620>{{cite web |url=http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/20/richard-dawkins-memes |title=Richard Dawkins on the internet's hijacking of the word 'meme' |last=Solon |first=Olivia |date=June 20, 2013 |website=Wired UK |archiveurl=http://www.webcitation.org/6HzDGE9Go |archivedate=July 9, 2013 }}</ref>
The Golden Age ended with the invasion of al-Andalus by the invasion of the [[Almohades]], a conservative dynasty originating in North Africa, who were highly intolerant of religious minorities.


==Meme maps==
===Crusaders period (1099 – 1260)===
One technique of meme mapping represents the evolution and transmission of a meme across time and space.<ref name=Paull2009>{{Citation | author = Paull, John | year = 2009 | title = Meme Maps: A Tool for Configuring Memes in Time and Space | url = http://orgprints.org/15752/1/15752.pdf | journal = European Journal of Scientific Research | volume = 31 | issue = 1| pages = 11–18 | postscript = . }}</ref> Such a meme map uses a figure-8 diagram (an [[analemma]]) to map the gestation (in the lower loop), birth (at the choke point), and development (in the upper loop) of the selected meme. Such meme maps are nonscalar, with time mapped onto the y-axis and space onto the x-axis [[transect]]. One can read the temporal progression of the mapped meme from south to north on such a meme map. Paull has published a worked example using the "organics meme" (as in [[organic agriculture]]).<ref name=Paull2009/>
{{Main|History of the Jews and the Crusades}}
{{See also|Siege of Jerusalem (1099)}}
[[File:1099jerusalem.jpg|thumb|left|[[Siege of Jerusalem (1099)|Capture of Jerusalem]], 1099]]
In 1099, Jews helped the Arabs to defend Jerusalem against the [[Crusaders]]. When the city fell, the Crusaders gathered many Jews in a synagogue and set it on fire. In Haifa, the Jews almost single-handedly defended the town against the Crusaders, holding out for a month, (June–July 1099).<ref name=SKatz/> At this time there were Jewish communities scattered all over the country, including Jerusalem, Tiberias, Ramleh, Ashkelon, Caesarea, and [[Gaza City|Gaza]]. As Jews were not allowed to hold land during the Crusader period, they worked at trades and commerce in the coastal towns during times of quiescence. Most were artisans: glassblowers in [[Sidon]], furriers and dyers in Jerusalem.<ref name=SKatz/>

During this period, the [[Masoretes]] of Tiberias established the ''[[niqqud]]'', a system of [[diacritic]]al signs used to represent vowels or distinguish between alternative pronunciations of letters of the [[Hebrew alphabet]]. Numerous [[Piyyut|piyutim]] and [[midrash]]im were recorded in Palestine at this time.<ref name=SKatz/>

[[Maimonides]] wrote that in 1165 he visited Jerusalem and went to the Temple Mount, where he prayed in the "great, holy house".<ref>Sefer HaCharedim Mitzvat Tshuva Chapter 3</ref> Maimonides established a yearly holiday for himself and his sons, the 6th of [[Cheshvan]], commemorating the day he went up to pray on the Temple Mount, and another, the 9th of Cheshvan, commemorating the day he merited to pray at the [[Cave of the Patriarchs]] in [[Hebron]].

In 1141 [[Yehuda Halevi]] issued a call to Jews to emigrate to the land of Israel and took on the long journey himself. After a stormy passage from [[Córdoba, Andalusia|Córdoba]], he arrived in Egyptian [[Alexandria]], where he was enthusiastically greeted by friends and admirers. At [[Damietta]], he had to struggle against his heart, and the pleadings of his friend Ḥalfon ha-Levi, that he remain in [[Egypt]], where he would be free from intolerant oppression. He started on the rough route overland. He was met along the way by Jews in [[Tyre (Lebanon)|Tyre]] and [[Damascus]]. Jewish legend relates that as he came near Jerusalem, overpowered by the sight of the Holy City, he sang his most beautiful elegy, the celebrated "Zionide" (''Zion ha-lo Tish'ali''). At that instant, an Arab had galloped out of a gate and rode him down; he was killed in the accident.{{citation needed|date=November 2012}}

===Mamluk period (1260 – 1517)===
In the years 1260–1516, the land of Israel was part of the Empire of the [[Mamluk]]s, who ruled first from [[Turkey]], then from Egypt. War, uprisings, bloodshed and destruction followed the [[Maimonides]]. Jews suffered persecution and humiliation, but the surviving records note at least 30 Jewish urban and rural communities at the opening of the 16th century.

[[Nahmanides]] is recorded as settling in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1267. He moved to [[Acre, Israel|Acre]], where he was active in spreading Jewish learning, which was at that time neglected in the Holy Land. He gathered a circle of pupils around him, and people came in crowds, even from the district of the Euphrates, to hear him. [[Karaite Judaism|Karaites]] were said to have attended his lectures, among them Aaron ben Joseph the Elder. He later became one of the greatest [[Karaite (Jewish sect)|Karaite]] authorities. Shortly after Nahmanides' arrival in Jerusalem, he addressed a letter to his son Nahman, in which he described the desolation of the Holy City. At the time, it had only two Jewish inhabitants—two brothers, dyers by trade. In a later letter from Acre, Nahmanides counsels his son to cultivate humility, which he considers to be the first of virtues. In another, addressed to his second son, who occupied an official position at the [[Crown of Castile|Castilian]] court, Nahmanides recommends the recitation of the daily prayers and warns above all against immorality. Nahmanides died after reaching seventy-six, and his remains were interred at [[Haifa]], by the grave of [[Yechiel of Paris]].

Yechiel had [[aliyah|emigrated]] to Acre in 1260, along with his son and a large group of followers.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/places/acco.html |title=Jewish Zionist Education |publisher=Jafi.org.il |date=2005-05-15 |accessdate=2012-08-13}}</ref><ref>http://www.lookstein.org/resources/bionotes.pdf</ref> There he established the Tamudic academy ''Midrash haGadol d'Paris''.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.jewishhistory.com/jh.php?id=AdditionalReadings&content=content/segal_ch17 |title=Section III: The Bibilical Age: Chapter Seventeen: Awaiting the Messiah |author=Benjamin J. Segal |work=Returning, the Land of Israel as a Focus in Jewish History |publisher=JewishHistory.com |accessdate=August 12, 2012}}</ref> He is believed to have died there between 1265 and 1268. In 1488 [[Obadiah ben Abraham]], commentator on the [[Mishnah]], arrived in Jerusalem; this marked a new period of return for the Jewish community in the land.

====Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East====
{{Main|History of the Jews in Spain}}
{{See also|Islam and Judaism|Mizrahi Jew|History of the Jews under Muslim rule}}
During the Middle Ages, Jews were generally better treated by Islamic rulers than Christian ones. Despite second-class citizenship, Jews played prominent roles in Muslim courts, and experienced a "Golden Age" in [[Moorish Spain]] about 900–1100, though the situation deteriorated after that time. [[Riots]] resulting in the deaths of Jews did however occur in North Africa through the centuries and especially in [[Morocco]], [[Libya]] and [[Algeria]], where eventually Jews were forced to live in ghettos.<ref>Maurice Roumani, ''The Case of the Jews from Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue'', 1977, pp. 26–27.</ref>

During the 11th century, Muslims in Spain conducted pogroms against the Jews; those occurred in Cordoba in 1011 and in [[1066 Granada massacre|Granada in 1066]].<ref>{{cite encyclopedia |encyclopedia=Jewish Encyclopedia |title=Granada |url=http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/6855-granada |accessdate=August 12, 2012 |year=1906}}</ref> During the Middle Ages, the governments of [[Egypt]], [[Syria]], [[Iraq]] and [[Yemen]] enacted decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues. At certain times, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death in some parts of Yemen, Morocco and [[Baghdad]].<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Jews_in_Arab_lands_%28gen%29.html |title=The Treatment of Jews in Arab/Islamic Countries |author=Mitchell Bard |year=2012 |publisher=Jewish Virtual Library |accessdate=August 12, 2012}}</ref> The [[Almohad]]s, who had taken control of much of Islamic Iberia by 1172, surpassed the [[Almoravides]] in fundamentalist outlook. They treated the ''[[dhimmi]]s'' harshly. They expelled both Jews and Christians from [[Morocco]] and Islamic Spain. Faced with the choice of death or conversion, many Jews emigrated.<ref>[http://www.theforgottenrefugees.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=66&Itemid=39 The Forgotten Refugees] {{wayback|url=http://www.theforgottenrefugees.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=66&Itemid=39 |date=20070928051923 }}</ref> Some, such as the family of [[Maimonides]], fled south and east to the more tolerant Muslim lands, while others went northward to settle in the growing Christian kingdoms.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Sephardim.html |title=Sephardim |author=Rebecca Weiner |publisher=Jewish Virtual Library |accessdate=August 12, 2012}}</ref><ref>Kraemer, Joel L., "Moses Maimonides: An Intellectual Portrait," ''The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides'', pp. 16–17 (2005)</ref>

===Europe===
{{Main|Jews in the Middle Ages}}
According to the American writer [[James P. Carroll|James Carroll]], "Jews accounted for 10% of the total population of the [[Roman Empire]]. By that ratio, if other factors had not intervened, there would be 200 million Jews in the world today, instead of something like 13 million."<ref>Carroll, James. ''[[Constantine's Sword]]'' (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) ISBN 978-0-395-77927-9 p. 26</ref>

Jewish populations have existed in Europe, especially in the area of the former Roman Empire, from very early times. As Jewish males had emigrated, some sometimes took wives from local populations, as is shown by the various [[Mitochondrial DNA|MtDNA]], compared to [[Y-DNA#Genetic genealogy|Y-DNA]] among Jewish populations.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/14/science/in-dna-new-clues-to-jewish-roots.html |title=In DNA, New Clues to Jewish Roots |first=Nicholas |last=Wade |date=May 14, 2002 |work=The New York Times |accessdate=June 16, 2013 }}</ref> These groups were joined by traders and later on by members of the diaspora.{{Citation needed|date=June 2013}} Records of Jewish communities in France (see [[History of the Jews in France]]) and Germany (see [[History of the Jews in Germany]]) date from the 4th century, and substantial Jewish communities in Spain were noted even earlier.{{Citation needed|date=June 2013}}

The historian [[Norman Cantor]] and other 20th-century scholars dispute the tradition that the Middle Ages was a uniformly difficult time for Jews. Before the Church became fully organized as an institution with an increasing array of rules, early medieval society was tolerant. Between 800 and 1100, an estimated 1.5 million Jews lived in Christian Europe. As they were not Christians, they were not included as a [[Estates of the realm|division]] of the feudal system of clergy, knights and serfs. This means that they did not have to satisfy the oppressive demands for labor and military conscription that Christian commoners suffered. In relations with the Christian society, the Jews were protected by kings, princes and bishops, because of the crucial services they provided in three areas: financial, administrative and medical.<ref name="Cantor"/>

Christian scholars interested in the Bible consulted with Talmudic rabbis. As the Roman Catholic Church strengthened as an institution, the Franciscan and Dominican preaching orders were founded, and there was a rise of competitive middle-class, town-dwelling Christians. By 1300, the friars and local priests staged the Passion Plays during Holy Week, which depicted Jews (in contemporary dress) killing Christ, according to Gospel accounts. From this period, persecution of Jews and deportations became endemic. Around 1500, Jews found relative security and a renewal of prosperity in present-day [[Poland]].<ref name="Cantor">Norman F. Cantor, ''The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era'', Free Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0-7432-2688-2, p. 28–29</ref>

After 1300, Jews suffered more discrimination and persecution in Christian Europe. As Catholics were forbidden by the church to loan money for interest, some Jews became prominent moneylenders. Christian rulers gradually saw the advantage of having such a class of people who could supply capital for their use without being liable to excommunication. As a result, the money trade of western Europe became a specialty of the Jews. But, in almost every instance when Jews acquired large amounts through banking transactions, during their lives or upon their deaths, the king would take it over.<ref name="jewishencyclopedia">[http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5764-england "England" [[Jewish Encyclopedia]] (1906)]</ref> Jews became imperial ''"servi cameræ",'' the property of the King, who might present them and their possessions to princes or cities.

Jews were frequently massacred and exiled from various European countries. The persecution hit its first peak during the [[Crusades]]. In the [[First Crusade]] (1096) flourishing Jewish communities on the Rhine and the Danube were utterly destroyed; see [[German Crusade, 1096]]. In the [[Second Crusade]] (1147) the Jews in France were subject to frequent massacres. They were also subjected to attacks by the [[Shepherds' Crusade]]s of 1251 and 1320. The Crusades were followed by massive expulsions, including (in 1290) the banishing of all English Jews; in 1396 100,000 Jews were expelled from France; and in 1421, thousands were expelled from Austria. Over this time many Jews in Europe, either fleeing or being expelled, migrated to Poland, where they prospered into another [[History of the Jews in Poland#Early history to Golden Age: 966–1572|Golden Age]].

==Early Modern period==
Historians who study modern Jewry have identified four different paths by which European Jews were "modernized" and thus integrated into the mainstream of European society. A common approach has been to view the process through the lens of the European [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]] as Jews faced the promise and the challenges posed by political emancipation. Scholars that use this approach have focused on two social types as paradigms for the decline of Jewish tradition and as agents of the sea changes in Jewish culture that led to the collapse of the [[ghetto]]. The first of these two social types is the [[Court Jew]] who is portrayed as a forerunner of the modern Jew, having achieved integration with and participation in the proto-capitalist economy and court society of central European states such as the [[Habsburg Empire]]. In contrast to the cosmopolitan Court Jew, the second social type presented by historians of modern Jewry is the ''maskil'', (learned person), a proponent of the [[Haskalah]] (Enlightenment). This narrative sees the maskil's pursuit of secular scholarship and his rationalistic critiques of rabbinic tradition as laying a durable intellectual foundation for the secularization of Jewish society and culture. The established paradigm has been one in which Ashkenazic Jews entered modernity through a self-conscious process of westernization led by "highly atypical, Germanized Jewish intellectuals". Haskalah gave birth to the Reform and Conservative movements and planted the seeds of [[Zionism]] while at the same time encouraging cultural assimilation into the countries in which Jews resided.<ref>{{cite web |title=Reframing Jewish History |url=http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10513 |accessdate=2011-05-24}}</ref>
At around the same time that Haskalah was developing, [[Hasidic Judaism]] was spreading as a movement that preached a world view almost opposed to the Haskalah.

In the 1990s, the concept of the "[[Port Jew]]" has been suggested as an "alternate path to modernity" that was distinct from the European [[Haskalah]]. In contrast to the focus on Ashkenazic Germanized Jews, the concept of the Port Jew focused on the Sephardi conversos who fled the Inquisition and resettled in European port towns on the coast of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Eastern seaboard of the United States.<ref name=HelenFry>{{cite journal |title=Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmpolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550–1950 |first=Helen P. |last=Fry|journal=European Judaism |volume= 36 |publisher=Frank Cass Publishers |year=2002 |ISBN=978-0-7146-8286-0|url=http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5002650793 |quote=Port Jews were a social type, usually those who were involved in seafaring and maritime trade, who (like Court Jews) could be seen as the earliest modern Jews. Often arriving as refugees from the Inquisition, they were permitted to settle as merchants and allowed to trade openly in places such as Amsterdam, London, Trieste and Hamburg. 'Their Diaspora connections and accumulated expertise lay in exactly the areas of overseas expansion that were then of interest to mercantilist governments.'}}</ref>

===Court Jew===
{{main|Court Jew|shtadlan}}
[[Court Jew]]s were [[Jew]]ish [[banker]]s or businessmen who lent money and handled the finances of some of the [[Christian]] [[Europe]]an noble houses. A corresponding historical term is '''Jewish [[Bailiff]]'''. See also ''[[shtadlan]]''.

Examples of what would be later called court Jews emerged when local rulers used services of Jewish bankers for short-term loans. They lent money to nobles and in the process gained social influence. Noble patrons of court Jews employed them as [[financier]]s, suppliers, [[diplomat]]s and [[trade delegate]]s. Court Jews could use their family connections, and connections between each other, to provision their sponsors with, among other things, food, arms, ammunition and precious metals. In return for their services, court Jews gained social privileges, including up to noble status for themselves, and could live outside the Jewish ghettos. Some nobles wanted to keep their bankers in their own courts. And because they were under noble protection, they were exempted from [[rabbi]]nical jurisdiction.

From medieval times, court Jews could amass personal fortunes and gained political and social influence. Sometimes they were also prominent people in the local Jewish community and could use their influence to protect and influence their brethren. Sometimes they were the only Jews who could interact with the local high society and present petitions of the Jews to the ruler. However, the court Jew had social connections and influence in the Christian world mainly through his Christian patrons. Due to the precarious position of Jews, some nobles could just ignore their debts. If the sponsoring noble died, his Jewish financier could face exile or execution.{{Citation needed| date=February 2012}}

===Spain and Portugal===
Significant repression of Spain's numerous community occurred during the 14th century, notably in 1391 a major pogrom which resulted in the majority of Spain's 300,000 Jews converting to Catholicism. With the conquest of the Muslim Kingdom of Granada in 1492, the Catholic monarchs issued the [[Alhambra Decree]] whereby Spain's remaining 100,000 Jews were forced to choose between conversion and exile. As a result, an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 Jews left Spain, the remainder joining Spain's already numerous Converso community. Perhaps a quarter of a million Conversos thus were gradually absorbed by the dominant Catholic culture, although those among them who secretly practiced Judaism were subject to 40 years of intense repression by the Spanish Inquisition. This was particularly the case up until 1530, after which the trials of Conversos by the Inquisition dropped to 3% of the total. Similar expulsions of Sephardic Jews occurred 1493 in [[Sicily]] (37,000 Jews) and Portugal in 1496. The expelled Spanish Jews fled mainly to the Ottoman Empire and North Africa and Portugal. A small number also settled in Holland and England.

===Port Jew===
{{main|Port Jew}}

The [[Port Jew]] describes Jews who were involved in the seafaring and maritime economy of Europe, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries. Helen Fry suggests that they could be considered to have been "the earliest modern Jews". According to Fry, Port Jews often arrived as "refugees from the Inquisition" and the expulsion of Jews from Iberia. They were allowed to settle in port cities as merchants granted permission to trade in ports such as Amsterdam, London, Trieste and Hamburg. Fry notes that their connections with the [[Jewish Diaspora]] and their expertise in maritime trade made them of particular interest to the mercantilist governments of Europe.<ref name=HelenFry /> Lois Dubin describes Port Jews as Jewish merchants who were "valued for their engagement in the international maritime trade upon which such cities thrived".<ref>Dubin p. 47</ref> Sorkin and others have characterized the socio-cultural profile of these men as marked by a flexibility towards religion and a "reluctant cosmopolitanism that was alien to both traditional and 'enlightened' Jewish identities".

===Ottoman Empire===
{{Main|History of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire}}

During the Classical Ottoman period (1300–1600), the Jews, together with most other communities of the empire, enjoyed a certain level of prosperity. Compared with other Ottoman subjects, they were the predominant power in commerce and trade as well in diplomacy and other high offices. In the 16th century especially, the Jews were the most prominent under the ''millets'', the apogee of Jewish influence could arguably be the appointment of [[Joseph Nasi]] to [[Sanjak-bey]] (''governor'', a rank usually only bestowed upon Muslims) of the island of [[Naxos Island|Naxos]].<ref>Charles Issawi & Dmitri Gondicas; ''Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism'', Princeton, (1999)</ref>

At the time of the [[Battle of Yarmuk]] when the [[Levant]] passed under Muslim Rule, thirty Jewish communities existed in Haifa, Sh’chem, Hebron, Ramleh, Gaza, Jerusalem, and many in the north. Safed became a spiritual centre for the Jews and the [[Shulchan Aruch]] was compiled there as well as many Kabbalistic texts. The first Hebrew printing press, and the first printing in Western Asia began in 1577.

Jews lived in the geographic area of Asia Minor (modern Turkey, but more geographically either Anatolia or Asia Minor) for more than 2,400 years. Initial prosperity in Hellenistic times had faded under Christian Byzantine rule, but recovered somewhat under the rule of the various Muslim governments that displaced and succeeded rule from Constantinople. For much of the [[Ottoman Empire|Ottoman]] period, Turkey was a safe haven for Jews fleeing persecution, and it continues to have a small Jewish population today. The situation where Jews both enjoyed cultural and economical prosperity at times but were widely persecuted at other times was summarised by G.E. Von Grunebaum :

<blockquote>It would not be difficult to put together the names of a very sizeable number of Jewish subjects or citizens of the Islamic area who have attained to high rank, to power, to great financial influence, to significant and recognized intellectual attainment; and the same could be done for Christians. But it would again not be difficult to compile a lengthy list of persecutions, arbitrary confiscations, attempted forced conversions, or pogroms.<ref>G.E. Von Grunebaum, ''Eastern Jewry Under Islam'', 1971, p. 369.</ref></blockquote>

===Poland-Lithuania===
{{Further|History of Jews in Poland}}

In the 17th century, there were many significant Jewish populations in Western Europe. The relatively tolerant Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe that dated back to 13th century and enjoyed relative prosperity and freedom for nearly four hundred years; however the calm situation there ended when Polish and Lithuanian Jews were slaughtered in the hundreds of thousands by the cossacks during [[Chmielnicki uprising]] (1648) and by the [[Swedish wars]] (1655). Driven by these and other persecutions, Jews moved back to Western Europe in the 17th century. The last ban on Jews (by the English) was revoked in 1654, but periodic expulsions from individual cities still occurred, and Jews were often restricted from land ownership, or forced to live in [[ghettos]].

With the [[Partition of Poland]] in the late 18th century, the Jewish population was split between the [[Russian Empire]], [[Austro-Hungary]], and [[Prussia]], which divided [[Poland]] for themselves.

===The European Enlightenment and Haskalah (18th century)===
During the period of the [[European Renaissance]] and Enlightenment, significant changes occurred within the Jewish community. The [[Haskalah]] movement paralleled the wider Enlightenment, as Jews began in the 18th century to campaign for emancipation from restrictive laws and integration into the wider European society. Secular and scientific education was added to the traditional religious instruction received by students, and interest in a national Jewish identity, including a revival in the study of Jewish history and Hebrew, started to grow. Haskalah gave birth to the Reform and Conservative movements and planted the seeds of [[Zionism]] while at the same time encouraging cultural assimilation into the countries in which Jews resided. At around the same time another movement was born, one preaching almost the opposite of Haskalah, [[Hasidic Judaism]]. Hasidic Judaism began in the 18th century by [[Baal Shem Tov|Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov]], and quickly gained a following with its more exuberant, mystical approach to religion. These two movements, and the traditional orthodox approach to Judaism from which they spring, formed the basis for the modern divisions within Jewish observance.

At the same time, the outside world was changing, and debates began over the potential emancipation of the Jews (granting them equal rights). The first country to do so was France, during the [[French Revolution]] in 1789. Even so, Jews were expected to integrate, not continue their traditions. This ambivalence is demonstrated in the famous speech of [[Clermont-Tonnerre]] before the [[National Assembly (French Revolution)|National Assembly]] in 1789:

<blockquote>We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals. We must withdraw recognition from their judges; they should only have our judges. We must refuse legal protection to the maintenance of the so-called laws of their Judaic organization; they should not be allowed to form in the state either a political body or an order. They must be citizens individually. But, some will say to me, they do not want to be citizens. Well then! If they do not want to be citizens, they should say so, and then, we should banish them. It is repugnant to have in the state an association of non-citizens, and a nation within the nation...</blockquote>

===Hasidic Judaism===
{{see also|Mitnagdim}}
[[File:Gottlieb-Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur.jpg|thumb|210px|right|Hasidic Jews praying in the synagogue on [[Yom Kippur]], by [[Maurycy Gottlieb]]]]

[[Hasidic Judaism]] is a branch of [[Orthodox Judaism]] that promotes spirituality and joy through the popularisation and internalisation of [[Jewish mysticism]] as the fundamental aspects of the [[Judaism|Jewish faith]]. Hasidism comprises part of contemporary [[Haredi|Ultra-Orthodox]] Judaism, alongside the previous Talmudic [[Lithuanian Jews|Lithuanian-Yeshiva]] approach and the Oriental [[Sephardi Judaism|Sephardi]] tradition.

It was founded in 18th-century [[Eastern Europe]] by Rabbi Israel [[Baal Shem Tov]] as a reaction against overly [[Talmud|legalistic]] Judaism. Opposite to this, Hasidic teachings cherished the sincerity and concealed holiness of the unlettered common folk, and their equality with the scholarly elite. The emphasis on the [[Divine immanence|Immanent]] Divine presence in everything gave new value to prayer and deeds of kindness, alongside Rabbinic supremacy of [[Torah study|study]], and replaced historical [[Kabbalah|mystical (kabbalistic)]] and [[Musar literature|ethical (musar)]] [[Asceticism in Judaism|asceticism]] and [[Maggid|admonishment]] with optimism, encouragement, and daily[[Deveikut|fervour]]. This populist emotional revival accompanied the elite ideal of nullification to paradoxical Divine [[Panentheism]], through intellectual articulation of inner dimensions of mystical thought. The adjustment of Jewish values sought to add to required standards of ritual [[Halacha|observance]], while relaxing others where inspiration predominated. Its communal gatherings celebrate soulful [[Nigun|song]] and [[Yiddish literature#Hasidic and Haskalah literature|storytelling]] as forms of mystical devotion.{{Citation needed| date=February 2012}}

==19th century==
[[File:Napoleon stellt den israelitischen Kult wieder her, 30. Mai 1806.jpg|thumb|right|275px|An 1806 French print depicts [[Napoleon Bonaparte]] emancipating the Jews.]]
Though persecution still existed, emancipation spread throughout Europe in the 19th century. [[Napoleon]] invited Jews to leave the [[Jewish ghettos in Europe]] and seek refuge in the newly created tolerant political regimes that offered equality under Napoleonic Law (see [[Napoleon and the Jews]]). By 1871, with Germany’s emancipation of Jews, every European country except Russia had emancipated its Jews.

Despite increasing integration of the Jews with secular society, a new form of anti-Semitism emerged, based on the ideas of race and nationhood rather than the religious hatred of the Middle Ages. This form of anti-Semitism held that Jews were a separate and inferior race from the [[Aryan]] people of Western Europe, and led to the emergence of political parties in France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary that campaigned on a platform of rolling back emancipation. This form of anti-Semitism emerged frequently in European culture, most famously in the [[Dreyfus Trial]] in France. These persecutions, along with state-sponsored [[pogrom]]s in Russia in the late 19th century, led a number of Jews to believe that they would only be safe in their own nation. See [[Theodor Herzl]] and [[History of Zionism]].

During this period, Jewish migration to the [[United States]] (see [[American Jews]]) created a large new community mostly freed of the restrictions of Europe. Over 2 million Jews arrived in the United States between 1890 and 1924, most from Russia and Eastern Europe. A similar case occurred in the southern tip of the continent, specifically in the countries of [[Argentina]] and [[Uruguay]].

==20th century==

===Modern Zionism===
{{Main|History of Zionism}}
{{refimprove section|date=February 2012}}
[[File:Herzl-balcony.jpg|right|thumb|150px|[[Theodor Herzl]], visionary of the Jewish State, in 1901.]]
During the 1870s and 1880s the Jewish population in Europe began to more actively discuss immigration back to Israel and the re-establishment of the Jewish Nation in its national homeland, fulfilling the biblical prophecies relating to [[Shivat tzion|Shivat Tzion]]. In 1882 the first Zionist settlement—[[Rishon LeZion]]—was founded by immigrants who belonged to the "[[Hovevei Zion]]" movement. Later on, the "[[Bilu]]" movement established many other settlements in the land of Israel.

The Zionist movement was founded officially after the [[Kattowitz convention]] (1884) and the [[World Zionist Congress]] (1897), and it was [[Theodor Herzl]] who began the struggle to establish a state for the Jews.

After the [[First World War]], it seemed that the conditions to establish such a state had arrived: The United Kingdom captured [[Palestine (region)|Palestine]] from the [[Ottoman Empire]], and the Jews received the promise of a "National Home" from the British in the form of the [[Balfour Declaration of 1917]], given to [[Chaim Weizmann]].

In 1920 the British Mandate of Palestine began and the pro-Jewish [[Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel|Herbert Samuel]] was appointed High Commissioner in Palestine, the [[Hebrew University of Jerusalem]] was established and several big Jewish immigration waves to Palestine occurred. The Arab co-inhabitants of Palestine were hostile to increasing Jewish immigration however, and began to oppose Jewish settlement and the pro-Jewish policy of the British government by violent means.

Arab gangs began performing violent acts and murders on convoys and on the Jewish population. After the 1920 [[1920 Palestine riots|Arab riots]] and 1921 [[Jaffa riots]], the Jewish leadership in Palestine believed that the British had no desire to confront local Arab gangs over their attacks on Palestinian Jews. Believing that they could not rely on the British administration for protection from these gangs, the Jewish leadership created the Haganah organization to protect their farms and Kibbutzim.

Major riots occurred during the [[1929 Palestine riots]] and the [[1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine]].

Due to the increasing violence the United Kingdom gradually started to backtrack from the original idea of a Jewish state and to speculate on a [[binational solution]] or an Arab state that would have a Jewish minority.

Meanwhile, the Jews of Europe and the United States gained success in the fields of the science, culture and the economy. Among those generally considered the most famous were scientist [[Albert Einstein]] and philosopher [[Ludwig Wittgenstein]]. A disproportionate number of [[Nobel Prize]] winners at this time were Jewish, as is still the case.<ref name="Jewish Nobel Prize Winners"/> In Russia, many Jews were involved in the [[October Revolution]] and belonged to the [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union|Communist Party]].

===The Holocaust===
[[File:Razzia in een getto (detail).jpg|left|110px|thumb|A boy raises his hands when the Jews leave the bunkers after the submission of the [[Warsaw Ghetto Uprising]]]]
[[File:Rows of bodies of dead inmates fill the yard of Lager Nordhausen, a Gestapo concentration camp.jpg|right|240px|thumb|During [[World War II]] [[the Holocaust]] occurred, in which [[Nazi Germany]] carried out systematic state-sponsored extermination (genocide) of approximately six million [[European Jews]].]]
{{Main|The Holocaust}}
In 1933, with the rise to power of [[Adolf Hitler]] and the [[Nazi party]] in Germany, the Jewish situation became more severe. Economic crises, racial anti-Semitic laws, and a fear of an upcoming war led many Jews to flee from Europe to Palestine, to the United States and to the Soviet Union.

In 1939 [[World War II]] began and until 1941 [[Hitler]] occupied almost all of Europe, including Poland—where millions of Jews were living at that time—and France. In 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the [[Final Solution]] began, an extensive organized operation on an unprecedented scale, aimed at the annihilation of the Jewish people, and resulting in the persecution and murder of Jews in political Europe, inclusive of European North Africa (pro-Nazi Vichy-North Africa and Italian Libya). This [[genocide]], in which approximately six million Jews were murdered methodically and with horrifying cruelty, is known as [[The Holocaust]] or ''Shoah'' (Hebrew term). In Poland, more than one million Jews were murdered in [[gas chambers]] at the [[Auschwitz]] concentration camp alone.

The massive scale of the Holocaust, and the horrors that happened during it, heavily affected the Jewish nation and world public opinion, which only understood the dimensions of the Holocaust after the war. Efforts were then increased to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

===The establishment of the State of Israel===
{{Main|History of Israel}}
{{See also|Israel|Declaration of Independence (Israel)}}
{{History of Israel}}
In 1945 the Jewish resistance organizations in Palestine unified and established the Jewish Resistance Movement. The movement began attacking the British authority.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/resist.html |title=The Jewish Resistance Movement |publisher=Jewish Virtual Library |accessdate=August 12, 2012}}</ref> Following the [[King David Hotel bombing]], [[Chaim Weizmann]], president of the [[WZO]] appealed to the movement to cease all further military activity until a decision would be reached by the [[Jewish Agency]]. The Jewish Agency backed Weizmann's recommendation to cease activities, a decision reluctantly accepted by the Haganah, but not by the Irgun and the Lehi. The JRM was dismantled and each of the founding groups continued operating according to their own policy.<ref>Horne, Edward (1982). ''A Job Well Done (Being a History of The Palestine Police Force 1920–1948)''. The Anchor Press. ISBN 978-0-9508367-0-6. Pages 272, 299. States that Haganah withdrew on July 1, 1946. But remained permanently uncooperative.</ref>

The Jewish leadership decided to center the struggle in the illegal immigration to Palestine and began organizing massive amount of Jewish war refugees from Europe, without the approval of the British authorities. This immigration contributed a great deal to the Jewish settlements in Israel in the world public opinion and the British authorities decided to let the United Nations decide upon the fate of Palestine.{{Citation needed| date=February 2012}}

On November 29, 1947, the [[United Nations General Assembly]] adopted [[Resolution 181]](II) recommending partitioning Palestine into an Arab state, a Jewish state and the City of Jerusalem. The Jewish leadership accepted the decision but the Arab League and the leadership of Palestinian Arabs opposed it. Following a period of [[1947–1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine|civil war]] the [[1948 Arab–Israeli War]] started.{{Citation needed| date=February 2012}}

In the middle of the war, after the last soldiers of the British mandate left Palestine, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed on May 14, 1948, the establishment of a [[Jewish state]] in [[Eretz Israel]] to be known as the [[State of Israel]]. In 1949 the war ended and the state of Israel started building the state and absorbing massive waves of hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over the world.

Since 1948, Israel has been involved in a series of major military conflicts, including the 1956 [[Suez Crisis]], 1967 [[Six-Day War]], 1973 [[Yom Kippur War]], [[1982 Lebanon War]], and [[2006 Lebanon War]], as well as a nearly constant series of ongoing minor conflicts.

Since 1977, an ongoing and largely unsuccessful series of diplomatic efforts have been initiated by Israel, Palestinian organisations, their neighbours, and other parties, including the United States and the European Union, to bring about a [[Peace process in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict|peace process]] to resolve conflicts between Israel and its neighbors, mostly over the fate of the Palestinian people.

==21st century==
Today (2014), [[Israel]] is a [[Parliamentary system|parliamentary democracy]] with a population of over 8 million people, of whom about 6 million are [[Israeli Jews|Jewish]]. The largest Jewish communities are in Israel and the [[American Jews|United States]], with major communities in France, Argentina, Russia, England, and Canada. For statistics related to modern Jewish demographics see ''[[Jewish population]]''.

The [[Jewish Autonomous Oblast]], created during the [[Soviet Union|Soviet]] period, continues to be an [[autonomous oblast]] of the Russian state.<ref>Fishkoff, Sue (October 8, 2008). [http://www.jewishaz.com/jewishnews/041008/revival.shtml "A Jewish revival in Birobidzhan?"] ''Jewish News of Greater Phoenix''. Accessed on June 8, 2008.</ref> The [[Chief Rabbi]] of [[Birobidzhan]], [[Mordechai Scheiner]], says there are 4,000 Jews in the capital city.<ref>Paxton, Robin (June 1, 2007). [http://www.fjc.ru/news/newsArticle.asp?AID=525676&cid=84435&NewsType=80052 "From Tractors to Torah in Russia's Jewish Land"]. Federation of Jewish Communities. Accessed on June 8, 2008.</ref> [[Governor]] [[Nikolay Mikhaylovich Volkov]] has stated that he intends to, "support every valuable initiative maintained by our local Jewish organizations".<ref>[http://www.fjc.ru/news/newsArticle.asp?AID=221939 "Governor Voices Support for Growing Far East Jewish Community"] (November 15, 2004). Federation of Jewish Communities. Accessed on June 8, 2008.</ref> The [[Birobidzhan Synagogue]] opened in 2004 on the 70th anniversary of the region's founding in 1934.<ref>[http://www.fjc.ru/news/newsArticle.asp?AID=166969 "Far East Community Prepares for 70th Anniversary of Jewish Autonomous Republic"] (August 30, 2004). Federation of Jewish Communities. Accessed on June 8, 2008.</ref>

==Jewish history by country or region==
{{Main|Jewish ethnic divisions}}
For historical and contemporary Jewish populations by country, see [[Jews by country]].
* [[History of the Jews in Austria]]
* [[History of the Jews in Belarus]]
* [[History of the Jews in Central Asia]]
* [[History of the Jews in the Czech Republic]]
* [[History of the Jews in France]]
* [[History of the Jews in Germany]]
*[[History of the Jews in the Land of Israel]]
* [[History of the Jews in Latin America and the Caribbean]]
* [[History of the Jews under Muslim rule]]
* [[History of the Jews in Poland]]
* [[History of the Jews in Romania]]
* [[History of the Jews in Russia]]
** [[History of the Jews in the Soviet Union]]
* [[History of the Jews in Serbia]]
* [[History of the Jews in Ukraine]]
* [[History of the Jews in the United Kingdom]]
** [[History of the Jews in England]]
** [[History of the Jews in Scotland]]
** [[Resettlement of the Jews in England]]
* [[History of the Jews in the United States]]
** [[American Jews]]
** [[History of the Jews in New York]]


==See also==
==See also==
<!-- Please keep this list alphabeticised. Thanks! -->
{{Refbegin|2}}
{{col-begin}}
*[[Antisemitism]]
{{col-2}}
*[[Crypto-Judaism]]
* [[Chain letter]]
*[[Historical Jewish population comparisons]]
* [[Memetic algorithms]]
*[[History of the Jews during World War II]]
* [[Memetic engineering]]
*[[Jew]]
* [[The Beginning of Infinity]]
*[[Jewish diaspora]]
*[[Jewish population]]
* [[Biosemiotics]]
*[[Jews by country]]
* [[Darwin machine]]
*[[Jewish Science]]
* [[David Deutsch]]
*[[Jewish ethnic divisions]]
* [[Dual inheritance theory]]
* [[The Electronic Revolution]]
*[[Jewish refugees]]
{{col-2}}
*[[Jewish exodus from Arab lands]]
* [[Evolutionary biology]]
*[[Josephus]], a famous Jewish historian from [[Roman Empire|Roman]] times
*[[Judaism]]
* [[Mimicry]]
*[[Lists of Jews]]
* [[Phraseme]]
* [[Psycholinguistics]]
*[[Timeline of Jewish history]]
* [[Edward Burnett Tylor#Survivals|Survivals]]
*[[Timeline of women rabbis in America]]
*[[Jewish emancipation]]
* [[Universal Darwinism]]
*[[Jewish question]]
* [[Viral marketing]]
* [[Viral video]]
{{Refend}}
* [[Folie à deux]]
{{col-end}}


==Notes==
==Notes==
{{Reflist|2}}
{{Reflist|30em}}


==Bibliography==
==References==
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* {{Citation |last=Distin |first=Kate |title=The selfish meme: a critical reassessment |publisher=Cambridge University Press |location=Cambridge, UK |publication-date=2005 |year=2005 |page= 238 |isbn=0-521-60627-6 |oclc= |doi=}}
|ref = harv
* {{Citation |last=Farnish |first=Keith |title=Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis |publisher=Green Books |location=Totnes |page=256 |isbn=1-900322-48-X |year=2009}}
* {{Citation |last=Graham |first=Gordon |title=Genes: a philosophical inquiry |publisher=Routledge |location=New York |year=2002 |page=196 |isbn=0-415-25257-1 }}
* [[Keith Henson|Henson, H. Keith]]: [http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/17/194059/296 "Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War."]
* {{cite journal | last1 = Henson | first1 = H. Keith | authorlink = Keith Henson | year = 2002 | title = Sex, Drugs, and Cults. An evolutionary psychology perspective on why and how cult memes get a drug-like hold on people, and what might be done to mitigate the effects | url = http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/cults.html | journal = The Human Nature Review | volume = 2 | issue = | pages = 343–355 }}
* {{Citation |last1=Heylighen |first1=Francis |author-link=Francis Heylighen |last2=Chielens |first2=K. |year=2009 |contribution=Evolution of Culture, Memetics |title=Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science |publisher=Springer |editor-last=Meyers |editor-first=B. |url=http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Memetics-Springer.pdf |bibcode=2009ecss.book.....M |journal=Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science by Robert a Meyers |doi=10.1007/978-0-387-30440-3 |isbn=978-0-387-75888-6}}
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* [[Francis Heylighen|Heylighen, Francis]], (1992) : "Selfish Memes and the Evolution of Cooperation", ''Journal of Ideas'' vol. 2, no. 4, pp, 77–84.
* Sachar, Howard M. ''The course of modern Jewish history'' (Vintage, 2013).
* Jan, Steven: ''[https://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=8553&edition_id=9264 The Memetics of Music: A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture]'' (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)
* Schloss, Chaim. ''2000 Years of Jewish History'' (2002), Heavily illustrated popular history.
* {{Citation |last =Kelly |first=Kevin |title=Out of control: the new biology of machines, social systems and the economic world |publisher=Addison-Wesley |location=Boston |year=1994 |page=360 |isbn=0-201-48340-8 |oclc= |doi=}}
* {{Citation |last=Lynch |first=Aaron |authorlink=Aaron Lynch |title=Thought contagion: how belief spreads through society |publisher=BasicBooks |location=New York |publication-date=1996 |year=1996 |page=208 |isbn=0-465-08467-2 }}
* {{Citation |last=McNamara |first=Adam |title= Can we measure memes? |journal= Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience |publication-date=2011 |volume=3 |doi=10.3389/fnevo.2011.00001 |year=2011 }}
* {{Citation |last=Millikan |first=Ruth G. |authorlink=Ruth Garrett Millikan |title=Varieties of meaning: the 2002 Jean Nicod lectures |publisher=[[MIT Press]] |location=[[Cambridge, Massachusetts]] |publication-date=2004 |year=2004 |page=242 |isbn=0-262-13444-6 }}
* {{Citation |last=Post |first=Stephen Garrard |last2=Underwood |first2=Lynn G |last3=Schloss |first3=Jeffrey P Garrard|title=Altruism & Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy, & Religion in Dialogue |publisher=Oxford University Press US |publication-date=2002 |year=2002 |page=500 |isbn=0-19-514358-2}}
*Moritz, Elan. (1995): "Metasystems, Memes and Cybernetic Immortality," in: Heylighen F., Joslyn C. & Turchin V. (eds.), ''The Quantum of Evolution. Toward a theory of metasystem transitions'', (Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, New York) (special issue of ''World Futures: the journal of general evolution'', vol. 45, p.&nbsp;155-171).
* {{Citation |last=Poulshock |first=Joseph |title=The Problem and Potential of Memetics |periodical=Journal of Psychology and Theology |publisher=Rosemead School of Psychology, Gale Group (2004) |publication-date=2002 |year=2002 |pages=68+ }}
* {{Citation |last=Russell |first=Bertrand |authorlink=Bertrand Russell |title=The Analysis of Mind |publisher=George Allen & Unwin. |location=London |year=1921 }}
* {{Citation | last =Sterelny | first = Kim | last2 =Griffiths | first2 = Paul E. |title=Sex and death: an introduction to philosophy of biology |publisher=University of Chicago Press |location=Chicago |year=1999 |page= 456 |isbn=0-226-77304-3 }}
* {{Citation | last =Veszelszki | first = Ágnes |title="Promiscuity of Images. Memes from an English-Hungarian Contrastive Perspective", in: Benedek, András − Nyíri, Kristóf (eds.): How To Do Things With Pictures: Skill, Practice, Performance (series Visual Learning, vol. 3) |publisher=Peter Lang |location=Frankfurt |year=2013 |page= 115−127 |isbn=978-3-631-62972-7 }}
* {{Citation |last=Wilson |first=Edward O. |authorlink=E. O. Wilson |title=Consilience: the unity of knowledge |publisher=Knopf |location=New York |year=1998 |page=352 |isbn=0-679-45077-7 }}


==External links==
==External links==
{{Wiktionary}}
{{Commons category|Jewish history}}
* [http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/LSEPublicLecturesAndEvents/pdf/20060316-Darwn@LSE.pdf Dawkins' speech on the 30th anniversary of the publication of ''The Selfish Gene''], Dawkins 2006
*[http://jewishhistory.huji.ac.il/ The Jewish History Resource Center]. Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
* [http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/cas01.html "Evolution and Memes: The human brain as a selective imitation device"]: article by [[Susan Blackmore]].
*[http://jewishhistory.huji.ac.il/Internetresources/modern/israelindex.htm The State of Israel] The Jewish History Resource Center, Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
* {{cite news
*[https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ Jewish Virtual Library]. Extremely comprehensive
| url = http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if_pr.html
*[http://www.encyclopaediajudaica.com/ Jewish History and Culture Encyclopaedia] Official Site of the 22-volume Encyclopaedia Judaica
| title = Meme, Counter-meme
*[http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/jewish/jewishsbook.html Internet Jewish History Sourcebook] offering homework help and online texts
| first = Mike
*[http://www.adath-shalom.ca/israelite_religion.htm Israelite Religion to Judaism: the Evolution of the Religion of Israel].
| last = Godwin
*[http://www.adath-shalom.ca/greek_influence.htm Greek Influence on Judaism from the Hellenistic Period Through the Middle Ages c. 300 BCE–1200 CE].
| authorlink = Mike Godwin
*[http://www.adath-shalom.ca/jewish_sects.htm Jewish Sects of the Second Temple Period].
| date =
*[http://www.adath-shalom.ca/samaritan_origin.htm The Origin and Nature of the Samaritans and their Relationship to Second Temple Jewish Sects].
| work = [[Wired (magazine)|Wired]]
*[http://www.adath-shalom.ca/eb2bk.htm Jewish History Tables].
| accessdate = 2009-11-05
*[http://www.oztorah.com/category/australian-jewry/ Articles on Australian Jewish history].
}}
*[http://www.oztorah.com/category/british-jewry/ Articles on British Jewish history].
* [http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/ Journal of Memetics], a peer-refereed journal of memetics published from 1997 until 2005
*Barnavi, Eli (Ed.). ''A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People''. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1992. ISBN 978-0-679-40332-6
* [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html Susan Blackmore: Memes and "temes"], TED Talks February 2008
*[http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/Jewish_History.htm Crash Course in Jewish History]
* [http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/Philo/Philosophie/philosophie/files/meme.pdf Christopher von Bülow: ''Article Meme''], translated from: [[Jürgen Mittelstraß]] (ed.), ''Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie'', 2nd edn, vol. 5, Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler 2013
*[http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/68870/jewish/Jewish-History.htm Jewish History] chabad.org

*[http://csicso-nagy.uw.hu/fo-o-Csicso-NAGY-A/jewish-families.htm Jewish families in Csicsó - Cicov (Slovakia) until the Holocaust]
{{Richard Dawkins}}
*[http://www.bib-arch.org/bar/article.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=36&Issue=1&ArticleID=29 "Under the Influence: Hellenism in Ancient Jewish Life"] Biblical Archaeology Society
{{World view}}
*[http://www.jewishhistory.org/crash-course/ Summary of Jewish History] by Berel Wein
*[https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0021_0_21139.html "The Jews of Wyoming: Fringe of the Diaspora"] ISBN 978-0-9676357-0-5 by [[Penny Wolin]], 2000
*[http://histclo.com/chron/ancient/heb/heb-hist.html Ancient Hebrew history]
*[http://jewishhistorylectures.org/ Videos of Jewish History Lectures by Dr. Henry Abramson of Touro College South]


{{Jewish history}}
{{Portal bar|Culture}}
{{History of religions|state=collapsed}}


[[Category:Memes| ]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Jewish History}}
[[Category:Jewish history| ]]
[[Category:Collective intelligence]]
[[Category:National histories]]
[[Category:Cultural anthropology]]
[[Category:Religion in classical antiquity]]
[[Category:Evolutionary psychology]]
[[Category:Futurology]]
[[Category:Philosophy of mind]]
[[Category:Units of information (cognitive processes)]]
[[Category:Units of morphological analysis]]
[[Category:Words coined in the 1970s]]
[[Category:Behavioral and social facets of systemic risk]]
[[Category:1976 introductions]]

Revision as of 16:45, 27 May 2016

For other uses, see Jewish history (disambiguation).
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A meme (/ˈmiːm/ MEEM)[1] is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture".[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.[3]

Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences a meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.[4]

A field of study called memetics[5] arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that academic study can examine memes empirically. However, developments in neuroimaging may make empirical study possible.[6] Some commentators in the social sciences question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units, and are especially critical of the biological nature of the theory's underpinnings.[7] Others have argued that this use of the term is the result of a misunderstanding of the original proposal.[8]

The word meme originated with Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins's own position is somewhat ambiguous: he welcomed N. K. Humphrey's suggestion that "memes should be considered as living structures, not just metaphorically"[9] and proposed to regard memes as "physically residing in the brain".[10] Later, he argued that his original intentions, presumably before his approval of Humphrey's opinion, had been simpler.[11] At the New Directors' Showcase 2013 in Cannes, Dawkins' opinion on memetics was deliberately ambiguous.[12]

Etymology

The word meme is a shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme (from Ancient Greek μίμημα pronounced [míːmɛːma] mīmēma, "imitated thing", from μιμεῖσθαι mimeisthai, "to imitate", from μῖμος mimos, "mime")[13] coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976)[1][14] as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catchphrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches. [15]

Origins

Richard Dawkins coined the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

The word meme originated with Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins cites as inspiration the work of geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, anthropologist F. T. Cloak [16] and ethologist J. M. Cullen.[17] Dawkins wrote that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission — in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.

"Kilroy was here" was a graffito that became popular in the 1940s, and existed under various names in different countries, illustrating how a meme can be modified through replication.[18]

Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesized that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples. Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behavior. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.[15]

Dawkins defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation and replication, but later definitions would vary. The lack of a consistent, rigorous, and precise understanding of what typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in debates about memetics.[19] In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. Meme transmission requires a physical medium, such as photons, sound waves, touch, taste or smell because memes can be transmitted only through the senses.

Dawkins noted that in a society with culture a person need not have descendants to remain influential in the actions of individuals thousands of years after their death:

But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea...it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.[20]

Memetic lifecycle: transmission, retention

See also: Diffusion of innovations

Memes, analogously to genes, vary in their aptitude to replicate; successful memes remain and spread, whereas unfit ones stall and are forgotten. Thus memes that prove more effective at replicating and surviving are selected in the meme pool.

Memes first need retention. The longer a meme stays in its hosts, the higher its chances of propagation are. When a host uses a meme, the meme's life is extended.[21] The reuse of the neural space hosting a certain meme's copy to host different memes is the greatest threat to that meme's copy.[22]

A meme which increases the longevity of its hosts will generally survive longer. On the contrary, a meme which shortens the longevity of its hosts will tend to disappear faster. However, as hosts are mortal, retention is not sufficient to perpetuate a meme in the long term; memes also need transmission.

Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means). Memes can replicate vertically or horizontally within a single biological generation. They may also lie dormant for long periods of time.

Memes reproduce by copying from a nervous system to another one, either by communication or imitation. Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behavior of another individual. Communication may be direct or indirect, where memes transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score. Adam McNamara has suggested that memes can be thereby classified as either internal or external memes (i-memes or e-memes).[6]

Some commentators have likened the transmission of memes to the spread of contagions.[23] Social contagions such as fads, hysteria, copycat crime, and copycat suicide exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas. Observers distinguish the contagious imitation of memes from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate (rather than socially learned) behaviors.[24]

Aaron Lynch described seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "thought contagion":[25]

  1. Quantity of parenthood: an idea that influences the number of children one has. Children respond particularly receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas that directly or indirectly encourage a higher birthrate will replicate themselves at a higher rate than those that discourage higher birthrates.
  2. Efficiency of parenthood: an idea that increases the proportion of children who will adopt ideas of their parents. Cultural separatism exemplifies one practice in which one can expect a higher rate of meme-replication—because the meme for separation creates a barrier from exposure to competing ideas.
  3. Proselytic: ideas generally passed to others beyond one's own children. Ideas that encourage the proselytism of a meme, as seen in many religious or political movements, can replicate memes horizontally through a given generation, spreading more rapidly than parent-to-child meme-transmissions do.
  4. Preservational: ideas that influence those that hold them to continue to hold them for a long time. Ideas that encourage longevity in their hosts, or leave their hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, enhance the preservability of memes and afford protection from the competition or proselytism of other memes.
  5. Adversative: ideas that influence those that hold them to attack or sabotage competing ideas and/or those that hold them. Adversative replication can give an advantage in meme transmission when the meme itself encourages aggression against other memes.
  6. Cognitive: ideas perceived as cogent by most in the population who encounter them. Cognitively transmitted memes depend heavily on a cluster of other ideas and cognitive traits already widely held in the population, and thus usually spread more passively than other forms of meme transmission. Memes spread in cognitive transmission do not count as self-replicating.
  7. Motivational: ideas that people adopt because they perceive some self-interest in adopting them. Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted memes do not self-propagate, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with memes self-replicated in the efficiency parental, proselytic and preservational modes.

Memes as discrete units

Dawkins initially defined meme as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".[15] John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favorable or unfavorable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change".[26] The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.

While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist that cannot be dissected into smaller pieces. A meme has no given size. Susan Blackmore writes that melodies from Beethoven's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty involved in delimiting memes as discrete units. She notes that while the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (listenⓘ) form a meme widely replicated as an independent unit, one can regard the entire symphony as a single meme as well.[19]

The inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to quantifiable key units is widely acknowledged as a problem for memetics. It has been argued however that the traces of memetic processing can be quantified utilizing neuroimaging techniques which measure changes in the connectivity profiles between brain regions."[6] Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures. To illustrate, she notes evolution selects for the gene for features such as eye color; it does not select for the individual nucleotide in a strand of DNA. Memes play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.[19]

The 1981 book Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process by Charles J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson proposed the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory. They coined their own word, "culturgen", which did not catch on. Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[27]

Evolutionary influences on memes

Dawkins noted the three conditions that must exist for evolution to occur:[28]

  1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements;
  2. heredity or replication, or the capacity to create copies of elements;
  3. differential "fitness", or the opportunity for one element to be more or less suited to the environment than another.

Dawkins emphasizes that the process of evolution naturally occurs whenever these conditions co-exist, and that evolution does not apply only to organic elements such as genes. He regards memes as also having the properties necessary for evolution, and thus sees meme evolution as not simply analogous to genetic evolution, but as a real phenomenon subject to the laws of natural selection. Dawkins noted that as various ideas pass from one generation to the next, they may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the ideas themselves. For example, a certain culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool-making that give it a competitive advantage over another culture. Each tool-design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological gene in that some populations have it and others do not, and the meme's function directly affects the presence of the design in future generations. In keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes. Consequently, a successful meme may or may not need to provide any benefit to its host.[28]

Unlike genetic evolution, memetic evolution can show both Darwinian and Lamarckian traits. Cultural memes will have the characteristic of Lamarckian inheritance when a host aspires to replicate the given meme through inference rather than by exactly copying it. Take for example the case of the transmission of a simple skill such as hammering a nail, a skill that a learner imitates from watching a demonstration without necessarily imitating every discrete movement modeled by the teacher in the demonstration, stroke for stroke.[29] Susan Blackmore distinguishes the difference between the two modes of inheritance in the evolution of memes, characterizing the Darwinian mode as "copying the instructions" and the Lamarckian as "copying the product."[19]

Clusters of memes, or memeplexes (also known as meme complexes or as memecomplexes), such as cultural or political doctrines and systems, may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes. Memeplexes comprise groups of memes that replicate together and coadapt.[19] Memes that fit within a successful memeplex may gain acceptance by "piggybacking" on the success of the memeplex. As an example, John D. Gottsch discusses the transmission, mutation and selection of religious memeplexes and the theistic memes contained.[30] Theistic memes discussed include the "prohibition of aberrant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, castration, and religious prostitution", which may have increased vertical transmission of the parent religious memeplex. Similar memes are thereby included in the majority of religious memeplexes, and harden over time; they become an "inviolable canon" or set of dogmas, eventually finding their way into secular law. This could also be referred to as the propagation of a taboo.

Memetics

Main article: Memetics

The discipline of memetics, which dates from the mid-1980s, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Memeticists have proposed that just as memes function analogously to genes, memetics functions analogously to genetics. Memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology) to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas.

Principal criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. Questions remain whether or not the meme concept counts as a validly disprovable scientific theory. This view regards memetics as a theory in its infancy: a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to some detractors.

Criticism of meme theory

An objection to the study of the evolution of memes in genetic terms (although not to the existence of memes) involves a perceived gap in the gene/meme analogy: the cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selection-pressures neither too great nor too small in relation to mutation-rates. There seems no reason to think that the same balance will exist in the selection pressures on memes.[31]

Luis Benitez-Bribiesca M.D., a critic of memetics, calls the theory a "pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution". As a factual criticism, Benitez-Bribiesca points to the lack of a "code script" for memes (analogous to the DNA of genes), and to the excessive instability of the meme mutation mechanism (that of an idea going from one brain to another), which would lead to a low replication accuracy and a high mutation rate, rendering the evolutionary process chaotic.[32]

British political philosopher John Gray has characterized Dawkins' memetic theory of religion as "nonsense" and "not even a theory... the latest in a succession of ill-judged Darwinian metaphors", comparable to Intelligent Design in its value as a science.[33]

Another critique comes from semiotic theorists such as Deacon[34] and Kull.[35] This view regards the concept of "meme" as a primitivized concept of "sign". The meme is thus described in memetics as a sign lacking a triadic nature. Semioticians can regard a meme as a "degenerate" sign, which includes only its ability of being copied. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs.[clarification needed]

Fracchia and Lewontin regard memetics as reductionist and inadequate.[36] Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr disapproved of Dawkins' gene-based view and usage of the term "meme", asserting it to be an "unnecessary synonym" for "concept", reasoning that concepts are not restricted to an individual or a generation, may persist for long periods of time, and may evolve.[37]

Applications

Opinions differ as to how best to apply the concept of memes within a "proper" disciplinary framework. One view sees memes as providing a useful philosophical perspective with which to examine cultural evolution. Proponents of this view (such as Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett) argue that considering cultural developments from a meme's-eye view—as if memes themselves respond to pressure to maximise their own replication and survival—can lead to useful insights and yield valuable predictions into how culture develops over time. Others such as Bruce Edmonds and Robert Aunger have focused on the need to provide an empirical grounding for memetics to become a useful and respected scientific discipline.[38][39]

A third approach, described by Joseph Poulshock, as "radical memetics" seeks to place memes at the centre of a materialistic theory of mind and of personal identity.[40]

Prominent researchers in evolutionary psychology and anthropology, including Scott Atran, Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, John Tooby and others, argue the possibility of incompatibility between modularity of mind and memetics.[citation needed] In their view, minds structure certain communicable aspects of the ideas produced, and these communicable aspects generally trigger or elicit ideas in other minds through inference (to relatively rich structures generated from often low-fidelity input) and not high-fidelity replication or imitation. Atran discusses communication involving religious beliefs as a case in point. In one set of experiments he asked religious people to write down on a piece of paper the meanings of the Ten Commandments. Despite the subjects' own expectations of consensus, interpretations of the commandments showed wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus. In another experiment, subjects with autism and subjects without autism interpreted ideological and religious sayings (for example, "Let a thousand flowers bloom" or "To everything there is a season"). People with autism showed a significant tendency to closely paraphrase and repeat content from the original statement (for example: "Don't cut flowers before they bloom"). Controls tended to infer a wider range of cultural meanings with little replicated content (for example: "Go with the flow" or "Everyone should have equal opportunity"). Only the subjects with autism—who lack the degree of inferential capacity normally associated with aspects of theory of mind—came close to functioning as "meme machines".[41]

In his book The Robot's Rebellion, Stanovich uses the memes and memeplex concepts to describe a program of cognitive reform that he refers to as a "rebellion". Specifically, Stanovich argues that the use of memes as a descriptor for cultural units is beneficial because it serves to emphasize transmission and acquisition properties that parallel the study of epidemiology. These properties make salient the sometimes parasitic nature of acquired memes, and as a result individuals should be motivated to reflectively acquire memes using what he calls a "Neurathian bootstrap" process.[42]

Religion

See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Although social scientists such as Max Weber sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute, Richard Dawkins called for a re-analysis of religion in terms of the evolution of self-replicating ideas apart from any resulting biological advantages they might bestow.

As an enthusiastic Darwinian, I have been dissatisfied with explanations that my fellow-enthusiasts have offered for human behaviour. They have tried to look for 'biological advantages' in various attributes of human civilization. For instance, tribal religion has been seen as a mechanism for solidifying group identity, valuable for a pack-hunting species whose individuals rely on cooperation to catch large and fast prey. Frequently the evolutionary preconception in terms of which such theories are framed is implicitly group-selectionist, but it is possible to rephrase the theories in terms of orthodox gene selection.

— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

He argued that the role of key replicator in cultural evolution belongs not to genes, but to memes replicating thought from person to person by means of imitation. These replicators respond to selective pressures that may or may not affect biological reproduction or survival.[15]

In her book The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore regards religions as particularly tenacious memes. Many of the features common to the most widely practiced religions provide built-in advantages in an evolutionary context, she writes. For example, religions that preach of the value of faith over evidence from everyday experience or reason inoculate societies against many of the most basic tools people commonly use to evaluate their ideas. By linking altruism with religious affiliation, religious memes can proliferate more quickly because people perceive that they can reap societal as well as personal rewards. The longevity of religious memes improves with their documentation in revered religious texts.[19]

Aaron Lynch attributed the robustness of religious memes in human culture to the fact that such memes incorporate multiple modes of meme transmission. Religious memes pass down the generations from parent to child and across a single generation through the meme-exchange of proselytism. Most people will hold the religion taught them by their parents throughout their life. Many religions feature adversarial elements, punishing apostasy, for instance, or demonizing infidels. In Thought Contagion Lynch identifies the memes of transmission in Christianity as especially powerful in scope. Believers view the conversion of non-believers both as a religious duty and as an act of altruism. The promise of heaven to believers and threat of hell to non-believers provide a strong incentive for members to retain their belief. Lynch asserts that belief in the Crucifixion of Jesus in Christianity amplifies each of its other replication advantages through the indebtedness believers have to their Savior for sacrifice on the cross. The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious sacraments, and the proliferation of symbols of the cross in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes.[25]

Although religious memes have proliferated in human cultures, the modern scientific community has been relatively resistant to religious belief. Robertson (2007) [43] reasoned that if evolution is accelerated in conditions of propagative difficulty,[44] then we would expect to encounter variations of religious memes, established in general populations, addressed to scientific communities. Using a memetic approach, Robertson deconstructed two attempts to privilege religiously held spirituality in scientific discourse. Advantages of a memetic approach as compared to more traditional "modernization" and "supply side" theses in understanding the evolution and propagation of religion were explored.

Memetic explanations of racism

In Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, Jack Balkin argued that memetic processes can explain many of the most familiar features of ideological thought. His theory of "cultural software" maintained that memes form narratives, social networks, metaphoric and metonymic models, and a variety of different mental structures. Balkin maintains that the same structures used to generate ideas about free speech or free markets also serve to generate racistic beliefs. To Balkin, whether memes become harmful or maladaptive depends on the environmental context in which they exist rather than in any special source or manner to their origination. Balkin describes racist beliefs as "fantasy" memes that become harmful or unjust "ideologies" when diverse peoples come together, as through trade or competition.[45]

Architectural memes

In A Theory of Architecture, Nikos Salingaros speaks of memes as "freely propagating clusters of information" which can be beneficial or harmful. He contrasts memes to patterns and true knowledge, characterizing memes as "greatly simplified versions of patterns" and as "unreasoned matching to some visual or mnemonic prototype".[46] Taking reference to Dawkins, Salingaros emphasizes that they can be transmitted due to their own communicative properties, that "the simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate", and that the most successful memes "come with a great psychological appeal".[47]

Architectural memes, according to Salingaros, can have destructive power. "Images portrayed in architectural magazines representing buildings that could not possibly accommodate everyday uses become fixed in our memory, so we reproduce them unconsciously."[48] He lists various architectural memes that circulated since the 1920s and which, in his view, have led to contemporary architecture becoming quite decoupled from human needs. They lack connection and meaning, thereby preventing "the creation of true connections necessary to our understanding of the world". He sees them as no different from antipatterns in software design – as solutions that are false but are re-utilized nonetheless.[49]

Internet culture

Main article: Internet meme
See also: List of Internet phenomena

An "Internet meme" is a concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based E-mailing, blogs, forums, imageboards like 4chan, social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, instant messaging, and video hosting services like YouTube and Twitch.tv.[50]

In 2013 Richard Dawkins characterized an Internet meme as one deliberately altered by human creativity, distinguished from Dawkins's original idea involving mutation by random change and a form of Darwinian selection.[51]

Meme maps

One technique of meme mapping represents the evolution and transmission of a meme across time and space.[52] Such a meme map uses a figure-8 diagram (an analemma) to map the gestation (in the lower loop), birth (at the choke point), and development (in the upper loop) of the selected meme. Such meme maps are nonscalar, with time mapped onto the y-axis and space onto the x-axis transect. One can read the temporal progression of the mapped meme from south to north on such a meme map. Paull has published a worked example using the "organics meme" (as in organic agriculture).[52]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b Dawkins, Richard (1989), The Selfish Gene (2 ed.), Oxford University Press, p. 192, ISBN 0-19-286092-5, We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.
  2. ^ Meme. Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
  3. ^ Graham 2002
  4. ^ Kelly, 1994 & p. 360 But if we consider culture as its own self-organizing system — a system with its own agenda and pressure to survive — then the history of humanity gets even more interesting. As Richard Dawkins has shown, systems of self-replicating ideas or memes can quickly accumulate their own agenda and behaviours. I assign no higher motive to a cultural entity than the primitive drive to reproduce itself and modify its environment to aid its spread. One way the self organizing system can do this is by consuming human biological resources."
  5. ^ Heylighen & Chielens 2009
  6. ^ a b c McNamara 2011
  7. ^ Gill, Jameson (2011). Memes and narrative analysis: A potential direction for the development of neo-Darwinian orientated research in organisations. In: Euram 11 : proceedings of the European Academy of Management. European Academy of Management.
  8. ^ Burman, J. T. (2012). "The misunderstanding of memes: Biography of an unscientific object, 1976–1999". Perspectives on Science. 20 (1): 75–104. doi:10.1162/POSC_a_00057. (This is an open access article, made freely available courtesy of MIT Press.)
  9. ^ Dawkins 1989, p. 192 harvnb error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFDawkins1989 (help)
  10. ^ Dawkins, Richard (1982), The Extended Phenotype, Oxford University Press, p. 109, ISBN 0-19-286088-7
  11. ^ Dawkins' foreword to Blackmore 1999, p. xvi
  12. ^ Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors' Showcase 2013
  13. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition, 2000
  14. ^ Millikan 2004, p. 16; Varieties of meaning. "Richard Dawkins invented the term 'memes' to stand for items that are reproduced by imitation rather than reproduced genetically."
  15. ^ a b c d Dawkins 1989, p. 352 harvnb error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFDawkins1989 (help)
  16. ^ Cultural microevolution, 1966. Research Previews 13: (2) p. 7-10. Also presented at the November, 1966 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.
  17. ^ Is a cultural ethology possible? Hum. Ecol. 3, 161-182. Cullen, J. M. (1972).
  18. ^ "Kilroy Was Here - Los Angeles Times". articles.latimes.com. 2000-03-05. Retrieved 2013-12-06.
  19. ^ a b c d e f Blackmore 1999
  20. ^ Dawkins, Richard (2006). The Selfish Gene 30th Anniversary Edition (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, UK. p. 199. ISBN 9780191537554.
  21. ^ Heylighen, Francis. "Meme replication: the memetic life-cycle". Principia Cybernetica. Retrieved 26 July 2013.
  22. ^ R. Evers, John. "A justification of societal altruism according to the memetic application of Hamilton's rule". Retrieved 26 July 2013.
  23. ^ Blackmore 1998; "The term 'contagion' is often associated with memetics. We may say that certain memes are contagious, or more contagious than others."
  24. ^ Blackmore 1998
  25. ^ a b Lynch 1996
  26. ^ Wilkins, John S. (1998), "What's in a Meme? Reflections from the perspective of the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology", Journal of Memetics, vol. 2
  27. ^ Wilson 1998
  28. ^ a b Dennett 1991
  29. ^ Dawkins 2004
  30. ^ "Mutation, Selection, And Vertical Transmission Of Theistic Memes In Religious Canons" in Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2001. Online version retrieved 2008-01-27.
  31. ^ Sterelny & Griffiths 1999; p.333
  32. ^ Benitez Bribiesca, Luis (January 2001), "Memetics: A dangerous idea" (PDF), Interciencia: Revista de Ciencia y Technologia de América, 26 (1), Venezuela: Asociación Interciencia: 29–31, ISSN 0378-1844, retrieved 2010-02-11, If the mutation rate is high and takes place over short periods, as memetics predict, instead of selection, adaptation and survival a chaotic disintegration occurs due to the accumulation of errors.
  33. ^ Gray, John (2008-03-15). "John Gray on secular fundamentalists". The Guardian. London.
  34. ^ Deacon, Terrence. "The trouble with memes (and what to do about it)"". The Semiotic Review of Books. 10: 3.
  35. ^ Kull, Kalevi (2000). "Copy versus translate, meme versus sign: development of biological textuality". European Journal for Semiotic Studies. 12 (1): 101–120.
  36. ^ Fracchia, Joseph; R C Lewontin (February 2005), "The price of metaphor", History and theory, 44 (44), Weleyan University: 14–29, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2303.2005.00305.x, ISSN 0018-2656, JSTOR 3590779, The selectionist paradigm requires the reduction of society and culture to inheritance systems that consist of randomly varying, individual units, some of which are selected, and some not; and with society and culture thus reduced to inheritance systems, history can be reduced to "evolution." [...] [W]e conclude that while historical phenomena can always be modeled selectionistically, selectionist explanations do no work, nor do they contribute anything new except a misleading vocabulary that anesthetizes history.
  37. ^ Mayr, Ernst (1997). "The objects of selection". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 94 (6). Stanford University's HighWire Press®: 2091–2094. doi:10.1073/pnas.94.6.2091. PMC 33654. PMID 9122151. Archived from the original on November 15, 2013.
  38. ^ See Edmonds, Bruce (September 2002), "Three Challenges for the Survival of Memetics", Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, vol. 6, no. 2, retrieved 2009-02-03
  39. ^ Aunger 2000
  40. ^ Poulshock 2002
  41. ^ Atran 2002
  42. ^ Stanovich, Keith E. (2004). The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin (1st ed.). University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-77089-3.
  43. ^ Robertson, Lloyd Hawkeye (2007), "Reflections on the use of spirituality to privilege religion in scientific discourse: Incorporating considerations of self", Journal of Religion and Health, 46 (3): 449–461, doi:10.1007/s10943-006-9105-y
  44. ^ Dennett, Daniel C. (1995), Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the meanings of life, New York: Simon and Schuster
  45. ^ Balkin 1998
  46. ^ Nikos Salingaros: Theory of Architecture, chapter 12: Architectural memes in a universe of information, ISBN 3-937954-07-4, Umbau-Verlag, 2006, 2008, pages 243 and 260
  47. ^ Salingaros, 2008. pp. 243–245.
  48. ^ Salingaros, 2008. p. 249.
  49. ^ Salingaros, 2008. p. 259.
  50. ^ Schubert, Karen (2003-07-31). "Bazaar goes bizarre". USA Today. Retrieved 2007-07-05.
  51. ^ Solon, Olivia (June 20, 2013). "Richard Dawkins on the internet's hijacking of the word 'meme'". Wired UK. Archived from the original on July 9, 2013.
  52. ^ a b Paull, John (2009), "Meme Maps: A Tool for Configuring Memes in Time and Space" (PDF), European Journal of Scientific Research, 31 (1): 11–18.

References

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