People that Validate Jewish History From Torah

Nadene Goldfoot                                                             

 One group of Protestants still respect  the Old Testament  who are called "Evangelicals."  James B. Irwin, astronaut on Apollo 10, was active in believing the writings in the Bible, especially after his experience on the moon.  He led an expedition to search for Noah's Ark.  I don't think his not finding it deterred him as he later "founded an evangelical religious organization."  His knowledge of science did not deter his validating the writings of the Torah. 

 What religion should do for a person is to give them that moral fiber to be moralistic. That includes all the good that people should be and how they treat each other.  One look at this world of ours, and we can see we are failing.  People are as crude and rude as they were back in the Neolithic days, ready to kill off most of the planet's population much quicker than the cave men could.  Those that are most ready to do so do not think much of the 10 Commandments, so basic to civilization.   

Christopher Columbus in 1492 could have been Jewish.   Jews in 1492 were hiding the fact to keep from being converted or killed and were called Marranos.  He could have been one, for that matter, though he is listed as a Catholic    He spoke Spanish better than Italian.   He wrote to his son in Hebrew.This was at a time where Spain was telling Jews that they had to convert or leave the country. The New Testament had replaced the Jews' history found in the Old.    The mapmakers he met with when in Genoa were Jews, as Jews had been merchants way before 70 CE and traveled a lot on the seas from Israel and Judah and probably did a lot of charting.  He must have found credible facts to undertake such a voyage, for Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 14 hundred and 92. If he trusted their map making, it also could be that he trusted their history, found in the Christian "Old Testament."  Being he was to become a very famous person, I have included him for representing a time when Jews were suffering the worst and had been forced to leave Spain, then Portugal and finally find other countries to live in such as Syria.

The United States of America was settled by religious people in 1620 who came to Plymouth Rock, the land later to become the state of Massachusetts.  They believed in G-d, and had a  relationship with the Old Testament, which they read. They even studied a little Hebrew.     They had broken off from Catholicism long before in England to become Protestants, and these Pilgrims were a branch of that group who felt they still had no religious freedom of choice, so off they went from Holland, which they had tried to settle in, to the unknown land of America in a little sailing ship called "The Mayflower."  They weren't the first to arrive in North America. English people had sailed to Jamestown much further south and established it with a colony  on May 14, 1607   "The colony gave England its first foothold in the European competition for the New World, which had been dominated by the Spanish since the voyages of Christopher Columbus in the late 15th century ".It later became Jamestown, Virginia.  

Being that the south was not settled by religious people of that day, they saw nothing wrong about having slaves and defied the request from the President and the North  to free them, which England had already done in 1833.   Therefore, the refusal to do so  started   the American Civil War in 1861 and didn't end till 1865. Since then, religion did make its way into the South.  

Religion is losing out in the USA.  Less and less people have any respect for the Old Testament, the part that tells the history of the Jewish people.   They think it is just an Old Wives' Tale, legends, having nothing to do with today's scientific facts.  Bring up borders, boundaries, land, and few heed the information IF it comes from the Bible.  "Oh, I don't believe that stuff.  It's not true."  Little do people realize that this written history is actually recorded history of the Jews, telling of battles and who with and what happened.  It even includes geography and genealogy.  Hebrew texts, material written in Hebrew, date back to the 2nd millennium BCE, when Abraham was living.

Why are Hebrew writings so easy to ignore?  This is history recorded in writing.  At the same time there was writing going on in Egypt, Babylonia and China. Moses (1391-1271 BCE) most likely was schooled in hieroglyphics.  In 1391 BCE Amenkotep III was the pharoah.   People pay attention  to material from those sources.  Why is the Torah not paid respect as a source of history by people other than the Jews?  The Culture, the foods, the animals and plants, all are recorded there.  It's a wealth of information. The Babylonian Empire, which existed at the same time, wrote in the Akkadian language.  That's where Hammurabi came from.  People were writing Akkadian, a cunieform style of writing  in 2,500 BCE.  Sumerians invented it in the 4th millennium BCE.

Jewish people do not use the King James edition of the Old Testament, however.  Translation errors have been made from Hebrew to Greek to English.  Our word for bible is Tanach, so we use The Stone Edition Tanach from the ArtScroll Series which is considered to be the most accurate.  There are people who think that the Torah has changed over the years, and they do not understand the original and continuing care that has been taken to make sure that not one word was changed.  Even pieces found in the Dead Sea Scrolls are proving that they haven't changed since the 1st century for the past 2,000 years.  One can visit the Dead Sea Museum online or in person which is in Jerusalem and view the original findings.  Evidently people like to be told things, like in a preached speech, and personal detective work is awkward for them to do a study on their own.  If they're not told this is it, they don't trust the information that this is not just folk lore.  .

 DNA, another science from geneticists, is giving us a clear cut road map of people, calling this new science population genetics.  Someday, the two must get together and see if they can mesh their findings with what we have known since Moses and his people who existed for over 3,000 years.  One thing about our writings.  They never have been known to put themselves in a better light by leaving out the bad parts.  Egypt was known to do that by covering over hieroglyphics that the next ruler didn't approve of.  They only wrote about their successes.  We wrote about our sins, that of David, especially, and the women in his life.  We learn from from, or try to.
                                                                               

Francis S. Collins, PhD is one of the world's leading scientists who studies genetics.  He was the head of the Human Genome Project.  He's also a man of unshakable faith in G-d and scripture and believes that faith in G-d and faith in science can coexist within a person and be harmonious.  He wrote the book, "The Language of God," which of course is our DNA.   In fact, discovering our DNA has made him more religious.  One of the more interesting chapters in his book is "Genesis, Galileo, and Darwin. Darwin is most interesting to me because the Nazis took his theories and used them to prove they had the right to exterminate all the Jews in the world, of course which was not what Darwin had intended.   

The book, followed up with its own movie,  "Roots," by Alex Haley, set me on fire as far as dabbling into my own genealogy.  He tells of the African custom of reciting their oral history before their family group. He was able to trace his family line to one tribe in Africa through oral history.

 Our oral history has accompanied our written history as well.  We Jews probably did the same thing, recite this history of ours, telling of things left out when Moses set down his 5 books, another thing that modern people of today want to pooh pooh.  We have since printed the oral history before we forgot it.  It's called the "Mishnah."  So we have 3 sources of importance, The Torah or 5 books of Moses, the Talmud and the Mishnah.  Rabbis have been discussing our writings since the fall of Jerusalem of 70 CE with Rashi being the most famous commentator (1040-1105 CE)

Jews in Israel depend on the Torah for their strength.  I've known of soldiers who used its geography descriptions of the terrain to get themselves out of harm's way when confronting the enemy.  It worked!  They found paths, ancient, but still usable for them.  The description of Eretz Yisrael giving the boundaries and the description of it is found in the Tanakh.

King David (1010-970 BCE)  is said to be the author of Psalms.  I found #62 that is most prophetic. He speaks for all Jews of today.   The first stanza goes like this: and is addressed to the wicked, murderous schemers.  One must never allow the power and ill-gotten wealth of the oppressor to erode one's trust in G-d and faith in His justice.

For G-d alone my soul waits silently,
    my salvation comes from him.
He alone is my Rock and my  salvation
     my stronghold,
   I shall not falter greatly. 
 ------------------------------------------------
To falter-means to stumble, to hesitate.
-------------------------------------------------
You'd think someone wrote that today, knowing how many have tried to convert us since the many Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and people ringing our door bells.  For us, G-d remains that unseen force that created everything.  Could it still be that anti-Semitism, because Jews have not converted to others' religions, is the cause of not wanting to believe anything written by Jews?  It most likely goes like this:  since Jews are wrong about G-d, their book has to be all wrong, too.  They ignore that their Savior was a practicing  Jew.  
                                                                               

Therefore, when we give testimony of our former history in Eretz Yisrael, people can hoot and holler all they want.  They just show me that they have read but very little history.  The archaeologist just beginning in their professions seem to be one of the worst in reading about our history, thinking they can know all the history from the few remains they find after 3,000 years. Of course the findings are fantastic and  validate our history, but somehow there are those who still hold out that our Torah is just stories for children. "Oh no", they say, "It can't be." I'd say they are in denial, like an alcoholic.  They want to ignore the findings that do prove our existence and story.  For instance, an ancient 4th century CE Samson Mosaic  was found in a synagogue in Israel in September 2013. A stone altar was discovered in November 2013 dating back to the Israelite kings at Shiloh from 1010 BCE.  "Three complete cooking pots and a small ceramic oil lamp were uncovered in June 2013 inside a small cistern in a drainage channel that runs from the Shiloah Pool in the City of David to Robinson’s Arch near the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City that were at least 2,000 years old.  A 2nd Temple period ritual bath was located  in April 2013 in the  Qiryat Menachem quarter of Jerusalem, a rare ritual bath - known as a mikvah in Hebrew." So, young archaeologist, pay attention to what has been going on in the archaeology areas in Israel before you say nothing is found to prove our existence there or our facts thereof.  

Christopher Columbus updated: 2/19/14.

Resource:  http://abagond.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/america-did-not-start-with-the-pilgrims/
http://www.historyplace.com/civilwar/
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/talmud_&_mishna.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Irwin
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/10/us/james-b-irwin-61-ex-astronaut-founded-religious-organization.html
http://www.hebrewhistory.info/factpapers/fp009_navigation.htm
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=883&dat=19651105&id=46ccAAAAIBAJ&sjid=smEEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3959,4986769 (Columbus)
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/egyptian.html
http://judaism.about.com/od/jewishhistory/a/Hebrew-Language-Origins-History.htm
https://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/akframe.html
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Archaeology/archdiscovery2013.html
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/09/archaeologists-stunning-find-ancient-treasure-trove-at-temple-mount-is-a-once-in-a-lifetime-discovery/

Are the Karaites Jewish?

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                         

Karaites  were Jewish people living in ancient Israel who followed the Torah along with all the rest of the 12 Tribes and others. They consider themselves following the original form of Judaism.  It is possible they were members of the Saducees.  Most all Jews  were dispersed at the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE though some were not rounded up and taken as slaves and remained.  The earliest appearance as a sect of Judaism was in 1177-1187 CE by Rabbi Petakhya from Regensburg who met them in "the land of Qedar.  This could have been somewhere in eastern Europe.

They have been found in Constantinople/Istanbul, the Crimean, Asia Minor, the Balkans, Syria (Damascus) Cypus, Moslem Spain (Toledo), Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania. The Palestinian and Egyptian centers of Karaites surpassed those of Persia and Babylonia.  Part of this was because of lenient marriage regulations adopted in the 11th century superseding strict rules by Anan and the early Karaite scholars.  Anan Ben David of the 2nd half of the 8th century was perhaps not the  founder of the sect of Karaites, but was with a similar group that joined the Karaites.  He was the oldest son of the Babylonian exilarch and learned in Jewish law but followed one of the messianic sects then prevalent in Babylon.  His younger brother, Hananiah,  then was chosen  by the caliph in about 760 CE  as head of the academy.   Because they were found in  the Pale of Settlement (Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania), I become very interested as my grandfather came from Telsiai, Lithuania and we consider ourselves as Ashkenazis with the DNA haplogroup of Q1b1a, which is 5% of the Jewish population.

The Palestinian Karaites (those that remained in Israel and Judah after 135 CE) were austere, and settled in Jerusalem and adopted the custom of the Avele Zion who mourned for the Temple and prayed continually for redemption.  The Diaspora communities accepted the authority of the Jerusalem scholars.  Karaism was checked in the 12th century.  There was a verbal dispute in Spain that lasted for 150 years when Judah Ibn Ezra in Castile suppressed the Karaites.  They were also weakened in Palestine by the Seljuk Turks and the Crusaders.  Maimonides curbed the Karaite activity in Egypt.  Leadership of the Karaites then went to people in Constantinople, Adrianople, etc. where scholars added more literature.  By the 12th century, Karaism arrived in Lithuania.  It was found in Troki in the 13th century and Volhynia (Luck).

.  From early times in Israel there had existed a tradition of interpretation and analysis of the Written Law of Moses, and this was handed down orally from generation to generation, as each improved upon understanding the statements.  Thus, no one can say that our religion is "old" or stagnant.  Each time it was updated for better understanding and to fit in their contemporary society.  However, with the Karaites, they felt it was up to each person to interpret the law on his own.

Evidently when Assyria attacked Israel in 721 BCE and then Babylon followed up in 597-586 BCE, many Jews eventually found themselves living in Persia along with Queen Esther.  When Jews returned to Israel from the Babylonian Exile, it was most important that they retain knowledge of their descent and history.  Not only for historical reasons, but also this served as status in their society which affected their relationships with other prominent families, like the ruling House of David.  Jews who had assimilated with non-Jewish neighbors while in Babylon, something not often happening, found that their lineage was thought suspicious especially if they had been a member of the priesthood, the Cohens.  This is referred to in the Book of Ezra.

Judean Jews intermingled with previous exiled Israeli Jews from Assyrian times in Babylon. Their leaders were from of the Davidic dynasty.   Jews were able to return to Israel when Cyrus gave them permission.

During the 2nd Temple period of 538-515 BCE, the Oral Tradition handed down was upheld by the Pharisees and supported by the majority of the people, but it wasn't recognized by the Saducees or the Essenes who had developed their own interpretations of the written law.  When the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, the Pharisaic view won out.  Students would study the Oral Law in many academies.  Then parts of the Oral Law were finally recorded so as not to be forgotten.  Thus, the Mishnah was compiled by Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi.

The very discussion about the laws were recorded later as the Talmud (Gemara).  During the Gaonic Period, the Karaites rejected the Oral Law and denied the validity of the Talmud.  The Gaons were the intellectual leaders, often with power of the Babylonian Jewish community in the post-Talmudic period from the 6th to the 11th century CE.  They were the heads of the academies.  At the end of the 9th century, the academies of 2 different groups moved to Baghdad.

Conventional Rabbis avoided confrontation with the Karaite group until Saadyah Gaon who died in 942 CE attacked them violently and sought to exclude them from the Jewish community.  Various groups closed their ranks and united.  This caused the Golden Age of Karaite literature in both Arabic and Hebrew, producing much writings.  The Gaon failed in his act and much intermarriage continued.  Karaites studied with rabbis and were influenced by them.

 Thus, we find the Vilna Gaon in Lithuania (Elijah Ben Solomon Zalman 1720-1797), a Talmudist. We know he traveled in Poland and Germany, finally settling in Vilna, Lithuania.   He was one against the Hasidism spreading in Lithuania.                            
                                                                           

When the Russians annexed Lithuania and Crimea in the 18th century, Russian Karaites received privileges and rights from the Czars which were denied to the Rabbanites.  The Russian Revolution cut off the Crimean Karaites from others.  350 Karaites survived in WWII in the Crimea and the Russian 1970 census showed a population of the USSR at 4,571 .  In 1991 Troki had 288.  Many from Jerusalem and Damascus had moved to Egypt and then in 1948 they moved back to Israel in Matzliah and other places.  In 1990 Israel had 25,000 Karaites.

Karaites doctrine is conservative and more stringent than rabbinical teaching.  They forbid levirate marriage and all Sabbath illumination and is stricter on laws of purity. That means that  sexual intercourse is encouraged for married couples for Shabbat by Rabbinites, while it is forbidden by Karaites.  They have different laws of ritual slaughter which prevents inter-mingling with the Rabbanites.  They do not celebrate Hanukkah as that is a post biblical historical event.  They don't use tephillin or mezuzot.  Their own Oral Law has evolved with time and sometimes is the same as rabbinical tradition.  The only big difference we Ashkenazi or Sephardi Jews have with them is the sanctity of the Oral Law.  Their literature deals with practical observances and doesn't discuss ethics and metaphysics, with the exception of Aaron ben Elijah who was influence by Maimonides.  Anon abolished the afternoon prayer but he said this was from the post biblical period inserted by the Rabbinites.  He wrote prayers from biblical verses.

Intermarriage between Karaites and Ashkenazi Jews rarely happened, especially not in the Austrian Empire.  Some did take place  in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.   Examples show marriage contracts with special clauses to fit a Karaite-Rabbanite marriage.  A few converts went over to Karaism, most likely with the wife converting.   The rule of being Jewish with Karaites is through the father which used to be followed by Rabbinical Judaism until the 4th century BCE.  Some men from both communities had a special inherited title added to their name.  Cohen shows a descent from the priests who served in the temple in Jerusalem.  Levi is the name of the tribe who served the priests.  This would be found in both groups.

Eastern European Karaites were found who spoke a Turkic language.  It is thought that perhaps they descended from one or more Turkic-speaking tribes who had converted to Karaite Judaism like the Khazars or Kipchaks.  I know that my grandfather b: 1871 in Telsiai, Lithuania, spoke Yiddish and had a Yiddish-German surname of Goldfus, so he wasn't a Karaite, though could have had a few of their genes.   "DNA study has led us to conclude that they also descend in part from ethnic groups that lived in the Byzantine Empire and in Asia. They may have small amounts of Western European and Caucasus region ancestries (the Byzantine Empire at times included portions of those regions)." Brook.  Today, Karaites are a very small minority, and most Rabbinical Jews do not even know that they exist.

Resource: The Genetic Signatures of East European Karaites
by Kevin Alan Brook, Leon Kull, and Adam J. Levin http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/karaites.html
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia 
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/9211-karaites-and-karaism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Karaites
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaite_Judaism
http://www.karaite-korner.org/
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Karaites.html
http://www.karaites.org/
Corrected .  

What The Talmud Really Is

Nadene Goldfoot                                                               

I have found lies on webpages about the Talmud on facebook and they are horrendous.  Most comments are  from Muslims.  They have no idea what they are doing except spreading hatred for Jews.  Someone creates a website, and they all are so fast to believe what is libelously written about the Talmud  that they probably are falling over themselves.  If the Palestinians and their cohorts and suppliers aren't hitting us with rockets, they're hitting us below the belt in our religion.  No telling what their sources are; mostly from some Nazi type of imagination.  Let's get into what the Talmud  really is.

When we were in exile after 70 CE, we wound up in the world in two general areas.  There, our religious leaders needed to write down more about the 5 Books of Moses in teaching materials, so created the Talmud, which means "Teaching" in Hebrew.  One Talmud was written in Babylonia and was called the Babylonian Talmud.   The other was called the Palestinian Talmud as it was written in what was called Palestine, which was the land of Judah renamed by the Romans.

Jews didn't just read the Torah and other books which eventually made up the Tanakh, or "Old Testament."  They discussed it with other learned men, and these discussions were written down like one takes notes in a meeting by the secretary.  So they are a compilation of the records of academic discussion and of the judicial administration of Jewish Law by generations of scholars and jurists in many academies and in more than one country during several centuries after 200 CE.

Each Talmud contains the Mishnah together with a gemara, which is both a commentary on and a supplement to the Mishnah. The Mishna  is the legal codification containing the core of the Oral Law.  It's divided  into 6 sections.  The 1st deals with religious laws pertaining to agriculture.  The 2nd deals with the laws of our Sabbath and the festivals.  The 3rd section deals with women and the laws of marriage and divorce and vows.  The 4th deals with damages, civil and criminal legislations.  The 5th deals with holy things, laws of Kashrut, how to kill a kosher animal without causing pain, consecrated objects.  The 6th deals with the laws of ceremonial purity.  It's very well organized.  The Talmud is a study of different interpretations by very wise men.

They both contain non-legal digressions.  The Babylonian Talmud contains about 2 1/2 million words and is more than 3 times as long as the Palestinian Talmud.  The gemara of the Babylonian Talmud is in Hebrew and eastern Aramaic while the gemara of the Palestinian Talmud is in Hebrew and Western or Palestinian Aramaic.  As it turns out, the Babylonian Talmud is by far the more important of the 2 compilations.

I do not own a Talmud.  I have a Tanakh or Bible, the Jewish version, The Stone Edition.  I also have a set of Haftorahs, which is the Bible in two volumes with commentary.  I love to read the commentary or explanations.  A person who is a biblical scholar would have a Talmud and they would also be in the synagogue libraries.  I find that at present, the best edition available is the Vilna edition of 1902 which has a large number of commentaries and has been reprinted many times.

Where the so called Talmud came from that got into the hands of these anti-Semites probably was created in someone's basement. How could they ever read a Talmud?   They would have had to break into a synagogue and steal one.  I am sure that if it was printed into English, it would be far over their head in understanding.  This stuff is pretty deep,  meant for rabbis, really.

 They are not the first to attack our sacred literature.  There was a Talmud burning by the Catholic Church in Paris on June 17, 1242.  24 cartloads of Talmuds pages were burned as a sequel to the religious Disputation there 2 years earlier.  It happened again  in Italy in 1322.   Then in the 16th century many volumes of all types of Jewish literature was destroyed in Rome on September 9, 1553.  Rabbinic works found in raids on the Jewish quarters were burned sporadically.  Thousands of volumes of the Talmud were burned in Poland by order of Bishop Dembowski  in 1757.

These misguided and hateful fools can barely understand their own  reading material at a 4th grade level most likely and now they're telling their 'like" friends that they can read and understand something in a foreign language and understand the points of view of very scholarly people like a group of PhD's.  Most interesting.

If you read my post on comparing Judaism to Islam, the Muslims have the same amount of religious dogma just like we do.

Resource: http://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2012/02/differences-between-judaism-and-islam.html
 The New Standard Jewish Encycloopedia
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/talmud_&_mishna.html
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/texts/Rabbinics/Talmud.shtml
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/texts/Rabbinics/Talmud/Talmud/Studying_Talmud/First_Page.shtml
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/14213-talmud