Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 12:15, 15 October 2024

Not to start a discussion, just a matter of mutual interest FYI

AI's threat to Misplaced Pages Late Night Live 8 October 2024. Nishidani (talk) 13:00, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

What you said

Hi Levivich. I don't understand why you would write this. You said there - " Not a lot of people will say with a straight face variations of "God gave the land to us." That's an outlier view."

I never said something like that and I don't know why you seem to hold this opinion about me. I'm asking you to please retract your comments. I don't know where your ideas come from but I am really really suggesting that you allow us to just coexist. I think it might do some good to you too. I don't know how this conflict met or meets you so I prefer to give your this chance. PeleYoetz (talk) 19:30, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

In my view, statements like There were always Jews who returned to the Land of Israel and yearned to do so. Starting from the Book of Lamentations through ancient, mideaval and modern sources, this has always been a central theme in Jewish religion, history, and liturgy. It was not yet a political movement, but this fact provides vital context and is absolutely DUE. are among the kinds of statements I had in mind when I wrote variations of "God gave the land to us."; in this example quote, you argue it's true and Misplaced Pages should say it's true because, in part, the Bible (Book of Lamentations) said so.

Although, when I wrote that sentence, I specifically had in mind this article complaining about Misplaced Pages's coverage of Zionism, which at the end quotes somebody as saying the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was the fulfillment of God’s promise to gather His people back to Zion.

Bringing the Bible to a Misplaced Pages talk page as if it were a history book is a tell-tale sign of POV pushing of a very specific and uncommon POV: biblical literalism. This view, though almost unheard of in any intellectual discussion in the real world and certainly in academia, finds surprising popularity on the talk page of Misplaced Pages's articles about Israel, e.g. here and here, where other editors also claim that because it's in the Bible, it's true. Levivich (talk) 19:56, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry but your response is simply no less insulting and disappointing than your original comments. I'm going to repeat myself - I haven't said at any point "God gave the land to us", and I've never mentioned God.

Psalm 137 is an ancient Jewish text, it described the remembrance and the yearning for Jerusalem from the point of view of Babylonian captivity. It is clearly ancient, probably from the Babylonian or Persian periods. That the centrality of the Land of Israel, and the yearning for a return continued throughout the generations is a historical fact, this theme is indeed recurring in Jewish history since antiquity. In the 2nd century BCE, Simon Thassi, when told by the Seleucids he was occupying Jaffa, replied: "We have never taken land away from other nations or confiscated anything that belonged to other people. On the contrary, we have simply taken back property that we inherited from our ancestors, land that had been unjustly taken away from us by our enemies at one time or another." In the 12th century, Judah HaLevi wrote: "My heart is in the east, and the rest of me at the edge of the west. ... / ... While Zion remains in the Cross's reign, and I in Arab chains?" When the Jews of the diaspora revolted against Rome, one of the purposes, was a return to Judea and defend it. Levivich, really just try and read more about the history of Jewish identity. I really think you need to do some self reflection.

I'm now asking you once more, apologize and retract your inappropriate comments. PeleYoetz (talk) 06:37, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

May I intervene here?

"Not a lot of people will say with a straight face variations of "God gave the land to us."

Since you are taking an extreme literalist view of part of this, let me construe the sentence and style of that type of remark.

The quote refers obviously to a theme, not to what you said, but to Levivich's subsuming the various remarks you made as reflective of a general theme. This is called stylistically 'variations on a theme' broadly, a musical term which has been adopted in general prose. Technically, these variations are what are called topoi, literary embroideries of some standard image, idea, or argument in a literary canon masterfully surveyed by Ernst Robert Curtius in his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948, esp.pp79ff.) When you read anything in literature depicting a pleasant landscape or garden, nilly willy, it will be categorized as an example of the tradition of a Locus amoenus.

So when Levivich states that in his reading your statements are 'variations' on a generic premise that 'God gave the land to us', he is not putting the latter phrase into your mouth. He is saying that he reads your remarks as 'topical variations' on that powerful biblical theme that Palestine was given to Jews as a promised land, and which underlies all alternative echoes of that notion.

In layman's language, you are asking him to recant the reasonable impression he drew from your mode of arguing, in the way your terms evoke to the common reader an omnipresent theme in the Bible and in Judaism. There is no room for ambiguity here: 'variations' means that the quotation in inverted commas does not literally refer to any statement you made. It means, not only in Levivich's view, that your remarks are redolent, as thematic variations, of the topos of the promised land. This is quite innocuous, a fair assessment. It may not reflect what you take your remarks to mean, but it is the inevitable outcome of the language you use.

The attribution to the whole of the Jewish people of a desire to return to the land of their forefathers cannot be grounded on quoting passages from Simon Thassi or Judah Halevi on the topos of Libi baMizrach (my heart is in the east), any more than would be the case for quoting the far more realistic thinking of an 'average' Jew in the diaspora captured by Bloom's thoughts after he ducks into the butcher shop for a pork kidney for his breakfast from his fellow Jew, the Hungarian Dlugacz,- this violation of a kosher prohibition grounded in Deuteronomy 14:8.,- means that he feels he must, when the opportunity presents itself, up stakes and perform aliyah, along the lines of a pamphlet by Agendath Netaim he picks up to browse, a company offering land for prospective buyers with citrus groves by Lake Tiberias. 'Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.'(James Joyce, Ulysses The Bodley Head 1960 p.72)I often sing to myself the songs of my childhood like Molly Malone and It's a Long Way to Tipperary but anyone who took those as evidence of my desire to return there would be mistaken. They reflect a long and intense cultural attachment. Arguments to the contrary simply reflect a Zionist topos which retroactively attributes to all Jews historically the idea proffered by their very recent ideological justification for that movement, one that was dismissed as heretical by the majority of rabbinical scholars when it was first articulated.

In 2600 years of life outside of the Biblical land, many Jews the world over may well have taken to heart the stirring passages of poetic nostalgia in the classics of their literary tradition. Percentually, despite no obstacles, very few ever acted on it, any more than Greeks in the oikoumene beyond, when recalling the nostos of Odysseus, dropped their copy of Homer and left the Ukraine, Egypt or Africa broadly, to return to the ancient roots of some of their forefathers in Chios or Samothrace. When Eastern European Jews were offered the prospect of going to the United States or Palestine in the 1880s onwards, the overwhelming majority went West (to the 'new Zion'), not South.

There is nothing to apologize here, except for the commonplace misprisions you make about a putative universal perennial longing among Jews, which is a literary and rabbinical construction of 'Jewishness'. And using an ultimatum for such a trivial misreading of your interloctor's words looks highly 'instrumental'.Nishidani (talk) 08:22, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

... @Levivich, you should clearly redact your comments, you have put words in the mouth of PeleYoetz, who clearly did not say anything about God, just talked about history. Inventing words and attributing them to others to promote sanctions against them is... not right. The time to apologize is now. ABHammad (talk) 12:15, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

• Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery