Rick Spence
speaker
498 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Rick Spence’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So that's really where you see the earliest version of that. And the reasons for it would be,
What you could say is that going back to Manetho and to the Roman period, Jews, Judeans frequently experienced difficulties, conflicts with other people living around them. And part of that probably had to do with the diaspora, which was the movement. Well, you know, you get the idea. The Romans came and he kicked everybody out, which they didn't.
Jews had been leaving Judea since it was a poor, limited area and moving to areas like North Africa, Egypt, Cyrenaica, all the way into Southern France. They moved widely around the Roman Empire. So that sense of both distinctness and hostility existed since ancient times.
So it wasn't just the attitude of the church towards Jews was mixed by... Well, one of the ideas, of course, is that at the end of time, just before the second coming, one of the signs, how are we going to know that Jesus is going to return and the world is going to end? Well, the Jews will all convert. There will be a mass conversion. They'll sort of see the light. Now,
So there have to be Jews around to do that, or we won't. It's like a canary in a coal mine. You have to have them there to tip it off. So that was one of the arguments as to why, within the church, as to why Jews would not be forcibly converted, beyond the fact that it's just kind of bad policy to forcibly convert people because you don't know whether it's sincere.
But they need to be preserved as a kind of artifact. which will then redeem itself at the end of time. It's not something which is encouraged. It predates Christianity.
And then Christianity, of course, in its own way, just sort of plagiarizes the whole Jewish thing, doesn't it? I mean, I hesitate to use that term, but that's what you do. It's just like, well, we're the Jews now. Okay, you used to have a unique relationship with God, but now it's been passed over to us. And so, you know, thanks for the Bible. You know, I can remember that.
And my mom's side, I was periodically exposed to Sunday school. And pretty much the Old Testament was always presented as if somehow it was the You know, the history of like, for lack of a better term, you know, Europeans in some way. It was sort of a Christian history. It was all the prequel to that. And there'd be some sort of, first the term Hebrew was always used, never Jews.
So, you know, the ancient Hebrews and somehow the Hebrews just sort of became the Christians. And I don't know, the Jews just got, they didn't get a memo or something. So it's basically like Christianity, the prequel. It's the Old Testament. But they just sort of take over. Okay. We have the special dispensation now. Thank you very much. You're an artifact.
I think that modern antisemitism is very much a creation of the modern world and the industrial revolution. It's, it's largely a creation of Jewish emancipation.
It's the nasty flip side of that. Okay. All of the restrictions are thrown off, but now also you become the focus of much more attention than what you had before.
Prior to that, you had the kind of ghettoization, which worked both ways. I mean, there were rabbis who praised the ghettos as a protection. of Jews against the outside world, because inside we can live our life as we wish and we're unmolested. Whereas if we were, the great fear is that if we were sort of absorbed into this larger world, we'll lose our identity.
That sort of question comes up in the 18th century and things like the Haskalah movement in Germany, because the German Jews were always at the sort of cutting edge of assimilation and modernity. Moses Mendelssohn was an example of that, arguing that, you know, we just need to become Germans. So, you know, as much as possible, synagogues should look like Lutheran churches.
Everything, you know, things should be given in good German. And that's the way we need to become Jewish Germans. We don't want to become a kind of group of people who are apart in that way. And that has created great tensions ever since. You know, one of the essential points, it seems to me, in anti-Semitism, anti-Jewism, is that all the Jews are in it together. Isn't that one of the things?
Okay. They're always talking about it as if they're a collective. Jews this, Jews that. as if it's a single undifferentiated mass of people who all move and speak in the same way. From my personal experience, not being Jewish, It's incredibly diverse in many ways, really. One of the things that anti-Semitism proposes is a continuity or a singularity of Jewish identity that never existed.
Well, here's... Yeah. Jews aren't the only recipient of that. I mean, any time you hear people talking about Jews this or that, white people this or that, black people this or that, Asians this or that, where they're an undifferentiated mass who apparently all share something in common, well, then nobody's really thinking.
And the other thing you'll find is that people who will express those views when pressed will argue that, oh, well, if they actually know anybody from those groups, those are okay. Mm-hmm. It's like Nazis. They go, this isn't okay, Jew. They're all right. They were always constantly making exceptions.
What they actually meant an actual human being, and they seemed to be fairly normal, well, they were okay. So what it was that they hated weren't actual people for the most part. It was just this kind of gollywog vision that they had of them. You're not even talking about real people. Uh, I don't know. What does that tell you about human nature? Well, okay.
In 70 odd years, what have I learned about my fellow creatures? One, I don't actually understand them any better than I ever did. In fact, less so.
Okay. I would say this.
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