Introduction

Christianity, Islam, Rabbinic Judaism (Rabbinism), and Karaite Judaism (Karaitism) all descend (via complicated intellectual lineage) from Biblical Judaism, whose Palestinian Temple variant died a slow death after the defeat of Bar Kochba as the vast majority of the Judean peasantry (90% of the population) converted in droves to Christianity. Greek Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, and Coptic Orthodox have ritual close to that of the elite Jerusalem/Leontopolis Temple version of Biblical Temple Judaism. Islam mostly descends from Jamesian Christianity in which Jesus was Messiah but not divine. Islam is a minor evolution of the popular Biblical Judaism of first century CE Palestine. Rabbinic Judaism is a Mesopotamian religion that diverges tremendously from the core of Biblical Judaism. Not only is Rabbinic Judaism barely Abrahamic, but as the pre-modern Jewish commercial-financial niche vanished, modernization caused far more decay in Rabbinic Judaism than is seen in Christianity or in Islam.

Zionism is a Recent Phenomenon That Obscures the Nature of Judaism

Zionism is a scam that depends on gentile ignorance.

The minority of modern Jews, who practice Rabbinic Judaism, adhere to a religion with less continuity to Biblical Judaism than either (Orthodox) Christianity or Islam have.

Zionist racism against Palestinians includes delegitimizing them by asserting that European Jews descend from ancient Judeans while Palestinians descend from Arabs that colonized Palestine from the 7th century CE onward.

Only a moron, ignoramus, or liar claims that modern Jews have any more connection to ancient Judeans than modern Roman Catholics have to ancient Romans.

To be more accurate, modern Roman Catholics have more connection to ancient Romans than modern Jews have to ancient Judeans because some modern Roman Catholics descend from ancient Romans. Ancient Judeans (as well as ancient Samarians and other peoples of ancient Palestine) never left Palestine en masse either by voluntary departure or by forced exile.

The Romans never removed a population en masse from its territory and had no effective means to do so.

Why would the Romans remove the peasantry, who formed most of the value of Palestine and constituted about 90% of the population? The Romans divvied up the estates of rebels among themselves. The Romans would hardly have destroyed the value of those estates.

The ancient peoples of Palestine including Judeans are ancestors of modern Palestinians as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi wrote in The Land of Israel in Past and Present — ארץ ישראל אין פאַרגאַנגענהייט און געגענװאַרט. (Ben-Gurion and Ben-Tzvi were trying to formulate a way to render the Zionist movement to the Ottoman Empire, which they feared would drive out the Zionist movement if the Central Powers won WWI.

No modern Jew descends from ancient Judeans — Judaism was a massively proselytizing religion in ancient times

• as Hebrew and Christian Bibles as well as the Talmud attest and
• as ancient writers like Josephus, Dio Cassius, Tacitus, Seneca, and many others recognized.

In the Roman Imperial period and probably long before, the vast majority of the Judaic population was non-Judean in origin.

Modern Jews all descend from non-Judeans that converted to Judaism.

Palestinian Biblical Judaism versus Mesopotamian Rabbinic Judaism

Even though non-specialists incorrectly assume that Judaism practiced by ancient Judeans of the Greco-Roman period was the same Rabbinic Judaism that modern Jews practice today, Rabbinic Judaism is the youngest of Abrahamic religions and is a Mesopotamian religion that does not reach final form until the 10th century CE by dint of the effort of RASAG, his colleagues, and his opponents. A Greco-Roman Judean (or Galilean like Jesus) would have to convert to Rabbinic Judaism to be accepted as a Jew.

RASAG is also known as:

• Saadia ben Yosef Gaon,
• سعيد بن يوسف الفيومي‎, or
• רבי סעדיה בן יוסף אלפיומי גאון.

The Babylonian Talmud, written in Babylonian Aramaic and Mishnaic Hebrew, is the main scripture of Rabbinic Judaism. The Rabbinic Jewish calendar is the imperial Mesopotamian calendar and not the Palestinian calendar used by Samaritans. Rabbinic Jewish synagogue rites follow Mesopotamian ritual and not the originally pre-Rabbinic Palestinian ritual, which died out as Aramaic-speaking native Judeans all converted to Christianity or to Islam.

Mishnaic Judaism and Christianity

Rabbinic Judaism descends from Mishnaic Judaism.

While one might argue incorrectly that the Mishnaic portions of the Talmud show the Palestinian origin of the Babylonian Talmud and thus demonstrate the Palestinian origin of Rabbinic Judaism, such a claim is incorrect.

[The Tannaim of the Talmud were Palestinian, but they (especially Rabbi Akiva) were completely discredited in the eyes of Palestinian peasants for supporting Bar Kochba, who persecuted the peasantry.]

Judah the Prince (or Patriarch) along with Nathan of Babylon

1. built on the earlier efforts of the Tannaim in their new effort to introduce a written version of the Oral Torah (תורה שבעל פה) to Palestine from Iraq (Mesopotamia or Babylon) and
2. redacted the Oral Torah into a set of codices in order to compete with Christianity, which was at the time the trending codex religion.

The Oral Torah is almost certainly a complete fabrication.

[A modern Rabbinic Jew, who has genuine religious faith, would probably assert that after the shattering of Biblical Temple Judaism by the Judaic Wars, the subgroup,

1. which studied the Mishnah,
2. which created the Talmud, and
3. which became the Rabbinic Jewish community,

remained within the community of Israel even though Rabbinism differs radically from Biblical Judaism because the ancestors of this subgroup participated in the theophany at Sinai but interpreted the theophany in way appropriate to their time period and circumstances.]

Neither Jesus, Philo of Alexandria, nor Josephus shows any knowledge of an Oral Torah.

Judah’s codices were a flop in Palestine probably because the Mishnah (Judah’s redaction of alleged Oral Torah) mandated a particularly vile form of male genital mutilation, which appears to have been common in Mesopotamia but was alien to Biblical Temple Judaism (or to Hellenistic Biblical Judaism) as it was practiced at the time of Jesus or of John the Baptist.

Mishnaic Judaism was unable to compete with Judean Christianity, which had won the hearts of the Palestinian peasantry, which began to consider Judaism a religion of proprietors and exploiters. The hostility was mutual between the large class Palestinian peasant and the small group of Palestinians that participated along with a much larger group of Mesopotamians in the development of Talmudic Judaism. (The Hebrew phrase for peasantry עם הארץ became an insult in Mishnaic Hebrew and in Talmudic Aramaic. While the Yiddish pronunciation of the phrase in Yiddish merged Hebrew evolved to near unrecognizability, the phrase is also an insult in Yiddish.)

Talmudic Judaism and Islam

Wikipedia correctly describes the relationship between the Gemara, the Mishnah, and the Talmud. “The Gemara and the Mishnah together make up the Talmud. The Talmud thus comprises two components: the Mishnah – the core text; and the Gemara – analysis and commentary which ‘completes’ the Talmud” and which is written primarily in Aramaic, which is a language only rarely understood by modern Jews.

Somewhat simultaneously with composition (or completion) of the Babylonian Talmud, Islam (or proto-Islam) seems to have started in Hijaz where Jamesian Christian Galileans seem to have emigrated to avoid persecution. Jamesian Christianity considered Jesus to be the Messiah but not divine just as Islam does.

When the Byzantine Empire drained by war with the Sasanian Empire retrenched and left Palestine to the rule of Levantine Arab foederati and Ghassanid Arabic Phylarchs in a tributary Arabic state, Palestine was peacefully incorporated into a nascent Arabic Empire. The Arabic or Islamic Conquest seems to be a religious myth that has no historical reality.

Despite Zionist propaganda intended to legitimize and to normalize genocide of Palestinians, exactly the same people lived in Palestine in 630 CE and in Palestine in 640 CE after the mythical Islamic Conquest.

Islam seems to have crystallized in Palestine (Crossroads to Islam - Wikipedia) as the Arabic Empire replaced the Byzantine Empire in Palestine. Eventually Islam won the hearts of most of the people of Palestine. The finalization and spread of Islam seems to have provided the impetus for the crystallization of Rabbinic Judaism from Talmudic Judaism.

Rabbinic Judaism: A Domain Specific Religion

Rabbinic Judaism can be elucidated by reference to Islam.

The Mishnah is apodictic. The Babylonian (Mesopotamian) Talmud, which is the Holy Scripture of Rabbinic Judaism, provides theory, principles, and methodology of jurisprudence.

Rabbinic Judaism especially in its Central and Eastern European variant is a religion built on scripture that is a giant treatise on أصول الفقه (usul al-fiqh: loosely “legal theory” – a term of art in Islamic jurisprudence but also applicable in Rabbinic Judaism, in which the legal core is the Mishnah).

Because the Talmud is a giant treatise investigating and extracting theory, principles, and methodology of law, argumentum ad absurdum (analysis of extremes) often plays an important role in the text just as similar analysis is often used in Western legal systems.

Islam does not have an apodictic text like the Mishnah. Islam uses the example of the Prophet Muhammad to extract something like the Mishnah via علم الحديث (ilm al-hadith: science or investigation of traditions). Then أصول الفقه is applied to create a school of law and associated legal code.

In Islam the class of علماء (ulama: scholars) was proportionately small. Rabbinic Judaism was customized to be a religion to a community that had the role of a commercial-financial stratum on a contract basis to a state or state-like organization, which needed commercial-financial services.

The Rabbinic Jewish class with a need for knowledge of commercial law was relatively large. The Hebrew Bible really had but one purpose in pre-modern Jewish communities. All Jewish pupils in a heder (Yiddish or Hebrew: חדר ) or kuttāb (Judeo-Arabic: كتاب, כתאבּ) were taught to understand meanings of Bible verses in relation to commerce. This common understanding, which is based on RASHI’s commentary, made it possible for Jewish business networks to function among Jews, who did not really have a common language.

[Before RASHI’s family switched from European Hellenistic Biblical Judaism to Mesopotamian Talmudic Judaism, he family had been leaders of European Hellenistic Judaism. RASHI’s Biblical commentaries preserve the learning of European Hellenistic Biblical Judaism.]

Otherwise the Hebrew Bible, which is the backstory to the Talmud, was relatively less important for Jews than the Old Testament is for Christians to whom the Old Testament is the critical backstory to the New Testament, which makes no sense without the Old Testament.

Zionism and the Decay of Rabbinic Judaism

A phenomenon like Zionism developed because the medieval commercial-financial niche, which belonged to Jews began to vanish and traditional Talmudic learning lost importance.

Jews were left only with misunderstood Hebrew Biblical texts and distorted derivative fairy tales.

To acquire comprehension of Rabbinic Judaism, one does not use a Jewish encyclopedia, which has usually been written by Jews with little knowledge of Rabbinic scholarship. One must spend time in a yeshiva, misivta, and kollel or in a Jewish seminary. Judaism like Islam never had an intellectual revolution that caused important religious texts to be translated into vernacular languages.

Darmok

If it seems incredible that a religion could be constructed around religious law that is transformed into a universal commercial code, it is worthwhile to note an old Yiddish proverb.

• .תורה איז די בעסטע סחורה
• Toyre iz di beste shkoyre.
• Torah (religious law) is the best merchandise.

The STNG Season 5 Episode 2 Darmok (Watch Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 5 Episode 2: Darmok - Full show on Paramount Plus) does a fairly good job of demonstrating how common understanding of Biblical verses served Jewish trading networks during the pre-modern period. See below.