User talk:Nishidani

Personal work section notes.

I get headaches and am as slow as a wet week, in dragging up diffs, and even have a geezer's trouble in following these arguments all over several pages, so I can't really make an adequate case. So I'll have to make my contribution in the next few days, according to the fashion I normally work after, when I did work, in the real world. Reflecting from principles, through to the problem, the evidence and conclusions. Apologies to anyone reading this. It's written to help myself get some order into this chat, not to guide others.

(I) The Problem

• An editorial split between those in favour of using 'Judea & Samaria' to designate (a) parts of, or (b) all, or (c) all of the West Bank and parts of Israel, and those who oppose the usage, except on those specific pages devoted to (i) Samaria (ii) Judea (iii) the administrative territory known in Israel as 'Judea & Samaria'.

• The 'Judea and Samaria' school holds that (a) these are geographical and historical designations predating the West Bank (b) used in a variety of sources published in Israel and abroad to denote the territory, or parts of it, known as the West Bank (c) and that opposition to the employment of these words in wiki constitutes an 'ethnic-based discrimination' against both Israeli and Jewish people.(d) specifically, that MeteorMaker, Pedrito and myself have conducted a campaign to denigrate or deprecate Jewish terms in the I/P area, a kind of ethnic cleansing of nomenclature, in a way that lends substance to fears our position is motivated by, well let's call a spade a spade, anti-semitism.

• The 'West Bank' school asserts that (a) these terms have an intrinsic denotative vagueness because they refer to different geophysical, administrative and political terrains depending on historical period, and that to use the terms of the territorially bounded and defined area known internationally as the West Bank creates cognitive dissonance (b) that these terms, as documented, were used under the British Mandate, then dropped for 'West Bank', which has remained to this day the default term of neutral usage internationally and in international law and diplomacy (c) that, after the Israeli conquest of the West Bank, in 1967, the terms 'Judea & Samaria' were pushed onto the political agenda by an extremist settler group, Gush Emunim, then adopted by the Likud government in 1977, and imposed by government decree on the Israeli mass media, which suppressed the international term, West Bank (d) that, as documented, the terms 'Judea and Samaria' have a potent ideological charge as appropriative nomenclature, renaming Palestinian land presently occupied, annexed or expropriated illegally by Israel (ICJ judgement 2004), over which Israel has no sovereignty, where Israel is establishing illegal settlements at least half of which on land with private Palestinian title, and with its own Arabic toponyms, and erasing the traditional native nomenclature by creating a neo-biblical toponomy (d) that reliable secondary sources explicitly define the term as partisan, even in contemporary Hebrew and Israeli usage (e) that the evidence for usage overwhelmingly documents the prevalence of 'West Bank' (northern, southern) in neutral sources, whose neutrality is affirmed also by the very sources that otherwise employ the words 'Samaria and Judea' adduced by the former school, (f) that if explicitly attested partisan Israeli toponymy and administrative nomenclature is allowed on non-Israeli territory, then by WP:NPOV criteria, automatically this would mean the corresponding Palestinian toponymy and nomenclature, often covering the same areas, would have to be introduced (g)that in this whole debate, the West Bankers have not even represented the Palestinian side, which is absent, invisible, while the Israeli side is being treated as though its national naming were on terms of parity and neutrality with international usage (h) that wiki criteria, WP:NPOV, WP:Undue, WP:RS, WP:NCGN etc. require that neutral terminology, particularly as evidenced by the overwhelming majority of reliable sources, be employed. (i) If we are to allow Israeli terminology to be generally employed in denoting territory over which Israel exercises no sovereignty, but is simply, in law, an occupying belligerent, a very dangerous precedent, with widespread consequences for articles where ethnic conflicts exist, would be created.

(2)Note on language, naming as an appropriative act of possession and dominion.

Wa’-yitser’ Yĕhôwāh’ (Adonai) ĕlôhīm’ min-hā'ădāmāh’ kol-‘ha’yath’ ha’-sādeh’ wĕ'ēth kol-ôph ha’-shāma’yim wa’-yāvē ‘ el-hā'ādām’ li-r'ôth mah-yiqrā-lô’ wĕ-kôl ăsher yiqrā-lô’ hā'-ādām‘ ne’pfesh ‘ha’yāh’ hû shĕmô. (20) Wa’- yiqrā’ hā'-ādām‘ shēmôth….

‘And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 20. And Adam gave names.. .'

Wa-‘allama ādama l-asmā’a kullahā,

'And He taught Adam the names, all of them.’ Qu’ran 2:31.

In Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon, the narrator Cherrycoke recounts, against the huge backdrop of seismic shifts in the political and scientific world of that time, the story of the eponymous figures who have undertaken to draw a scientific map of the wilderness and terrain between Pennsylvania and Maryland:

‘what we were doing out in that Country together was brave, scientifick beyond my understanding and ultimately meaningless, - we were putting a line straight through the heart of the Wilderness, eight yards wide and due west, in order to separate two Proprietorships, granted when the World was yet feudal and but eight years later to be nullified by the War for Independence.”

Late in the novel, the Chinaman of the piece remarks:

‘To rule forever, . .it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call . . Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,- to create thus a Distinction betwixt’em. –’tis the first stroke.-All else will follow as if predestin’d, into War and Devastation.’

The dispute here in wiki, like the historical reality it refers to, has its ‘Bad History’. In the novel, the apparently empirical task of defining boundaries is found unwittingly implicated in the later travails of American history, with its exceptionalism, erasure of native peoples, of possible alternative worlds, of Frostian paths never taken. American innocence and pragmatic realism, in the innocuous work of two surveyors, is swept up in the torment of power: cartographic principles embody an Enlightenment’s reach into the unknown, while, applied, to the ends of order and control, they inadvertently engender violent confusion and disarray. What is the ‘right line’ to take on nomenclature, when history’s line demarcating Israel and the West Bank was drawn by war, then the West Bank was occupied in the aftermath of war, and the world of Israeli settlers begins to redraw the map? One thing that happens is that the complexities have drawn editors into a minor war, as Pynchonesque as it is Pythonesque. There is one difference: most the cartographers say one thing, and Israel, the controlling power, asserts a different terminology. So what’s in a name?

Before the world was tribalized and invested by the collateral damage or fall-out from the Tower of Babel, God assigned to the mythical forefather of all, ‘man’ or Adam, the faculty to name the world, though God himself had exercised this right in naming the light (or) day (yom) and the darkness (hôshek) night(layĕlāh) (Gen.1.5) There was only one name for each thing, and in later European thought the primordial language employed in this taxonomy was to be called ‘the Adamic vernacular’. The thesis was that the pristine jargon employed by Adam, being pre-Babelic, represented the true name for every object: every thing had a proper name intrinsic to its nature. The Greeks, as we see in Plato’s Cratylus, were much prepossessed by the philosophical crux of the correctness of names (ὀρθότης τῶν ὀνομάτων): did names have an intrinsic relation to, or represent, things, or was the link arbitrary.. The Confucian school’s doctrine of the Rectification of names (zhèngmíng: 正名). In the Bible itself the Hebrew text is full of the magic of words, of the power of words themselves to alter reality, a belief testified to in Isaiah:

'So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please.'

Modernity, especially after Ferdinand Saussure (1916), has opted, correctly, for the latter position, and disposed of the magical force of naming. But nationalism, another product of modernity, reintroduced it, via the backdoor, in a new sense. Naming was an act of assertive territorial control, of defining ethnic rights over land, especially as Anthony Smith argues, ethnie are defined also by attachment to a specific geophysical reality, the ‘homeland’ that defines in good part their identity ). Since national identities are a political construct, the inculcation of a uniform language, and the use of its lexicon to define or redefine the landscape, are crucial instruments in forging a national sense of common tradition. Nationalism demanded toponymic unison, and linguistic conformity.

John Gaddis, glossing James Scott’s recent book on North Dakota roads and maps, remarks on maps that they reflect

‘what states try to do to those portions of the earth’s surface they hope to control, and to the people who live upon them. For it’s only by making territories and societies legible – by which he means measurable and hence manipulable – that governments can impose and maintain their authority. “These state simplifications,” he writes, are “like abridged maps.” They don’t replicate what’s actually there, but “when allied with state power, (they) enable much of the reality they (depict) to be remade.”

The idea of a nation as a territorial unit speaking one language over that territory is a parlously modern ideology, one engineered by nation-builders into a plausible if specious semblance of commonsense. As Massimo d’Azeglio is said to have remarked at the dawn of the Italian Risorgimento, ‘we have made Italy: our task now is to make Italians’, 95% of whom could neither read, write and nor often even speak ‘Italian’.

Imperialism, venturing into terra incognita to appropriate foreign land and incorporate it into an empire, went side by side with nationalism, which was a form of internal colonization over, and homogenization of, the disparate cultures that made up an historically defined territory. For the natives, their indigenous naming is ‘essentially a process of asserting ownership and control of place and landscape’

Daphne Kutzner, in her analysis of the role of Empire in classic children’s fiction, looks at the question from the perspective of the intrusive Empire and its refraction of imperial renaming as reflected in popular books, notes that

‘Naming a place gives the namer power over it, or at least the illusion of power and control. Colonial powers literally transform a landscape once they rename it and begin reshaping it.’

Terra incognita is the foreigner’s name for an ostensibly empty landscape which, had they taken the trouble to learn the local languages, would have revealed itself to be replete from every rocky nook to crannied gulley with ancient toponyms. The tendency was one of erasure, and, as with introduced fauna and flora , the landscape was consistently remade as it was renamed to familiarize the alien by rendering it recognizable, a variation on the landscape settlers came from. The new mapping, as often as not, represent as much the settler’s mentality, as the queerly new features of the foreign landscape under toponymic domestication.

Australia is somewhat the extraordinary exception, and broke with the gusto for imperial nomenclature. There, following the pattern set by the earlier land surveyor Thomas Mitchell and his assistant Philip Elliott that “the natives can furnish you with names for every flat and almost every hill” (1828), native names were adopted in a standarized English form for both euphony and their characteristic relation to the landscape, and indeed a resolution was passed as early as 1884 which established the priority of native names in international usage.

Often imperialism and nationalism go hand in hand. Napoleon’s troops, in 1796, could hardly communicate with each other, such were the grammatical, semantic and syntactical rifts between the various provincial patois at the time. By 1814, Napoleon had formed a European empire, and millions of provincials spoke the one, uniform language of the French state’s army. When two nations, or ethnie, occupy the same territory, the historical victor’s toponymic choices, dictated by the victor’s native language, and as articulated in bureaucratic documents and maps, usually determines what names are to be used. However, the presence of two distinct ethnie on the same national soil creates fissiparous tensions in nomenclature. Speaking of French and British conflict in Canada over areas, Susan Drummond, remarks that, 'Symbolic appropriation of a territory is a critical index of control’, and notes that, as late as 1962, the Québec cartographer Brochu, invoked the political dimension of place names as important, in the conflict with the majoritarian English heritage of Canada over the naming of the northern Inuit lands.

Again, in another familiar example, Alfonso Pérez-Agote notes that Spain has its Basque Autonomous region, Euskadi. But the original force of that name covers an area beyond the administrative and territorial units of Spain, and Basque nationalists evoke its symbolic territory, comprising also the Basque area of Navarre in France. Euskadi has, on one level, within Spanish administrative discourse, a ‘territorial political objectification’, and on another level, in Basque nationalism, a ‘non-administratively objectified’ territory extending into a neighbouring country.. The analogy with Israeli and Palestinian nationalism is close. In Israeli discourse, Israel or Eretz Israel can denote Israel and its outriding West Bank, while Palestine, which is the favoured term of West Bank Arabs for the land they inhabit, also can refer to the whole neighbouring territory of Israel as well.

The anomaly, in comparative terms, is that history has settled the question, whatever local separatist nationalisms, revanchist or irredentist, may claim, except for such places as ‘Palestine’. For there, while Israel is a constituted state, it emerged the victor, manu militari in a conflict that gave it control over a contiguous land, but has no recognized legal right, since that land is defined as and ‘Occupied Palestinian Territory. Acts of unilateral annexation, the extension of administrative structures, settlements, toponymic remapping, and widescale expropriation of land in Palestinian title, is not only not recognized, but judged ‘illegal’ by the highest international bodies of law. All major encyclopedias (Encyclopædia Britannica, Encarta etc.,), except Wiki, maintain a strict neutrality, and, in recognition of the fraught difficulties, adopt the neutral toponymic convention of ‘(northern/southern) West Bank’ in order to avoid lending their prestige to the partisan politics of the parties in this regional conflict.

(3)The specific instance of Palestine and the West Bank

When the British wrested control over Palestine from the Ottomans in the First World War, and established themselves there to administer the region, Selwyn Troen notes that, 'naming also became part of the contest for asserting control over Palestine'.. As early as 1920 two Zionists advising the British Mandatory authority on everything regarding the assignment of Hebrew names, fought hard for the restoration of Hebraic toponymy, and when, with such places as Nablus, or indeed 'Palestine' itself, were given non-Hebrew names, they protested at the designations as evidence of discrimination against Jews. The point is made by the Israeli historian and cartographer Meron Benvenisti:-

'When the Geographical Committee for Names, which operated under the aegis of the Royal Geographical Society (the only body authorized to assign names throughout the British Empire, decided to call the Mandatory geopolitical entity “Palestine” and the city whose biblical name was Shechem, “Nablus” these Jewish advisers saw this as an act of anti-Jewish discrimination, and a searing defeat for Zionism.'

One pauses to reflect. We are being accused here of 'anti-Jewish/Israeli discrimination' for refusing to insert Israeli toponyms into the West Bank. Nothing is said of the logic of this POV-pushing, i.e. that a Palestinian reader might well regard a Wiki endorsement of suc h foreign nomenclature as a 'searing defeat', and adduce it as proof of 'anti-Palestinian discrimination' both by Zionist editors, and Wikipedia itself.

Since Zionism took root, and especially since Israel was founded, the making of a people, living in a defined territorial unit and speaking one language, has followed the universal pattern of modernity. The landscape, full of Arabic words, had to be renamed, often according to Biblical terminology, but, more often, by the invention of Biblical-sounding names. To do this, a good part of the 10,000 odd Arabic toponyms collected by Herbert Kitchener, T. E. Lawrence and others in surveying that part of the Middle East had to be cancelled, and replaced with Israeli/Hebrew terms, to remake the landscape and its topographic songlines resonate with historical depth. Hebrew is a ‘sacred tongue’ (Leshon HaQodesh:לשון הקודש), the Bible describes the conquest of Eretz Yisrael, and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples, who were not part of the chosen: the pattern is repeated in modern times, down to the renaming. The revival of Hebrew, with its potent shibboleths, understandably exercises a powerful hold over the new culture of the country.

The problem is, as Steven Runciman pointed out in the mid-sixties, that the part assigned to Israel by the UN deliberation of 1947 was the western, non-Biblical part, whilst the part assigned to a future Palestinian state, what we now call the West Bank, is precisely the area most infused with Biblical associations cherished by the Jewish people, with sites and names redolent of the founding myths and realities of their ancient forefathers. Israelis, in their secular land, mostly dwell where the Philistines dwelt. The Palestinians dwell where the ancient Jewish tribes once settled. The tensions simmer between the secular Israel, which thrives in its new Mediterranean world, and the religiously-identified Israel that aspires to return to a geophysical space where origins and the present, the sacred nomenclature of the Bible and the modern world of Jewish life, might at least, once more overlap, in an ‘Adamic’ harmony congruent with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

(4)The Negev Precedent

With the foundation of Israel, and in the aftermath of the 1948 war, the vast Negev and part of the Arava were captured, and Ben Gurion duly established a Negev Names Committee to ‘hebraize’ the landscape’s features, its mountains, valleys and springs. The area already had a rich Arab toponymy, and some on the committee thought these terms might be preserved as a ‘democratic gesture towards the Arab population of the new state.’ It was not to be. The nomadic Bedouin who dwelt throughout the area were rounded up and expelled by force. They had terms for everything, but with their uprooting and displacement, Benvenisti notes, ‘an entire world, as portrayed in their toponomastic traditions, died.' Ben Gurion wrote to the committee setting forth his view that:-

We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs’ political proprietorship of the land, so also we do not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names.

Political pressure and ‘the influence of patriotic arguments’ prevailed over those who, like S.Yeibin, thought the erasure of Arab names, many of which might preserve an archaic Hebrew origin. Yeibin thought this a disaster:-

‘With a clap of the hand they were wiping out an entire cultural heritage that must certainly conceal within it elements of the Israeli-Jewish heritage as well. The researchers did indeed endeavour to identify all those names that had a link to ancient Hebrew ones in an attempt “to redeem, as far as possible, names from the days of yore.” <

Any Arabic toponym in short only interested the topographers in so far as it might provide a clue to reconstructing the hypothetical Hebraic original that might lie behind it. This consideration, however, often created a mess of concocted pseudo-traditional names. The hebraization of such Arabic toponyms did not restore the historic past, but invented a mythical landscape, resonant with traditionalist associations, that had, however, no roots in Jewish tradition. The most striking geologic formation in the Negev, Wadi Rumman was rewritten as if that word disguised an ancient Hebrew Ram ('elevated'), whereas the Arabic term it was calqued from actually meant 'Pomegranate Arroyo', for example.

Reflecting on Benvenisti’s account in his larger study of language conflict in the Middle east, the Palestinian expatriate scholar Yasir Suleiman makes remarks that,

’By assigning Hebrew names anew to places on the map, the committee was therefore ‘redeeming’ these places from the corrupt and ‘alien’ Arabic names that they have acquired over the centuries’

and likens this process of linguistic erasure of Arabic and the reconstitution of Hebrew metaphorically to the nakba:-

‘The cartographic cleansing of the Negev map of Arabic place names and their replacement by Hebrew names is an enactment of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their homeland’

The record is therefore one of a linguistic cleansing of Palestine of any trace of its long Arabic history, and, as we shall see, an attempt to remodel Arabic usage in the territories Israel conquered and controls, to conform with Hebrew. Toponyms can only retain some semblance of an Arabic form, if that form is suspected to camouflage, in turn, an original Hebraic name. Adapting the reborn Hebrew language to the alien realities of the Palestinian landscape, the obvious problem was that the nomenclature for much of the flora and fauna, not to speak of the landscape itself, was infused with the very language, Arabic, a revarnished Hebrew had to compete with. As early as 1910 Jacob Fichmann, a member of the Language Council, stated that Hebrew:

‘will not digest the new names of plants, especially those which have been taken from the Arabic language’ and that these borrowed names ‘will always be like atrophied limbs’ for ‘despite the fact that the Arabic language is our sister language in the family of Semitic languages, it has no foundation in our psyche’

Hebrew was thus to be programmatically sealed off from Arabic, to prevent atrophisation, and cultivate purism by means of a fake Biblical antiquarianism. Theodor Adorno, writing in the melancholic aftermath of the Holocaust on the effects of cultural purism, once remarked on the purging of foreign words from German undertaken by nationalists intent restoring an ideal on cultural authenticity. He saw this as part of the pathology of nationalism in Germany. Foreign words were treated as if they were 'the Jews of language' (Fremdwörter sind die Juden der Sprache). In expunging the landscape and the human world of Palestine of its Arabic language, of landscape and culture, Zionism likewise treated Arabic as German or French linguistic purists treated loan-words in their own languages, or, later, actual Jews in their midst, as foreign bodies to be expelled, or expunged if a proper 'foundation for an authentically Jewish psyche' were to be successfully engineered. One would call this ironic, were it not so tragically melancholic in its unintended resonances.

(5)The West Bank. History and Naming

The relationship between demographic displacement and the loss of one's landscape through the erasure of its traditional placenames in Palestine has been remarked on by Paul Diehl.

‘The exclusive attachment to territory is reflected in the naming and renaming of places and locations in accordance with the historic and religious sites associated with the dominant political group. Not only did the outflow of Palestinian refugees bring about a change in the Jewish-Arab demographic rations, it brought about the replacement of an Arab-Palestinian landscape with a Jewish-Israeli landscape. The names of abandoned villages disappeared from the map and were replaced with alternative Hebrew names . . Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank have taken on biblical names associated with the specific sites as a means of expressing the Jewish priority in these places and the exclusive nature of the territorial attachment. Modern Israeli and Palestinian maps of Israel/Palestine possess the same outer borders, but the semantic content of the name is completely different.. The means by which new landscapes are created to replace or obliterate former landscapes is a good example of the way in which metaphysical and symbolic attachment to territory is translated into concrete realities on the ground.’

In 1950, when King Abdullah, of the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, unilaterally annexed the territory he had conquered in 1948, he changed the name of his country to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which incorporated the remaining fragment of Palestine as aḍ-Ḍiffä l-Ġarbīyä, or 'the West Bank' of that kingdom. The usage is still current in German (Westjordanland). Though only Britain recognized his annexation, the word itself found ready acceptance in, and was not, 'forced on', the international community, as Binyamin Netanyahu argued.

In 1967, Israel conquered what the world knew as ‘The West Bank’, the Biblical heartland, and a decree calling it ‘Judea and Samaria’ was issued by the Israeli military on December 17 that year with the explicit definition that it would be identical in meaning for all purposes to the West Bank region to replace the interim terms 'Occupied Territories' (ha-shetahim ha-kevushim), and ‘the Administered Territories’ (ha-shetahim ha-muhzakim) in use since the immediate aftermath of the June war. The term 'Judea and Samaria' however was rarely used until Likud took power. The Labour Government never enacted a settlement policy, though Gush Emunim, an extremist settler ground with a fundamentalist ideology, pressed settlement, and propagated the terminology ‘Judea and Samaria’. When the Likud party, the maximalist, expansionist party with strong ties to both religious and ultra-Zionist groups and traditions, was elected in 1977, it imposed Samaria and Judea as the vox propria in modern Hebrew on the mass media, expressly forbidding the use of the international term West Bank. Notably, the government's imposing of these terms on Israeli usage was seen as a prerequisite for an envisioned settlement policy, since accepting the terms would predispose the public to accepting the policy.

Gideon Aran describes the achievement:

‘The importance of changing names in the process of conquering territory is well known. Assimilation of the name “Judea and Samaria” in normal and official language, as well as in jargon, attests to G(ush)E(numin)’s political and cultural achievements.'

The Camp David Accords negotiations of and the final agreement, in 1979, only underline how great was the linguistic rift between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's position and the American government intent on brokering an agreement.

‘Begin consistently proved to be the most extreme member of his delegation, insisting on seemingly innocent terms such as “autonomy” as opposed to “self rule,” on the labelling of the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” in the Hebrew text, and on the use of the phrase “undivided Jerusalem.'

A huge amount of wrangling between the American negotiators and Begin revolved around this term.

‘for what must have been the tenth time, he (Begin) objected to the term West Bank, giving a lesson to the president on the geographic and historical appropriateness of the term and the importance of using the words Judea and Samaria.’

Begin refused to back down from his ‘rock-hard’ intransigence on using ‘Judea and Samaria’ and at the Camp David signing ceremony, (March 26,1979) several interpretive notes were required to be added as annexes to the basic documents, one specifically dealing with the West Bank, which President Carter annotated with his own hand with the words:

‘I have been informed that the expression ‘West Bank’ is understood by the Government of Israel to mean ‘Judea and Samaria’.

An ambitious programme of colonising settlement, toponomastic Hebraisation and cultural Judaization was undertaken, and indigenous Palestinians were shifted off their land, in a repetition of the Negev programme, which forms the precedent. The programme took wing especially after the unprovokedinvasion of Lebanon in 1982, whose key political objectives included ousting the refugee Palestinian resistance in the para-state on Israel’s northern flank from Lebanon, where the PLO projected a 'state in waiting' image that threatened Israel’s plans for long-term control over the West Bank. The war was, the head of the IDF said at the time, ‘part of the struggle over the Land of Israel. It aimed to further the isolation of Palestinians on the West Bank by depriving them of close support, halt the rise to political respectability of the PLO, which embodied Palestinian nationalist aspirations, and deprive that body of its claims to be a political partner in the peace process for Israel’s normalization of its relations with the outside world. One calculation, a minority view entertained by both Ariel Sharon and Raphael Eytan, however, was that, expelled from Lebanon, the PLO would be forced to return to Jordan, topple king Hussein, and establish a Palestinian state there to satisfy Palestinian national ambitions that Israel would thwart on the West Bank.

Changing the realities of occupied territory by the manipulation of language, Hebrew, Arabic, and in controllable sources like the global Wikipedia, became a programmatic goal. The settlers were in fact 'colonists' in the old sense, but Israeli English usage has here prevailed in the politics of the culture wars to determine how the international community perceives the dynamics of that area. The corresponding Hebrew usage is complex (see Israeli Settlements), but continuity with the biblical setlement of Eretz Yisrael is evoked by referring to Jewish settlers as mitnahalim. The root *n-h-l directly evokes a passage in the Book of Numbers where each tribe is assigned its portion on entering Canaan, or the Land of Israel, particularly as ' in the pledge by the tribes of Gad and Reuben that they will fight on the west side of the Jordan river to help the other tribes take possession of their assigned portions' Settlers, qua, mitnahalim are not colonizing anybody's land, in this usage: they are simply taking up their 'assigned portions' as those were marked out by God to the Chosen People.

Rashid Khalidi has remarked how the Israeli authorities themselves try to engineer the way Palestinians think in Arabic by tampering with that language's natural idiom in the Arabic broadcasts they authorize. Over Israeli Arabic channels, one does not hear Jerusalem referred to, as it is customarily in Arabic, and by Palestinians, as Bayt al-Maqdis ('The House of Sanctity') or Al Quds al-Sharif ('The Noble Holy Place'). Arabic usage as sanctioned by Israel speaks rather of Urshalim ('Jerusalem') or Urshalim/al-Quds ('Jerusalem Al-Quds'). The purpose is to diffuse a variety of Arabic names for places that are calques on the Hebrew terms chosen for the area..

This goes right through the bureaucratic language, a form of linguistic colonization that reinforces the physical occupation of the west Bank by cultural re-engineering. A new travel permit was imposed on the colonized Palestinians in the West Bank in 2002, and required of any of them wishing to travel in that area. This was issued, printed and released by Israeli authorities who call it in Arabic Tasrih tanaqul khas fi al-hawajiz al-dakhiliyya fi mantaqat yahuda wa al-samara. ('Special Travel Permit for the Internal Checkpioints in the Area of Judea and Samaria.'). Here, Palestinians who must travel in the West Bank, for them 'Filastin', are required to obtain a document which requires that area to be referred to by the settler term, 'Judea and Samaria'. It is this form of Arabic which they are expected to use in negotiating their way with Israeli authorities through checkpoints. But West Bank Palestinians simply abbreviate it and refer to their tasrih dakhili (Checkpoint permit), , thereby eluding the settler term imposed on them.

A proposal is now being made to apply the principle of Hebraization, as of 2009, even to those places within Israel which the world designates by traditional toponyms, such as Jerusalem (Yerushalayim) Nazareth (Natzrat) and Jaffa (Yafo)

(Note that, as the Arbcom review got under way, someone made this edit, on the 9th of March effectively removing evidence that the term 'West Bank' is perfectly normal in modern Hebrew usage (Hebrew: הגדה המערבית, HaGadah HaMa'aravit). 11 days have passed. No one appears to have noticed, or cared to restore the deleted fact.)

(6) Analysis of Ynhockey's suggestions

‘Mapmaking was one of the specialized intellectual weapons by which power could be gained, administered, given legitimacy and codified’

'Mapmaking is not, however, solely an instrument of war; it is an activity of supreme political significance – a means of providing a basis for the mapmaker’s claims and for his social and symbolic values, while cloaking them in a guise of “scientific objectivity.” Maps are generally judged in terms of their “accuracy”, that is, the degree to which they succeed in reflecting and depicting the morphological landscape and its “man-made” covering But maps portray a fictitious reality that differs from other sorts of printed matter only in form.'

After 1967 ‘Cartographers . .had many options, which tended to reveal their political proclivities. Those who were sympathetic to Israel labelled the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Sinai as “administered territories” and used the phrase “Judea and Samaria” for Jordan’s former West Bank. They also included all of Jerusalem within Israeli territory,. Mapmakers who were ideologically neutral generally referred to “occupied territory” and maintained the term “West Bank”. . . In the post-1993 period a Palestinian Authority has been established in the West Bank and Gaza, yet there is no actual independent state of Palestine. Most international maps have stayed with the terms “West Bank” and “Gaza” but maps published by the Palestinian Authority describe these areas as “Palestine.” Furthermore, Palestinian Authority maps usually leave out Israel and assign its territory to “Palestine,” with the added designation that it is “occupied territory.”Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, Harvey Sicherman, The power of projections: : how maps reflect global politics and history, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006 pp.37-8

We are dealing with a defined territory and its naming. User:Ynhockey would make tidy distinctions, define the bound geographical territory (CIA Factbook) as just a political reality, and use Judea and Samaria for all other contexts. In his own work on Wiki, much of it admirable, we find many maps. Examine the following map he authored and uploaded, and which is employed on the Battle of Karameh

The central colour, a washed acquamarine tint, allows one to highlight the field of movement in the battle, and blurs the neat territorial division between the West Bank, and Jordan. But note that, in a wholly unnecessary manner, Israel is stamped in large bold characters and made to overlay the West Bank, which is placed diminutively in parentheses. Willy-nilly, the impression is that the West Bank is some territorial hypothesis or province within Israel. Whether Ynhockey meant to give the reader this impression or not is immaterial. Maps, as one source already quoted noted, reflect the cognitive bias of the mapmaker as much as an interpretation of a landscape, and here the bias is that the West Bank is under Israel, behind Israeli lines, a subset of that state. It is a fine example of what many cartographers and historians of cartography argue: the making of maps, and toponymic nomenclature in them, serves several purposes, to clarify, as here, a battle landscape, for example, but also to impose or assert power, or claims, or blur facts. Objectively, User:Ynhockey has loaded wiki with a map that cogs our perceptions, tilting them to an annexationist assumption. Indeed, unlike the Israeli government so far, his map actually looks like it has the West Bank annexed.

In a tiff over the editing ofSusya, I reverted Ynhockey for eliding information he thought poorly sourced (from Counterpunch, though the authors are all notable scholars with a published record for studying settlements on the West Bank) concerning the Palestinian origins of that town. His response was to upload a map onto the Susya page (30/03/2009). Though his map image gives Susya as south of Hebron and, without words, within the boundaries of what an attentive reader knows to be the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank, as one runs the cursor over the map, a pop-up suggests to us the falsehood that 'Susya is located in Israel'. If one clicks on the map for details, again, one finds the pushpin map he created described as 'Southern West Bank (Judea region)'. Whether the pop-up comes from him, or, as Nableezy now tells me, is a collateral effect from the Susya web-site (?) I cannot judge. But User:Ynhockey's practice on wiki, where his cartographic gifts are acknowledged, is ambiguous. His maps are so drawn, or glossed on the Wiki Commons page that at times a false impression, or subliminal message, is conveyed to Wiki browsers. In Karameh, certainly, the occupied areas are in Israel. In Susya, the pop-up effect, whoever is responsible, should have been removed.Nishidani (talk) 08:54, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

LOL

"Nishibani," LOL! Sorry -- Freudian slip or whatever. :-D

This was very nice of you, by the way. SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 21:37, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Nishi-Banni ! Too much :-)

So Nishi-Bunny, pourquoi partir ?

Le comité pour la neutralité-forcée a besoin d'un Président ! ;-)

Ceedjee (talk) 16:08, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

A la niche, Danny !

Still no email ?

Amitiés, Ceedjee (talk) 16:14, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Oui, c'était merveilleux, ce calembour-là!. En lisant ce lapsus délicieux de notre amie, je pensais qu'il faudrait bien se dire que, 'Tel qu'en moi-même mon exécution administrative me change, voilà que l'éternité me trouve 'banni', mais au même temps, 'bunny' comme le lapin dans 'Alice in Wonderland', ou membre d'un tribu arabe (Bani), et beaucoup d'autres identités. Pas mal, Bunny. sobriquet du grand homme de lettres, Edmund Wilson!

Pourquoi partir?! Il n'y a pas ici une question de choix et, bien que 'la chair soit triste, hélas, ayant lu tous les articles', il faut 'fuir, là-bas fuir . .je sens que ce lapin est ivre d'être parmi l'écume bien con(nue) de la mer(de)'!!

Je te remercie encore une fois, mon cher ami. Oui, je pense qu'il faudrait maintenir des contactes avec mes amis ici, mais pour le moment, j'aurai besoin d'une période du silence, cultivant mon jardin. Un'abbraccio.Nishidani (talk) 17:14, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Je pense que je t'ai déjà dit à plusieurs reprises que cette décision de prendre du recul était tout aussi bonne. Profiter des réalités de la vie et s'éloigner du monde virtuel.

Quelle que soit ta décision, ce sera la bonne !

Ton niveau en français m'impressionne vraiment en tout cas !!! Tu as dû le pratiquer intensivement pendant des années !

Amicalement, Ceedjee (talk) 17:29, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Je suis un imbécile !

Je viens à peine de voir la décision de l'ArbCom te concernant.

Cette décision est typique de ce que peut générer l'ArbCom...

Bonne continuation. Ceedjee (talk) 18:32, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your kind note. I feel bad that I'm getting to know you just as you're subject to a topic ban. Let me just say that it's been a pleasure working with you, and I only wish I had encountered you sooner. I hope you'll keep on editing in other areas, and perhaps if you do have an Israel-Palestine related insight, you could post it on your talk page. :-) best, SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 18:08, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

I reciprocate your sentiments. It should have indeed been a far more creative, productive and pleasant an experience as editor while I still had those rights, if our paths had crossed much earlier. Problems subsist, the swarming effect continues unabated: a flow chart would show the numbers to secure a majority are in a steady-state equilibrium, and one has the impression that the area is a social outlet, like a mall, for playing virtual games, or political rough-house (of course, privately I'm an 'extremist' in most things, but I don't think it influences very much my understanding of what is required by NPOV, and WP:RS) to keep articles in an entropic/dysentropic seesaw full of conflicting POVs, so that readers more or less come away with a confused impression. Comprehensive FA status articles here would shock, precisely because, in modern middlebrow media, to see sensitive, touchy issues treated with olympian equanimity is rare, and coming across them would open the global readership to a more reflective relationship, perhaps reviving over time (or what's left of it!) in our virtual culture what Nietzsche, as a thoroughly trained Pfortian classicist, called the art of 'slow reading' (he calls himself a 'teacher of slow reading', ein Lehrer des langsamen Lesens, in the preface to Dawning).

Ah, too deviously ambitious an intention, however, this covert POV of mine!

As to editing other areas of wiki, no. I don't think I have to brownnose my way back by proving anything, churning out edits in areas I really know well for the good of the encyclopedia. To do so, while the area I was focused on languished, would be to volunteer my time and pay dues not owed, to impress others with my desire for social redemption. Oh, really, I much prefer the company of Max Stirner!, being neither a masochist, nor a Christian, nor someone with some guilty debt to amortize towards superiors. Of course there is a deep aesthetic of pleasure in productive composition (for what is basically a utopian endeavour of singular merit), besides so many other motives, that prod us to join this project, but if the revocation of one's desire to be useful depends on a do ut des, Maussian logic of the gift, donating oneself further, in projects others define and rule over, in order to cash in the payback of being accepted, the spirit of autonomous choice is violated.

Bejayzus, it must have been that extra port I drank over dinner.

Look, that intensive effort to both pick up where Tiamut left off, and drive that page on against the hurdles of humdrum minds, was a delight to observe, and I think I'm not alone in saying you've given, on that page, in short order, a standing lesson to the shabby little world of I/P pov-warriors. Someone should tell them that a nation's moral strength is inversely proportional to its defensively aggressive instincts. The stronger the latter, the more etiolated the former. The genius of the diaspora told us that, so did that Crawford twit, GWB, incidentally.

Oh fuck it, sermonizing and it's still 45 minutes away from Sunday. What a sanctimonious chump. You get, I think, my last post. I hope you stay on in the I/P area without it devouring too much useless expenditure of unrewarded energy. You'll find several excellent editors in there, Ceedjee, but also quite a few from the shady side, strongly tempted to, not swarm, but co-edit towards quality, with rapid informed collaboration. One hopes that our dearest Tiamut, above all, may see this as an opportunity to return. These are all people with strong personal views, which however never blind them to the pleasure of comprehensive NPOV composition, of the kind you've tried to exemplify on the Lydda page. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 21:21, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Thank you

Just wish to round off this sad affair and say thank you for everything. You've been my role model and taught me a lot, and in an immensely entertaining way too. It hurts that the WP system can be so wasteful of resources. Wonder what the knowledge vacuum will suck in when you move to other pastures... if metaphors can be mixed that way.

Myself, I've lost a bit of spirit along with the illusions, so I'm probably not going to contribute that much in the future — unless the permit to take part in the guidelines draft discussion is unexpectedly granted (and I hope you will apply too). However, my girlfriend rightly sees Wikipedia as a dangerous rival for my attention, and if I analyze things objectively, I have in fact neglected her as well as my job and my friends for more than six months now, so, in a few weeks, I'll probably see some merit in the decision. RIght now, I'm just pissed off. MeteorMaker (talk) 00:00, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Been keeping a wandering eye on all this from afar, but felt the need to interrupt my vacation to drop a line. This place is utterly hopeless, a scholarly encyclopedic article on the least controversial article is near impossible to achieve, and those who strive to achieve such a goal (you, Nickhh, G-Dett, Pedrito, MM, ..., and lest I forget Tiamut) are invariably subject to being chased off or stonewalled by morons who are only good for googling some nonsense (usually some term with "antisemitic" attached to the search). When I get back to the states I think I am just going to finish up an article I am working on and say fuck this place. Don't even know if that is worth the time and effort, but might as well leave something behind. I've learned a lot just by reading your comments, and wish you well in whatever you pursue. Peace and happiness Nishidani. Respectfully, Nableezy (talk) 14:16, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Nah, Nab. That's not what an old codger like myself expects from a tough young Chicagoan. Chin up, son. You're a gifted editor, and the place needs'em. For the moment, just enjoy your stayover, and don't get fazed by things. Which reminds me, if you're within a cooee of the Naguib Mahfouz Café at the Khan al-Khalili, or near al-Jamaliyyah, it might be worth taking a digitalized snapshot of the café where Mahfouz hung out most evenings, or if you can, get idem of his house in al-Jamaliyyah, or a shot of the Palace of Desire (Qasr el-Shoaq) area, that figures in his great Cairo Trilogy. If you're in Alexandria what about checking out the old 10 Rue Lepsius where Constantine Cavafy lived. The last I heard it was converted into a Pension, pension Amir, in the renamed 4 Sharia Sharm Al-Sheikh. Or a snap of the house where he was born on Seriph Pasha Street. I've just checked and those articles need some photo downloads onto Wiki commons if they're ever to be brought up to snuff.

Had a wonderful conversation about Cairo with an Egyptian Franciscan friar, while guest of my next door monastery last night. He gave me a useful analysis of the meaning of sumud in Arabic. Poor guy can't have his heart's desire fulfilled though. He travels on an Egyptian passport, which means he can't visit the 'Holy Land' (I think that is what is called in rhetoric a cynicdoche!). I greatly enjoyed our work together, and hope you can stay on, if only desultorily to maintain a sane voice in the hubbub. Best Nishidani (talk) 15:38, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, didnt see the request for pics until now, and alas it is too late to tote the camera around the city (this was mostly a family oriented trip, didnt go to the touristy parts of either town, though was fortunate enough to spend some time in Alexandria with most of my time spent in Cairo). Next year, if you are still hanging around, you'll see some pics in those articles. The passport thing is interesting as I have recently been informed that those traveling from Israel need not provide any documentation when going into Sinai, only when they get to Suez do they need to present papers. Sadat wasnt big on equal treatment, and Mubarak seems to follow in his footsteps (who knows what Gamal Mubarak will do when he inevetiably takes power, but I am guessing there won't be that much of a difference. Good thing I am typing this from an internet cafe, any wiretapping as a result of these words wont affect me) Peace Nishidani, Nableezy (talk) 11:51, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Closure. It looks like a tie-break between G-Dett and myself.

Unless I am mistaken, G-Dett and myself are neck to neck in a stiff race to see who will poll the most votes. We've comprehensively beaten the rest of the field, and the judges, though wavering on the stragglers in our wake, are unanimous in acknowledging that honours at the post are to be split between the two of us. One trundles to the stables, in my case, one slouches towards Bethlehem, with head erect, nostrils flairing at the 'stir and keep of pride'! Cheerio Nishidani (talk) 16:42, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

RFAR/West Bank - Judea and Samaria

This arbitration case has been closed and the final decision is available at the link above. Canadian Monkey (talk · contribs), G-Dett (talk · contribs), MeteorMaker (talk · contribs), Nickhh (talk · contribs), Nishidani (talk · contribs), NoCal100 (talk · contribs), and Pedrito (talk · contribs) are prohibited from editing any Arab-Israeli conflict-related article/talk page or discussing on the dispute anywhere else on the project. Jayjg (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) is also prohibited from editing in the area of conflict, and he is stripped of his status as a functionary and any and all associated privileged access, including the CheckUser and Oversight tools and the checkuser-l, oversight-l, and functionaries-en mailing lists. Jayjg is also thanked for his years of service.

After six months, these editors may individually ask the Arbitration Committee to lift their editing restrictions after demonstrating commitment to the goals of Wikipedia and ability to work constructively with other editors. However, restrictions may be temporarily suspended for the exclusive purpose of participating in the discussion of draft guidelines for this area.

In the meantime, the community is strongly urged to pursue current discussions to come to a definitive consensus on the preferred current and historical names of the region that is the source of conflict in this case. Note that this must be consistent with current Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources, a neutral point of view, and naming conventions. This decision will be appended onto this case within two months from the close of the case.

For the Arbitration Committee, hmwithτ 17:34, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Discuss this

No, thank you. On a couple of points of form, however

(a) discuss on is not acceptable English.

(b) Though it is implied, it is not clear from the text that Jayjg is included in the list. Indeed, as phrased, whereas the 7 editors are

'prohibited from editing any Arab-Israeli conflict-related article/talk page or discussing on the dispute anywhere else on the project.'

The following mention of the one administrator involved reads:-

'Jayjg (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) is also prohibited from editing in the area of conflict, and he is stripped of his status'

That 'also' would appear to include Jayjg in all the restrictive provisions applied to the other 7. However, the exepegetical language following 'also' reading 'prohibited from editing in the area of conflict', would allow a wikilawyer to argue that, thus formulated, unlike the other 7, Jayjg may not edit in the area of conflict, but since, unlike the others, this is not in his case clarified, it may be taken that he can 'edit on talk pages' and 'may discuss (on) the dispute anywhere on the project'.

(c) Observers will note that 5 editors on one side of the divide were sanctioned, while only 3 were sanctioned on the other. This is probably inversely proportional to the numbers of the respective forces in the field. A psephologist reading this, who was a partisan, would, on the strength of the breakdown in the numbers, conclude on the whole that one cause (civic activists for neutrality as per policy (reliable sources, a neutral point of view, and naming conventions ) in public discourse in G-Dett's words) lost out to the other (the nationalist party). Aleatory of course, and I make the remark simple because that is the way the cookie had to crumble, given the original indictment. Regards Nishidani (talk) 18:04, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Hmwith probably did not watchlist this page after posting her notice here (and many other places), so if you'd like her to respond you might ping her on her talkpage. I'd argue the point about how this decision impacts the battlefield in this area - it isn't accurate, to my mind, to describe one side as nationalist and the other as possessed of the purest democratic motivations. In any case, the ban 'em all approach in this case lumps everyone with a blemished history together regardless of whether any one alone earned the consequence. I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from how it broke out in terms of partisanship (in fact, I'm not sure in all cases who is on which side - perhaps I should pay closer attention?). That the outcome weighs in the favour of a particular point of view is possible, but my feeling is that we'll be right back to "normal" before long. The lasting impact will be that whatever minimal education the rest of Wikipedia managed to give the combatants in this case will need to be repeated, from the beginning, for all those who will arrive to find the field cleared and decide to "right the wrongs" on Wikipedia. Nathan ^{T (formerly Avruch)} 18:23, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Fair enough, Nathan. Perhaps I overegged the pud in the contrast nationalist versus policy pushers, but that is how I see it, for the simple reason that I (a life-long anti-nationalist, and academically published on it), Meteormaker, Nickhh, G-Dett and Pedrito, as far as I can make out, are a mixed bunch from, I gather three continents, with POVs, undoubtedly, but not, certainly, here, a nationalist POV (if we were Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Egyptians etc., perhaps an odour of suspicion in that regard might arise). I think this fact gave many the impression that there must be some common motivation, either 'pro-Palestinian' (which G-Dett is not, no more than she is 'pro-Israeli) or 'anti-semitic' fixations. In short, I find nothing that binds me to those who saw the problem as I saw it. I see something that binds the three on the other side of the divide.(When I say I am 'pro-Palestinian' (strongly so), I hope it should be clear that this in no way implies that I am 'anti-Israel').

I will admit to an antipathy, and Jayjg and Canadian Monkey, aren't the object of it. I think one editor there never showed, from the outset, the slightest interest in wikipedia as anything other than an area of enjoyable conflict. Jayjg could tie one up with rules. Most of those who imitate him, just bore the living daylights out of you with their impressively comprehensive nescience about the subject one edits with them. At least with him there was an atmosphere of almost goliardic thrust and paring at a chess level. With so many, one knows one is just like Sisyphus, pushing rockhard and heavy evidence uphillagainst the huge downward momentum and gravitational pull of an ill-informed POV.

I don't think Arbcom had the slightest interest in issuing a result that would read, in terms of numbers, the way it does now read. In the initial brief, it was virtually inevitable that, given the rules, it would play out as it did. By restricting the issue to the conflict at 'Judea and Samaria' and not to the whole I/P field, it shortlisted, rather arbitrarily just a handful of people, and left out many problematical editors still in there, with the result that 5 'pro-Palestinian' editors were in the dock with 3 'pro-Israeli' editors. I was privately absolutely convinced, from the beginning of the Mohammad al-Durrah article, that Tundrabuggy came from the CAMERA cabal. I suppose quite a few of us knew it, since it was pretty obvious. But one had to, and one has to, put up with this 'tacit knowledge' (Michael Polanyi). Proving the obvious in this system is perhaps the most problematical thing about wiki. One just has to, or had to, soldier on, WP:AGF, knowing full well that often one's interlocutor's edits give one no warrant for such an assumption, pretending one does not know such things. Often such implicit knowledge influences one's prose, or summaries (it happened thus with my edit against Jordandov on Susya, which Risker worried over).

You may say what you will of Jayjg, but a fair judgement would recognize he worked extensively also on many articles, and in several, enriched the encyclopedia. Many remain who have done nothing for it, and hang round kibitizing and quibbling over the I/P area singularly. Though he may have shared their views, he was far more capable than they are of selection, of choosing where to challenge the text and other editors.

What really troubles one in here is the lack of what is the most outstanding feature of Jewish culture, the intellectual trenchancy and brilliance, the ease with difficulty, that is the hallmark of its tradition. Were I an Israeli nationalist, that would be my plaint, my irritation, a sense of being let-down by a blind resolution to push the poorest defences, and employ the pawkiest forms of aggression, in defence of a human reality. These chaps are not doing justice to their country, nor their tradition. Deplorable. Well mate, I must check off. I don't want to make my infractions worse by allowing this page to become a blog, by letting it slouch off into a virtual variant of Simone de Beaver's unending 'Cérémonie des adieux'. Cheers and best wishes.Nishidani (talk) 19:12, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

This is great. We are not nationalists, they are nationalists. We are not POV pushers, they are POV pushers. You're in serious need of a mirror. You did make me laugh though. Then we have some stereotyping in the guise of a compliment. Well done on all fronts. No More Mr Nice Guy (talk) 15:35, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

• Cheers and best wishes, Jaakobou^{Chalk Talk} 21:02, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

• Sorry to see this draconian, randomly punitive decision. No way to cook a small fish. Indefinite talk page banning? Perhaps the only way to disabuse the arbcom of belief in magic is for them to see its failure.John Z (talk) 06:44, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

• Indeed, and this "remedy" will certainly not cure the problem. It's weird, but no more weird than some other aspects of Israel/Palestine articles on Wikipedia, not least the number of editors who appear so keen to promote, indirectly, the slaughter and vilification of Jews, while believing they are doing the exact opposite. Take the positive out of this, it will leave you free to get on with other worthwhile activites, and I won't be wasting so much time reading your contributions . --NSH001 (talk) 08:33, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

• What a surprise, 5 pro-Palestinian editors banned and only 3 pro-Israelis banned, despite a lot more being involved in the dispute. Factsontheground (talk) 14:01, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

		The Barnstar of Integrity
		All the interesting people banned! Things will be pretty dull for a while. Will miss you --Ravpapa (talk) 16:15, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

I wholeheartedly agree with the bestowed Integrity Barnstar. I also note that an indicated 5 pro-P, and 3-pro-I synopsis of the result is overly simplistic; I suspect the ethno-religious make-up of the editors is considerably different, and generally agree with Nishidani that this tends to be specifically a pov-NPOV debate. As Nishidani notes, being pro-one does not automatically mean anti-the-other. I too fall in that category and would characterize the other side as being "pro-one automatically does mean anti-the-other", which I can not see as NPOV-accepting. I see the same 5-3 split, but see it as NPOV and pov; NPOV got trounced and it is simply the project's loss. With many others, I question how much good this will do within the larger I/P arena, but note that the J-S debate is only one definable geographic symptom of the larger conflict. The J-S debate is only one outgrowth of the differences between Jewish, Zionist and outside concepts of Medinat Yisrael and Eretz Israel, and understanding their conflation, or not. It is quite well explained in the introductory paragraph of the latter, and collaboratively edited rather than edit-warred at follow-on other pages.

My best evidence for alleged pov'd conflation of terms lies right here at Eretz-Israel. Notice a difference? That re-direct seems very specifically POV'd to me and very much stating one pov as if it was NPOV. It sure seems to be a case of "such as advocacy or propaganda, furtherance of outside conflicts, publishing or promoting original research, and political or ideological struggle, is prohibited", like that ArbCom decision states. Regards, CasualObserver'48 (talk) 04:07, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Sorry to muffle your thunder, CO48, but I've gone and changed that redirect. It's only the third edit ever, so it's not as if there's been consultation or a big edit war and WP:Bold,especially in it's and WP:So fix it incarnation applies.--Peter cohen (talk) 10:12, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Nishidani, I'm sorry to see this happen to you as you are an editor who I respect. However, this repsect means that I consider you well able to be of value to Wikipedia in a range of areas and not just the I/P conflict. I hope therefore that you see yourself as able to contribute to the project elsewhere.--Peter cohen (talk) 10:12, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

hi there. just read the Arbcom decision just now for the first time, as I'd been sort of ignoring this issue area for a while. guess that makes me a model editor of sort!! :-) I too am totally surpised by the odd nature of the arbcom decision. I think this says more about the arbitration committee here than about any of the individual editors!

I am planning to read some of the other comments here and then eprhaps to comment further. feel free to reply though if you wish. --Steve, Sm8900 (talk) 21:29, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Damn. Hang in there. If you're ever editing a Wikipedia article, FAC or not, and would like someone to proofread it, feel free to ask me, per User:Coppertwig/Notices#Proofreading offer. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 23:12, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Consolation barnstar

		The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
		For hours of fruitless effort trying to protect Wikipedia from nationalist bias. Although you have been sanctioned unfairly, your thoughtful arguments and dogged research have given the community a strong background of information to draw on when denouncing future attempts to portray ideology as fact. untwirl(talk) 14:54, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

The Kafka Award

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.
RolandR (talk) 18:59, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

The baskets of Hipparenum

English

Hi Nishidani,
Would you mind checking this :

In July 1948, the Israelis launched the Operation Dani to conquer the cities of Lydda and Ramle. The first attack on Lydda occured on the afternoon of 11 July when the 89th battalion mounted on armoured cars and jeeps raided the city "spraying machine-gun fire at anything that moved". "Dozens of Arabs (perhaps as many as 200)" were killed. According to Benny Morris, the description of this raid written by one of the soldiers "combine[s] elements of a battle and a massacre".

Later, Israeli troops entered the city and took up position in the town centre. The only resistance came from the police fort that was hold by "a small force of Legionnaires and irregulars". Detention compounds were arranged in the mosques and the churches for adult males and 300-400 Israeli soliders garrisoned the town. In the morning of 12 July, the situation was calm but around 11:30 an incident occured. Two or three armoured cars entered the town and a firefight erupted. The skirmish made believe to Lydda townspeople that the Arab Legion was counter-attacking and probably a few dozen snipers fired against the occupying troops. Israeli soldiers felt threatened, vulnerable because they were isolated among thousands of hostile townpeople and 'angry [because] they had understood that the town had surrendered'. '[They] were told to shoot 'at any clear target' or, alternatively, at anyone 'seen on the streets'. The Arab inhabitants panicked. Many rushed in the streets and were killed.

There is a controversy among historians for the events that followed. According to Benny Morris, at the Dahaimash mosque some prisonners tried to break out and escape, probably fearing to be massacred. IDF threw grenades and fired rockets at the compound and several dozens Arabs were shot and killed. The Palestinian historiography describes the events differently. According to it, it was civilians that had refugeed themselves in the mosque, thinking that the Israelis would not dare to profane the sanctuary. The Israelis killed all the people there making 93 to 176 dead. Alon Kadish and Avraham Sela write that there is a confusion between two mosques. According to them, detenees were only gathered around the Great Mosque, where no incident occured and it is a group of 50-60 armed Arabs who barricaded in the Dahaimash mosque. Its storming resulted in the death of 30 Arab militiamen and civilians, including elderly, women and children.

The deaths of July 12 are regarded in the Arab world and by several historians as a massacre. Walid Khalidi calls it "an orgy of indiscriminate killing." Benny Morris writes that the "jittery Palmahniks massacr[ed] detenees in a mosque compound." According to Yoav Gelber, it was a "bloodier massacre" than at Deir Yassin. Alon Kadish and Avraham Sela write that it was "an intense battle where the demarcation between civilians, irregular combatants and regular army units hardly existed."

Ceedjee (talk) 16:28, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

C'est défendu. Ils m'ont fait déguerpir,(1948!)Nishidani (talk) 19:22, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

La France est prête à t'offrir l'asile politique !!! :-) fr:Discussion utilisateur:Ceedjee

Ceedjee (talk) 17:32, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Idée géniale! Mais les délateurs parleraient de moi, dans ce rôle, comme un agent d'influence indirect, agissant à travers ton travail là pour, quand tu écrits ici, contourner les régles de ce système fou! Pour toi, mon ami, il y a un risque à courir, et il ne vaut pas la peine d'offrir aux malveillants l'occasion de clabauder contre toi. Amitiés.Nishidani (talk) 20:14, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

C'est sage mais je ne crains pas trop les contraintes virtuelles.

Je peux te proposer malgré tout l'asile politique de la wikipédia francophone dans son ensemble :-)

Il y a là-bas quelques articles qui mériteraient ton analyse et quelques articles ici qui ne demandent qu'à être traduits là-bas...

Mieux... Je te rappelle que selon la décision du comité d'arbitrage, le contributeur qui prouverait sa dévotion au projet en contribuant à la promition d'un article jusqu'à l'AdQ (FA) verrait sa sanction levée... Cela pourrait se faire en traduisant en anglais un AdQ francophone.

A+, Ceedjee (talk) 20:59, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Pourquoi pas celui ci : fr:Grande Idée ou encore celui-là : fr:Pinocchio (film, 1940)

Le choix est vaste : fr:Wikipédia:Articles de qualité

Ceedjee (talk) 21:06, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Par principe, si mon hôte me reconduit jusqu'à la porte, je n'y frappe plus, encore moins essayer de rentrer par la fenêtre, fredonnant les chansons qu'il adore!Nishidani (talk) 11:19, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Je pense que tu commets un erreur de principe. Il n'y a pas d'hôte sur wikipédia. Wikipédia n'est pas une personne (un hôte, un brave, un démon, un ami ou une ennemi...) mais un système, voire une structure ! Les règles qui régissent le comportement des systèmes ne doivent surtout pas être comparées aux règles qui régissent le comportement d'un individu.

Dans un système comme wikipédia, c'est à chaque individu à voir s'il y trouve son compte. Si oui, à lui de louvoyer avec les règles de fonctionnement du système. Sinon, alors il faut jeter l'éponge et passer à autre chose...

Toujours pas de courriel ? ...

Ceedjee (talk) 17:49, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Hey

Is your plan really to stop editing altogether? In case you do, please keep in touch -- I am slimvirgin at gmail dot com. Best, SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 06:39, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

But please keep your eyes open, Nishidani. -- ZScarpia (talk) 10:57, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

You remain deeply missed ...

as always. Tiamut^talk 09:46, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Jerusalem

Hi, Thanks for your message. A couple of years ago I wrote some text that is here: User_talk:Zero0000/temp#Etymology of the name Jerusalem. You can see it agrees pretty much with yours. I put your text there too, for easy comparison. I think we should work up a combined version and see how long it survives in the article (there are an awful lot of "City of Peace" folks out there as you know). Cheers. Zero^talk 09:59, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

AE

Welcome back, I'm hoping your presence means you might resume editing (although your comments at AE suggest otherwise, sadly.) Just wanted to leave a note about this edit - no members of ArbCom have commented in the discussion as yet. Josh Gordon's term expired last go 'round, and FT2 resigned some time ago. Nathan ^T 20:51, 2 September 2009 (UTC) (formerly Avruch)

Isnt Coren still an arbiter? But welcome back Nishidani, and if you are interested I could use a hand on an article you should be free to edit nableezy - 21:14, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

You're right! I forgot he was the first to comment. Nathan ^T 21:16, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Nab, I'm not back. I just caught and found it unbelievable, that anyone like myself under a general ban 'encompassing the entire set of Arab-Israeli conflict-related articles, broadly interpreted', could get away with editing a page on Islam and antisemitism, as if that were unrelated to the problem.

Of course if I can help out on something unrelated to the I/P area, let me know. I've got a superb knowledge of the rules of playing bunnyhole with marbles, which I often lost, that doesn't seem to be covered! Nishidani (talk) 21:28, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, see if you would be interested in putting in some work here. I had hoped Ramadan would give me some added motivation but the fact is it has made me lazier than ever. Not sure how interested you would be, but if you are by all means lend a hand. nableezy - 21:35, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

It's late, I see what I can do tomorrow. Cheers and Ramadan mobarak. Nishidani (talk) 21:36, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Ahlan wa Sahlan! Very nice to hear from you again Nishidani. Tiamut^talk 23:21, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Ahlan Bik, Tiamut.Nishidani (talk) 09:28, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Implications

If I came across as intimating that you were trying to be underhanded in the Islam and antisemitism article, my deepes apologies; that was in no way shape or form my intention. I am an expert in neither Islam nor antisemitism, and do not claim to come to the article from a position of scholarship. My opinion is, and has always been, that I/P articles need to follow the guidelines up a tree and off of a cliff, so that when decisions/consensus are eventually made/formed, we have a much stronger defense against claims of POV (like Zero has been making about AfD recently, for example).

In this case, Laquer has made statements about I&AS which have been quoted by others (I think). If everything he brings can be sourced to someone else, that is great. If not, we should discuss his appropriateness on the talk page as we are doing now. I respect your opinion as to Laquer's appropriateness, but the best way to address this, I think, would be to find outside sources that make those claims about Laquer, and either put them in the article or use those to support the removal. Our own opinions are often suspect, even when they should not be :( -- Avi (talk) 16:00, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Hello, Nishidani. In order to ensure that you don't take my future silence as ignoring you, I have to let you know now that I'm travleing for business much of next week, and then comes Rosh HaShana (Sat/Sun) and the Ten days of Repentance, and then Yom Kippur and then Succos, so my on wiki time is going to be extremely sporadic and short-lived for the next 3 to for weeks or so. Your comments require careful reading and response; they cannot be addressed quickly, because they are content-rich and thought provoking. For what it is worth, I will not oppose removal of the Laquer quote from the article and accept the decision on the talk page. -- Avi (talk) 00:12, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Hiss

If it's from Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, Knight was at a conference about the book and I believe remains unconvinced. Something about it in counterpunch a while ago, could follow the links, but too tired to do so now. Best,John Z (talk) 10:05, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Nothing to do with that, but took a look at Conservapedia, and noted the Arthur Schlesinger quote there, interesting that his son Stephen is more skeptical.John Z (talk) 10:12, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, here's her reply to Haynes and Klehr's letter - [1] is their full, unprinted response to Knight's review. I don't see anything definitive from either side on the dating matter. I have no time to explore this stuff myself and am sure you know more about it than me, but diehard? academic skeptics clearly do still exist. Since the material comes through Vassiliev and is not directly from open archives, doubt doesn't seem unreasonable to me.John Z (talk) 21:01, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Here's a numbingly detailed review posted yesterday on a leading pro Hiss site, something you might not have seen.John Z (talk) 21:28, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Shahak

Hello, and it is good to hear from you and know that you are still around. As I thought I made clear, I haven't read Segev's account, only Shahak's and Jakobovits'. But Segev wasn't contemporary, and was writing after the other narrators had died. He ma6y have spoken to Shahak about this -- if you have the book, maybe you can confirm this. The fact remains that Boteach, writing last year, states explicitly that the potential caller was not a Jew, without giving any source for this; and he is then treated as a reliable source for this (according to you, untrue) assertion.*(see below)

In any case, it is a remarkable indictment of the orthodox rabbinical tradition that the whole issue turns on whether or not this passer-by was a Jew; and to that extent, Shahak's denunciation is valid, whatever the specifics of this case.

I realise how galling it must be for you to sit silently while others less well-informed or more ideologically than you driven make nonsense of articles to which you would have a lot to contribute. And it would indeed be humiliating to have to beg for an indulgence from those who have traduced and convicted you. Nevertheless, I very much hope that in November you will humour your censors, and request the restoration of the editing privileges of which you should never have been stripped, so that we can all once again benefit from your knowledge. RolandR 19:38, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

• Not arguing the assertion is untrue (cf.WP:V. Recently, because, beyond the strict call of duty, I like to check things out thoroughly, people get the impression I am involved in violations of WP:NOR or that I ignore that Wikipedia deals with verifiability, not truth). I was merely noting that one WP:RS identifies the person denied the use of a telephone as being Jewish. Nishidani (talk) 20:57, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

Hi, We have a problem at Joseph's Tomb in that the best historical sources are in German. Can you read it? If so and you are willing to help, send me wiki-email and I'll send you a nice German journal article. Cheers. Zero^talk 11:26, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Good to hear from you

I've been in a very isolated part of the world and without any connection to the Internet for the last three months, so only just read your message on my user page. Hope you'll forgive the long delay in receiving a response. It's very good to hear from you. -- ZScarpia (talk) 17:20, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

round numbers

You know you have another 998 edits to go now right? nableezy - 14:30, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

DYK for Al-Azhar Mosque

On November 6, 2009, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article Al-Azhar Mosque, which you created or substantially expanded. You are welcome to check how many hits your article got while on the front page (here's how) and add it to DYKSTATS if it got over 5,000. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.

SoWhy 23:14, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

For the record, I neither created nor substantially contributed to the article and don't desire this badge of recognition on my page.Nishidani (talk) 12:28, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Yeah you did, you added about 8% of the page. nableezy - 13:35, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Judaism

With all due respect I think you miss my point. I use the phrase "beliefs and practices" knowing full well that these words can and do describe religion (I am not as Tim implies trying to fool anyone, let alone myself). But "beliefs and practices" - speaking as an anthropologist - refer to other cultural domains besides religion. Capitalism is a set of beliefs and practices. Democracy is a set of beliefs and practices. Nationalism is a set of beliefs and practices. I use the plural "sets of beliefs and practices" because this language will include those beliefs and practices we call religion, but also include those beliefs and practices that are central to Judaism but not, strictly speaking, religion.

I honestly thought this was a simple and clear point. I write several times that I do not deny that Judaism is among other things a religion, just that it is other things also. Why do Tim - and I have to say, you to - ignore the "also" and suggest that I am claiming "instead" when I never say that it is not religion. I even wrote that I agree that the word religion belongs in the first paragraph, and in fact it is in there, so it is not being excluded.

My only concern is that by changing "beliefs and practices" to "religion," other things get excluded.

In all of this, I sincerely and upon reflection (and reading your comment) firmly sure, as an anthropologist and as a Wikipedia editor, sure that this is the best wording. Why? Nishidani, I posted several sources: two notable theologians, a historian of Judaism, a popular writer on Jewish topics, and a coupld of websites. All I ask you to do is to start with the sources, not any pre-conceived notions you have about Judaism. isn't this how we should do research? Just look at the sources ... Perhaps you will revise your comment. Slrubenstein | Talk 17:50, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Sources are infinite. Google Islam+beliefs and practices/Christianity+beliefs and practices, and then you get the same result as the one you supply for Judaism. Do you really think that by using 'religion' in the Christianity and Islam articles, we are getting other things excluded?

I look at the generic issue. The main problem of wikipedia as an encyclopedia is that, edited by interested parties, it is subject to the stresses of partisan POV perspective. In itself, there is nothing wrong in your edit, but, to my eyes, if you change 'religion' to 'sets of beliefs and practices', then I expect that a parallel series of edits is therefore suggested for the leads of Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, etc., altering a 'religion' to 'sets of beliefs and practices'.

Thus we would change 'Christianity is a monotheistic religion' to 'Christianity is a monotheism with sets of beliefs and practices originating in the Old and New Testaments'.

We would change 'Islam is the religion articulated by the Qur’an,' into 'Islam is a set of beliefs and practices originating in the Qur'an'. etc.

Interestingly enough, we have on the Buddhism article: 'Buddhism . . .is a religion or spiritual philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices.' Here 'religion' is the primary term, and 'beliefs and practices' is not a tautological gloss, but, governed by 'variety', refers to the great number of distinct traditions within the generic tradition of Buddhism.

I don't have, and rather regret you think, that I edit this area, or anything else 'with preconceived notions'. This is very pointed language when one deals with Judaism, since it insinuates I have some prejudice about Judaism, or even Jews.

The effect of your elision of 'religion' and its replacement by '(sets of) beliefs and practices' is, within the context of a global encyclopedia, tantamount to rendering Judaism definitionally unique. That is my primary objection. I'm a generalist, prepossessed by avoiding the all too human error of what Freud called 'the narcissism of minor differences'. That everything is different is, in my private world, true. That the human sciences must, methodologically, address the generic before isolating specificities, is also true.

The obvious immediate compromise solution, in lieu opf the fatigue of altering the parallel articles on other religions as above, would be to write: 'Judaism is a religion embracing sets/a variety of beliefs and practices'. As it stands, in comparative, interwikitextual terms, the edit looks like subliminally suggesting, though I believe this was not your intention, that Judaism, unlike its fellow monotheisms, is not a religion, but a 'tertium quid'. In short, when editing, one has to think in comparative terms. Most pages suffer because we do not take the trouble to think, while we edit, across comparable pages.

I don't think you answered the point my quote from Durkheim made. I could quote any number of authorities, from him through to J.G.Frazer down to Mary Douglas, to underline the point that religion is tantamount to 'a set or sets of beliefs and practices'. As it stands, your edit, unfortunately, suggests to the common reader that Judaism is singular among monotheisms in not being primarily he or she would understand by the word 'religion'. Nishidani (talk) 18:28, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I should add that I can see why a secular Jewish mind, not necessarily your own, would prefer not to define Judaism as a religion, but rather as a 'set or sets of beliefs and practices', because many Jews, at least of my acquaintance, entertain a Judaism that consists more of practices than of beliefs. But this is also true of most Protestants and Catholics I know. Anecdotally, this morning, an old woman my wife and I met on the street said she'd just come from the local cemetary. She's a Catholic, a regular church-goer and yet in the conversation that developed, it emerged she thought the idea of an afterlife was nonsense. When my wife spoke of the resurrection, she said. 'Only God was resurrected. We're not God.' I could gloss this indefinitely from experiences with other believers, many of them outwardly pious. Their practice, Wittgensteinians would argue, defines them, not their beliefs, in Judaism as in many other religions. Religion is primarily a social praxis, and to think that theology or belief has primacy is to allow oneself to be beguiled by the textuality of high, elitist culture and be blinded to the real practice of most believers. Nishidani (talk) 18:57, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

(ec)Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Just to be clear: I never meant to imply that you might be anti-Jewish let alone anti-Semitic. Also, I thought I had replied to your point about Durkheim as I have stated consistently that among the sets of beliefs and practices that constitute Judaism is religion.

The preconceived notion to which I referred is the notion that there is an objective category, "religion," and that as religions Judaism, Islam and Christianity are comparable. As a scholar, I have two problems with this.

First, I have to tell you more about my experience in anthropology. The way I was trained, the project of defining domains like the political, the social, the economic, the religious, has its origins in 19th century thinkers and persisted in anthropology utnil fifty or sixty years ago. Today - or at least, this is what I was taught - most anthropologists, and generally mediocre ones, believe that there is such a thing as "religion" (I mean, as a universal category) and an anthropologist can go any where in the world and do a study of "the religion of the X." Most anthropologists (again, so I was taught) today see these categories (religion, politics, economics) as Western categories that emerged with modernity and the reorganization of European society with the breakdown of feudalism and the Catholic Church. A good deal of the most cutting edge research in anthropology involves finding "sets of beliefs and practices" that do not neatly fit into any of these Western categories. The best of this research shows how sets of beliefs and practices found in non-Western societies challenge and undermine such Western categories. Durkheim was and remains an important thinker and I would advise any student in the social sciences to read his work, but within anthropology it is at best of historical value. His positivist project, for better or worse, has largely been abandoned by academic anthropology. Anyway, I may be wrong but I wondered if you were not presupposing that "religion" is a category with universal applicability. Because of my training, I start off with the opposite assumption. I do not assume that when I go to my fieldsite that the beliefs and practices I will encounter can or should be classified as "religious," "political" etc. I was taught that doing so usually leads to misunderstanding.

Second, based on my research of Judaism, I have learned that there is a strong argument that most of Judaism developed in Babylonia and Persia. The five books of Moses, according to tradition, were revealed to him in Sinai by God; most historians I have read believe that they derive from a diverse set of oral traditions from many parts of the Near East, from the span of the Fertile Crescent, fron the Nile to the Persian Gulf. But that they were not codified as "the five books of Moses" or "the Torah" until the Jews were in exile in Babylon (and they were brought back to Palestine by Ezra). Similarly, while the Hebrew Bible was canonized in Palestine, much of it was written in Babylonia/Persia. The bulk of classical Jewish literature, the midrash and Talmud, were written in Babylonia/Persia. There is a strong claim that Zoroastrianism had a greater influence over Judaism than Hellenistic culture. My point is that Judaism cannot be viewed as a fundamentally Western religion. Even as much as we can say "religion," it is profoundly non-Western. I think that many Christians - and thus readers of Wikipedia (I am not referring to you as I do not know you background) believe that they understand Judaism because they believe that they are the heris of the covenant between Abraham and God; they are the new Israel. But Christianity is in many ways a Western religion - even "Eastern" Orthodoxy is "Western" i.e. Hellenic (Ethiopian and Syrian Orthodox Christianity having been marginalized a long time ago). But Judaism is an Asian religion. And Judaism, more broadly speaking, emerged long before Islam and Christianity, when a different cultural landscape dominated Asia. When Judaism emerged religions and nations were isomorphic; each nation had its own god. Hellenistc civilization was responsible for many innovations, the claim to universal reason being one of them. And Christianity and Islam emerged in a post-Hellenistic landscape, as religions claiming not to represent a nation but to being universal.

There are two very important differences between Judaism on the one hand, and Christianity and Islam on the other. Judaism is non-credal, and Judaism does not claim this universality. Judaism still refers to a nationality or nationhood as much as a religion. This is something that I know from personal experience many Christians do not understand. They do not understand how one can be Jewish regardless of ones beliefs and practices. It works both ways - I think very few jews understand Christianity.

This is not my argument. My point is not that Jews and Christians do not understand each other, that is a banal point. My point is that Jews and Christians face major obstacles understanding one another because they are so different. And that is what is at stake here. I have read research - including a book by Daniel Boyarin, a professor of jewish studies at university of California Berkeley, who is quoted in the article, who has claimed that Judaism, because it developed before the Western categoriy of religion developed, does not easily fit that category. Boyarin claims that Judaism also challenges Western notions of the nation and ethnicity.

One editor has said that he understand that Jews are also an ethnic group (and of course we have a separate article on jews). I have no problem with one article on Jews and one on Judaism. Bt I think it is bad scholarship to say htat one article is on ethnicity (or culture) and the other on religion. This is like an anthropologist going to Melanesia and saying "This is their religion, that is their politics, here is their economy." Maybe sixty or seventy years ago anthroppologists did that. But even the best ones from back then argued: "here is something that is neither religion nor politics. Or we can say it is both but both in a way that is indivisible, in a way that breaks down Western categories of religion and politics."

I have never said that judaism is not a religion, or that there are no Jews who consider it a religion. Napolean told Jews in france that they could have equal rights only if they abandoned all claims to nationhood and abandoned all civil law, keeping only the religious, and abandoned the prohibition against intermarriage. French jews agreed. It is historically accurate to say that after 1806 French judaism was a religion, period. In the United States reform jews issued a platform declaring that they too would abandon all national claims and consider themselves a religion. it is accurate to say that Reform Judaism (at least, before the seventies, or eighties - things have been changing) was a religion, period. But Conservative Judaism, Reconstructionist Judaism, and certain branches of Orthodox Judaism refused to abandon those claims, and insisted that Judaism is not a religion in the same way that Christianity and Islam are.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and must use reliable sources in an NPOV way. That is all i ask for. I am sorry, Nishidani, but it really appears to me to be some kind of prejudice to insist a priori that Christianity, Islam and Judaism are similar enough that they can all be named "religions." Such claims disregard the reliable sources. Some elements of the Jewish nation, following the Enlightenment, considered judaism to be a religion just like Christianity and Islam. But other elements have explicitly argued against this position. And before 1806, notable historians have argued that judaism was not a religion like Christianity or Islam. Christians or Muslims may have viewed Judaism that way for the same reason that 19th century Europeans argued over whether shamanism is religion or magic, insisting that it has to fit one of their categories. But anthropologists today do not consider shamanism to fit either Western category. Why should we assume or insist that Judaism has to? As i said, some Jewish authorities DO accept this position. Many others do not. How can any editor who accepts NPOV insist that we accept the first position but reject the second? I truly do not understand. Slrubenstein | Talk 19:42, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I did not see this, nor the effort you put into writing a reply, when replying below. As I say there, I have a druggie habit of mainlining on political scandal Thursday evenings. I will address your remarks tomorrow. Nishidani (talk) 20:43, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

That pretty much sums it up. In that vein maybe Slr can explain what other things that are not religious but are part of Judaism get excluded and if these "other things" amount to an exceptional case, more so than the "other things" one might find related to Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. to make it meaningful not to use this label primarily in this instance? I would suggest that if he is making a larger argument about the way we use the term "religion" on Wikipedia, perhaps he should bring it up at the religion Wikiproject for more general input. We don't use these terms because they are perfect, but simply because it is the best we can do in helping people understand how various phenomena are related to each other.PelleSmith (talk) 19:09, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I see no need to make a larger argument about the way we use the word "religious" or "religion." My larger argument - PelleSmith is correct that there is a lager argumnt at stake - is that our articles should represent significant views from notable sources. That's all! If significant views from notable sources say that several Jewish movements do not consider judaism to be a religion, we have to include that in our articles. it does not matter what my personal point of view is. As to Christianity, I hold the same policy: we should say what significant views in notable sources say. I have not edited the Christianity article because i have not researched Christianity. if i did and I saw that significant views from notable sources argued that Christianity (or Buddhism, or Hinduism) is not a religion, OF COURSE we would be wrong just to call it a religion. Why is this so hard for people to comprehend? I know both of you have been editors in long, good tanding. Don't you know our NPOV, RS, and NOR policies? With all due respect some of you (certainly SkyWriter) seem to have strong feelings about religion, and think I dotoo. But what you or I think about religion is irrelevant.

This all started because Blizzard thought that since Christianity and Islam are defined as religions, so should judaism. Do you guys honestly not see how profoundly wrong this is? Articles should define their subject as a religion because significant views from mainstream sources say so. The second paragraph of the Judaism article calls judaism a religion. i have never, ever, ever, deleted or changed that. Wanna know why? Because it is supported by significant views from reliable sources. But I do insist that Judaism not be identified just as a religion. Wanna know why? Because that view is cntradicted by significant views from reliable sources. Why on earth should anyone think that the Hinduism article has to say something because the Christianity article says something? Whatever the hinduism article says should reflect significant views from reliable sources. Every article should be based on significant views from reliable sources. Where have I ever departed from this view? Slrubenstein | Talk 19:42, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

The edit I saw referred to the opening line of the lead. Judaism is, in academic literature, historical writings of all descriptions, and common usage, a word referring primarily to the beliefs and practices, the religion of the Jewish people over time, and is not interchangeable with Jewish history or the history of the Jews. No definition exhausts meanings. Definitions concern the key, or essential point of departure for a concept.Judaism survived the enmity of centuries for one single reason, the admirably fanatical resistance of its religious leaders against bowing to the ideological tyranny of their 'host' societies. Sure there's other stuff but the Catholic Hour refers to men having a drink at 11 am on Sundays in Irish tradition, so being a Catholic is more than the catechism. What's new?

Your quibble grandstands a minority view. Read Jacob Neusner's opening chapter,'Defining Judaism', in the Blackwell Companion to Judaism, pp,3-19 and get back to me. He's translated most of the Talmud so I reckon he's as goopd an authority as you get. In any case, someone should edit out the ridiculous suggestion, below your edit, which identifies Judaism with the Tanakh as interpreted in rabbinical tradition. Judaism, like the word in Greek itself, preceded rabbinical tradition by at least five centuries.Nishidani (talk) 20:25, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

SRubenstein. Sorry, that sounds rudely abrupt. I have to go down stairs to get my weekly dose of toxic news about Berlusconi's Italian miracle on Michele Santoro's Annozero. I'll reply more decently when I get over my newswonky or is that wanky?hangover at the 2 hours of utterly believable scandal, tomorrow.Nishidani (talk) 20:33, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm completely perplexed by this remark for a variety of reasons: But I do insist that Judaism not be identified just as a religion. Wanna know why? Because that view is contradicted by significant views from reliable sources. The issue here is more precise ... how to identify Judaism first and foremost and not how to identify Judaism as only being. Two things have been agreed upon by everyone involved. 1) Judaism is a religion and 2) Judaism may refer to more than strictly a religion. Arguments about the boundaries of the term religion aside, I don't think either of those ideas are in dispute. What Slr is arguing for is the primacy of the second point, and that is what baffles me in terms of "significant views from reliable sources." Judaism is primarily considered a religion, and then depending on the scope of "religion" one may consider the nuances of how components of Judaism are not religious or what claiming to be Jewish but not "believing in the religion of Judaism" actually means. It is a fact that mainstream scholarly opinion (see texts on Judaism, or World Religions for starters) considers Judaism primarily to be a religion. It is my opinion that most working definitions of religion would also allow space for various practices that self identifying Jews may themselves not consider "religious". I have already argued why I believe there is a discrepancy there, and it relates to the mistaken emphasis people have on religious belief. Slr is completely right about one thing -- we should be relying on expert consensus, I just don't agree at all about what that consensus is.PelleSmith (talk) 21:43, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, I've enjoyed my nightmare on Italian politics, and it's late. I share your perplexity. I think the best to untangle this is to review closely our interlocutor's generous statement of his background, and approach. I'll do that tomorrow, but will anticipate by asking him to rethink his remarks on universal categories, recognizably the defect of an earlier school (though still residual in Lévi-Strauss), and Judaism, in terms of how Clifford Geertz, father of the school he appears to subscribe to, would think. Rubenstein has deconstructed 'religion' as a universal in one part of his argument, only to not only 'ontologize' Judaism, but 'orientalise' it, by making it wholly alien (Asiatic') to 'Western' monotheism. In other words, Durkheim is cast aside as dated, and yet, like a rabbit out of the habit, a conception of the orient and Judaism that would not be out of place in the works of Count Gobineau, is whipped out, as though this were the result of both modern research and recent theory. I must sound elliptic, when not obscure. I'll clarify tomorrow.

p.s. SlR, don't take the analogy with Gobineau badly. The lately lamented C Lévi-Strauss held him in the highest esteem as a writer.Nishidani (talk) 22:52, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Things were getting crowded here so I left a more recent response to Slr on his talk page.PelleSmith (talk) 23:15, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't take the comment about Gobineau personally. Your point is I am falling back on Orientalist categories. I admit that the way I wrote invited that critique. Actually I would say that we need to be just as cautious about how Europe has constructed Judaism as its Other, as talking about the influence of Western culture on Judiaam. I have provided a few specific examples of where Judaism clearly is a religion. In the examples I provided, this was the result of Western infuence. I do not think that this make Reform Judaism "inauthentic" and I have no problem talking about Judaism as Western as much as it is Eastern. If anything this supports my point that Judaism does not easily fit many categories, that is because judaism takes many different forms. Now I realize you could make the same argument about Christianity (Irish, Polish, Italian) - I'd only say - bravo, now go and improve the Christianity article. My point about Judaism developing in Persia is not to make Judaism inscrutable to Western eyes but to provide a precise historical reason for why people could misunderstand features of Judaism ... it is also to point the way to understanding for example the way Urbach has used knowledge of Zoroastrianism to help explain certain features of Judaism.

I am not sure that we need to pick which of the two views Pelle acknowledges (and I have to admit based on earlier comments of his it was not clear to me that he acknowledged these points) should come first. I know Pelle says religion comes first. Why not Civilization? Why not nation? I see sources that support those as going first. Pelle seems convinced that religion coming first is the mainstream view. But I think that there may not be a mainstream view - we may just need to distinguish between the range of views among Jewish leaders, and views among historians, and views among scholars of religion. My argument all along has NOT been that an "anti-religious" view has to "come first." As i have explained, I chose the words "sets of beliefs and practices" because that phrase CAN refer to religion and it CAN refer to other things. I was trying not to put religion second, but rather to come up with phrasing that is more inclusive i.e. can sigifiy religion OR nation OR civilization. I was not trying to put any one first. But it seems like Pelle insists on putting one first. Slrubenstein | Talk 23:54, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Just a note. I won't clarify, since (a) I think you realize from my hint at Geertz, how wildly your remarks above contradicted the anthropological methods you otherwise espouse and (b) there are so many points, here and on the page, that beg the question. (c) All these issues are resolved in wiki by consensus, and most, not all, of those who will vote show little awareness of the historic background, and nuances of the arguments. So no amount of philology will avail to modify or affect the likely outcome, a muddle, as is the norm.

The hardest test for an anthropologist is to estrange his native vision to the point where he can return to his own culture, tradition and religion, and see it with fresh eyes. All I see on the other page are positions I've seen hundreds of times, almost off a template, stressing, as do most peoples, uniqueness, difference, singularity, all against some monolithic 'other', in your case (America) a variety of Protestant Christianity. Technically what you should have done was to choose the 'emic' term that best sums up in infra-Jewish usage the concept you think shortchanged by the foreign term 'Judaism'. Historically, in early texts the shifts in the meaning of the Latin term religio exactly correspond to those in the rabbinical uses of dīn. But I digress. Best of luck, you'll need it. That talk page is sheer provincialism.Nishidani (talk) 20:18, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

You keep insisting that the language I use to describe Judaism has something to do whith Christianity. I don't see why it should, or why you should think so. Once you and others conceeded that reliable sources actually were saying what I said they were saying (that some major Jewish leaders either did not view Judaism as a religion, or did not view it as just a eligion, and that historians like Cohen also considered the meaning of Judaism too complex to be reduced to one term), your next tactic was to say that my points about Judaism apply to Christianity as well. Ho hum. If they apply to Christianity, well, why not edit the Christianity article accordingly? What is this need for uniqueness, difference, singularity? This is not my need, itis yours - this all started with Blizzard insisting that Christianity and Judaism be described the same way. My point was not that Judaism is unique, just that the reliable sources about Judaism say that Judaism cannot be described the same way as Blizzard, you, others describe Christianity. Now you tell me that Christianity can be described the same way as I describe Judaism. Well, if that is what the reliable sources on Christianity say about Christianity you have to go and change the Christianity article. Does that mean its lead will become more like the Judaism lead? That won't bother me!

Above, I was only trying to explain to you why historians of Judaism on't reduce it simply to religion which you hld Christianity was, which entailed me suggesting ways in which Judaism was different from Christianity. But if reliable sources on Christianity say it to cannot be reduced to religion, please change the Christianity intro. The point is neither to fetishize difference or sameness, as you seem to wish to do. The point is to follow reliable sources by puting all significant views in our articles. Slrubenstein | Talk 00:09, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

You keep posting badly sourced nonsequiturs on this page, while not answering simple questions (what is the 'emic' Hebrew for 'religion' and 'Judaism'?), and therefore I've wasted three hours of my time and broken an undertaking (which I emailed to PelleSmith) not to comment because you are confused on very simple issues, and your remarks are as methodologically skewed as your knowledge of Judaism, Islam, Christianity and religion, let alone of the semantics of concepts and anthropology. Sorry, take it back to the relevant page, where I need not comment because I get weary following the varied inputs. For what it's worth, here is my original reply.

I have to tell you more about my experience in anthropology. The way I was trained, the project of defining domains like the political, the social, the economic, the religious, has its origins in 19th century thinkers and persisted in anthropology utnil fifty or sixty years ago.

There's nothing 'contemporary' or 'cutting edge' about your approach. In my heyday, this was all a matter of 'ethnomethodology', which Harold Garfinkel theorized about in the mid-late 50s. It was was strong on rhetoric, but never produced much. See Roy Turner,(ed.) Ethnomethodology, Penguin 1974.

At least, this is what I was taught - most anthropologists, and generally mediocre ones, believe that there is such a thing as "religion" (I mean, as a universal category) and an anthropologist can go any where in the world and do a study of "the religion of the X."

Again, you seem to think that until recently, anthropologists were uninfluenced by the principles enunciated by Franz Steiner in his groundbreaking, posthumous monograph Taboo (1956).

Most anthropologists (again, so I was taught) today see these categories (religion, politics, economics) as Western categories that emerged with modernity and the reorganization of European society with the breakdown of feudalism and the Catholic Church.

Actually most anthropologists for the past several decades have been thinking field-techniques and descriptive methodology as something that must be exceptionally sensitive to the cognitive filters, as Westerners, which they invariably bring to the discipline. Talal Asad's Anthropology & the colonial encounter, 1973: Adam Kuper's 'The Invention of Primitive Society,' (1988) review much of the problem.

'A good deal of the most cutting edge research in anthropology involves finding "sets of beliefs and practices" that do not neatly fit into any of these Western categories. The best of this research shows how sets of beliefs and practices found in non-Western societies challenge and undermine such Western categories.

As Ernest Gellner often argued, most of what you call 'cutting edge research' is poor in actual ethnological description and rich in theoretical quibbling. Like it or not, any one trained within a modern academic discipline, is heir to a discursive and conceptual tradition that, however defective its eurocentric lineaments, cannot, by a touch of the magic baton, be made to disappear. This cognitive baggage or what Foucault called an 'episteme', is always there, in practice as in critics of practice. No one can pretend that, in his fieldwork, what the natives report is unaffected by premises woven into the kind of questions he or she as anthropologist will tender.

Durkheim was and remains an important thinker and I would advise any student in the social sciences to read his work, but within anthropology it is at best of historical value. His positivist project, for better or worse, has largely been abandoned by academic anthropology.

It's a bit like saying Rashi or Maimonides are important thinkers, but their ideas about Judaism are at best of historical value, idem Ibn Khaldun's ideas about Arab polities. The truth of the matter is that any discipline worth a candle is practiced by those who master its history of cognitive mappings, and bear their distinctive contributions in mind while advancing towards new approaches. To cite Durkheim on religion as tantamount to a set of 'beliefs and practices', does not mean one underwrites Durkheim's theories. It simply meant that when you say Judaism is more than a religion, since it involves sets of 'beliefs and practices', that you have forgotten that passage in one of the founders of anthropology.

I may be wrong but I wondered if you were not presupposing that "religion" is a category with universal applicability.

Why should I be so naive? We all know the trouble Evans-Pritchard got into with his Nuer Religion(1956) and the notorious last chapter, and likewise all remember the trouble even Geertz, the ultimate relativist, trod on, according to his critics, when defining religion as a universal category in his The Interpretation of Culture, (1973). Who, interested in these things, hasn't read Talal Asad's essay,'The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,'in his Geneaologies of Religion:Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, 1882 pp.27-54? Yet Geertz's redefinition of religion, as an anthropological category, in terms of a symbolic order endowing meaning to a culture, understood in the widest sense, did have the merit of disentangling the word from the eurocentric theological bias of 'Western' tradition. His definition more or less of religion fulfils everything you say is lacking in the word 'religion' as a denotation of Judaism. As an anthropologist you should have reflected on this. Geertz's definition of 'religion' makes it perfectly applicable to Judaism.

Because of my training, I start off with the opposite assumption. I do not assume that when I go to my fieldsite that the beliefs and practices I will encounter can or should be classified as "religious," "political" etc. I was taught that doing so usually leads to misunderstanding.

Your training is in anthropology. But this does not mean your position is the anthropological one. Anthropology is a discipline with an extraordinary rich curriculum of competing theories, often regionally and historically distinct (Boasian anthropology introduced Herder's tradition within German ethnology to the US: Malinowski's Machian background inflected British empirical traditions of field-research; the Prague school of linguistics via Roman Jakobson infused French anthropology, with its earlier positivism, when Lévi-Strauss adopted it etc.) and you embrace a particular, I think post-Boasian tradition within it, emphasizing absolute relativism. One patent semantic, conceptual, or if you like, philosophical contradiction in your many remarks on 'religion' as a 'Western' category is that you define it in essentialist terms, commensurate with a Western ideology, and yet while denying 'religion' as a universal, you make anthropology into a universalist discipline.

Then, you say you are trained to refrain from classifying elements in the alien culture you study in your fieldwork in terms of 'Western' concepts, like 'the religious' or 'the political', or 'the economic'. Frankly, this is rhetoric, and nonsensical, and very much part of the self-justifying gossip of 'postcolonial' or 'postmodernist' practitioners of anthropology. For in layman's terms, if anyone raised in the Western or eastern first world visits and studies another people, like the Nambikwara, the Akuntzu, the Pintupi, or the Gilgit, unless he is blind and deaf, he will observe (a)rites of the dead (b) the arrangements with contiguous tribes and inter-group rules governing interactions (c) how people harvest food. That these activities are denominated by words in one's own language like religion, politics and economics does not fatally imperil one's project of description. One can avoid them, in one's field notes, but essentially one will look at such things because all known societies have definable rules regarding the disposal of the dead, the conduct with other groups and the securing of means of subsistance.

Second, based on my research of Judaism, I have learned that there is a strong argument that most of Judaism developed in Babylonia and Persia. The five books of Moses, according to tradition, were revealed to him in Sinai by God; most historians I have read believe that they derive from a diverse set of oral traditions from many parts of the Near East, from the span of the Fertile Crescent, fron the Nile to the Persian Gulf. But that they were not codified as "the five books of Moses" or "the Torah" until the Jews were in exile in Babylon (and they were brought back to Palestine by Ezra).

What has this to do with the price of tea in China? We were told all much of that in primary and secondary school, if we were alert to the teacher lecturing us on the history of religion. To make this recitative only suggests to your interlocutor that you are so prepossessed by your thoughts that you are not listening, between the lines of a dialogue, to your interlocutor, and, instead, presume that whoever you encounter requires a refresher course on the ABC of post-exilic Judaism. Do you think non-Jewish people, of Christian background, are never exposed to quite detailed accounts of the world of the Old Testament, which is an integral part of their tradition?

Similarly, while the Hebrew Bible was canonized in Palestine, much of it was written in Babylonia/Persia.

This is wrong, or, at best, a theory or generalization that begs the obvious question. No one would cavil had you written much of it was edited in the form we now have it during the Persian period (a theory all the same, particularly regarding the Pentateuch).

The bulk of classical Jewish literature, the midrash and Talmud, were written in Babylonia/Persia. There is a strong claim that Zoroastrianism had a greater influence over Judaism than Hellenistic culture. My point is that Judaism cannot be viewed as a fundamentally Western religion.

Meaningless because what Judaism, again, are you speaking of? The Judaism of the Second Temple period was influenced by both Persian and Greece cultures. Rabbinic Judaism? well of course there was a Babylonian ascendency historically, but also a Palestinian Talmud read throughout the diaspora, even in Persia. In the Talmud itself you will find the passage attributed to Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel, referring to the fact that there were: 'a thousand young men in my father's house; five hundred of them studied Torah while the other five hundred studied Greek Wisdom.' Moses Hadas even had a theory that rabbinical thought owed deep debts to Platonism, imbibed from the Hellenizing period onward. The number of Greek loan words adopted into rabbinical Judaism's language runs into over a thousand, at a minimal count, attesting to the deep familiarity, and continuing dialogue with Hellenism, that characterised the Jewish diaspora. So much so that, correct me if I err, Greek by rabbinical authority, was at one point judged to be the only language into which the Pentateuch could be translated.

Secondly, the last line must strike many as an example of pronounced idiosyncrasy. What do you mean by 'Western' here? Pagans like myself, who think the world little improved after 400 BCE., have their hackles rise every other day when they read, in the Western press, people from the Pope to Presidents of states, talk about the 'Jewish-Christian' roots of Western civilization. A whole campaign has been waged to try to get this term into the EEC charter, and was thankfully torpedoed. Christianity historically, esp. in the form it developed after the Rformation, and in the United States, is instinct with the OT. Indeed to an outsider, much of American Christianity doesn't accord in any way with the variety they were raised in, since it is fundamentalist, more OT-centered, than grounded in the Gospels.

Rabbinical Judaism is far closer to Islam than to Christianity. And one of the central differences, constituting the divide in belief and practices between the the former two and the latter, resides in the lack of a distinction between church and state, or religious and temporal authority or power in the former. Talal Asad, and many others who highlight this in order to question the use of the 'Western' concept of 'religion' as a valid category to describe Islam and Judaism, overlook the fact that Christianity, in so far as it is conceptually indebted, and affiliated, to these Semitic monotheisms' all-embracing worldviews, was perennially tempted to subordinate secular power to sectarian theology. The second reason overlooked is that, in the development of both Islam and rabbinical Judaism, the induction of Greek philosophical thought played a crucial role. But whereas Christian thought knew nothing of Plato's Republic, with its totalizing vision of society, and was greatly influenced by Aristotle's Politics, in both rabbinical and Muslim thought, exposure to Aristotle's works, not least in Maimonides and Averroes, (so much for your hallucination about the 'non Greek' 'non-Western' nature of Judaism!) excluded knowledge of the Politics of Aristotle, while it was deeply familiar with Plato's 'Republic'. That difference in what key texts from classical Greek political thought inflected these respective traditions accounts in good part for the Islamic-Judaism holistic interpretation of 'religion' as a comprehensive way of life including the political, as opposed to the Christian awareness that the political dimension could be treated independently of the purely religious dimension.

Even as much as we can say "religion," it is profoundly non-Western. I think that many Christians - and thus readers of Wikipedia (I am not referring to you as I do not know you background) believe that they understand Judaism because they believe that they are the heris of the covenant between Abraham and God; they are the new Israel. But Christianity is in many ways a Western religion - even "Eastern" Orthodoxy is "Western" i.e. Hellenic (Ethiopian and Syrian Orthodox Christianity having been marginalized a long time ago). But Judaism is an Asian religion.

Well, in the 19th century, people like Disraeli championed the Jewish 'race' for having provided the 'West' with its key spiritual values. In the early 21st century, naturally, this is stood on its head, with the postmodernist fashion for inverting whatever conclusions were current before its rise to fashion, and now we are told that Judaism is something wholly extraneous to 'the West'.

All I can deduce from this weird remark of yours is that your experience of Christianity is extremely parochial, not informed by wide reading, and perhaps tainted with a limited, and intense exposure to certain varieties of American Christianity, which however often strike non-American Christians as quite bizarre. (Just as to my Irish Catholic kin who remain 'in the faith' visits to Italy only elicit, after a week or month, the comment, 'but Italians aren't Catholics, they're pagans').

Your premise deconstructs itself further by the fact that while you vigorously contest the denotative precision of a 'foreign' word 'religion' and its conceptual implications, to describe the 'non-Western' reality you take Judaism to be, at the same time, you hypostasize, as a transhistorical essence, Judaism itself, as both an internally consistent, historical cogent, and suprasectarian unity. This is just false. No one minimally informed about the history of Judaism can fail to note the immense variety of its usages, practices and beliefs, as diverse at times as those which have riven Christianity and Islam. Between Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Falasha, orthodox, and reform judaisms, and their numerous subgroupings, numerous distinct emphases obtain.

Secondly, by saying Judaism is 'non-Western' 'Asiatic' you are making a clamorous oversight about the centrality to two forms of Judaism that have played a decisive role in the way Jews adapted to the modern world. Ashkenazic Judaism (true also of Sephardic Judaism to a lesser extent) was formed within Christian countries and, despite the Pale, was not in suspended animation, but in constant dialogue with Christianity. A few days ago, I read Ariel Toaff's monograph Bread and Water ('Pane e vino', 1988) on medieval Umbrian Jewish communities, and it confirmed what so many other books say. There was a fluid osmosis of ideas, customs, rites, beliefs flowing between host and 'guest' cultures, and the idea that somehow these Jewish communities were nothing more than isolates nurturing their own beliefs in quarantine from the larger Christian world is unhistorical, as is also the case with Judaism under Islam, where, note Maimonides, there was a long tradition of cultural exchange and influence between host and guest communities.

Judaism, more broadly speaking, emerged long before Islam and Christianity, when a different cultural landscape dominated Asia. When Judaism emerged religions and nations were isomorphic; each nation had its own god.

Sorry, but that is sophomoric in its thumbnail lecture-noted-ness. You are speaking here not of 'rabbinic Judaism' which arose contemporary with Christianity, but with two forms of belief, the inchoate Israelitic religion under the two Kingdoms, of the pre-exilic period (not yet a 'Judaism'), and the exilic/post-exilic 2nd Temple Judaism. There was no one 'cultural landscape' dominating Asia from the 10th. century to the Ist century BC, except perhaps in Will Durant's popularizations. The period embraces Canaanite polytheism, echoes of Egyptian henotheism from memories of Akhnaton, Phoenician and maritime Grecian cit-state cultures, Babylonian theogonies, Assyrian tyrannies, Persian kingships with their Indo-european tripartite ideologies (which inflected Judaism if Dumézil's excursion on this is to be believed, though Brumby dismisses it), Arabian clan-patriarchal idolatries, Edomite, Moabite, etc.etc., regional cultural pressures, splits between Israel and Judah in terms of religious and cultic belief, and 'nations' were not isomorphic with religions, because 'nations' in the modern sense did not exist, only empires, and tribal and clan-thronged peripheries which from time to time resisted their hegemonic onslaughts. You are using 'nation' tellingly, in the Latinate sense (in an argument where you repudiate the latinate 'religion'), and not in its received modern sense, and play on the tacit ambiguity that covers extended kinship-based clan polities and non-kinship based, mixed polities (as historic Israel often was). And, in a further confusion, you assign each nation a god. Most, even early Israel, were polytheistic. You have constructed an orientalist fiction of a Judaic 'other' that is 'Asiatic', when it is neither 'other' nor 'Asiatic' to Christianity, esp. since in early rabbinical writings, Christianity was considered a heresy (minut/minim) within the bosom of the Jewish community, and not some intrusively 'Western' creed. In any case, the whole argument is nonsense because, as Judaism precedes Christianity, so Christianity, as an 'Asiatic' Jewish heresy precedes 'the West', which is a construct that developed quite late in the piece.

Hellenistc civilization was responsible for many innovations, the claim to universal reason being one of them. And Christianity and Islam emerged in a post-Hellenistic landscape, as religions claiming not to represent a nation but to being universal.

So did rabbinical Judaism, whose roots date to post 70CE., and which emerged the victor among many flourishing sects within the bosom of the Judaic world, according to Jacob Neusner and many others, in the 4th-6th cventuries CE. Secondly, Islam, like Christianity, is profoundly indebted to forms of Judaism (and Christianity). 2nd Temple Judaism lived under, and was in intense dialogue with, Hellenism for centuries. Greek was the second language of Jews. Have you never read the voluminous works of Philo of Alexandria, or Josephus? Philo believed in Hellenism and its universal reason. In all your remarks, you are constantly jumping from one period of Judaism to another, glossing over the fact that in terms of periodization, the forms of Judaism were subject to different influences, Greek, Roman, Christian, Persian, Babylonian, Egyptian. The definitive statement in the Talmud about the Jews being a 'nation' understood as a category uneluctably bound together by race (nationality) dates to the Babylonian Talmud period after the 4th century.'An Israelite, even if he sins, remains an Israelite '(Berakhot 6b)

There are two very important differences between Judaism on the one hand, and Christianity and Islam on the other. Judaism is non-credal, and Judaism does not claim this universality.

So what? Calling Judaism a religion, in your grid of assumptions, means by some queer logic, that it must be credal, or universalistic? Most religions are neither 'credal' or catechistic in the Christian sense, nor aspire to universalism. At least, this is what students used to be told if they studied the history of religions under Mircea Eliade at Chicago.

Judaism still refers to a nationality or nationhood as much as a religion. This is something that I know from personal experience many Christians do not understand. They do not understand how one can be Jewish regardless of ones beliefs and practices. It works both ways - I think very few jews understand Christianity.

Go into the details of actual practice among the various forms of Judaism and you will find that this is doctrinal, but rarely as simple as you make out. Were it true in practice, neither Raphael Patai nor Shlomo Sand would write books about the myth of a Jewish race, or the invention of a Jewish people. The pious are strict: the larger community outmarries, and then marries back, as occasion dictates. One of my many sisters-in-law found recently her real father was Jewish, though not her mother. Not Jewish some rabbis said. Jewish, if you undergo the proper rites, another. In any case, that having an impeccable bloodline related to a cultural identity may be important for many Jews. But you just told me below that Ludwig Wittgenstein was not 'Jewish' despite being the scion of a majority of grandparents and parents who were of Jewish origin. See, SlRubenstein, you, like so many, use Judaism, and Jews in various arguments, in various ways, ambiguously. At times it is an ontology, an essence, denoting one historically inclusive coherent reality, and then, in other contexts, it is no such thing. In saying Wittgenstein was not a Jew, you denied, in that context, what you affirm in the passage above, that 'Judaism refers to a nationality' (and note the word 'nationality' is a euphemism here for 'race' 'ethnic group'). Wittgenstein's bloodlines were predominantly Jewish, but his family outmarried and converted, and in saying he is not Jewish, you use a different criterion, by implicitly asserting in this context that affiliation to Judaism is cultural, a matter of maintaining a set of practices and beliefs, which the Protestantising Wittgensteins disowned, and not a matter of descent by 'nation'.

'My point is not that Jews and Christians do not understand each other, that is a banal point. My point is that Jews and Christians face major obstacles understanding one another because they are so different.

Again you are guilty of naive essentialism. Who are you talking about when you say 'Jews' and 'Christians'?. The unlettered hoi polloi? I grew up next door to Jews, and never knew they were Jews until decades later, and we had no trouble understanding each other. Ze'ev Jabotinsky writing of his time in Italy in 1908 said no one ever made him feel he was different, or a Jew. He was both, but this was wholly irrelevant to what interested people in him. They never struck me as different, perhaps because they were, like everyone else, as part of our country as we several others were, spoke our language, worked with us, were 'us'. What they did privately, as Jews, was their business. The same with many of my teachers. It would never have struck my mind, in listening to several luminaries of Jewish origin who taught me, that they didn't understand me. The issue of their being Jew or myself being an ex-Catholic never arose. We were of the same 'nationality', 'spoke the same language', 'discussed the same politics', shared similar interests in sports, chess, etc. That on Friday night they might have been girding themselves for 'shalosh seudot', while I, following an ancient Irish custom, went out to wipe myself off till dawn with whiskey, port and beer was immaterial. This surely is note an isolated experience. I gather you think of Jews and Christians only as people with a pronounced religious commitment who, being assertive in their choice of a religious lifestyle, are notable to each other, and get into conflict or argument, or are prepossessed about blazoning their identities to others in society who do not share them.

Daniel Boyarin, a professor of jewish studies at university of California Berkeley, who is quoted in the article, who has claimed that Judaism, because it developed before the Western categoriy of religion developed, does not easily fit that category. Boyarin claims that Judaism also challenges Western notions of the nation and ethnicity.

Nothing new. Actually the other day, when I decided that the way this was being argued meant participation was pointless, I sent a note on that text (Daniel Boyarin, ‘The Christian Invention of Judaism: The Theodosian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion,’ Hent de Vries (ed.), Religion: Beyond a concept, pp.150-177) to PelleSmith, as can be confirmed, saying the point you were arguing had been made with less confusion by Boyarin. Boyarin's conclusion is similar to yours, but the argument is (a) far more nuanced (b) historically articulated as affirming this of a specific variety of Judaism from the late 5th century CE.,(c) can be read as just one more example of the fashionable academic theory, according to which all traditions, concepts, or descriptions of the other are 'invented' (the fad started with a solid book by Hobsbawn and Ranger in 1982). (d) Boyarin does not say what you say, because the Judaism he speaks of is the victorious late rabbinical Judaism, whose victory he sets after many pages devoted to material that shows Christianity and Judaism's early points of contiguity as 'religions'. In any case, the definition of Christianity as a religio arose when Romans decided to define it thus, and not as a superstitio, which was the word they used both of Judaism and its early heretical form, Christianity, superstition meaning an excessively fervid ostentatious mode of worshipping. Boyarin's view is a RS, but it is a thesis, not the consensus of scholarship, or a significant (too recent) view. In defining Judaism in the lead, you need a consensual perspective, and the overwhelming mass of books by Jewish scholars and historians alone in the last 150 years speak of Judaism as a religion. Boyarin has a right to problematize this, but his problematization reflects (a) an academic appropriation of the anthropological jargon of the exotic 'other' to reinvent a subject or challenge the customary terminology used for its description, and as such a symptom, though at the highest level of the academic endorsement of ethnic chic that ran riot in the 1980s, and tempted everyone in the melting pot to retrieve their exotic roots, by marking out differences, real or imagined (b) post-1948, espo. post 1967 debates in US Jewish circles where the political tensions over identity, nationality, religion as they have developed within Israel have been refracted back into the discourse of American Jewry. This, I hazard to suggest, affects your own judgement. You are trying to exoticize a subject that, over hundreds of years, scholars of Jewish and Christian extraction had no problem in defining as a 'religion'. The more 'exotic' Judaism is made to appear to the 'Christian West', the greater the cautions that are then raised in a politely monitory fashion, about all things Jewish, of which Israel is one. Like it or not, this is the subtext, political, not 'religious' that non-Jewish bystanders like myself read as partially, ineludibly, adhering to your textual manoeuver.

'One editor has said that he understand that Jews are also an ethnic group (and of course we have a separate article on jews).

Again, that belonging to a religion can require a genealogical certificate of correct descent by blood in no way means, simply because this is not required in either Christianity, or Islam, that therefore the other faith isn't technically a 'religion'. For the implicit premise here is that the word 'religion' must mean no racial or ethnic lien is required for 'baptism' into its community. Actually, Brahmanism has a similar rule, only formulated in terms of caste. Most historical 'religions' being tribal were practiced by affines.Your emphasis on 'nationality' looks like a smokescreen for the Orthodox view of Judaism. The reality is that half of American Jews 'marry out', and yet this does not mean that, 'ipso facto', their spouses or children lose out on belonging to Judaism. In all forms of Judaism, bar I think one or two Syrian sects, there are appropriate rituals for non-Jews, people lacking the appropriate 'nationality', to convert. The history of this is unbelievably complex, but proselytism and conversion were important in two periods of Judaism,(Judaism in the Hellenizing period, Judaism in the early 'Christian' period) meaning 'nationality' in the strict sense was not always as important as it became under rabbinical Judaism for 14 centuries.

This is like an anthropologist going to Melanesia and saying "This is their religion, that is their politics, here is their economy." Maybe sixty or seventy years ago anthroppologists did that. But even the best ones from back then argued: "here is something that is neither religion nor politics. Or we can say it is both but both in a way that is indivisible, in a way that breaks down Western categories of religion and politics."

Judaism, practiced continuously in Europe (the West) since the 4th century BCE., to which the distinguished Roman community of Jews traces its origins, is not something that Europeans/Westerners stumble across with the same sort of categorical confusion, and headaches that Malinowski suffered from as he set foot in the Trobriand Islands, to which you allude. This ploy of exoticing what is in our midst, of taken as a conceptual puzzle a culture that, either as Judaism, or Judaism's reflex in its filiated form, Christianity, has been fought with, mulled over, learnt from, and studied with high erudition for millenia, doesn't work. Anti-semitism, and the holocaust, were not the products of the rise of semitic philology as a discipline and the development of 'Western' Biblical hermeneutics.

Napolean told Jews in france that they could have equal rights only if they abandoned all claims to nationhood and abandoned all civil law, keeping only the religious, and abandoned the prohibition against intermarriage. French jews agreed. It is historically accurate to say that after 1806 French judaism was a religion, period.

This is just plain wrong. French Jews had been granted equal civil rights 15 years earlier. Napoleon wasn’t imposing a dictate, or ‘telling Jews’ anything. He was asking the assembly of notables to clarify, on 12 points, crucial differences that had emerged between rabbinical law and the laws of France, a country of which they were citizens. In the work of the Sanhedrin, a considerable number of responsa then worked out theoretical positions that cancelled the effects of earlier traditional responsa in rabbinical writ that had justified Jews treating non-Jews unequally. This required revision of a considerable number of ‘religious’ positions and traditions, for the simple reason that Judaism’s beliefs and practices were established by rabbinical consultations on precedent and law, as developed over the ages, precedents and law that in turn go back to interpreting the Bible. The Assembly effectively in its response ‘reinterpreted’ traditional discriminatory religious laws based on interpretations of passages in the Tanakh. French Judaism before and after 1807 was a religion, the accommodation made in 1806-7 was one made by rabbinical authorities themselves, and no principle of Judaism was sacrificed to politics, as we can now understand with the publication of the long hidden responsa. The simple matter was that Judaism changed by rabbinical adjustments to how the laws were to be interpreted.

Conservative Judaism, Reconstructionist Judaism, and certain branches of Orthodox Judaism insisted that Judaism is not a religion in the same way that Christianity and Islam are.

So what? Gridiron is not a sport in the same way that soccer and Australian Rules football are. They are all sports (not ‘good sports’) and have different rules.

I am sorry, Nishidani, but it really appears to me to be some kind of prejudice to insist a priori that Christianity, Islam and Judaism are similar enough that they can all be named "religions."

Then old chap, you must write off to Jacob Neusner and tell him that a lifetime of study is to no avail because like thousands of Jewish historians, thinkers and writers over the past centuries, he is prejudiced since he has had no problem writing in Western languages that ‘Judaism is a religion’. You must write to inform S.Daniel Breslauer that what he wrote 8 years ago about

'the courage required to create some version of a Judaism without religion,’ in his Judaism without religion: a postmodern Jewish possibility, University Press of America, 2001 p.ix

has been superseded by epochal seismic shifts in the meaning of the word Judaism and religion, thanks to a few papers in academic journals. In just 8 years, the need to muster a difficult iconoclastic courage has disappeared, for ‘Judaism’ for three millennia, according to the new revelation, has always been more than ‘just religion’, and in any case, ‘religion’ in the Western sense it never was.

You had better send an hypogeal email to the late Yeshayahu Leibowitz telling him that all his pious writings defining Judaism as ‘coextensive with the observance of Torah and the commandments of Judaism’ reflect nothing more than Western prejudices, he wasn’t aware of.

Judaism, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it refers to the beliefs and practices of the Jewish religion. If you dislike that, write an article on Yahadut, which is the ‘emic’ term in Hebrew for Judaism. Your problem will then be however that while Ioudaismos has a long history, from the Bible to modern times, Yahadut is absent from the Tanakh, and rabbinical literature, and only became current in modern times. ‘Dat Yehudit’ which is the only instance close to it refers precisely to a Jewish custom or practice. But let me cite Rabbi Louis Jacobs, in his article in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, surely as authoritative as reliable sources come:

‘In modern usage the terms ‘Judaism’ and ‘Torah’ (doctrine) are virtually interchangeable, but the former has on the whole a more humanistic nuance while “Torah” calls attention to the divine, revelatory aspects. The term “secular Judaism” – used to describe the philosophy of Jews who accept specific Jewish values but who reject the Jewish religion – is not, therefore, self-contradictory as the term ‘secular Torah” would be. (In modern Hebrew, however, the word torah is also used for “doctrine” or “theory,” e.g., “the Marxist theory”, and in this sense it would also be logically possible to speak of a secular torah.) A further difference in nuance, stemming from the first, is that “Torah” refers to the eternal, static elements in Jewish life and thought while “Judaism” refers to the more creative, dynamic elements as manifested in the varied civilizations and cultures of the Jews at different states of their history, such as Hellenistic Judaism, rabbinic Judaism, medieval Judaism, and, from the nineteenth century, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism. (The term 'Yidishkeyt' is the Yiddish equivalent of “Judaism” but has a less universalistic connotation and refers more specifically to the folk elements of the faith).’ Rabbi Louis Jacobs, ‘Judaism: The Religion, Philosophy, and Way of Life of The Jews’’ (Encyclopaedia Judaica) reprinted in Jacob Neusner, Alan Jeffery Avery-Peck (eds.) The Blackwell reader in Judaism, Wiley-Blackwell, 2001 pp.3f.

No amount of exoticizing haute theoretic play, à la Homi Bhabha, with anthropological fashions can turn a recent position in the 'groovy' groves of academia into a significant position, when the literature on religion over the last two hundred years overwhelmingly uses the word Judaism as Jacobs defined it for the authoritative Jewish encyclopedia. You are confusing Judaism with Jewishness, or the history of the Jews, as youngsters these days often do.Nishidani (talk) 22:31, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Wittgenstein

was not Jewish. Slrubenstein | Talk 00:24, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I thought you were going to make an argument based on what religion he was brought up in, but looking at the article I see that the only one of his grandparents who wasn't born Jewish is his maternal grandmother. So by that traditional definition, he isn't Jewish. Didn't save the family from the activities of a fellow pupil at his school. Now was Hitler slow? Or was Wittgenstein two years ahead of most of his year group?--Peter cohen (talk) 01:39, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

According to Ray Monk, Hitler was just a poor student, which accounts for the two year lag. In any case,the ostensibly simple issue of whether one is Jewish or not, is perspectival, as is often the case with all forms of identity. The family wangled its way round, or rather paid its way round, the Nuremberg laws to be reclassified as not Jewish. Slrubenstein's criteria for arriving at the same conclusion are different, but not exhaustive, for foreclosing on other criteria that would affirm the opposite. Proof if any is required of how arbitrary, and variable, identity can be when it is determined by others, and not by the subject him/herself. Wittgenstein was Jewish, but that was only part of his identity, which haunted him in nightmares, as with the famous Vertsag dream. Nishidani (talk) 17:36, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Nishidani, how can you comment on my criteria for arriving at this conclusion? here as with the other topic on which we have disagreed you seem too easily to jump to conclusions about what I think. What is your source for saying Wittgenstein was Jewish? You never provided any sources for your views about Judaism and religion, is this another case where you have views but no sources? Slrubenstein | Talk 23:57, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Are you one of those insecure academics who think that everytime a commonplace, or something you yourself in your reading have not come across, is uttered, it must be footnoted? The usual practice is to provide sources for new , improbable or unfamiliar ideas. People familiar with Wittgenstein's life and work would never think of challenging the obviousness of the remark I made. In any case, I have answered you above. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 22:34, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

No, I don't think so. About Wittgenstein: I thought Monk's biography showed that his grandparents had converted to Christianity (certainly before he was born) and that Wittgenstein, reared as a Catholic, never identified as a Jew. If I a misremembering I would be thrilled to be corrected, but a page number would help. Dreams are notoriously complicated to interpret and I hope you have more evidence than a dream for your claim. About me: it was you who wrote "Slrubenstein's criteria for arriving at the same conclusion are different, ..." which led me to belived that you thought you know my criteria. Since I did not state my criteria I wondered how you knew. You seem to take it as some sign of insecurity that I ask. But is it possible that you are one of those insecure intellectuals who always will deflect a simple question with obfuscation? Slrubenstein | Talk 12:10, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

That you are quite unfamiliar with the niceties of anthropological thinking on method emerges from your statement:-

'Since I did not state my criteria I wondered how you knew.'

Okay, you've studied anthropology, but have no grounding in philosophy or logic.

Criteria, Slrubenstein, since at least the development of the Socratic elenchus, are principles teased out by analysing statements. In field work, one elicits the criteria governing modes of behaviour by posing questions on any topic and analysing the responses. I do not need you to state your criteria formally. I only need to examine the various ways you use your concepts, in the light of their contexts, to grasp what criteria underlie your judgements. You're of course at liberty to think I am treating you as a 'native' and reject my subtle imperialist appropriation of statements you make, an appropriation that allows me to elicit the criteria governing your opinions on this or that. But, in everyday discourse, most people do this, if unconsciously, and unsystematically. I must confess that the repeated questions you throw my way suggest you don't do this, since were you to read what I wrote as closely as I read what you write, our dialogue would have concluded many pages ago, since you wouldn't have thrown out so many vagrant points, and I would not have been required to answer them, tediously, in return.

I'll just take, mostly, your last remark to illustrate the point, about knowing what criteria you have in mind even if formally you yourself do not state them.

You said Wittgenstein was not 'Jewish'.

This affirmation means that you must have a definition of what constitutes being Jewish.

You earlier spoke of the importance of 'nationality' to Judaism, hence (a)descent from Jews, the bloodline, is one criterion.

You write of his grandparents' conversion to Christianity, and that he was reared as a Catholic. This means (b) you take as a criterion of 'being Jewish' that one was raised by Jews as a Jew, meaning within a family that was attached, loosely or strongly, to Judaism as a religion, or raised in a Jewish ambiance.

You write that 'Wittgenstein never identified as a Jew'. The criterion assumed in this statement is that (c)'to be Jewish' requires that one identify oneself as a Jew.

There! You provided three criteria, unwittingly or otherwise, regarding how you think about the issue of what constitutes 'being Jewish'. In terms of them, Wittgenstein was Jewish as regards (a) and (c). As to Ray Monk (there are other sources), read para 4 of p.5. As to point (c), which you might probably challenge, to avoid more wasted time, I note that (among other passages, and other sources) Monk also writes:

'Opinions vary as to what degree of concealment there was about his true background. Perhaps the most important fact is that Wittgenstein himself felt that he was hiding something - felt he was allowing people to think of him as an aristocrat when in fact he was a Jew.' (Vintage ed.1991 p.279).Nishidani (talk) 18:47, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

What an intersting talk page you have

I don't know if you saw it but just the other day the NY Times had a discussion of the new full translation of Hobbes' Leviathan in Hebrew.[2] Apparently there was already a Hebrew translation but it left out the last two sections and much of the intersection between belief and political organization. I couldn't help but think of that after reading your part of the Judaism debate here. --JGGardiner (talk) 09:10, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Good grief, my friend! My life is plagued by coincidences, I even have a diary of them, started almost 4 decades ago when I read Arthur Koestler's The Roots of Coincidence. Your note arrives after I decided to go back through my tattered copy of Hobbes' masterpiece for bedtime reading. I'd decided to reread it through again late last week, had dropped it for a few days, distracted by wiki, and only retook it up late last night. Now that you mention it, Slruibenstein's remarks on the composition of the OT mainly took place in Persia, could have been annotated by this coincidental reading, that Hobbes wrote 'it is manifest enough, that the whole Scripture of the Old Testament was set forth in the form we have it, after the return of the Jews from their Captivity in Babylon' (Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.E.Macpherson, Penguin 1968 p.422). Of course. scholarship has moved on. But marking that caesura, decisive for the emergence of Judaism, was an important achievement for that period.

No, I hadn't noticed the NYT's article, but will examine it. Another line of thought, another source. I must get back to pruning the garden as this Indian summer prevails. I need the kindling. Something to think about, and stoke the mental cockles, as I clip the magnolia today. Thanks again.Nishidani (talk) 11:20, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Glancing at my 'note' earlier, I notice my link to Franz Steiner is red-linked, and thus wiki has no page on him. He was an extraordinary powerful and creative thinker, not only in anthropology, and though he published relatively little in his lifetime (his massive magnum opus got lost, likeT.E.Lawrence's first draft of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution which John Stuart Mill's housemaid threw into the fire), exercised a decisive impact on a wide variety of later éminences grises (Mary Douglas, Ernest Gellner etc.). There's short work for someone. Perhaps Slrubenstein, or Slim Virgin, who has the right cultural and intellectual background, I gather, to work up a rapid article?Nishidani (talk) 11:31, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

To be honest I don't completely understand SLR's reasoning. As I understand it, most Christians and Muslims also accept that Jews are a nation. Some even believe in dual-covenant theology. So even on this particular question all three have the very same mixture of belief and practice which should disqualify them all as religions.

There is actually a simple de.wikipedia article on Steiner.[3] A simple translation might be a good start for an en. one if somebody wants to tackle that. German and anthropology bring up bad undergrad memories for me so I think I'll leave that to someone else. Enjoy the magnolias. Cheers. --JGGardiner (talk) 00:45, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Incidentally in all the Darwin celebration recently I happened to read a bit about Pierre Magnol who played his own part in removing botanical classification from the sphere of religion. --JGGardiner (talk) 00:48, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Islam is the most comprehensive of all, in ignoring the secular/religious divide. Christianity accepts the division canonically, except in the variety that emerged under Byzantine, and which so affected Slavic orthodoxy, of Caesaro-Papism. Judaism, except for its covenant-conquest myth, developed historically as a religion within other Empires (Islamic, Byzantine-Christian, Christian), lacking itself (except for the hypothesis of a Khazar khaganate) an historical state, and it is this peculiarity among the three monotheisms that SlR uses as leverage for his emphasis on idiosyncrasy.

With the rise of Israel, things get complicated, given the importance of defining the state as Judaic, even if it is secular. One can speak of Muslim society (the name of a brilliant and penetrating monograph by Ernest Gellner I strongly recommend if this branch of study interests you), Christian society, and Jewish society now. In all three cases, one is dealing with a broader social praxis than just religion, but one informed, or measured against, the foundational texts informing those religions. Generally, traditional social structures prove stronger than the orthodoxies imposed on them by cultural or religious elites, and inflect the way those generic belief systems are adapted, from zone to zone. Religion, for Gilbert Murray, was whatever system or set of practices furnished one with an escape-hatch from the entanglements of contingent circumstance. For him it was books, for others it is the sense of a tribal affection (patriotism is a form of secular religion), a lien to God or gods, the comfort of soteric rites, or companionate solidarity. All three faiths supply this function in a rich variety of ways, and to define 'religion' narrowly means the historical semantics of one tribe's word for these practices trumps function as we undertake to make generic definitions comprehensive of human societies. This may look good anthropologically, but only in so far as that discipline has reneged on its obligation as a science of man to encompass diversity with conceptual unity.

The German article (for which many thanks) is pretty straight-forward, and basic. I'd do it myself (English sources are fairly rich) only I'm on a perma-strike! Cheers Nishidani (talk) 11:27, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes. I wrote a reply but I deleted it before I posted because there's really no point preaching to the choir here. Although I did see an interesting and somewhat related article in the Atlantic about Einstein's first trip to America for the World Zionist Organization.[4]

I also meant to say yesterday that I noticed a Google Books preview that included most of an interesting biographical essay, An Oriental in the West: The Life of Franz Baermann Steiner.[5] It might be useful for whoever writes that article. --JGGardiner (talk) 23:44, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Whadya reckon if we shanghai the Nabster into doing it, as penitence for his loutish behaviour, and irresponsible wasting of wiki responsibilities, once the time's expired on the rap they doled out to him? Thanks for the google link. A beauty. I think if yourself, me, sean.hoyland and most of the other people he's harassed and insulted ask him to make amends by a gesture of reparation in this way, he may succumb to shame, and do it. Hadn't taken the trouble to search for that myself. I was relying on my reading of Taboo in 1973, an obit by Mary Douglas and gossip about him I'd picked up here and there.Nishidani (talk) 10:05, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Probably not, part of the advantage of being such an uncouth bastard is that I never have to show any remorse or attempt to make amends for my behavior. Though truthfully I did search a bit, seems most of the biographical sources I can find are either in German or only available in these places called libraries. nableezy - 15:32, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Deeply disappointed, Nab. I was expecting you to tell me to get stuffed, that you weren't some scumbag gofer for retired wikipedian wankers, at the beck and call of otiose hustlers from the wiki talk-but-baulk circuit, and that I had more hide than Jessica the elephant (yes, the beast Wittgenstein asserted might well be lurking in Bertie Russell's room, while they were taking tea there one afternoon, in, was it, 1913) for even imagining I could rope you in, a lawless Chicagoan, with a little muscle from the other chaps who happen to be in good standing with the establishment. You're becoming polite. It augurs badly for the future.Nishidani (talk) 19:15, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Sorry Nishi, my momma taught me to be respectful to the elderly and the infirm. You can thank her for my inability to properly reply to such a defamation of my character as saying I am becoming polite. I moved from Chicago a few years back to a place where the driving ability of the residents can only be described as "doodly", as in "doodly doo, let's take the scenic route and look at the trees". A co-worker remarked that over the past years my driving had become progressively less, let's just say "efficient", and more "respectful". I had to restrain myself from punching him. (Also, if you are a football fan, you have my condolences on being screwed by the French. I was almost as upset about that as the other French team winning Africa's last spot) nableezy - 23:42, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I didn't remember the Jessica part. But I wonder now if Nableezy believes in logical atomism. He did say that he "calls a spade a spade". But you can probably interpret that either way.

I'm also sorry about the losses. As a Canadian, I've learned to accept that French teams can upset you. --JGGardiner (talk) 01:39, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I've read various accounts of this over the years, one relates to an incident in Russell's rooms. But this gives a slightly different version. I think Nableezy, when not burning rubber (or French letters which is the same thing, I guess) on the asphalt in gerontocratic suburbs, subscribes to logical ahemism. I think we'd better end it here, as I have enticed you into an abuse of wiki talk pages. Sorry, and regards.Nishidani (talk) 12:00, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

That's true. I should stop abusing talk pages and get back to abusing articles. But thanks for the distraction. I will get around to that Steiner article some day if nobody else does so at least some good will come of this section. Cheers. --JGGardiner (talk) 00:17, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, fuck it. I suppose, since I complained and tried to strongarm others into doing it, that I'd at least better give some notes. I've used the German article as a template, but it has quite a few errors. I've misplaced, or another visitor has stolen it, my copy of Canetti's memoirs where Steiner is written about, so can't use that source. I can't remember which of Murdoch's early novels portrays him in fictional form, or whether the figure of the intense intellectual in her novels owes more to Canetti than to Steiner. I'll try to look up my notes on the backleaves of her mid 50s work for something on this. I don't like adding anything to WP since I can't edit the only area, a trash-heap of poor POV editing, where I could really be useful. In my book, that's like helping the rich, while the poor go begging. But, you can use the stuff below as a basis for the future article, when time allows. Best wishes JGG and Nab. It was a pleasure to edit with you two guys, pushing useful shit uphill against the runny landslides of loquacious madness and wildcat editing that was the norm at the Gaza war page! You can see here many points of contact with what Slrubenstein asserted. That's why Steiner came to mind. He said it much better. I agree, on this, with neither, but that is not the point, when writing a wiki article.

Franz Baermann Steiner (b 12 October 1909 in the town of Karlín (the later suburb of Karolinethal), just outside Prague, Bohemia d. 27. November 1952 in Oxford) was an ethnologist, polymath, essayist, aphorist and poet. He was familiar, apart from German, Yiddish and Czech, with Greek and Latin, classical and modern Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Armenian, Persian, Malay, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, six other Slavonic languages, Scandinavian languages and Dutch.

His paternal family hailed from Tachov in Western Bohemia, his father was a small retail businessman dealing in cloth and leather goods. His mother’s from Prague. Neither side were practitioners of Judaism, his father was an atheist, but he received elements of a religious education at school. He belonged to the last generation of the German, and Jewish, minority in Prague of the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire who were to make distinctive contributions to German literature. From his early childhood he was a close friend of Hans Günther Adler. In 1920 he entered the German State Gymnasium in Štepánská Street, where Max Brod and Franz Werfel had studied. He joined the Roter Studentenbund (Red Student Union) in 1926. He was attracted to Marxism early, and his fascination lasted four years, until 1930, and also to political Zionism. With regard to the latter, he may have been influenced, during his year in Jerusalem, by the Brit Shalom circle, which espoused a rapprochement between Jews and Arabs . He enrolled at the German University of Prague in late 1928 for coursework on Semitic languages, with a minor in ethnology, while pursuing as an external student courses in Siberian ethnology and Turkish studies, at the Czech language Charles University of Prague. He studied Arabic abroad for a year, in 1930-1, at the Hebrew University in Palestine . In Jerusalem, after some time staying with an Arab family, he was forced to move out by the British, and took up digs with the Jewish philosopher Hugo Bergman, a key figure in the development of Prague Zionism, a schoolfriend of Franz Kafka's, and an intimate of Martin Buber, Judah Leon Magnes and Gershom Sholem. . It was from this circle during his stay that he developed views akin to those of Brit Shalom on Jewish-Arab cooperation, though he remained suspicious of fundamentalist Islam.

It was from this intense period, that Steiner developed the idea, already represent in the work of the sociologist Werner Sombart, who had stressed the oriental character of Jews, that he was ‘an oriental born in the West’.. On this premise was grounded his later critique of the imperial cast of Western anthropological writing, as was his sympathy for hermeneutic techniques that would recover native terms for the way non-Westerners experienced their world. He obtained his doctorate in linguistics 1935 with a thesis on Arabic word formation (Studien zur arabischen Wurzelgeschichte: ‘Studies on the History of Arabic Roots'). He then moved to study at the University of Vienna to specialize in Arctic ethnology . During his exile in England he was taken under the wing by Elias Canetti, whom he had already met in Vienna, who was based in London. During the war he studied under Evans-Pritchard, while in turn deeply influencing him and many lecturers and students of that circle including Meyer Fortes, Mary Douglas, Louis Dumont, M.N.Srinivas, Godfrey Lienhardt, Ernest Gellner. Iris Murdoch, though she had met him briefly in 1941, fell in love with him in the summer of 1951.

He was appointed Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Oxford in 1950, a position he held until his premature death two years later. He is mainly known for his posthumous collection Taboo, composed of lectures he delivered on that subject, after being persuaded by Evans-Pritchards to teach this, rather than, as planned, a series of lectures on Marx

His thought is characterized by an intense commitment to the right of self-determination of non-Western peoples. His analytical technique constantly exposed the biases of the anthropological tradition which, down to his day, had endeavoured to describe these peoples. He included his own ethnic group, the Jews, in this category.. His influence was informal and vast, within the tradition of post-war British anthropology, but is rarely attested in the literature because he published little.

Shy, whimsical, and endlessly curious, he was regarded by many of his contemporaries as ‘intellectual’s intellectual’ for the extraordinary multidisciplinary erudition he had at his fingertips. . His family was exterminated during the Holocaust. He died of a heart-attack, Iris Murdoch thought that it was the result of his heart-break over the fact of the Holocaust. He is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Oxford.

• Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon ‘An Oriental in the West: The Life of Franz Baermann Steiner’ in Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writings, vol.1: Taboo, Truth, and Religion, (eds. Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon), Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 1999 pp.16-102
• Franz Steiner, Taboo (ed.) Laura Bohannan, with an introduction by Evans-Pritchard, Cohen and West London, 1956
• Franz Baermann Steiner, Am stürzenden Pfad: gesammelte Gedichte, (hrsg. Jeremy Adler), Wallstein Verlag, 2000
• Mary Douglas, 'Franz Steiner: A Memoir', in Franz Baermann Steiner. Selected Writings, vol.1: Taboo, Truth, and Religion, (Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon eds.), Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 1999 pp.3-15,

cleaned up here, but I dont see you citing Steiner (2000) anywhere, and as I cannot read German I wont be able to add anything from it. Anything you wish to add before it goes in the mainspace? And do you have a source for Iris Murdoch thought that it was the result of his heart-break over the fact of the Holocaust? That would be a good dyk hook. nableezy - 18:54, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Is the line on heartache taken from the quote Franz was certainly one of Hitler's victims in Steiner (2000) p. 433? nableezy - 21:30, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Yep. Edit-conflict, which is only to be expected between the two of us. I tried to post a minute ago the following, but I'd advise you to enjoy Saturday afternoon, watch some cricket, play pool, drown in a pool, something like that. No one should work from Saturday to Friday, esp. Saturday.

'Cleaned up'+'my momma taught me to be respectful to the elderly and the infirm.'

Yeah, I getcha. I messed up, and you've started to wipe up the mess after my aged, incontinent, editorial imcompetence has left the page spattered like a mad woman's . .excrement. Jeez, the things we old geezers have to put up from the young.

The postscript by Jeremy Adler to his collected poems, Franz Baermann Steiner, Am stürzenden Pfad: gesammelte Gedichte, (hrsg. Jeremy Adler), Wallstein Verlag, 2000, pp.440-462 has a rich and useful compendium of his life and the thematic interweaving of its moments in his poetry.

His parents were murdered in Treblinka.

He had a nervous breakdown in 1946, and a coronary thrombosis in 1949 (2000 p.449). Not an organic problem, it was diagnosed as function, related to stress, and his poverty in England.

As to your two remarks re Steiner (2000) and Murdoch, I was thinking of the following remark, but paraphrased it badly:

'Franz was certainly one of Hitler's victims' Iris Murdoch, cited in Franz Baermann Steiner, Am stürzenden Pfad: gesammelte Gedichte, (hrsg. Jeremy Adler), Wallstein Verlag, 2000 p.433

The same text speaks of his late encounter (actually they met fleetingly in 1941) with her as one which would have led to marriage, though this created problems for him, as an orthodox Jew for it meant facing the issue of marrying a Christian woman.(p.449)

The manuscript of his Comparative Study on the Sociology of Slavery, and all of his notes on sources, the result of 4 years work, was lost during a train trip between Oxford and London.(p.445, thus the German text, in Srinivas's memoir ('Franz Steiner: A Memoir,' in Adler and Fardon (eds) Selected Writings, vol.2, 1999 pp.3-10, pp.4-5, we are told that it was during a train trip from London to Oxford (p.4). Unfortunately Srinivas then ruins his veracity by implying that this occurred during the morning journey from Oxford to London which required him to switch trains at Reading, if he missed the usual 8.40 am express. He apparently went to the loo to splash his boots and propped his briefcase outside, and it vanished. I'm fucked if I know why people don't control the truth of the stories they make up when they write autobiography!)

The German text put his arrival in England in 1936. Mary Douglas put it in 1938. The Postscript to the poetry collection edited by Adler, specifies that he went to London in 1936 in order to work in the British Museum, and study modern field research methodology under Bronislaw Malinowski ((p.444)). So the German text was right and I was ethnocentric in trusting Mary Douglas's memory

I know there is a striking congruency between some of his ideas and his style and that of Theodor Adorno, who was in Oxford at the same time as Steiner's first visit to England. Adorno apparently also tried to get Steiner's letters published, so they must have corresponded. Of the several books on Adorno in my library none speaks of the connection however.

I've left out huge loads of stuff easily available in those books, since I'm on strike. Like his belief Israel could only exist as a theocracy. The connections between his poetry, and concepts of both truth (his influential Chagga paper)and myth (that can be gleaned from the section 'The Poet as Anthropologist' pp.67ff. in Selected Writings, vol.2: Orientpolitik, value, and civilisation,, (eds.Jeremy Adler, Richard Fardon) Methodology and History in Anthropology, vol.3, Berghahn Books, 1999 with a memoir by M.N. Srinivas

Hey, what the fuck!, I'm acting like a scab, subverting my own strike. I'm not going to work on this wiki crap anymore. To hell with it, . . this has already cost me 23 minutes of a Bruce Willis movie rerun. Young people are drinking Guinness over at the pub, a crescent moon is scratching its back on the hills over the valley, people are socializing on Saturday, and here I am getting cerebral hemarroids, redeyed in front of a rather unattractive computer screen, trying to cope with your nagging. Don't insult me, to drive me like a slave, anymore Nab, or I'll get JGGardiner to dob you into the cops over at AN/1 again, for stalking retired wikipedians.Nishidani (talk) 21:52, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

The heart stuff should be phrased per Murdoch. Actually Herz, is a crucial, keyword in his poems, and in one notable text he speaks of it being a sacrificial victim. But that's for some future editor to figure out. We've done our bit, pal.Nishidani (talk) 21:55, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

That looks great. I'm embarrassed now by the rough translation of the de. article sitting in my notes. I was a little concerned that the red link might require another new article but we do actually have one for H. G. Adler.

Don't blame Douglas, the discrepancy in the two sources about his arrival in England is because he actually came twice. First in 1936 but he left in July 1937 to go back to Prague, then came his Ruthenian study followed by more time in Prague and finally a return to England in early 1938. It is on page 46 of the Adler and Fardon biography that I linked to above. Cheers. --JGGardiner (talk) 01:03, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks JG. I see Nab has entered the relevant edit, linking Adler père to the wiki article on his Franz B.Steiner workpage. Jeremy, who edits all of Steiner's stuff, is his son of course.Well, there's the makings of a good stub, slightly better than the German one, all wrapped up in a few days. I'm not good at finding photos but hope we can eventually get a copyright free one from the net. Perhaps Fardon (at SOAS)or Adler (at King's College) might oblige with suggestions, if all else fails on that score. Sorry for jumping the gun on you. I just got irritated by a series of private messes, and allowed myself to be distracted to get this off my chest, not thinking you both might be mulling the job. I left out the excessive and trivial detail re Canetti on the German wiki page because it seemed unfocused, and eventually a para or two on them will be required. Any further edits can be done on the Nab page. No hurry though. When it's in some readable shape and formatted properly, you can take it to wiki. It's nice to think that, from a bit of wiseacre jawing at each other, we incidentally managed to get together for a few hours to do a neglected figure the honour he's owed. Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 10:48, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

[6].

I can't format the last three books in the bibliography in accordance with the obscure citational template everyone uses.

Needs categories at the bottom

A photo

I'm sounding like a spoiled kid asking for Christmas presents from Canuckistan or Ci cago (how Italians write 'Chicago', meaning 'I shit there'). I'll get Andrea Bocelli to sing the Canadian national anthem in this year's Macy Street Christmas parade, or hymn the praises of Chicago in the Potawatomi language, if either or both of you can fix stuff like that? Nishidani (talk) 11:21, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

I've made the Adler/Fardon edit on his return to Prague in July 1937, but the other source I used said his Ruthenian research took place in spring of that year, not late summer, as p.46 suggests. I've a hangover, and have already mussed up some edits, so will leave it for today.Nishidani (talk) 12:13, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Deletion criteria

Well spotted with the complete list of British journalists - I had no idea there were that many pages here. This is an interesting category/list as well. Anyway I'm going to steer clear of it now, for obvious reasons - I think a general comment about journalism and/or general notability is fine, but anything more probably risks someone diving in on either of us. It'll be interesting to see what happens - there's a real risk it'll be wiped I guess, because closing admins just tend to count votes and take as read any negative comments about lack of notability. They often don't actually take an independent look - even spending two seconds to do a "Jonathan Cook" +Nazareth Google search would reveal how widely he is cited and his work reproduced online, as well as his status as one of the few Western journalists - if not the only one - permanently based in any Palestinian areas. Just because he is often published in fairly radical outlets - or, the horror, foreign ones - doesn't negate the notability of his writing. An interesting comparison might be made with this AfD, where a couple of passing mentions in one or two media sources of an organisation whose existence or real nature is doubtful, were deemed enough to save it.--Nickhh (talk) 15:39, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Well Nick, it is absolutely shameful that this sort of politically motivated censorship be allowed even a hearing on wikipedia. Check the arguments against Cook against the following (Hillel Fendel,Yishai Fleisher,Yehuda HaKohen,Daphne Barak,Menashe Amir,Yoel Esteron,Itamar Ben Canaan,Imanuel Rosen,Tzipi Hotovely,Haggai Hoberman just a few) pages of really non-notable Israeli journalists, all poorly or self-sourced. I don't expect an admin to look into this, but it is politics, and has nothing to do with writing an encyclopedia. Yes, technically we should keep out of it. But it is a clearcut case of numbers' stacking, coordinated to wipe out a perceived 'hostile element'. The only way to deter people abusing the rules to play these games is to get an immediate comparative list of all people in the same category who come from the POV area that the deletion-proposer comes from, and ask him if he is willing to include, for the same reasons, all these other articles for immediate deletion. Won't be done though. Wiki is anything but internally consistent.Nishidani (talk) 15:47, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

AfD on Jonathan Cook

I think you know your participation in that discussion is a violation of your topic ban. Please delete your comment there. Mr. Hicks The III (talk) 17:22, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

你無法阻止鳥兒在你的頭頂飛翔，但你可以阻止它們在你的頭發上做窩Nishidani (talk) 18:06, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

I can stop the birds. nableezy - 18:09, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Amicus certus in rebus incertis cernitur You're my greatest discovery since finding out about how to eat porridge with buttered toast soaked in vegemite.Nishidani (talk) 18:22, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Yuck... ;) pedrito - talk - 18:38 27.11.2009

Pedrito caro, pan con pan, comida de tontos!Nishidani (talk) 19:58, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Notice

I've requested clarification here: [7]