by EzraLB » Sat Dec 26, 2015 9:07 am
One of the issues that has always confused me is how the secular Greeks and Romans distinguished between biological jews and White Israelites. For example, did the Greeks have a derogatory term for "jew"? I know the Greeks sometimes spoke disparaging of Moses and his descendants, but they also seem to have had negative attitudes toward biological jews.
Of course jewish "historians" lump them all together--the descendants of Moses and the edomite jews--but did the Greeks and Romans? When we read their comments about "jews" or "judeans", is it only by context that we can discern about whom they are speaking?
The Romans seem to have used the terms "Iudaeus" and "Iudaeorum" for jew and jews, but sometimes I can't tell if they are talking about edomites or Israelites. It seems, on the other hand, that the early Greek writers were describing true Israelites as opposed to edomites posing as judaites--after all, Judaism probably didn't take off as a "religion" prior to about 150BC or there about.
I found this essay, by a jew, of course, on the history of "antisemitism" in the Greco-Roman period, and it obviously does not make a distinction between jews posing as Israelites and the true Israelites, which makes this essay confusing at times. My question is--how do we make those distinctions when reading the Greek and Roman historians? Is it merely by context or are there clues within the vocabulary too?
http://users.ipfw.edu/bartky/Y200Y401%2 ... Daniel.pdf
"No Rothschild is English. No Baruch, Morgenthau, Cohen, Lehman, Warburg, Kuhn, Kahn, Schiff, Sieff or Solomon was ever born Anglo-Saxon. And it is for this filth that you fight. It is for this filth that you murdered your Empire. It is this filth that elects, selects, your politicians." -- Ezra Pound