Just wanted to say thank you for all your videos. You got me interested in Jewish history and inspired me to make my own Jewish history RUclips channel. I remember watching you when you were still covering the second temple period, I never thought we'd get to the modern age
Just found your videos yesterday (and subscribed for more), and you've got some incredible material! Keep improving your recording quality and editing; we definitely need someone highlighting the more unhinged history that's out there.
I'm an Australian and I always saw john monash on the $100 note, but thinking back I don't remember ever hearing his name at school, not even in history. Our ww1 story is only focused on the scrappy young ANZACs at Gallipoli and then it's right onto ww2 and the cold war. The part you mentioned about us not articulating our pre ww2 history is very true and I suspect it will get worse with time.
@SamAronow Thank you so much for answering the question!!! I also only realized/remembered that the questions were only for Gaon and Navi level patrons after I sent in the question. I know there was a phenomenon in Kurland where at least one congregation built a Reform synagogue. It was boycotted by the Orthodox rabbis and, with the exception of Shabbat, was mostly empty, as people only came to it for Shabbat, just like church. At some point, the bima was moved and the synagogue was made Orthodox, so that the Orthodox could come on weekdays and everyone was together on Shabbat. Latvia has always been a mixture of Eastern and Western influences.
Australians are VERY bad at teaching our history. When someone says this they think we are refering to aboriginals, which is certainly true, but I doubt many Australians would be able to name our first Prime Minister. Imagine most Americans not knowing who George Washington was...
In fairness, Edmund Barton was no George Washington. I suspect a lot of this has to do with Australian independence being a slow transition as well as previous generations' aversion to engaging with the country's convict origins.
@@SamAronow He certainly wasn't, his successor Deakin is much more well known. We never had an 'exciting' or dramatic founding myth, federation and independence was peaceful, and framed as an economic and bureaucratic convienience. It's also an awkward truth that many of the founders of our political parties were avowed supporters of the White Australia policy, specifically the (then) socialist Australian Labor Party.
@@SamAronowI don't hear much talk in the U.S. about its convict origins either. Americans tend to gloss over the fact that the first novel in english deals with Britain sending its convicts to what are now the U.S. .
@@johnkilmartin5101 That's because it only applied to the Carolinas and Georgia, whose convict descendants flat out _denied_ their convict origins and insisted that they were descended from Norman nobility as part of a wider justification for slavery.
Is the special on the Jews of Denmark/Scandinavia? That would be my guess given the post about Bohr, but I'm sure it's pretty far off, either way looking forward to it!
gave the viewer survey. not a jew, not israeli, nor palestinian, arab or even middle eastern. i live thousands of miles away yet my interest in jewish history is peak. how far will the jewish history series go? Will you dive more into the "controversial" parts of jewish history that has relevance to everything that is happening right now?
Thank you for answering my question! I thought that the crypto jews perhaps changed certain key rituals to make them more secretive and came to think the new practices are a part of the religion. But if i understand your answer correctly they didnt misremember or change the ritual. Instead they simply thought of the secrecy itself as a part of the ritual and nothing more.(Besides the changes to prayers and removal of hebrew as you mentioned)
I feel like I need to say this, as it has picked on me for a while, as we lead more into the contemporary period were the event past are starting to overlap with larger portions of the population today of whom may be born of this time period onward. When the main Jewish history series ends, as it were does it cut off into modern-day politics and culture?
IME, historians tend to refuse to cover recent events, but given that Sam has a second RUclips channel dedicated to contemporary Israeli elections, he might do. OTOH, I kinda hope he goes back and revises some of his oldest videos to improve them to his current standard of quality, but that probably won't bring in many views.
Just wanna say, as a student of Ukrainian history who is of partial jewish descent, I really appreciated the nuance with the whole Petliura episode. Having also read Abramson's book, I'm glad his own very nuanced and balanced appraisal has become much more mainstream. I hope we get a video on Jewish autonomy in Soviet Ukraine and Belarus, and the Jewish-Ukrainian encounter of the 1920s as it relates to art and culture. Two of the most important Ukrainian-Soviet poets, Ivan Kulyk and Leonid Pervomais'kyi were Jewish. On that subject Petrovsky-Stern's Anti-Imperial Choice is an excellent book. Of course, we've also got tons of great Jewish literary and film figures who were Russophone in the USSR, Mandelstam, Babel, Vertov, and Eisenstein for example. Also excited for all the internal Zionist drama we're going to see in the next two decades, following Zabotinsky's career.
Okay, let's get real niche and arcane: Regarding the 72 names of HaShem (known as ע"ב שמות or שם בן ע"ב or, incredibally, השם המפורש)- though, by definition, such a concept is esoteric, it is certainly not obscure or forgotten, nor is it relegated to one lesser Kabbalist. Far from it. It is both a very old tradition and an extremely influential one in contemporary Jewish mysticism. It is FASCINATING that a crypto-Jewish community preserved it but changed 72 to 73. The tradition that HaShem has 72 names is at least as old as the Talmudic era. The earliest reliable explicit mention of this tradition which I could find is a midrash attributed to the 3rd or 4th century Galilean amora, Rabbi Abin (cf. Midrash Raba on Song of Songs). However, only in the Middle Ages do we see the 72 names actually spelled out - 72 names of 3 letters each, derived from a manipulation of the Hebrew letters of the verses in Exodus 14:19-21 (each of those three consecutive verses is comprised of exactly 72 Hebrew letters). Rashi (in the 11th century) mentions these 72 names in his exegesis on the Talmud and assumes (probably incorrectly) that the tanaim (rabbis of the Roman era) were aware of it. Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra of the 12th century (I'm assuming that's who you meant by Ezra of Tudela, but correct me if not), arguably the most influential Sephardic exegete on the Torah (and my personal favourite medieval exegete period), explicates the 72 names in more detail in his mystical(?) text "Sefer HaShem". It is further developed in the seminal (12th c.?) Kabbalist text Sefer Habahir, and even more so in the Zohar, where it is quite central. It was also a major part of the teachings and practice of such central Kabbalistic figures as Abraham Abu-Lafia, the RaMaK (Moshe Cordobero), and, of course, HaARI (Isaac Luria). Today you will often find the 72 names in the form of an 8X9 table of arcane three-letter combinations that is appended to Mizrahi and Hassidic sidurs, or as an amulet of sorts. It continues to be a huge part of both "serious" Kabbala and "popular" Kabbala. Outside of Haskala-centric Judaism, the 72 divine names continue to feature prominently, as has been the case for over a millenium. Ibn Ezra does indeed relate the number 72 to the Tetragrammaton in the sense that 72 is the gematric value of י יה יהו יהו-ה; later Kabbalists also derive it from the value of יו"ד ה"י וי"ו ה"י. But the arcane sequence itself of 72X3 letters is derived (through a rather counterintuitive method) from those verses in Exodus. I personally suspect that the number 72 came first and the clever ways of arriving at the number came later. In fact 72 may go all the way back to Canaanite mythology being the number of the gods: El, Asherat, and their seventy sons. Also: Moses, Aaron and the seventy elders as the prototypical Sanhedrin G'dola, which is likely modeled in part on the Canaanite notion of the pantheon. The Zohar and later Kabbalistic speculation also include a sacred sequence of numbers: 72, 63, 45, 52 - each corresponding to a different variation on the tetragramaton. MAYBE the sequence 72-63 contributed to the (d)evolution of 72 into 73 in the isolated crypto-Jewish tradition. But that might be a stretch.
Actually the Palestine advance used very little cavalry in comparison to the use of Mounted Rifles (or Light Horse) whether they are mounted on horses or on camels. Even British Cavalry (and their Indian brothers) were trained to us rifles (and they were the same as used by infantry not shortened carbines) as well as the arme blanche. It shocked the Germans in 1914. The Light Horse charge at Beersheba was with sword bayonets in hand (they were 550mm log!) After Beersheba the Light Horse began to be issued with cavalry swords but this was discontinued at the conclusion of hostilities and the swords withdrawn. Perhaps Monash is not as celebrated as many would wish because in Australia we do not applaud the generals but he common "digger". Shown as laconic, self deprecating, loyal to mates, will follow good officers, will criticise the hell out of those seen as elitist, etc. Monash did not kill too many but was ruthless in driving his troops to the achieve the objectives set for him and by him. (I note there is a lot of criticism of his handling of the August battles on Gallipoli) Best book on Monash is probably Peter Pedersen's 1985 book, Monash as Military Commander, Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, ISBN 0-522-84267-4. Pedersen's presentation on the August Battle and Monash's role was electrifying at a conference I attended...
"Marc François Jérôme Wolff, est colonel en 1808. Il se convertit cette année-là au christianisme et devient ensuite général et baron d'Empire. Mais se n'est pas par besoin de carrière qu'il se convertit. Un autre, resté Juif, devient général : Henri Rottembourg (1811); son nom est gravé sur l'Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile." Wolff converted... but was really the 1st... after I recognize it got in the fringe...
18:60 I think a lot of the reason for this is because American national identity is much more ideological than is common around the world. You and I can identify with the civil war and revolution even though our families didn't live here then because they are taught not as the struggles of our ancestors for an abstract idea of national identity, but as a struggle for freedom that anyone can identify with.
2024 Viewer Survey
forms.gle/Lm22oDgbR7ohfjrA7
Viewers surveys are something way more channels should use
and filled out.
Just wanted to say thank you for all your videos. You got me interested in Jewish history and inspired me to make my own Jewish history RUclips channel. I remember watching you when you were still covering the second temple period, I never thought we'd get to the modern age
Didn't expect to see you, love your videos!
@@singularkakapo Thanks! I'm hard at work on the next one
Ay yo butt naked commando??
your answers and memes on reddit are awesome dude.
Just found your videos yesterday (and subscribed for more), and you've got some incredible material! Keep improving your recording quality and editing; we definitely need someone highlighting the more unhinged history that's out there.
10:03 hey that was my correction, glad to have made an impact, no matter how small it was
7:36 Your audio mentions "The other person I left out was Henry Wickham Steed" twice.
The Mendelson Libe looks like it follows the Gefilte Fish Line fairly closely.
I'm an Australian and I always saw john monash on the $100 note, but thinking back I don't remember ever hearing his name at school, not even in history. Our ww1 story is only focused on the scrappy young ANZACs at Gallipoli and then it's right onto ww2 and the cold war. The part you mentioned about us not articulating our pre ww2 history is very true and I suspect it will get worse with time.
Exciting to see you get into the more modern parts of history. Thanks for this new perspective on history! Especially now.
Telling us there's another Mendelssohn line running through Asia but not showing us a map is plainly cruel.
Hi Sam, did you know that Melbourne has a renowned university named in honor of John Monash? If not, well now you know.
Gratulon kaj dankon!
@SamAronow Thank you so much for answering the question!!! I also only realized/remembered that the questions were only for Gaon and Navi level patrons after I sent in the question.
I know there was a phenomenon in Kurland where at least one congregation built a Reform synagogue. It was boycotted by the Orthodox rabbis and, with the exception of Shabbat, was mostly empty, as people only came to it for Shabbat, just like church.
At some point, the bima was moved and the synagogue was made Orthodox, so that the Orthodox could come on weekdays and everyone was together on Shabbat. Latvia has always been a mixture of Eastern and Western influences.
Yeah, this is actually pretty typical east of the line.
Thank you.
I thought "WW1: Part 2" was just known as "World War 2"
Glad you are finally covering "87 5", my favorite part of Jewish history.
He edited the title a few minutes after the notification, weird quirk
Great video as usual sam
Australians are VERY bad at teaching our history. When someone says this they think we are refering to aboriginals, which is certainly true, but I doubt many Australians would be able to name our first Prime Minister. Imagine most Americans not knowing who George Washington was...
In fairness, Edmund Barton was no George Washington. I suspect a lot of this has to do with Australian independence being a slow transition as well as previous generations' aversion to engaging with the country's convict origins.
@@SamAronow He certainly wasn't, his successor Deakin is much more well known. We never had an 'exciting' or dramatic founding myth, federation and independence was peaceful, and framed as an economic and bureaucratic convienience. It's also an awkward truth that many of the founders of our political parties were avowed supporters of the White Australia policy, specifically the (then) socialist Australian Labor Party.
@@SamAronowI don't hear much talk in the U.S. about its convict origins either. Americans tend to gloss over the fact that the first novel in english deals with Britain sending its convicts to what are now the U.S. .
@@johnkilmartin5101 That's because it only applied to the Carolinas and Georgia, whose convict descendants flat out _denied_ their convict origins and insisted that they were descended from Norman nobility as part of a wider justification for slavery.
@@SamAronow Moll Flanders is set in Virginia. I think an enterprising genealogist could find the origins of "white trash" in those convicts.
Is there a small cut error around 07:38 :) ?
Mises, the momentous person of libertarian economics, was born in a jewish family in Lviv. That what I can be proud of :)
Is the special on the Jews of Denmark/Scandinavia? That would be my guess given the post about Bohr, but I'm sure it's pretty far off, either way looking forward to it!
I am not Jewish but I still really love these videos they are very interesting
gave the viewer survey. not a jew, not israeli, nor palestinian, arab or even middle eastern. i live thousands of miles away yet my interest in jewish history is peak.
how far will the jewish history series go? Will you dive more into the "controversial" parts of jewish history that has relevance to everything that is happening right now?
Hi Sam! Do you think you will return to the Elections channel one day? I am eager to learn about the newer elections and drama in the Knesset
I can't fathom the concept of Old Australia being not relatable to New Australia as anything other than an exercise in self hatred
Thank you for answering my question! I thought that the crypto jews perhaps changed certain key rituals to make them more secretive and came to think the new practices are a part of the religion. But if i understand your answer correctly they didnt misremember or change the ritual. Instead they simply thought of the secrecy itself as a part of the ritual and nothing more.(Besides the changes to prayers and removal of hebrew as you mentioned)
There was at least one thing they changed: they observed Yom Kippur a day early to throw off the authorities.
@@SamAronow that's interesting! Surprised that it worked
@@almogz9486 Who's to say that it was necessary at all? The only thing that's certain is that it didn't fail.
leo amery quoting cromwell:in the name of god... go!
I feel like I need to say this, as it has picked on me for a while, as we lead more into the contemporary period were the event past are starting to overlap with larger portions of the population today of whom may be born of this time period onward. When the main Jewish history series ends, as it were does it cut off into modern-day politics and culture?
IME, historians tend to refuse to cover recent events, but given that Sam has a second RUclips channel dedicated to contemporary Israeli elections, he might do. OTOH, I kinda hope he goes back and revises some of his oldest videos to improve them to his current standard of quality, but that probably won't bring in many views.
Just wanna say, as a student of Ukrainian history who is of partial jewish descent, I really appreciated the nuance with the whole Petliura episode. Having also read Abramson's book, I'm glad his own very nuanced and balanced appraisal has become much more mainstream.
I hope we get a video on Jewish autonomy in Soviet Ukraine and Belarus, and the Jewish-Ukrainian encounter of the 1920s as it relates to art and culture. Two of the most important Ukrainian-Soviet poets, Ivan Kulyk and Leonid Pervomais'kyi were Jewish. On that subject Petrovsky-Stern's Anti-Imperial Choice is an excellent book. Of course, we've also got tons of great Jewish literary and film figures who were Russophone in the USSR, Mandelstam, Babel, Vertov, and Eisenstein for example.
Also excited for all the internal Zionist drama we're going to see in the next two decades, following Zabotinsky's career.
Just for the record:
You cannot speak about the “protocols of the elders of Zion” without mentioning Sergey Taboritsky
Okay, let's get real niche and arcane:
Regarding the 72 names of HaShem (known as ע"ב שמות or שם בן ע"ב or, incredibally, השם המפורש)- though, by definition, such a concept is esoteric, it is certainly not obscure or forgotten, nor is it relegated to one lesser Kabbalist. Far from it. It is both a very old tradition and an extremely influential one in contemporary Jewish mysticism. It is FASCINATING that a crypto-Jewish community preserved it but changed 72 to 73.
The tradition that HaShem has 72 names is at least as old as the Talmudic era. The earliest reliable explicit mention of this tradition which I could find is a midrash attributed to the 3rd or 4th century Galilean amora, Rabbi Abin (cf. Midrash Raba on Song of Songs). However, only in the Middle Ages do we see the 72 names actually spelled out - 72 names of 3 letters each, derived from a manipulation of the Hebrew letters of the verses in Exodus 14:19-21 (each of those three consecutive verses is comprised of exactly 72 Hebrew letters). Rashi (in the 11th century) mentions these 72 names in his exegesis on the Talmud and assumes (probably incorrectly) that the tanaim (rabbis of the Roman era) were aware of it. Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra of the 12th century (I'm assuming that's who you meant by Ezra of Tudela, but correct me if not), arguably the most influential Sephardic exegete on the Torah (and my personal favourite medieval exegete period), explicates the 72 names in more detail in his mystical(?) text "Sefer HaShem". It is further developed in the seminal (12th c.?) Kabbalist text Sefer Habahir, and even more so in the Zohar, where it is quite central. It was also a major part of the teachings and practice of such central Kabbalistic figures as Abraham Abu-Lafia, the RaMaK (Moshe Cordobero), and, of course, HaARI (Isaac Luria).
Today you will often find the 72 names in the form of an 8X9 table of arcane three-letter combinations that is appended to Mizrahi and Hassidic sidurs, or as an amulet of sorts. It continues to be a huge part of both "serious" Kabbala and "popular" Kabbala. Outside of Haskala-centric Judaism, the 72 divine names continue to feature prominently, as has been the case for over a millenium.
Ibn Ezra does indeed relate the number 72 to the Tetragrammaton in the sense that 72 is the gematric value of י יה יהו יהו-ה; later Kabbalists also derive it from the value of יו"ד ה"י וי"ו ה"י. But the arcane sequence itself of 72X3 letters is derived (through a rather counterintuitive method) from those verses in Exodus. I personally suspect that the number 72 came first and the clever ways of arriving at the number came later. In fact 72 may go all the way back to Canaanite mythology being the number of the gods: El, Asherat, and their seventy sons. Also: Moses, Aaron and the seventy elders as the prototypical Sanhedrin G'dola, which is likely modeled in part on the Canaanite notion of the pantheon.
The Zohar and later Kabbalistic speculation also include a sacred sequence of numbers: 72, 63, 45, 52 - each corresponding to a different variation on the tetragramaton. MAYBE the sequence 72-63 contributed to the (d)evolution of 72 into 73 in the isolated crypto-Jewish tradition. But that might be a stretch.
Actually the Palestine advance used very little cavalry in comparison to the use of Mounted Rifles (or Light Horse) whether they are mounted on horses or on camels. Even British Cavalry (and their Indian brothers) were trained to us rifles (and they were the same as used by infantry not shortened carbines) as well as the arme blanche. It shocked the Germans in 1914. The Light Horse charge at Beersheba was with sword bayonets in hand (they were 550mm log!) After Beersheba the Light Horse began to be issued with cavalry swords but this was discontinued at the conclusion of hostilities and the swords withdrawn.
Perhaps Monash is not as celebrated as many would wish because in Australia we do not applaud the generals but he common "digger". Shown as laconic, self deprecating, loyal to mates, will follow good officers, will criticise the hell out of those seen as elitist, etc. Monash did not kill too many but was ruthless in driving his troops to the achieve the objectives set for him and by him. (I note there is a lot of criticism of his handling of the August battles on Gallipoli)
Best book on Monash is probably Peter Pedersen's 1985 book, Monash as Military Commander, Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, ISBN 0-522-84267-4. Pedersen's presentation on the August Battle and Monash's role was electrifying at a conference I attended...
For which reason would you say the Israeli religious far right tends to be pro-Russia/Putin?
No idea; I haven't gotten there yet.
The 1920s... EVERYBODY CHARLESTON!
"Marc François Jérôme Wolff, est colonel en 1808. Il se convertit cette année-là au christianisme et devient ensuite général et baron d'Empire. Mais se n'est pas par besoin de carrière qu'il se convertit. Un autre, resté Juif, devient général : Henri Rottembourg (1811); son nom est gravé sur l'Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile."
Wolff converted... but was really the 1st... after I recognize it got in the fringe...
2nd commemt
Thanks for everything you do Sam!
18:60 I think a lot of the reason for this is because American national identity is much more ideological than is common around the world. You and I can identify with the civil war and revolution even though our families didn't live here then because they are taught not as the struggles of our ancestors for an abstract idea of national identity, but as a struggle for freedom that anyone can identify with.
1st like, comment and view
Again, the survey does not contain the category "man" so I cannot complere it
But there is… 👀 I just saw it