#13, the “root movement” would have been related more to persecution or expulsion than anything else, and Jews did not really get involved in finance until maybe the 16th century at the earliest — by which time Jewish settlement patterns in Europe were pretty stable.

Remember also that miscegenation was rare because of religious law on both sides. Conversion to Judaism was considered apostasy in both Christian and Muslim law, the child of an un-converted non-Jewish mother would not have been considered Jewish, regardless of paternity.

Lauren Bacall (pictured) is first cousin to the current President of Israel, Shimon Peres. (Bacall’s family name at birth was Persky, from which ‘Peres’ is derived.)

Any book recommendations (“popular science” type or maybe a bit more advanced) for someone who wants to better understand how genetics is applied to the study of human populations? I’m basically looking for a primer that would help me better understand Razib’s more technical posts.

One issue that has always troubled me about the “Khazar hypothesis” is the seemingly complete lack of linguistic evidence supporting it. If Ashkenazi Jews originate from Turkic tribes, why do they speak the street-language of ca. 11th-century Rhineland, lightly infused with Hebrew and Slavic loan-words but with basically no Turkic content at all?

@Charles Nydorf, what language did the Khazars speak? A Germanic language or a Turkic language?

Interesting stuff on the origins of the Khazar language and of Yiddish, but to me at least, the question I posed in post #5 above still stands — i.e. how one could defend the theory that the Turkic-speaking Khazars were the major ancestors of modern Ashkenazi Jews (as many still believe) when the Ashkenazi language contains so few identifiably Turkic words (and those it does contain seem to have come through the intermediacy of surrounding Slavic languages).

… that is, unless one argues that the Khazars (at least those who were Judaized) spoke a Gothic language that later evolved into Yiddish. Clearly I’m neither a historian nor a linguist.

Razib, I would be interested to know generally what your “day-job” is. This is purely out of a sense of curiosity (i.e., which part of an obviously bright and prolific polymath’s daily activities end up paying the bills?) The biographical sketch in the sidebar provides a couple of past details, but I’m still curious.

#29 Isabel, you might enjoy reading “When They Severed Earth From Sky”. It was a “game-changing” read for me.

Razib, I’m interested in what your “day job” is (generally speaking). The biographical sketch in the side-bar gives some info about your past experience, but I’m curious about how someone with such broad interests as yourself actually “pays the bills”.

An idea from a columnist in our local newspaper: those protesting come from societies where the government has traditionally placed extreme restrictions on the media (including the Internet). To them, for a movie / book / website to be allowed by the government means it must be condoned in some way by the government. Otherwise, why would it be available?

The basic divergence in values implied here is in freedom of expression. The protesters see governmental permission to blaspheme as government endorsement of blasphemy. The whole nation becomes guilty.

The stagnation of NY’s population is a bit of a surprise at first glance, but brings to mind my impressions on driving through Buffalo and Rochester — once part of the industrial / manufacturing heartland, but now shadows of their former selves.

Here in Canada you see comparatively few Kindles — much more popular is Kobo (formerly a Canadian company), which I believe is somewhat more “open”. The public library systems here “lend” e-books that are Kobo-compatible.

Great post, Razib — it’s going to take me a while to digest it. As I read it, though, I was thinking about how much your argument applies (or doesn’t apply) to Judaism in its most common form.

On one hand, in Judaism there is a strong alignment between “belief” and study of traditional texts, and the most important stage in a man’s religious development is spending a few years (or more) in the yeshiva learning Talmud all day (learning and using the “intellectual toolkit”). This is far more widespread today than it was in the past, but even then, basic literacy was relatively high (among males) and most would have been well acquainted with “Chumash (Bible) with Rashi”. It’s difficult to see a Christian parallel to this — maybe in Byzantine times but certainly not in the Western sphere.

On the other hand, the scope of this “intellectual toolkit” is almost entirely focused on decisions of civil law and ritual practice (kashrut, Sabbath laws, ritual purity, etc.) Theological speculation was traditionally discouraged for all but the elites and still is today (in Orthodoxy, only adult men of a certain age are permitted to study Kabbalah).

Your thoughts?

Hm, I didn’t even know Google Currents still existed — hope they don’t kill that one too! Anyway, I am using Feedly as well, and while it’s pretty good, some aspects seem more “clunky” than Google Reader.

The Digg Reader is supposed to come out today. Looking forward to seeing what that looks like.

They’re just that — risk factors. They raise the probability of getting cancer, but not all the way to 100%, just as their absence doesn’t lower the probability of getting cancer to 0%.

I’m not sure it makes sense to equate the 1660s “Dominion” of Virginia with the 1860s Dominion of Canada. The name may be the same, but surely the ideas behind it changed over 200 years.

I too would be interested in the details. I’m woefully ignorant about changes in government systems in other countries, but I can tell you that the Canadian system of government has changed very little since its inception (the only major change I can think of being the abolition of the upper houses at the provincial level, and that generally happened within 20-30 years of Confederation).

This is an interesting post, especially for someone who is largely ignorant of American history except in its broadest outlines (i.e., me). I have “Albion’s Seed” on my very long reading list after one of Razib’s previous posts recommending it.

I wonder if a similar analysis has been done for Canada. Patterns of immigration and assimilation have obviously been very different here relative to the USA — we started off smaller and grew much more slowly, and there were differences in the source countries, the timing of their arrival, and what happened afterward.

So, for example, while Canada had immigration from German-speaking countries, the scale was nowhere near what the USA seems to have had (was there not talk at one point in the 19th century of making German an official language in the USA?) Our Western provinces were settled to a massive extent by Ukrainian immigration in the late 19th c. (their descendants include some household names — Alex Trebek, Randy Bachman, etc.) which AFAIK was not a factor in the USA. Eastern European Jews arrived in Canada in large numbers, but in the 1920s (vs. the 1870s-1880s in the USA) so the patterns of settlement and assimilation have been different. Similarly for the Italians and Portuguese.

The most influential wave of immigration to Canada, of course, was the one that came from the USA in the late 18th century. It took me a while, as a kid, to make the connection between the United Empire Loyalists we heard so much about in history class and the “refugees” from the American Revolution (called “Tories” in the USA? The word now has a different connotation) Much of the cultural and economic growth of central and eastern Canada was seeded by the Loyalists.

How all this plays out politically is something I would have to sit down and read about (hopefully).

She didn’t say that she can’t wait to go to Finland, but she does express wonder at her Finnish (or Finnish-like) ancestry as well as an interest in pursuing it — so she doesn’t dismiss it entirely. In any case, I’m not surprised that she highlights the African part of her ancestry, for some of the reasons you cited — the precision that the results provide — and also because, for an American, west Africa is likely a lot more exotic than Finland.

I’m scientist working in industrial R&D. Don’t have much of biology / genetics background, but very interested in history.

So the interesting thing is that many Francophone Quebecois have Irish ancestry that dates from the mid-19th century (especially those from outside of Montreal). I wonder how that skews (or does not skew) the results.

Razib — yet another paper recently appeared on the genetics of the Ashkenazi Jews.

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131008/ncomms3543/full/ncomms3543.html

I am interested in the topic but am nowhere near qualified to understand the details (beyond the introduction). My take on it is that (1) it corroborates the idea that the Ashkenazim are, very broadly, descendants of Near Eastern (“Judaean”) men who lived in the Mediterranean basin and took local (“Roman”) wives, and that (2) it puts another nail in the coffin of the “Khazar hypothesis”.

Am I missing something important?

Brings to mind the great cilantro debate. I don’t know about the specifics of the genetics but there was an article in Nature last year.

http://www.nature.com/news/soapy-taste-of-coriander-linked-to-genetic-variants-1.11398

I have many friends who claim cilantro tastes like dishwater. I quite like it.

Interesting article Razib. The world of chemistry (my field) is only still in the baby-steps stage of modernizing scientific publishing; open-access articles are still quite rare, and publication of raw data is quite uncommon except in certain niche sub-specialties. I get the strong feeling that we are far behind biology and physics in this regard.

(1) I will be interested to hear your experiences with Kumon for reading. Our own experience (with our son, now in first grade) is that after a lot of time spent “working” on reading with him — mostly unsuccessfully — progress came rapidly and suddenly, around age 5.5. It’s like someone flipped a switch. Other parents I have spoken to report the same thing.

(2) Re: children as non-persons — I recall that there are some cultures (perhaps native South Americans?) where children are not even given names until age 4 or 5.

“Genome” was a great read — taught this chemist a lot of biology. I found it in the laundry room of the apartment building I was living in at the time (in a “free books, please take” pile). People used to leave back-issues of Science and Cell in the laundry room as well. It was that kind of place.

Razib writes: The problem, which was left implicit, is that it often meant that the regulated behavior of observant Jews become more and more constricted.

Joe Q. comments: In this case it’s not necessarily that their behaviour became more constricted, but that it became constricted by central authorities rather than a local ones. This is a broad trend in orthodox Judaism, one that traces over milennia but has accelerated in the last 80-odd years — the idea that authoritative decisions handed down in law codes become more valid than the body of decisions made by local community rabbis.

In practice, though, the level of practice ascends to the most rigid common denominator, as Razib points out.

As an aside, I found “The Essential Talmud” a frustrating book. It tells the reader what the Talmud is about, without ever demonstrating what it is.

I would have thought that the Crusaders would have mixed in at least a little bit with the original Christian population of Lebanon / Syria / Egypt etc. — maybe not enough to leave a cultural signature, but enough to leave genetic traces?

A couple of thoughts on this: I do agree that the science of nutrition is not nearly as robust as (to use Razib’s example) planetary mechanics, but I also suspect that many “authorities” in this area are aware of this. Is it instead that the breakdown is not in the research, but in how the research is forged into policies or recommendations (by governments, popular media, etc.) ?

A second thought is that moral panic about the “purity” of food is a side-effect of its ready availability. You can be picky when you know you won’t starve. I am reminded of horse-meat in the USA during the 19th century (there was just a good article on this somewhere — Priceonomics?) the popularity of which was inversely correlated with the health of the economy. Once times got better, people started to turn up their noses.

A related study was carried out at the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada) in 2013.
http://www.uoguelph.ca/news/2013/10/study_herbal_pr.html

It will be interesting to see if these findings strike a lethal blow to the naturopathy movement.

A great deal of Rabbinical Jewish literature is an attempt to reconcile Rabbinic precepts, or practical traditions as they have been received, with the “plain reading” of the Biblical texts (explaining contradictions or more generally demonstrating how the former is derived from the latter). Much of the Talmud consists of these attempts at textual reconciliation. Razib provides one example; there are other famous ones (such as the scene where Abraham appears to prepare and serve a non-kosher meal).

On a related note, throughout the Rabbinic literature there are threads that discourage literalist re-interpretation of the Biblical text. To study the Torah without the traditional commentaries in front of you (mostly of the medieval era) was frowned upon, borderline heresy, and this theme persists to this day — you will be very challenged to find an Orthodox printing of the Torah without commentaries.

The importance attached to commentary and traditional explanations of challenging segments of the Biblical text provides a degree of flexibility that allows Judaism to persist, or at least moves the basis of fundamentalism from the Biblical text to more pliable Rabbinic ones. As a counter-example see the Karaite Jews, who cling to a more direct interpretation of Jewish law directly from the Torah — and whose numbers have diminished significantly over the centuries.

Along these lines, I have often thought that Orthodox Judaism has more in common with both traditional Islam and Orthodox or traditional Catholic Christianity — all have an emphasis on ritual practice and a scriptural perspective that relies on ancient commentary and received traditions.

ISIS may be more akin to fundamentalist or Evangelical Islam, in some ways similar in its approach to Evangelical Christianity. That ISIS uses brutal violence is a reflection of violence as it is depicted in the Koran. Calls to violence in the Jewish Bible are more limited in scope, and in any case the Rabbinic interpretation has discouraged violence through creative reinterpretation (Amalek being a classic example). One wonders what would have happened if the Christian scriptures advocated extensive violence — what would the trajectory of the Evangelical movement have been?

Sorry for the long post, this stuff has been top of mind lately.

i have found the koran pretty boring and not too memorable, but i’m a little surprised anyone would say that the hebrew bible’s violence is ‘limited in scope.’

By “limited in scope” I mean “limited in time and place”, sorry if this was not clear. Obviously the violence described is brutal but it is directed at particular groups of people at particular times, rather than a blanket instruction destined at outsiders. And in any case the later layer of Rabbinic interpretation substantially neutralized much of this, including the death penalty. The Rabbinic treatment of the “eye for an eye” is… eye-opening.

Is the proper interpretation of “an eye for an eye” that it is a call for proportionality?

That is part of it. The rabbis reinterpret further and conclude that the whole passage refers to proportionate monetary compensation for damages.

“Malodour conjugate precursors” is a good one, reminds me of the unusual substance in asparagus that is metabolized to a smelly substance that comes out in the urine. The molecules pictured here are ones that I would not expect to have much of a smell on their own, but I can understand how differing levels in sweat would affect the makeup of skin and underarm flora — as well as susceptibility to bug bites.

In one of Ron Unz’s articles, he noted the collapse of Jewish achievement.

Your comment prompted me to dig up this discussion — seems that Unz is not without his critics on this point (apparently his analysis is based on numbers of students with Jewish-sounding names at east-coast US universities)

I think Greg Pandashtang’s comments were addressing Orthodox Christianity, not Orthodox Judaism.

The issue of Christianity-as-polytheism in Judaism is connected to business transactions and the oaths involved therein, but lurking in the background is the traditional Jewish reluctance to avoid ruling in ways that would provoke violent or costly retaliation from powerful non-Jews (local leaders, kings, the Church, etc.) My guess is that Rabbinical rulings about the status of Christianity are heavily coloured by these concerns. Better not to anger the Church when you depend on it to keep the local thugs calm.

In this sense “influenced by having to deal with Christians on a regular basis” is a good way of putting it.

Polygamy is likely a different case, as it was very much a local-cultural thing to begin with, and seems to have been rare at both in the Talmudic academies as well as Europe before the time of Rabbeinu Gershom. Iranian Jews practiced polygamy within the last 100 years, and Yemeni Jews even within the last 20-30 years.

The world of chemistry / materials science is sorely lacking in tools like these (my colleagues think I am high-tech for subscribing to the journals’ “as-soon-as-publishable” RSS feeds). One wonders why.

So far as I can tell, the US federal dietary guidelines are just that (guidelines, suggestions, etc.) No compulsion is involved and no guns are being held to any heads, so I’m perplexed at comments about the government “making decisions about the health of hundreds of millions” or “withholding salt … from the populace at large” as a way of diminishing the pleasure they get from food.

Fair enough, I was unaware that these institutions had to adhere to the guidelines to receive funding. (I don’t live in the USA)

The patients may be automatons, but there is still a gap between influencing medical advice and the idea that salt is being withheld from people, against their will (with the exception of government funded institutional kitchens, as noted above).

I see a fundamental difference between this case and the Food Babe: in the former, recommendations based on actual research (lacking though it may be) are revised over time, whereas in the latter, there is no actual research to begin with.

The interesting twist here being that Hillel was basically a Pharisee.

Sugar and whole grains, for sure. I would add trans fatty acids to the list.

School lunches is where this issue hits home for me.

Thank you for pointing this out. Here in Ontario, likely also in the rest of Canada, there is no cafeteria service in schools until you get to the high-school level. Kids bring their lunch from home.

Interesting to note that the natural sciences do not come off scot-free here, though the linked article does not make clear what exactly is meant by “read”.

Many papers in the sciences can be valuable (and cited) just for the procedures or protocols described, and extracting these nuggets of information doesn’t usually require a cover-to-cover reading.

Razib, one reason why the direct RSS feed of your GNXP post might be preferred is that (so far as I can tell) that particular feed provides the full text of articles, while your “total” feed only provides excerpts.

Can anyone recommend any layman-oriented articles or reviews that discuss the ancestry / heritage of the “Cape Coloured” people of South Africa?

Not only atheists and agnostics, but also Jews (2% of the general [American] public, 8% of scientists). However, in this case it is quite likely that “religious affiliation” is a poor proxy for depth of religious belief, since “Jewishness” as most American Jews define it has a massive ethno-cultural component with only tenuous links to any kind of theological world-view.

An interesting (and pretty much canonical) proverb in Jewish orthodoxy is that it is the government that keeps the world from descending into violent chaos. (The actual quote is something like “Pray for the welfare of the government, for if people did not fear it, they would eat each other alive.”)

At the same time, in some isolated groups of very traditional Orthodox Jews there is a widespread belief that the non-Jewish / non-religious world is steeped in licentious behaviour (random casual sex, robbery, etc.) and that those who turn away from Orthodoxy do so largely because they want to engage in said behaviour.

My recollection is that Arabic script is considered (in hindsight) fairly ill-suited to Turkish, based on the structure of the language itself (lots of open syllables, vowel harmony within words, etc.) and its poor match to a writing system that doesn’t “natively” indicate vowels in a straightforward way. The ambiguity in written language was largely resolved by switching to the Latin alphabetic system where vowels are specified explicitly.

Of course there was a strong political layer to the issue as well (which I believe is also playing out in central Asia, where some Cyrillic alphabets are being discarded for Latin-derived ones).

Overall though, the adaptability of alphabets is pretty interesting. There exists a rich literature in what is basically German written using the Hebrew alphabet. German written in the Hebrew alphabet is (IMO) easier to read than Hebrew written in the Hebrew alphabet.

How narrowly is literacy defined? I can easily appreciate that Japanese and Korean speakers have roughly equal ability to read and understand texts of equal complexity, but I’m not sure that their ability to write texts of equal complexity (e.g., dictation) would be the same. Just too many stories (including some in this thread) about Chinese or Japanese speakers forgetting how to write the character for “knee”, or “sneeze”, etc.

Curious if Razib or any of the regulars here have read the works of Vaclav Smil (“Bill Gates’ favourite writer”). I am halfway through “Creating the Twentieth Century”. It’s an interesting historical perspective but also somewhat frustrating from a science / engineering perspective. Wondering what to tackle next.

It will be interesting to see how the trajectory of same-sex marriage in the USA compares to Canada, which is about 10-11 years ahead in the process (and instituted same-sex marriage nationwide by legislation rather than a court decision, though court rulings at the provincial level had already legalized it in much of the country).

In Canada’s case the loudest criticism seemed to come from the Roman Catholic church hierarchy (Canada is a plurality Roman Catholic country). The RC Church criticized the nominally Catholic politicians who spearheaded the legislation, and a prominent Bishop appeared to advocate for the re-criminalization of homosexuality. There wasn’t much for opponents to hold on to in this case.

There was a brief attempt to re-open the debate when the current Conservative government took power in 2006, but it basically fizzled. Since then, same-sex marriage has pretty much been a non-issue, to the extent that Ontario now has an openly gay Premier who is married to her partner — a fact that was rarely mentioned or discussed during the campaign, even by social conservatives.

The distinction between Ashkenazi and Sephardi is important, but the commonality they share is equally important and in the end far more special than what either one shares with any goy. A hard line Ashkenazi rabbi will eventually admit, if pressed, that there is nothing apart from expediency which would preclude a man from having multiple wives.

This comment overstates the differences between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. All Jewish authorities agree that polygamy is permitted “de jure” — laws of Jewish marriage, divorce, and basic relations between men and women are predicated on the idea that a man may take multiple wives even though “de facto” polygamy has been prohibited in the Ashkenazi world since the Middle Ages by force of decree (from a very influential rabbi of that period). Polygamy has not been common in the Sephardi world for some time as well.

Differences between Sephardi and Ashkenazi practice are largely confined to some ritual activities and some aspects of dietary law. It’s hardly as if they are different religions.

Yemeni Jews continued to practice polygamy until well into the 20th century. Note that Yemeni Jews are not Sephardi (they do not descend from 15th-c. Spanish exiles)

It seems worth mentioning that even if you major in science you will have enough “general education” requirements in college that you are bound to be exposed to some level of literature and social sciences, even if it’s only 2-3 classes in each subject. AFAIK it’s really only engineering (which, for whatever reason, has resisted the shift to a mandatory graduate degree of other professions) where the requirements on students are so heavy that gen-eds are essentially waived.

That may be true in the USA, but not everywhere. I went to university in Canada as a science major and didn’t take any real literature or social science classes in my time there. I knew many others who were in a similar boat. It was simply not expected and not done. (This was in the mid-1990s)

Conversely, the engineers were required to take electives in these areas as a condition for getting their degrees.

It is hard to imagine the existence of a Dominion dominated by groups with dissenting Protestant sympathies and economically ascendant in a manner which competes with England not being a major question in the 19th century in lieu of the American Revolution.

Canada provides something of a natural experiment here. By the 1830s the major political forces in the Canadian colonies were just such a dissenting religious and cultural group (French-Canadian Catholics) and fellow-travelling reformers, with all the locals ruled in a heavy-handed way by Governors appointed in London, with assistance from the friendly local nouveau aristocracy (many of whom were Loyalist families).

The Canadian colonies weren’t really economically ascendant but they provided a lot of raw material to British industry, so there was a vested interest in Britain in keeping them under firm control.

The result was a violent rebellion in 1837-1838, followed by both the provision of responsible government (part of the slow road to Canadian political independence) and, paradoxically, by a policy of cultural assimilation that sought to overwhelm French Canada with English people, language and culture. The latter remains a grievance of mainstream French-Canadian nationalists to this day.

I was unaware of a Canadian rebellion.

It wasn’t particularly bloody but it was politically significant, especially in Lower Canada (present-day Quebec). The focus of the rebellion was not so much the Crown (though there certainly were republican elements) so much as against the patronage-driven, quasi-aristocratic system of government.

Speaking of World Wars, if the United States was part of the British Empire, it surely would have been involved much sooner in both World War I and World War II

It would have been involved in World War I immediately, by definition — individual component countries of the British Empire did not have control of their own foreign policies until the 1930s. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa entered World War I “automatically” when Britain declared war.

Further, in the wake of the American Civil War, Britain attempted to create a stronger centralized government in Canada, so that it would never experience the kind of secession movement that tore the U.S. apart. Of course, all these efforts failed, but they were real enough.

I wouldn’t say that the latter effort failed — Britain did indeed create a centralized government in the nascent Canada where there had been none before, and it has held up (secession movements notwithstanding) since 1867. Prior to the early 1860s it was not at all clear that the Atlantic colonies — which were politically and geographically isolated from Canada East and Canada West — would or should join with the Canadian colonies, and there was a lot of resentment and nervousness in Nova Scotia in particular (which has a strong legacy in the way Canada is governed).

However, you are certainly correct that the Civil War had an effect on the whole endeavour — people living in British North America were horrified, and the whole thing put a huge damper on republican movements in Canada, as well as leading to the exclusion of the word “Confederacy” from the country’s official name.

I’m not shocked or surprised at all… It’s a consequence of Canada’s small population and the USA’s extraordinarily strong inward-looking tendencies.

I lived in the USA for a number of years, and found that even people from border states knew little about Canada. The most common questions I got were related to French-Canadians (why weren’t they forcibly assimilated?) and to Canada’s status as an independent country (isn’t it colony of the UK?)

One wonders which is preferable — the status quo or deeper involvement. We are “sleeping with an elephant”, after all.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/p/pierretrud112307.html

I had to look up what you meant by “sweet tea” — I see that it means “sweetened iced tea” in the USA. Iced tea is not that popular in southern Ontario, but if you ask for it, you will indeed usually get the sweetened kind.

If you ask for “sweet tea” you will get a cup of hot tea with sugar.

I don’t doubt that there were a lot of “Tories” from the southern states who came to Canada, but I would be surprised if they were anywhere close to a majority. There is a reason Canadians speak like people from the northern US border states (and not like Brits or US southerners)

What do all those TLAs stand for? Is there an acronym glossary somewhere?

On a similar note, I remember seeing a video about a group of Greek-speaking Muslims in northern Turkey (Trebizond area? Can’t remember) They are said to speak a relatively “pure” Byzantine Greek even after all these centuries. They are Muslim but somehow have not assimilated into the Turkish-speaking majority population.

Razib — I would agree that it is hard to tease Mesopotamia apart from Persia as a whole, but given that the Persians ran their empire in a fairly “hands-off” way when it came to the different ethnicities living therein (at least by the standards of the era) I think it is worth making a distinction.

The Jewish community overall seems to have been quite comfortable in the Sassanid empire, for the most part. They had a considerable degree autonomy and were generally treated well by the authorities, but so far as I can tell from my reading, the authorities in question were usually local Babylonian administrators, not often Persians per se. So you find that overall there are very few Persian loan words or expressions in the Babylonian Talmud and only sporadic mention of specific Persian rulers.

I am sure that the Persian milieu had a big influence on Talmudic civil law, but it is hard to discern where the critical Persian influence on Talmudic religious law lies. Apparently there are some very “Zoroastrian” theological ideas scattered throughout the Talmud, but there are also some clearly anti-Zoroastrian comments as well. The Rabbis fairly roundly rejected dualism.

As for polygyny, it is true that only the Ashkenazim explicitly forbade it via the decree of Rabbeinu Gershom, but many Sephardim (especially in urban Europe and North Africa) followed the ban as well, and my understanding is that it became increasingly uncommon over the centuries in that community. The Yemenites of course practiced polygyny well into the 20th century.

I used to tell non-techie people that “the Internet helps connect people (of similar hobbies or interests) that ordinarily would never find each other”. I think this was very true in the era of Listservs, USENET, later PHP-BB forums for every conceivable topic, and later still the comments sections of popular blogs. A lot of that activity has since moved to Twitter and special-interest FB groups, not necessarily for the better IMO.

FB itself is a bit of a strange beast. Great for keeping in touch with former classmates and colleagues, seeing what they’re up to, seeing pictures of their kids. In that case it takes the place of the “annual Christmas letter”. I’m not sure it’s quite as a good as a forum for discussion or debate — it is a bit too one-stop shop — like an unholy mix of business and pleasure.

Twitter is something I still struggle with. I know a lot of people love it, but I find it far too ephemeral, the signal-to-noise ratio so low that one’s senses become overloaded. I only really use it for things that are not available elsewhere (public-transit system notifications and interesting people with no other online presence) Perhaps I’m just “doing it wrong”.

A similar situation obtains in Canada. The region of suburbs surrounding the City of Toronto is known as “the 905”, and its residents (about 4M of them) as “905ers”, after its area code (which split off from the main southern Ontario code some time back). It’s not necessarily pejorative though.

I too will give Genghis Khan book a try — I recently finished “Empires of the Silk Road” and have to admit that while there was certainly a lot of information in it, I found it somewhat tedious and (by the end) embarrassing.

RIP. I read “Ingenious Pursuits” some years ago and quite liked it.

Interesting article in Chemical and Engineering News a couple months back about animal trials of cancer therapeutics. Many dog breeds have had highly elevated risks of particular cancers accidentally “bred in”. E.g. Scottish Terriers at a 19-fold higher risk of developing bladder cancer compared to other breeds.

http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i33/Fido-Fetch-Cure.html

I find this interesting. I was accepted at some pretty good grad schools (in the sciences — but obviously one of the “lesser” sciences) with far lower than an 800 in the math GRE. I don’t recall ever being asked about my GRE scores, or extensively discussing them with classmates or professors (except for one acquaintance — a native English speaker — who went to a top-five graduate program in the hard sciences with a verbal GRE score in the 500s)

What seemed far more important in terms of admissions was the reputation of the undergraduate institution (i.e., has this institution previously produced candidates that have gone on to do well in our graduate program) and the candidate’s undergraduate research experience.

Pretty much all of Canada is “Pop” territory.

“Soda” I can understand, but “Coke”? Boggles the mind. I can’t imagine how those conversations play out.

Waiter: Would you like something to drink?
Customer: Sure, what kinds of Coke do you have?
Waiter: We have Coke, Sprite, ginger ale, and Orange Crush.
Customer: I’ll have a ginger ale then.

Brand name used as generic.

Kleenex instead of tissue
Q-Tip instead of cotton swab
Frigidaire instead of refrigerator

I don’t think it’s that simple. We’re not talking about all types of cola being referred to as Coke (which I could understand, and which would be analogous to your examples) but rather all types of soft drink regardless of their flavour or colour.

Anyone with working colour vision and taste buds can instantly tell the difference between Coke, Sprite, Ginger Ale and Orange Crush. The only things they have in common is that they are aqueous, fizzy, and sweet. Yet in some places they’re all referred to as “Coke”. It’s as if paper towels and toilet paper were all called “Kleenex”. Makes no sense.

The Theranos narrative always seemed a bit fishy to me. The idea of using a benchtop device to get accurate and reliable biochemistry results from miniscule quantities of blood is, to me, one of those extraordinary claims that requires extraordinary evidence, and that evidence is thin on the ground, IMO.

People sometimes compare Holmes to Steve Jobs (and her clothing choice would seem to encourage such a comparison) but the “technology readiness” ladder Theranos has to climb in order to be successful is necessarily much taller than anything Apple has faced. I think the WSJ is correct in pointing out that the public has been somewhat bamboozled by Holmes’ story (the nobility of her cause, dropping out of Stanford to pursue her dream, etc.) as well as by Theranos’ heavyweight board of directors.

You shouldn’t necessarily be concerned. I’m guessing you’re making the assumption here that most of your readers are mostly interested genetics in a deep way? That may be the case to be honest but personally I have a lot more interest in your political/cultural and especially historical themes. So I wasn’t likely to be interested in genetics anyway.

I’m pretty much in the same boat. I’m a science type, but not a biologist. The genetics stuff is interesting — but not enough for me personally to make the effort to delve into textbooks for fun — it’s the historical stuff that keeps me coming back.

I suspect the headline on the Quartz article was selected, by someone other than the author, to be inflammatory “by design”. The article focuses much more on women in tech (gender balance) than about the ethnic makeup of the SV workforce.

The title of the article on Bangladeshi UN peacekeepers reads “Why One Small Nation Plays a Major Role in Peacekeeping” — perhaps it’s small geographically, but they’ve got more people than France and Germany put together.

Its contribution to UN peacekeeping forces is impressive though.

Could there be a linguistic element to the more potent Islamization of the Moroccan community vs. the Turkish one? I would imagine that the bulk of social-media / recruiting content would be in Arabic.

One thing that I think is important to control for is self-selection in immersion programs. In Canada at least, immersion programs skew strongly to higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and even for immersion students from less well off backgrounds, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the parents of kids in immersion programs are more invested in their children’s education than average simply by virtue of taking the initiative to choose a specialized program for their child.

I think this is an important factor. In this case though, it’s probably hard to compare. The California system Razib is describing is more like the Francophone public schools we have in Ontario (and perhaps some other provinces) than like French Immersion.

Interesting piece, Razib. Here in Toronto there is a large evangelical Christian Korean-Canadian community. There are seven or eight Korean Presbyterian churches in the city, some of which are enormous.

These friends will talk about being the only Jew in the room the way that whites will talk about walking into black neighborhoods.

I’ve heard a lot of “only Jew in the room” type comments but it’s an ethnic diversity observation more often than not (i.e., “everyone in this room is a European-American [nominal] Christian except me”). I personally have never heard it used to express a feeling of being threatened.

I know little about the early history of Islam, but how certain can we be of the relationship of the Qurayshi of today to the Qurayshi of ca. 1,500 years ago? One would think there’d be some incentive for outsiders to fraudulently claim membership in a particularly “noble” tribe.

The map is fascinating. Bulgaria and the former DDR stick out like sore thumbs. And I do agree with the previous poster that the near-white area around Poland / Belarus / Ukraine seems to roughly trace out the borders of Poland as it existed in the inter-war years.

The caption states “children born out of wedlock” — I wonder how the survey data was actually collected. (I.e., children currently under the age of 13 who were born to unmarried parents vs. total fraction of the population whose parents were unmarried at the time of their birth)

I agree with you about the historical gap — it frustrates many people interested in Jewish history — the thing to remember is that the proto-Ashkenazi community was tiny both in size and in influence during this period. The centres of population and intellectual activity were much farther east.

It may not have been a rabbinic declaration but rather the Christianization of the Roman Empire that made Judaism as a whole (including conversion to Judaism) less tolerable. Certainly there were a lot of anti-Jewish edicts starting especially in the mid-300s AD.

The Talmud study practice you refer to in the opening of your post is called Daf Yomi (“daily page”) and is fairly new in relative terms — less than 100 years old. There is a set worldwide schedule and everyone participating studies the same page on the same day. It takes about seven years to read through the entire Talmud at this pace.

One thing to note is that most of the Talmud is very mundane. There are some “theological” discussions but enormous sections of it have to do with civil law, damages, elements of ritual practice, etc. It is mostly a logical analysis, attempting to reconcile differences of opinion between Rabbis and attribute statements that are not clear based on other statements that are. There is some story-telling and folk medicine. There’s not a lot of talk about God.

In practice working-class males were expected to engage in some traditional learning, but usually lighter fare. A page of Talmud a day in the original is a pretty major commitment and not really do-able except for the highly educated.

It’s logical within its four daled amos. You’ve got to give it credit. By modern rational standards, not so much.

Re: post-docs for those heading to industrial careers — they aren’t needed for training purposes, but they provide a competitive advantage to the job-seeker in an environment where there are more PhD graduates than relevant job openings. We have the same phenomenon in chemistry.

Re: gentrification: Razib writes “only people who can afford there should be able to live there”. In the case of home-owners, the “affordability” that matters may be decades in the past, and gentrification becomes an age thing. Here in Toronto the average house price is about ten times the median household income, and prices have been going up around 5-15% per year consistently for the last 12-13 years (with a brief blip in 2008-9), so age ends up being a better predictor of home-ownership than income is.

Last year I decided that I needed to learn a “modern” programming language (I’m part of the generation that used Turbo Pascal in high-school). I don’t do any programming for a living but felt it would be a useful skill. Python seems to be the recommendation of choice for people in my situation, so that’s what I went with. It seems very readable and intuitive, compared to what I’ve seen of some other languages.

I’m always somewhat surprised when big American scientific societies hold their annual meetings in Canada. I’d think it would pose an enormous barrier for many potential attendees (those without passports, or foreign students or trainees who would need special visas).

Vancouver is pretty crunchy-granola in many respects, and has the West Coast vibe going just like Seattle, but AFAIK Seattle is a lot more white than Vancouver. Vancouver is about 40% Asian (mix of East Asian and South Asian).

The ethnic diversity is pretty standard for Canadian cities. What sets Vancouver apart these days is the whole housing issue (one of the most expensive housing markets, on an income-multiple basis, in the Western world). It’s all-consuming and is slowly turning the city into a kind of casino for the ultra-rich.

Yes, the “astronaut” effect in the 1990s was hugely influential, but Vancouver had an enormous Asian character before that — lots of Japanese, Chinese and Indian immigration, some of which has been fairly well assimilated.

“Astronaut” phenomena are still hugely influential, but in this case the newcomers are from the PRC (no Commonwealth advantage). Vancouver has plenty of five- and six-bedroom homes (sitting on the site of former 1950s two-storeys) occupied by single 18-year-old, Bentley-driving UBC students. This is the modern story of the city. It may be “NorCal-Lite” in some respects, but Vancouver has only a small tech industry — its economy is based on real estate, international shipping, and (to some extent) the drug trade.

Razib — how do you find the time to read as much as you do? As someone who (like you) also has young kids and both full- and part-time gigs, and who has a long reading list that I can’t seem to make a dent in, I am genuinely curious. Do you spend all your leisure time reading, or are you an unusually fast reader, or both?

I’m curious — where did Cinnamon come from? Was he / she the pet of someone involved in the project, or otherwise specifically chosen for some reason?

The one and only Old Testament law clearly and positively affirmed by Jesus in the Gospels, in the Sermon on the Mount no less, is the prohibition against divorce (“… let no man put asunder.”)

I find this statement confusing. The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) clearly presupposes the existence of divorce — is there a prohibition against it in the Jewish scriptures? If so, where?

Right, the prohibition is not absolute.

The only prohibition is against a man re-marrying his ex-wife if she has been married to someone else in the interim. Otherwise, divorce is perfectly acceptable (though later Jewish law had a lot to say about it).

I do see your point about Evangelical acceptance of divorce. Every community has its own focus.

Evangelicals don’t care what you think about divorce; they should in principle care what Jesus thinks. That was my point, not pedantic discussions of Torah interpretation.

It’s hardly a pedantic discussion of Torah interpretation — it’s a straight reading of the Biblical text. You claimed that there is an Old Testament prohibition on divorce. There isn’t, though Hillel and Shammai disagreed on what were acceptable grounds for divorce.

I agree with you that that particular Christian teaching is often ignored by Protestants. We can leave it at that.

After four days in Canada I really don’t see why at minimum we don’t have a customs union and open borders so we can dispense with these sorts of friction to travel.
…
Pandora was blocked in Canada for some reason. And I had to call to make special provisions to maintain data on my phone. Really is there a reason for this?

Not to be glib, but the reason is that Canada (despite how familiar it may feel to visiting Americans) is a sovereign country with its own laws, its own telecommunications and IP regulations, its own trade and immigration policies, etc.

Canada (due to its relatively tiny size) tends to be very protectionist when it comes to issues like these. Even free trade with the US was enormously controversial in the late 1980s and received enormous news coverage when it was being negotiated (it was the major issue in the 1988 Canadian federal election). Trade- and border-related issues involving the US get a lot of press coverage and are very much in the public consciousness. Serious movement towards an open Canada-US border would likely mean suicide for any Canadian government that attempted to undertake it.

The requirement for a passport to cross the Canada-US border is indeed a post-9/11 thing, imposed on the US side. Some kind of ID and proof of citizenship has always been required, though.

The main concern with an open border on the Canadian side is fear of weapons smuggling, which is already a big issue in cities close to the border.

I too am having issues with the RSS feed. In my case I think I’m subscribed to the Razib Khan Total Feed or something. Lately it is kicking out old articles (from late 2015) as “new”. Not sure what is going on.

Many parts of the Reform Jewish service were expressly modelled on church worship. The early Reformers admired the pageantry / majesty / decorum of Christian religious services — traditional Jewish services are chaotic and free-wheeling by comparison.

There were places (mostly Europe, in the 19th c., IIRC) where Reform Jews observed their principal day of worship on Sunday — for the same reason.

I think the move back to traditionalism in Reform Judaism is partly due to lack of a “need to compromise” as Razib mentions — the other side of this coin is a renewed desire to affirm a sort of cultural or religious identity, and a recognition that Reform Judaism as it was being practiced in the mid-20th century typically led directly to disaffiliation or assimilation.

Good luck with your new site, Razib. I too was always a bit perplexed at how you fit in with Unz Review, which seems to otherwise be at a pretty low intellectual level.

Feedly is great, but Inoreader is also worth checking out, for those who were fans of the old Google Reader.