>>827253I’m not all that versed in the history of Arab Jews, but Ashkenazi are a weird product of separate class cultivated under the Roman Empire, with past shaped by Greek Hellenization.
You’re probably aware how far Hellenization went.
If I’m not wrong, Indians didn't have humanized depictions of Buddha before the Hellenization of Gandhara.
Hellenization worked both ways, that's the Greek Culture was forced upon other nations/peoples, but they also actively adopted elements of the "conquered cultures" and encouraged intermarriage.
Hebrews were some of the most Hellenized people as-well. The Maccabean ethnocentric revolt was a military success, but they failed to achieve the primary goal of the campaign that's ethnocentric cultural purity.
I mean, just look at the names their kings had. Alexander Yanai? Very culturally Jewish indeed.
The idea of the pure Semite that's Judean or Arab, is something very modern and actively used by various nations for propaganda, but the truth is... they all were Hellenized, just to different degrees.
The pre-Ashkenazi identity was partially cultivated by the Romans as means of crating moral‑theological justification of Christianity, as Jews being the "people of witness".
The Roman empire fell, but the ethnocentric Jewish class continued to exist.
Looking on Jews as on a clear unified organization is faulty approach, because Judaism can be adopted (popular historic examples would be Himyarites and Khazars).
A Jew is three things: A religion, a tradition and a status. These three can exist independently, overlap-partially, or fully.
Again, if you hate Jews on an instinctual level, you’d be inclined to notice only the bad people and the bad things they do. I hope that my thoughts helped you to see at least a fraction of light, in a culture you so hate.
My own lineage is the unlikely mixture of Eastern Orthodox Slavs, and Orthodox Jews, and I myself am an agnostic, so my relationship to those traditions is very complicated.
