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Jewish contribution to world civilization

First- it is true that Jews did not produce anything significant re modern culture until their emancipation at the beginning of the 19th C. But, in past 150 - 200 years, they were very present as contributors to modern science and culture in general. For instance, Einstein is certainly greater scientist than Maxwell (although not equal to Newton), and John von Neumann is one of the greatest mathematicians in history.

Also- historically, their stories and myths are indirect testimony of their own cultural influence as a distinct people, as Sistine chapel, many Rembrandt's works or most oratorios show. Motifs from their mythology in OT/Hebrew Bible, generally replaced- in significance- those from the Antiquity (Adam and Eve, Judith, Noah, David, Job,...).

Unlike Jews, Arabs have not produced anything of worth re modern culture in past 100-200 years (except a few scientists of Arab Christian descent). Well- they have as many chances to show what they can; they did not show anything. There are perhaps 250 million of them and- nothing.

Second- Germans were expelled. And this is both tragedy- and good. Under Nazi regime, Germans tried to exterminate more than half of Europe's population (Generalplan Ost) & actually they got off rather lightly. Germans lost ca. 25% of their country; in the case of Israel, Arabs lost less than 1% of their ethnic-cultural space. Palestinians, who are Arabs as any other Arabic geographical group, can go to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Algeria,... wherever they want & remain Arabs. For Jews as a people- Israel is their only national place. Palestinian Arabs are not a people different from other Arabs, and have huge swaths of land to go to.

Third- Germany has declined hugely after WW2, until present. I am talking about scientific contribution. Jews have been flourishing in Soviet Union/Russia, US, South Africa, France, Italy, Britain, Sweden, .. in the fields of math, physics, physiology, computer sciences, economics, biology, .., while Germans' contribution from 1945 to 2021 in mathematics, physics, medicine, computer sciences,...-virtually vanished.

Hilbert lived to see the Nazis purge many of the prominent faculty members at University of Göttingen in 1933. Those forced out included Hermann Weyl (who had taken Hilbert's chair when he retired in 1930), Emmy Noether and Edmund Landau. One who had to leave Germany, Paul Bernays, had collaborated with Hilbert in mathematical logic, and co-authored with him the important book Grundlagen der Mathematik (which eventually appeared in two volumes, in 1934 and 1939). This was a sequel to the Hilbert–Ackermann book Principles of Mathematical Logic from 1928. Hermann Weyl's successor was Helmut Hasse.

About a year later, Hilbert attended a banquet and was seated next to the new Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust. Rust asked whether "the Mathematical Institute really suffered so much because of the departure of the Jews". Hilbert replied, "Suffered? It doesn't exist any longer, does it!"
 

Replies: @Taxi, @Jihadijew, @Jihadijew, @ProudGermanic

Nice post, PG.

Further, Arabs may be inferior in individual achievement, but in terms of single important ‘deeds’ they are actually *necessary* for subsequent Western thought (scholasticism depended on the Arabian development of Hellenism, e.g. Averroes).
 

I saw this now & it's really useless to argue with someone so deficient in logic. So, just two points.

1. there is no equivalence between Nazi persecution of Jews & Israeli fight with Arabs, especially Palestinians. Nazis have exterminated ca. 1/3 of European Jews, and would have murdered them all if they could. Unlike that situation, Israelis never intended to murder, on any scale, any number of Arabs, including Palestinians. They accepted the UN plan of the partition of Palestine; they attacked Arabs in 1967 only because Arab exterminationist rhetoric & Nasser's war plans have risen to the level of immediate aggression with the aim to completely obliterate Israelis from the face of the earth. Then, in Nazi Germany Jews had been persecuted, tagged, their life boycotted, ... In Israel, Arabs are freer & live better than in most Arabs countries; In Germany, Jews were expelled from universities- in Israel, on the other hand, they give additional lectures to Israeli Arabs so they could enter prestigious Israeli universities, where they, Arabs, constitute ca. 20% of the student population (which is virtually the same as in general population). Could one imagine that Nazi Germany would promote Jewish students in Heidelberg or Goettingen? As regards occupied territories, Arabs have their own school system with university. Can one imagine that Nazi Germany would have allowed higher education in occupied Czechoslovakia, Poland or Russia?

So these parallels between Nazi Germans & Israelis are simply deliriously lunatic.

2. with regard to Jewish contribution to science & culture, I said that Jews have given in the past 150 years more than any people comparable in size, and they even outmatched those in more numerous peoples. It is futile to speculate who is greater, because historical circumstances prevent us from comparing, say, Hilbert to Cardano. This is simply meaningless. But, one must admit that Einstein was the last universal physicist, almost equal in eminence to Newton, and even greater in boldness & imagination- although not even close in mathematics. Einstein made a conceptual revolution more radical than any scientist before him. As far as other geniuses go, von Neumann, Grothendieck (if we are to count him as a Jew), ... perhaps 50% of most important US and Soviet mathematicians & physicists after WW2 were Jews, and Feynman and Gel-Mann are of no less importance than Planck or Fermi.
 
It may be that we live in the time of shrinking contributions to sciences- but, that means that even if Gauss or Newton were miraculously born now, they would not have achieved anything spectacular. For some reasons, creative periods tend to dry after accumulation of so much knowledge. So, in the biggest revolution in modern physics, Jews are extremely well represented- Bohr, Pauli, Oskar Klein, Born, Landau,..and later Feynman, Schwinger, Glashow, Steven Weinberg,.. They are even represented in visual arts, which is their weak spot: Modigliani, Pissaro, Soutine, Chagall, Grosz, Lissitzky.. and out of two most important 20th C composers, one is a Jew (Schoenberg).

This is an extraordinary accomplishment for such a small people- I think there are ca. 15 million of them now.

What is even more impressive is the resurrection of Hebrew language, which has been just a written language of Jewish literature, and became, after more than 2000 years, modern vernacular - a situation unparalleled in history. And that, by now, ca. 7 million people have learned to use it from a scratch- this is virtually a miracle. The existence of Israel is astounding. Apart from the military & similar stuff, Israelis have succeeded in agriculture (where they have been absent for centuries), in modern technology in most areas (say- USB stick), in irrigation, in medical innovation). It isn't for nothing they are dubbed start up nation. It is easy to compare their land, the quality of life there, how people work, learn, teach- with the way of life of surrounding peoples, from Egypt to Iran.

Now, this is longer than I intended, but the absurdness of the original ideas about them is such that to answer it properly, it would take hours & hours- and I have more important things to do with my life.  

Replies: @Truth Vigilante

Even if they get nuked, they have enough nukes to take the rest of the world down with them.
 

Replies: @anarchyst, @Fiendly Neighbourhood Terrorist

Actually, success in the physical world, requires that one be detached from it. Far from hating reality and being above the world, Arabs care too much about the world, and are too attached to certain outcomes, to have the necessary objectivity and distance to be successful, and to have a sense of what's possible, and when to compromise.

It is lack of spiritual virtue, an inability to achieve detachment, that has doomed the Arabs.

Jews have an edge because they are somewhat detached from this world. Western culture, surely, is weak today because it is too materialistic and too attached to this world. As is Islamic culture.

Idealism is universal; the distinctive intellectual creations of the West, are surely, materialism, in all it's forms (Darwinism, capitalism, science), and consequently, excessive attachment to this world.

"High culture" - idealism - is not what doomed the West.

It's an interesting paradox, but weakness is health. Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, understood this.

The true idealist, of course, does lose to the materialist, in the short run. But not the long run. The strong do win in the short run. But the weak win in the long run. The Arabs are losing, because they are trying to be too strong, just as Germany tried to be in WW2.

Replies: @Mulga Mumblebrain, @anon