The collapse of the imperial-scale welfare system, due to over-production of recipients (a special case of general imperial over-extension)

I haven't waded into political dIsCouRsE for awhile, since there has been nothing new to add from what I've already said. But with the looming possibility of food stamp (SNAP) benefits not going out for November, amid the federal government shutdown, it's worth examining the collapse of the charity / safety net sector of society, during the broader collapse of an empire -- as well as its stratospheric growth during imperial expansion.

A large majority of English-language internet content comes from outside America, as English has become the global lingua franca -- but that doesn't mean foreigners understand America, just cuz they speak English and have watched American movies or played American serial killer simulators. So when they hear about cuts to the American food stamp program, they project their own nation's status quo onto ours, and imagine cuts to their own system. But America is the last bloated empire left standing, currently entering its collapse stage, so all comparisons from foreigners will fail.

The clearest way to see this is in the scale of food aid across countries. With SNAP in the news, many Americans are suddenly shocked to discover how much of the population receives it -- about 13%, or 1 out of every 8 residents, an astonishing figure.

And that's just SNAP, not counting the various other arms of the food assistance system, such as food banks, where the estimate is about 17%, or 1 out of every 6 residents, receiving that form of food aid. Depending on the overlap between the two -- and presumably some people are getting both -- that's at least 20% of people living here relying on food aid.

Food banks don't supply every meal for every day in every month -- but neither do the benefits paid out by SNAP, which may be merely $25 a month.

Food banks de facto do not put any barriers to eligibility, unlike SNAP which is means-tested -- you have to be making below a certain income, you generally have to work if you're able-bodied and working-age, and so on, and all of this info is documented and verified by case workers. SNAP is targeted more toward rural residents, while food banks seem to be aimed more at urban or metro-area residents. So I don't think there's tons of overlap between the two, meaning the percent relying on food aid could be higher, like 25%. But it's at least 13%, based on SNAP alone.

What percent of other 1st-world countries rely on food aid? It's hard to say, cuz some bundle all social welfare pay-outs into a single allotment, and it goes toward food, housing, and other basic expenses. That is a maximum figure, then, for food stamps. Some countries don't include food payments, but do give out food packages in kind.

Regardless of these differences from the American system, no other 1st-world country is even remotely close to America's level of food assistance -- about 1-2% of the population in Sweden and Glorious Nippon, 4-5% in France and Italy, even in Poland only 3% rely on food aid. I looked for English-language stats on Russia, but sadly they're all slopaganda -- if any legit Russian-language source can be found, let me know.

So outside America, the most vulnerable 1-5% would be affected by cuts to food aid. And because those on food aid are so much lower in the social pyramid, cutting their benefits would strike their citizens as obscenely cruel.

But in America, cutting food aid "only" affects the bottom 13-25%, which of course includes the same bottom 1-5% as would be affected in other countries, but at least an extra 10% of the population higher up on the pyramid, which is between double the share who get aid outside America (in places where 5% get it), up to 8 times the share (in places where 1-2% get it).

Aside from cross-national comparisons at the same time, we can compare America today to America in years past, back to the 1970s when the system was regularized and institutionalized. There has been a jump in both the share of the American population relying on food aid, and the amount spent on food aid (inflation-adjusted, as a share of GDP, however you measure it). This traces back only to the aftermath of the 2008 Depression, from which America has never recovered (the elites only printed up $10 trillion and handed it out to moronic strivers to play around with). It spiked even further during the Covid hysteria, and 5 years later is still not down to pre-Covid levels, despite Covid being over.

There was a gradual increase during the '80s and '90s, although there was also a decrease during the second half of the '90s. So some of this can be blamed on neoliberalism and de-industrialization, but the jump since 2008 and 2020 seems more like the NGO-industrial complex seizing the opportunity to expand their operations, with the crisis du jour as a rationalization. Other 1st-world countries were destroyed by 2008 and 2020, but they didn't expand their food aid system to cover 13-25% of their population like we did.

For comparison, in 1974 as the system went nationwide, food stamp enrollment was 15 million, out of a total population of 214 million, or 7%. Since 1980, it has maxed out at 10% during a recession and/or a phase of greater funding, and dipped into the high single digits during economic recoveries and/or a phase of lesser funding. But tearing above 10% and that becoming the new normal is very recent. And by the looks of things, that percentage may only grow in the short-term.

And again, that's only SNAP, the means-tested form of food aid -- not covering the exponential increase in food bank aid, which used to be nearly non-existent and limited to soup kitchens, canned food drives, and the like, but has now expanded to rival the SNAP program itself. The estimate of 17% using them is over the course of a year, but even at the time-frame of a month, about 5% of respondents use them (see here for discussion of the 2 different national statistical surveys that ask about food security).

Food banks appear to have grown to fill a separate niche than the SNAP niche -- namely, people who don't qualify for SNAP, due to income, work status, citizenship status, difficulty / unwillingness in filling out forms, or whatever else.

There's surely some double-dippers, but most inquiries I found online about visiting food banks said they don't qualify for SNAP and are curious if the food banks will impose similar means-testing on people who show up to food banks (short answer: they will not, de facto, although they may ask you for an ID to show you reside in the area, or to sign a legally unbinding form that you pinky-swear represents your income). Food banks appear more likely to serve downwardly-mobile middle class residents of metro areas, compared to SNAP.

Then there's the growth in the amount spent on the program, aside from the rise in the percent using it. Some of the long-term growth in the SNAP budget is due to overall inflation, but the program's budget was fairly stable at about $20 billion during the '90s and early 2000s. It made a quantum leap to a new normal of about $60 billion in the wake of 2008, and made another quantum leap to a pandemic peak of $120 billion in 2022, although that has declined to a new normal that is still a quantum leap above the 2008 jump, at around $100 billion for 2024.

It doesn't matter that this is "a drop in the bucket" of the national budget, at 1-2% of federal spending -- when every single program uses up 2-3-4 times as much as it used to in just the 2000s, it collectively explodes the federal budget. And this is even more unsustainable these days, since more and more federal spending is paid for by debt -- with ever-soaring interest rates -- and by currency debasement (printing up trillions in a single year of 2020, which never gets withdrawn from circulation).

The good ol' days when "taxpayer dollars" paid for government spending are long gone -- now everybody pays a highly regressive tax, namely hyperinflation once our unsustainably skyrocketing debt gets defaulted on and no one will loan us even a small amount that is necessary, as well as currency debasement which has already shaved off a double-digit percentage of the dollar's purchasing power in the past few years alone -- and that trend is only escalating, as the dollar sinks and gold soars.

So, rather than the deluded para-political game of "musical chairs" that is a constant source of slopaganda in social media fanfic -- or picking which programs to keep and which to slash, and by how much for each program -- the reality is that every single one of those programs is going to collapse, as our empire collapses. All are bloated beyond their original purpose, beyond sustainable levels, and no one will yield, so they will all totally collapse, and be replaced by state-level replacements in the post-imperial era, much like rump states will replace the current federal state as polities.

In 5-10 years, we won't be bailing out Trump's cronies in Argentina to the tune of $40 billion on a whim, since we won't have any worthwhile currency to bail them out with anymore. We might as well hand them 40 gazillion Zimbabwe bucks.

We already have run out of actually valuable military equipment to flush down the toilet in Ukraine, and in 5-10 years, our military manufacturing industry will be even more hollowed out. So we won't be bogged down in that wasteful dead-end either.

But the point is, every one of these bloated, over-extended, ever-expanding cancerous growths on the empire is going to collapse the entire system on which they feed. They will be replaced by state-level replacements, which will not be so imperially over-extended and over-produced, since we will be in the post-imperial stage of our history.

Maybe one or two wealthy rump states, like the Grand Duchy of California, will attempt a relatively more generous welfare system than the kleinstaats that will make up New New England. But the days when well over 10% of the population is receiving food aid, will be over.

That will not be due to the poorest 1-2% getting wiped out -- they'll still be covered by the rump state welfare systems. But the over-produced group of food aid recipients will not be receiving it any longer. As in post-imperial Rome, foreigners will go back to their homelands, as wealth dries up in post-imperial America, the downwardly mobile will not have as many kids, and with no imperial-scale parasites at the top of the wealth pyramid, resources will be more evenly distributed in the rump states, so there won't be so many desperate working and middle class people either. The bloated war-losing military will be gone, the Baby Boomers will be dead, and Wall Street banks will be holding worthless currency, not real wealth with which to bully the rest of the economy.

Through these various channels, population size will collapse in post-imperial America, just as it did in the Roman Empire. The imperial capital, Rome, had over 1 million residents during the empire's peak in the 2nd century, but during the 5th C, it collapsed by an order of magnitude, or 90%, down to 100,000. It never regained the 1 million mark even after it emerged from the Dark Ages, like the Renaissance or Early Modern eras -- only after national unification brought loads of Italians from other regions of Italy to the new national capital, during the 20th C. (NB: not loads of foreigners, as during the Roman Empire.)

I don't know how long it'll take the population of New York -- and other major cities of post-imperial America -- to collapse by 90%, but they all will. It won't be hard to support the bottom 1-5% on welfare, like most non-imperial or post-imperial 1st-world countries manage today, since the total population is going to shrink down to 25-50 million. We may not collapse as hard as Rome did, since we have lots of open land to still colonize and exploit the resources of, but it will be a radical reduction.

The main thing to remember is -- everything of imperial scale is going to collapse when an empire collapses. If there is no state-level replacement, like a foreign-adventuring military, there will be no such replacement at all. There will be "no more foreign wars", just state-level militias for defense of their own territory. If there is a state-level replacement, like welfare, it will be scaled down obviously, but there will be a replacement.

Also crucial to remember -- none of this is up for debate, by anybody. Certainly not by the para-political fanfickers from social media, who treat the dIsCouRsE as though it's a "model UN" activity that will somehow magically alter the course of IRL events. That goes for both the objective / technocrat niche, as well as the subjective / moralistic niche. All fake and gay.

But it's not even up for debate by actual holders of national offices, their appointees, and their mega-donors. The American Empire is collapsing, irrevocably, and so will every institution of imperial scale along with it, to be replaced -- if at all -- by scaled-down state-level replacements, like rump states and welfare systems typical of the rest of the 1st world, not the over-extended and unsustainable system that we have erected up to this point.

Only the cold iron laws of historical dynamics have a say in the course of events, and we can see from every empire how this no-different empire will turn out, at a bird's-eye level.

Japanese Steppe origins: Breaking precious mirrors as a burial ritual

Before getting into the main topic, I'll just link to some observations I made in the comments to the previous post -- about a Korean royal clan claiming descent from the Xiongnu. This establishes that my parallel investigation of the Steppe, and specifically Xiongnu, origins of their Japanese neighbors is already on solid ground in Southeastern Korea.

The clan that united the kingdom of Silla, which then went on to unify all of Korea, was the Kim clan from Gyeongju. Their legend of their origins is that they descend from a Xiongnu prince, who the Chinese call Jin Midi, but who they themselves call Kim Al-chi. I immediately noticed that "alchi" is one of the variant names of the Alat tribe -- the one whose name means "piebald horse" in Turkic, and who were the ruling clan of the Xiongnu confederation.

Did the unifying clan of Korea really descend from Xiongnu rulers? Well, they made this claim themselves, it's not somebody like me 2000 years later attributing it to them. And Korean scholars note how similar the grave goods are for Silla and the eastern Xiongnu.

I think the Japanese chose to make their Xiongnu origins cryptic due to the rivalry between Wa / Yamato and Silla. Yamato was on the losing side of the Tang-Goguryeo War of the 7th C, whereas Silla was on the winning side (allying with Tang China). They wouldn't try to invade Korea for many centuries after that, and wanted to distance themselves from their geopolitical rivals. Since the Xiongnu origins of the Kim clan were well known back then, the Yamato decided not to make the same claim, lest they be seen as copying Silla, or engaging in sibling rivalry.

But all the signs are there if you look.

* * *

Which brings us to the main topic of this post -- the burial rituals of the Xiongnu and other Steppe cultures of that time, as well as the early Wa culture in Japan. (And Silla, too, of course, but I'm not focusing on that.)

To reiterate an ongoing theme, we have to try to avoid using examples of convergent evolution when linking two groups together. What causes two groups to converge on the same outcome is some kind of utilitarian, economic, materially motivated force -- like getting more calories in your diet.

Group A drinks milk, and group B drinks milk -- are they descended from a common ancestor? Maybe, but maybe not -- maybe they each independently took up pastoralism, and began consuming the dairy products of their livestock. Both of them drinking milk doesn't mean they share an ancestor, it may mean that pastoralists will end up consuming dairy products, whether they share an ancestor or not.

Likewise, quite a few pastoralist groups from the Steppe practice horse sacrifice and horse burials, including Indo-European cultures from the West and Altaic cultures from the East. But that doesn't mean they share a cultural ancestor -- it may just reflect that fact that both have adopted horses, which makes horses very important, and so, what greater sacrifice could they make than sacrificing a horse?

We want to look for examples that are not steered by a cold, clinical Darwinian, economic, utilitarian incentive -- things that are more like a shibboleth. I say "po-TAY-to", you say "po-TAH-to" -- and that proves we belong to two separate cultures, whatever else we might share. Pronouncing the word either way does not help you communicate the meaning more efficiently, it is simply a random inconsequential arbitrary coin-flip that we have constructed in order to distinguish the members of group A vs. group B.

When I get to clothing and jewelry styles, we'll really see this idea take off -- what does it matter if you close your robe left-over-right or right-over-left? The robe closes just the same. But in ancient East Asia, this seemingly meaningless distinction made all the difference between who was civilized (left-over-right) and who was barbarian (right-over-left).

And yes, people in Japan at that time, and up until the Nara period (around 700 AD), were firmly committed to wearing their robes in the Northern barbarian style, just like the Xiongnu. So were the Tocharians, an Eastern Steppe group who adopted an Indo-Euro language (the only known Eastern culture to do so), but remained true to their origins in dress.

Similarly, superstitions may have a utilitarian logic to them -- in which case, it means nothing if two groups share a superstition. I was looking up Japanese superstitions, and one of them is to not whistle indoors -- it turns out, almost every culture in the world shares this superstition. Probably because everyone perceives it as rude, as though you're trying to be a band-leader in an impromptu concert that nobody asked for. So it's frowned on all over the world, and it cannot be used to prove that Russians and Japanese descend from a common ancestral culture where this superstition was born. It was born in multiple places and at various times, independently of each other. It's convergent evolution.

So when we turn to burials -- the main material trace that is left in the archaeological record for us to study in the present about cultures from the past -- we have to look for examples that look like shibboleths, not practices that many cultures could come up with on their own.

E.g., "monumental size of the grave to reflect the elite status of those buried there" -- yeah, no shit, what else are they going to do, make tiny graves for the elite and mega-tombs for the commoners?

We also have to take into account the notion of "degrees of freedom" from statistics, or how much room for variation there is. You might think, Well, mega-size doesn't show that two cultures share an ancestor, but maybe the particular shape of their mega-tombs could play the role of a shibboleth.

Only problem is -- how many 3D shapes are there to choose from for a tomb? You've got your box-like shape, your rounded mound shape, a pyramid shape, and that's about it, for a single structure. There are far, far fewer possible shapes to build a tomb in, than there are possible sound sequences to convey the meaning of "father". If two languages share a word for "father", that's highly suggestive of shared ancestry. If they both build mounded tombs, that's only slightly suggestive.

So although mounded tombs were popular throughout the Steppe in ancient times, from the West to the East, and although the most famous tombs in all of Japanese history are indeed gigantic mounds (Kofun, giving their name to the period in which they were built, roughly 300-600 AD), that is only slightly suggestive of Japan's Steppe origins.

It certainly doesn't *contradict* the claim that Japanese culture has a Steppe component -- it's in line with the claim, but it's a weaker piece of confirming evidence than some example where there's lots more room for variation and more of a shibboleth nature to it.

* * *

Enter one of the most bizarre and distinctive burial rituals in world history -- the deliberate breaking of finely crafted, highly valuable, aesthetically adorned, built-to-last mirrors. Not just putting a crack in them with a little whack from a hammer, but breaking them into at least 4 separate fragments on average. That's no accident -- especially when mirrors in the old days were made of (polished) bronze, which is much harder to fragment than glass. And these were fairly large mirrors, around 8 inches in diameter, not a little hand mirror -- something that impressive, you'd figure they would want to preserve in order to show off as a status symbol.

This is a great example because we can rule out utilitarian, Darwinian, etc. incentives for two cultures sharing this ritual. It's breaking something useful, functional, and valuable -- it's going against the utilitarian motive. Even in the figurative sense, where the grave goods are not meant to be used by the living, but by the dead in the Otherworld, breaking the mirror deprives the deceased of its use or exchange value in the afterlife.

Imagine waking up on The Other Side, surrounded by mirror fragments -- "Gee, thanks a lot for making them worth a lot less, in case I wanted to trade them for something that's only available in the Otherworld, which you couldn't provide me with during the burial. Or in case I wanted to see what I look like dead, or if I wanted to reflect light for some reason. Whose idea was it to break them into pieces?!"

A superstition about not breaking a mirror, could arise independently through convergent evolution. Mirrors are functional, utilitarian, valuable things -- don't break them, or else bad things will follow. Breaking them on purpose is the opposite -- that must be due to some unclearly motivated shared tradition.

BTW, as for the modern American superstition about "break a mirror, and you'll get 7 years of bad luck", this is claimed with absolutely no evidence to stem from "ancient Greece and Rome" -- always a telltale sign of bullshitting. We don't come from Greco or Roman cultures, even distantly. No one can point to an author of the ancient world saying it's bad luck to break a mirror, cuz you'll get 7 years of bad luck. Or some other number of years of bad luck. Or even explicitly saying that breaking a mirror is unlucky.

So the "breaking a mirror is unlucky" superstition is likely much more modern than that, from the era when mirrors became commonplace and the targets of superstitions. At that point, multiple cultures could independently come up with a superstition against breaking mirrors, in America or wherever else.

Back to the ancient Steppe -- other cultures did in fact bury their dead with the same Chinese bronze mirrors (or imitations), but without the widespread practice of breaking them. That does *not* suggest a common origin for them -- functional, valuable, finely crafted things will be sought after as grave goods no matter who they are.

As it turns out, both the Western Steppe and Han China included bronze mirrors in their grave goods, but nobody thinks they share an ancestor. They both independently figured out that these things were valuable and impressive feats of craftsmanship, so why not include them with all the other goodies in the grave?

It was only the Eastern Steppe groups that fragmented the Chinese bronze mirrors as part of their burial rituals. See this review article of the broken bronze mirror phenomenon, which surveys the Western Steppe as well as the East.

It began with the Pazyryk culture from the Altai Mountain region during the mid-1st millennium BC. They are misleadingly called "Scythian" as though they were Indo-Euro-phone, culturally Iranian, or primarily Western Steppe, none of which is true -- they seem to be proto-Turkic if anything, the western frontier of the Eastern Steppe.

This practice continued, most famously, among the Xiongnu, around the turn of the millennium...

And as fate would have it, among the Kofun burials in Glorious Nippon, in the early 1st millennium AD (and in Silla). As with the Pazyryk and Xiongnu, not all of the Chinese bronze mirrors are broken in Kofun burials, but a large number of them are -- perhaps dozens of mirrors each broken into 3 or 4 fragments on average, within a single site. And this practice was not just one fluke site, but dozens of locations all around Japan.

Nor was it done only in peripheral or culturally deviant regions of the nascent Japanese nation -- if anything, it was done in abundance at the very heart of the soon-to-be Yamato state, around Nara. See this discovery of over 100 mirrors broken into nearly 400 fragments, from the Sakurai Chausuyama Kofun near Nara, dating from the 3rd C and belonging to a very elite individual, possibly the legendary Queen Pimiko herself.

This early date is also helpful to establish that these Steppe influences of Japanese culture did not only arrive during the course of the Kofun era -- they were there before 300 AD. And it is helpful to show that these influences are not "Korean," as though they were confined only to Korea and Japan. Rather, both of them are extensions of a broader Eastern Steppe tradition, brought by Steppe people who crossed the mountains into the Korean peninsula, the first wave going further into Japan, and a second wave remaining in Korea (the Koreanic speakers).

* * *

These bronze mirrors, and mirrors in general, are so important in Japanese culture that one of the three imperial regalia -- the special material items that legitimize each emperor, which are passed on to each new holder of that office -- is an ancient bronze mirror, the Yata no Kagami. (We'll get to the Steppe origins of another of the three, the magatama or curved jade jewel-bead, in the next post.)

Mirrors have always been important in the rituals of Shinto, as symbols of the sun. It seems like the Eastern Steppe cultures view mirrors as solar symbols -- miniature suns that you can wield with your own two hands, throwing bright beams of light wherever you please, like a demi-solar-god all by yourself. The Western Steppe cultures view them more in terms of reflecting the physical likeness of a person, not as pre-industrial spotlights.

And wouldn't you know it? While browsing the Wikipedia article on "mirrors in Shinto," I nearly fell out of my chair looking at how the mirror is displayed in a typical Shinto ritual. See the center top of this image, where the mirror lies between the 4 animal statues. The mirror itself is a disc, and it's resting on a stand that is curved very much like a crescent moon

There's that distinctly Xiongnu visual shibboleth again! A solar disc, with a crescent moon underneath, opening up to the sun, which remains in use on the national flag of Mongolia. We'll see that in Kofun-era earrings, in the post on clothing styles.

Do an image search for "Shinto mirror," and you'll see all sorts of variations on this theme, but they all involve a stand that is crescent and opening up to the solar disc. I can't determine when this combination of items began, but it has endured right up through the present.

Somewhere along the way, the Steppe fixation on the "sun and moon" duo was downplayed, and the crescent shape was carved in the shape of clouds or sea waves or some abstract thing. But who ever depicts clouds as forming a shape whose border is an upward-opening crescent? Or sea-waves depicted with that same border shape? It's obviously a crescent moon, and that border shape has been preserved -- even though its interior has been (re-)decorated to distract from its moon-focused origins.

I wonder if this Shinto mirror-and-stand configuration goes back to the Xiongnu, and the smaller golden "disc with crescent" items that are found among the Xiongnu, or the identical Kofun-era earrings, are just jewelry representations of their sun-and-moon religious rituals, which would have involved one of those large bronze mirrors as the solar disc, supported by a stand in the shape of an upward-opening crescent moon. IDK, something to think about / look into.

* * *

Like many ancient facets of Japanese culture, they have been preserved or served as inspiration for even the most hi-tech and futuristic domains of contemporary Japanese culture -- like video games. In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, there's a crucial item called the mirror of twilight, and it is in the shape and color of an ancient Chinese bronze mirror -- and it also lies in 4 fragments, which must be re-assembled in order to use it as a massive light-reflector.

In an earlier game in the series, Ocarina of Time, the player uses a mirror shield to reflect beams of light in order to trigger doors opening and such. However, it doesn't resemble the ancient bronze Chinese mirrors, and does not lie in fragments. Even earlier, in A Link to the Past, the mirror shield doesn't bounce rays of light, but absorbs them. And even earlier, in The Adventure of Link, the protagonist helps a townswoman find her lost mirror and is rewarded for it -- it's not shown at all, though, let alone in an ancient Chinese form, or lying in fragments, or reflecting light rays. But these are all still part of the enduring Japanese fascination with mirrors.

* * *

Finally, what the hell *was* the reason for breaking the mirrors back then? It doesn't matter for the purposes of linking various cultures together that share the practice. But just to try to get inside their heads...

I actually came up with a similar concept as the Twilight Princess video game, before even reading about it. None of the other grave goods, whether highly valuable or not-so-valuable, are deliberately broken. They're intact, in good working order, and meant to aid the deceased in some way.

Mirrors left intact would be the same -- an aid to the deceased.

But the ones that were broken -- could have been a reflection of the corpse itself. Something that used to be a finely crafted, highly valuable, built-to-last creation -- but that now finds itself at the end of its use, decaying into pieces, losing its order and structure, never to be used again...

Until some fateful event in the future, where the dead are brought back to life, and where these mirror fragments would be supernaturally placed back together, without the awkward glue or whatever means that a person would use, but actually restored to their original state and in their original working order -- with no cracks, glue, or anything else like that to be seen.

Until that day comes, both the corpse and the mirrors will lie in their fragmented, decaying state, unable to function as they were originally created.

Maybe they didn't have the apocalyptic revival of the dead and restoration of the mirrors, as though Humpty Dumpty had been miraculously put back together again. At the very least, they could have intended the broken mirrors to stand for the broken body, broken family, broken social hierarchy, now that this elite individual has been retired from their role.

Since they viewed mirrors mainly as sun symbols, i.e. projectors of light, then a broken mirror is tantamount to a snuffed-out candle for some other culture where candles represent light projection and mini-suns.

Such an important person dying is like the sun and moon themselves going dark in the sky.

We know that ancient Altaic people used to view the sun and moon as mirrors-in-the-sky -- see the earlier post on their creation myth, which is mainly about churning the primordial sea with a divine staff in order to make land-masses out of the resulting sea-foam on the surface. One of them also mentions that during the age of creation, two mirrors were placed in the sky, which brought light to the universe -- the sun and the moon.

So, far from being a sign of disrespect toward the dead, the broken mirror was the ultimate material expression of grief from the mourners.

Japanese steppe culture: Ruling clans with the piebald horse as totem animal, and ritual horse sacrifice

Following the previous post, we'll look at another sort of "creation" myth from Japan -- the origin myth of ritual impurity, and therefore, of ritual purification measures to counter-act it (the basis of Shinto practices). This myth provides 2 links to horse culture from the Eastern Steppe. It's from the Nihon Shoki, though not the Kojiki, from the earliest writings in Japanese (early 8th C AD).

The god responsible for introducing ritual impurity into the world is Susanoo, the impetuous storm god. The target of his ire in this story is his sister, the sun goddess Amaterasu. He takes the Heavenly Piebald Colt (Ame no Fuchikoma), and flays it alive -- starting with its back end, and working toward the head. The text uses a specific term to emphasize that this is a "backwards flaying" ("sakahagi"), not a standard flaying that starts at the head and works its way toward the tail.

This is a form of ritual impurity, since he has not killed the colt first (e.g., by slitting its throat), and since he's removing the skin in backwards order.

He then hurls the colt in through a hole in the roof of Amaterasu's weaving hall, where one of her maidens is so startled by the desecration that she runs into the spinning shuttle at her loom, which hits her in the genitals, causing her to begin bleeding from there. This is the origin of menstrual bleeding, another form of ritual impurity. Amaterasu then goes into hiding in the Heavenly Rock-Cave Door (Ame no Iwayato), in a form of menstrual seclusion. Susanoo also defecates in her palace, another form of ritual impurity.

This story reveals that the myth-makers of Japan were intimately familiar with horse sacrifices -- how they were supposed to be performed, and therefore, which actions would constitute desecration, defilement, and impurity.

I don't know about every culture that practiced horse sacrifice, but the Cheremis people (AKA Mari) began flaying the horse from the head, then ending at the tail. Of course its throat was slit first, not flayed alive. And it was a colt, not an adult horse (the Japanese term "koma" means specifically "colt," combining the words for "child" and "horse").

The whole ordeal is described in grisly detail in the Finno-Ugric portion of The Mythology of All Races, which I referred to in the previous post. Incidentally, from my reading of their myth and ritual, the Cheremis seem to be mostly Indo-European culturally, despite speaking a Uralic language -- much like the Hungarians, Estonians, and Finns. They live along the Volga River in Russia, a little ways north of the Steppe.

How would the creators of the Nihon Shoki know so much about horse sacrifice, and why would they want to use that as such a crucial example of Susanoo's causing ritual impurity? He also destroys Amaterasu's rice fields, but it's not described in cruel gut-wrenching detail like flaying a horse backwards while still alive. They really wanted to emphasize the importance of horses, and of horse sacrifices, in their culture.

A mainly agrarian culture would not care so much about defiling the horse sacrifice ritual -- and probably would not even refer to such a ritual, since there was never any such thing in their culture. It occupies center stage in the Japanese narrative because they hailed from a nomadic horse-centric culture before arriving in Korea and Japan -- which in that part of the world, means the Eastern Steppe.

Its similarity to the Cheremis horse sacrifice ritual suggests a common ritual all across the Steppe, whether the practitioners were Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, or otherwise.

* * *

However, the Japanese myth's emphasis on the piebald / skewbald / spotted / etc. color pattern of the horse, narrows down which range of the Steppe they originated from.

First, tribes or clans or chiefdoms being associated with particular color patterns of their horses is mainly an Eastern Steppe phenomenon, from the Turkic tribes all the way to Glorious Nippon. It makes their favored breed of horse into a totem animal for the social unit.

Amaterasu is not just any ol' goddess in the foundational texts of Japanese culture -- she is the deity through whom the Japanese imperial family traces their bloodline. So this means that the piebald horse is a totem animal for the ruling clan of Japan.

Where else is the piebald horse the totem animal for a ruling clan? Why, where else, and when else? -- in the Xiongnu confederation during the late 1st millennium BC, and several of its off-shoots after its break-up.

And not just any ol' clan within the Xiongnu, but their ruling clan, the Luandi, whose name likely derives from "piebald horse".

Then there was the Alat tribe, whose name also likely means "piebald horse", a Turkic tribe who also belonged to the Xiongnu, and were either related to the Luandi, or identical to them, or perhaps they coincidentally shared the same totem animal due to there only being so many color patterns to choose from, and due to every clan preferring a horse rather than some other species for their totem animal.

The same situation must have been true for the ruling tribe or clan among the Yayoi-like people who arrived in southern Korea and then Japan. Their totem animal was also the piebald horse, whether their clan was related to the Luandi or Alat by lineage, or just sharing a totem animal by happenstance. In either case, it places the continental component of the future Japanese culture among the Xiongnu confederation during the 1st millennium BC -- not Southeast Asia, not the far Arctic north, not during the 1st millennium AD, etc.

As with the horse sacrifice portion of the myth, specifying the color pattern of the heavenly horse reveals that the myth-makers of Japan were intimately familiar with Eastern Steppe practices for choosing a totem animal, like including its color pattern instead of a broadly defined breed or species name alone.

I don't think the Alat tribe being Turkic means that the ruling clan of the Yayoi-like people were Turkic. They could have been Mongolic or Tungusic. Making the horse your totem animal, and emphasizing its color pattern, was common among all of those Altaic speech communities.

And perhaps the Yayoi-like population was not ethnically homogeneous -- there could have been Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Uralic, or other groups among them. All sorts of people mixed with each other on the Eastern Steppe. Perhaps they only homogenized when they landed in Japan and were defined by a new ethnic opposition, between the various continental arrivals and the native Emishi / Ainu.

* * *

Over the past 10 years in Japan, there has been an insanely popular media franchise called Uma Musume ("Horse Girl") Pretty Derby, mostly based on an anime series and related video games, which revolve around a group of horse-human girls training to compete in horse-girl races. Yes, like in a traditional horse-racing track. They look mostly human, with horse ears, and as a side project devote themselves to singing and dancing on stage as idols.

This is yet another case of the horse-centric origins of Japanese culture re-asserting themselves in the modern age, after having lied dormant or secondary for many centuries.

But by now, horse racing is a very popular sport in Japan, and has been for decades. It's so popular that Lui, a vtuber from Hololive, hosts regular watching parties / informal betting streams as the major Japanese horse races are being broadcast. She can't re-broadcast the sound and image of the race on her own stream, due to copyright, but even just as a watching party, she gets close to 10K live viewers, judging from the one she held a few days ago (pretty good numbers for livestreams).

And as the very beginnings of Japanese literature show, their fascination with horses is neither new nor imported from the West. And far from viewing them as only a neat form of entertainment, they hold them to be one of the most sacred animals in creation, a testament to their origins in the Eastern Steppe, and the OG badass nomadic steppe empire in particular, the Xiongnu.

The truce in the battle of the sexes during peaks of social harmony, 1940s and 1990s, halfway between peaks of social chaos circa 1920, 1970, and 2020

A topic I've been exploring lately relates to the 50-year cycle that Peter Turchin uncovered in social chaos and civil breakdown in American history, with eruptions circa 1970, 1920, 1870, missing one in 1820, and 1770. On that basis he predicted another eruption circa 2020 -- boy, was he right on the money.

He does mention the opposite values of these chaotic eruptions -- low-points for civil breakdown, or in other words, peaks of social harmony. The Era of Good Feelings in the 1820s was halfway between the breakdowns of the 1770s and 1870s. The Gay Nineties were halfway between the breakdowns of the 1870s and circa 1920.

It's misleadingly called the WWII era, since it began well before the war did (certainly before America's involvement in it), but the '30s and first half of the '40s, even the late '20s, were another such period. Woody Allen dubbed the period Radio Days. Also the period in which A Christmas Story is set. Or the contempo setting of It's a Wonderful Life. Whatever we call it, it was halfway between the breakdowns of circa 1920 and 1970.

Well, we just went through another breakdown circa 2020, which leaves the halfway point between it and the previous one before that, 1970, circa 1995. And really, harmony had been on the upswing by the late '70s, lasting throughout the '80s, and peaking in the first half of the '90s.

Chaos, breakdown, disorder, riots, etc. -- far more attention-grabbing for historians. The phases of greater harmony, stability, order, and calm, tend to go unnoticed.

Because this cycle pertains to such a foundational aspect of society -- order vs. disorder -- it affects so many domains of societal life. Riots vs. calmness is an obvious one. I'm interested in surveying how broadly this cycle touches our lives.

A perennial topic of discourse is the battle of the sexes, which has reached a fever pitch in the last 5, 10, 15 years. I think we're past the worst part of it, but it's still raging.

And before focusing on the harmonious phase, it does help to start with the chaotic phase, since its symptoms are so much more intense and easy to discern.

During the most recent chaotic phase, circa the late '90s through the early 2020s, and exploding during the woketard 2010s, there are too many symptoms to list briefly. #MeToo, Slutwalk, toxic masculinity, incels, gay BFFs / fag hags, fujoshi fanfic (girl imagining herself as a male in a homoerotic male-male fantasy), redpill, Game / pickup artists, porn based on degradation or humiliation (for either sex), and on and on down the line. Guys and girls could not have inhabited more separate, and more mutually hostile social environments.

In terms of waves of feminism, this is associated with the Fourth Wave.

During the previous eruption of chaos in the late '60s and early '70s, there was the Second Wave of feminism. Mostly focused on abortion, but also women's liberation in general, free love, bra-burning, equal pay for equal work, divorce, and the birth of what's called radical feminism i.e. the bitter man-hating abolish all gender roles type. That included the SCUM Manifesto, i.e. the Society for Cutting Up Men, by the whackjob who shot Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas -- this was before feminazis sanctified gay men as their protective cockblocking eunuchs against the forces of toxic heterosexual masculinity.

During the previous eruption of chaos before that, was the breakdown of the late 1910s and early '20s. That coincided with the First Wave of feminism, specifically the Suffragette movement. Along with the chaotic social mood generally, this movement of feminism had been growing since the turn of the 20th century, it just hit its peak circa 1920 (when the US granted women the right to vote).

You may have noticed a skipped-over wave of feminism -- the Third Wave. That term applies to the '90s and the early 2000s, during a period of relative social calm rather than upheaval, as opposed to the other three waves coinciding with civil breakdowns.

Well, Third Wave feminism doesn't really exist, and feminists admit it -- its hallmark was its lack of cohesion politically, and lack of coherence conceptually. It's more of a placeholder term for "whatever feminists were up to in the '90s". And it's premised upon women of the '80s and '90s having won so many things during the previous two waves, so what was left for the '90s?

One of the major books of the Third Wave, Susan Faludi's Backlash ('91), is more about the past than the present -- the backlash against the Second Wave after the peak of social chaos had been reached, by the late '70s and throughout the '80s and into the early '90s.

The other major book, which *was* more about the present than a backlash against the previous wave, was The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (also '91). Like the Third Wave in general, its premise is how many material, legal, and other gains have already been won due to the First and Second Waves. Now with women seemingly having it all, they find themselves searching for that last little bit of perfection that cannot be allocated to them by laws or corporate policies -- beauty, namely cosmetic surgery, fashion victimhood, eating disorders, and the like. The idea was, let's try to liberate ourselves from that self-imposed / mass-mediated oppression, and focus more on our worth as people who are not paragons of beauty.

OK, if that's feminism, then there was a Third Wave of it in the '90s. But it's not a movement, not political, and not seeking to up-end society like the other three waves did. Crucially, it was not man-hating or man-blaming or seeking a redress of grievances from the offending male sex. All feminists are at least somewhat man-hating and man-blaming, but the Third Wavers were pretty tame and calm, relative to the radicals of the Second and Fourth waves on either side of them.

The most you could point to in the '90s was in its second half, after the peak of social harmony had been reached, and the pendulum began to swing once again toward chaos and breakdown -- but had only just begun to shift. These developments were the embryonic forms of Fourth Wave feminism that would rear their ugly heads for real during the woketard 2010s.

Things like The Vagina Monologues ('96) and the associated V-Day ('98) which warped Valentine's Day into a day of raising awareness about violence against women, and even the whole Girl Power phenomenon ("chicks before dicks", to counter "bros before hoes"), associated with the Spice Girls and their Millennial audience.

Also the rise of gay BFFs, gay eunuchs, fag hags, and fujoshi fanfic -- Will & Grace, Sex and the City, and by the early 2000s, the first gay kiss in primetime in an episode of Dawson's Creek (2000), and in the music video for "Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera (2002), and the bitter emo girl + messy gay BFF duo in Mean Girls (2004).

Suddenly, boys and girls were beginning to split apart, although this rift would not reach its yawning maximum until circa 2020. But it was quite a gear-shift or phase-change compared to the first half of the '90s, the '80s, and the late '70s.

So, one of the hallmarks of that harmonious phase was the relative absence of a feminist movement, especially of the man-hating and man-blaming and man-lobbying type that we usually require for something to be a true feminist movement.

The last time there was such a relative absence of feminism was the second half of the '20s (after women's suffrage was fait accompli, as well as discredited by their lobbying for the 18th Amendment to ban alcohol, which got repealed by the 21st Amendment in '33), all of the '30s, and at least the first half of the '40s.

You know the WWII era was barren of feminism when all they can point to, desperately, is the Rosie the Riveter ad campaign, or the fact that women joined the military as WACs and WAVES in their cute wool nurse's capes, to support the men in the war effort, in their typical female capacity. This was not man-hating, man-blaming, or man-lobbying for societal upheaval. So women could join the emergency war effort -- big deal, that's not radical at all, and tellingly it was not won by protests, violence, or other forms of coordinated confrontation against the power structure.

Much like the second half of the '90s, the second half of the '40s saw the very embryonic forms that would eventually become Second Wave feminism, like the 1949 publication of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, followed some time later in '63 by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

I will go into greater detail on other cultural correlates of these harmonious phases, when the battle of the sexes ground to a halt. But for now, just to get the ball rolling, this brief overview of the timeline of various waves of feminism should give you the overall picture.

I promise those details will be more exciting and relatable than the history of feminism! But we have to start somewhere uncontroversial, like organized man-hating, man-blaming, and man-lobbying. And of course, the pair movement of womanizing, woman-hating, woman-blaming, and woman-hectoring. But the male version is not an organized or academic affair, so it doesn't leave as rich of a paper trail as the female version.

And in any case, females are the choosy sex in human beings, so generally speaking, what they say goes, regarding how close or distant the sexes will be with each other. The fine-detailed surveys will also focus more on how women change or cycle over time, although I will note how men change or cycle over time in the same ways.

Unstolen election mega-thread

Just re-posting two initial comments here for now to get the ball rolling, will add to it in the comments as usual.

* * *

Why didn't Dems steal it this time? Well, Dems were promising to steal it -- the state election boards in battleground states, the media, and Obama himself on the campaign trail.

Why didn't they this time? Perhaps the election steal of 2020 was part of the broader civic breakdown of 2014-2020 -- most of which was marked by political violence, hostile rhetoric, etc. Stealing an election is not physical violence, or even heated rhetoric, but it is hyper-competitive, antagonistic, anti-social, etc.

It was also part of the broader hostile crusade by woketards, like censoring and deplatforming everyone during the 2014-2020 abyss. That's also hostile, anti-social, war-like, etc., but not physically violent.

This is part of the Peter Turchin 50-year cycle in civic breakdown, whose last peak was the late '60s and early '70s, then the late 1910s and early '20s, late 1860s and early '70s, a missing explosion circa the late 1810s and early '20s (which was instead the Era of Good Feelings), and another burst around the Revolutionary War of circa 1770.

It's a kind of energy that builds up, and then dissipates, over a cycle lasting 50 years, or 25 years in either direction.

By 2024, it was already clear that the violent symptoms of this pattern had abated -- BLM and Antifa did not burn down half the country in '24, there were no roving executions of cops caught on camera like in the mid-late 2010s, Democrats didn't roam around assassinating Trump supporters for no reason and getting off with no bail, etc. Although there were 2 assassination attempts on Trump himself -- the violence hasn't gone to 0, but it's only 5% of what it was during the 2014-2020 abyss.

Libtards didn't even hold marches when the Supreme Court over-turned their sacred cow of Roe v. Wade in '22. There will be no pussy hat marches when Trump is re-inaugurated.

Twitter allowed itself to be bought out and taken over by Musk, which would not have been allowed in 2014-2020, and they submitted to the new orders about no more crazy censorship and ban waves.

So, the failure or unwillingness of Dems to carry out the steal this time must be part of that general dissipation of policitized zeal from its 2014-2020 peak (abyss). There will be no Russiagate, #MeToo, Resistance, etc. bullshit like there was during Trump's first term, during the peak of politicized zealotry.

I thought since stealing an election wasn't violent or confrontational, they'd still do it -- especially since that's what they were promising for the past few months, right up through most of election night, with Philadelphia halting their vote count early in the evening, waiting for the rest of the state to return their numbers, anticipating a steal. Who am I to second-guess the same message, from the same top-level figures, that was followed up on by a successful insane steal in the very last election?

The energy level declining across all dimensions -- violence, censorship, stealing elections -- is also bipartisan. There was WAY less zeal on the Trump side this cycle, compared to 2015-'16, and even 2020. No one is sincerely posting God-Emperor memes anymore, no one is champing at the bit to lay the first bricks in that Big Beeyooteeful Wall, which never got built the last time. And there's just been far less trolling and teabagging this time than in 2016, and certainly 2020 when it got stolen, preventing the teabagging.

Politicized zeal overall in American society has fallen off of its 2014-2020 explosive peak, and will reach a minimum circa 2045, which will be as non-partisan as the mid-1990s were 50 years earlier. Then the next explosion will happen in the 2060s and early '70s, and the cycle will keep on repeating...

* * *

Also a quick dunk on tech determinist dum-dums, who blamed / credited the explosive zeitgeist of 2014-2020 on newfangled tech (social media, smartphones, "meme magic," online in general).

Well, Americans are even more online than they were in 2016, yet the zealotry has fallen off a cliff after 2020, and will continue plummeting toward a minimum in 2045 -- all while Americans continue to be as online, or even more online, than they were in the 2014-2020 period.

That's the cross-temporal proof. Then there's the cross-sectional proof -- Japanese people have become more and more online since they first adopted the internet. Yet they have experienced no such explosion of politicized zealotry -- whether leading to violence, censorship, heated rhetoric, stolen elections, or whatever else.

All technologies are mere tools, indifferent to how they're used, and impotent to shape, channel, or nudge human societal systems or individual behavior. Rather, the dynamics of society and individual psychology lead to some people using some tech for some purpose in some state of affairs, and some others to use some other tech (or even the same tech) for some other purpose when they're in some other state of affairs.

Americans didn't need social media or the internet or online anonymity to carry out an equally explosive bout of zealotry in the late 1960s and early '70s, or the late 1910s and early '20s, or the Civil War or the Revolution -- or the civic breakdown of the 60s AD during the Roman Empire, most of whom weren't even literate, let alone employing a communicative medium other than speech sounds coming out of the mouth.

When the cycle enters a crazy zealous phase, they use whatever means / media they have at their disposal, and when the cycle leaves the crazy zealous phase, they either use different media that have no stain of the zealous-associated media, or they use the same ol' media for a different purpose.

Technologies are utterly indifferent to how they're used, and they have no deterministic or even probabilistic influence stemming from inherently from themselves, toward human behavior, at any scale (person, group, society, etc.).

Judaism as a Third Way / Non-Aligned religion arising on the faultline between Christian and Muslim empires during the Dark Ages

Second post collecting together related ideas from an earlier comment section, building a model for why there as an explosion of conversion to (mainly Talmudic) Judaism during the Dark Ages, where it happened, and when it happened, surveying a very broad range of Jewish communities.

* * *

As far as I can tell, there was no mass migration of Judaeans out of Judaea during / after the collapse of the Roman Empire. They mostly stayed put, first converting to Christianity, and then to Islam. Their descendants are today's Palestinians, regardless of their religion.

Where did all these Medieval Jewish groups come from, then? They were mostly converts or adopters, a process that happened in many places independently of each other -- e.g., Sephardic Jews in Iberia and the Maghreb, and Ashkenazi Jews within the Khazar Empire (mainly, the non-Turkic subjects of the Khazars).

There's no evidence that any of these Medieval Jewish groups ever spoke a Semitic language, let alone Hebrew or Aramaic, which the Second Temple Judeans did. They kept their language from pre-conversion -- Old Spanish (Ladino) for the Sephardics, Farsi for the Persian Jews, and some Indo-European pidgin (Yiddish) for the Ashkenazis. Most of their culture remained the same as well -- only their religion changed.

Why did so many groups, separated by so much space, simultaneously adopt Talmudic Judaism? I think this was an attempt to forge a Third Way religion, a Non-Aligned Movement of its time, in the broader context of the expansion of Christianity and Islam.

Christianity was spreading via the Byzantine and Frankish Empires first and foremost, but secondarily through the Nestorian Church / Church of the East in Sasanian / Abbasid territory. Islam was spreading via the first Arabian Caliphate, and later successors like the Abbasid, Moorish, Fatimid, and various Turko-Mongol ones (like the Seljuks, Ottomans, Timurids, etc.).

Cuius regio, eius religio -- if you threw in your lot with a certain polity, you had to adopt their religion as a pledge of allegiance. If you wanted some kind of political autonomy, you had to adopt a non-aligned religion -- you weren't siding with any of the Christian empires, nor with any of the Muslim empires. Non-aligned, Third Way -- Talmudic Judaism!

Crucially, though, Talmudic Judaism could position itself as overlapping in interests with both sides, as it was a fellow Abrahamic religion. And its ancient prophets were still being looked up to by both Christians and Muslims. Talmudic Judaism did not precede Christianity, but in harking back to Second Temple and earlier stages, it could claim to precede Christianity and Islam -- hence, setting itself up as a dispassionate, wise elder that could adjudicate between the younger squabbling children, Christianity and Islam.

Forgot to mention the Bulgarian Empire as the other major vector for Christianity's expansion, in Eastern Europe / Slav-dom (Kievan Rus' played little role in this -- Old Church Slavonic is really Old Bulgarian, a Southern Slavic language, not Old Russian / Ukrainian / etc. from Eastern Slavic).

This matches with the geographic distribution of Medieval Jewish groups. They're on frontier zones between Christian and Muslim empires, where the pressure to remain non-aligned would have been greatest.

If the region were mainly Christian, the pressure is simply to adopt Christianity -- there's no Muslim presence that would justify your Third Way religion, as a triangulation strategy. And vice versa in regions that are primarily Muslim -- with no Christian presence, there's no logic to a Third Way religion. At least not where that Third Way is Talmudic Judaism.

The only Jewish empire ever -- the Khazars -- were smack dab in the middle between the Christian and Muslim spheres of influence, around the Caucasus mountains and sprawling toward the north, with Christianity to the west and Islam to the east.

Ashkenazi Jews emerged from the Khazar Empire, as did the Turkic off-shoots of the Khazar elite like the Krymchak Jews of Crimea.

Sephardic Jews came from the frontier between Christian Iberia and the Muslim Maghreb. I consider Maghrebi Jews to belong to the same group, with the only difference being language -- the adopters from Iberia kept speaking Old Spanish (Ladino), while the adopters from the Maghreb side kept speaking Maghrebi dialects of Arabic / Moroccan / Berber languages.

Jews in North Africa vanish as you move away from the Christian frontier of Iberia -- e.g. in Libya, where there were mainly Muslim polities, and no room for a Third Way to emerge.

Likewise as you move toward Northwestern Europe -- no native Jews, since France and Britain and Germany were entirely Christian, no Muslims nearby, hence no way for a Third Way to emerge. This also reinforces the view that the Ashkenazis do not hail from Germany, where there was no way for a Third Way to emerge, but originally from a region with a strong Muslim presence nearby, like the Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Caucasus, etc.

Ethiopian Jews lie on a frontier between the Christian parts of Ethiopia (in the north / west) and the Muslim parts of Ethiopia and Somalia (in the south / east). So do the Yemeni Jews, who are just across the Red Sea from historically Christian Ethiopia, but also have Muslims nearby in Somalia as well as all of Arabia.

There's a tiny pocket of Egyptian Jews, at the confluence between Muslim North-central and Northeast Africa and Arabia, and the semi-Christian Levant and nearby Anatolia and Greece.

Mountain Jews reflect the same position as the Khazar and Ashkenazi Jews, around the Caucasus between the Christian west and Muslim east.

Persian Jews come from the old days when Nestorian Christianity was expanding and at its peak in Iranian-controlled lands, which included Mesopotamia and into Afghanistan and the southern part of Central Asia. They were positioning themselves between the early Muslim Abbasid rulers and the Nestorian Christians, especially in western Iran and Mesopotamia. But also further east into Afghanistan (Herat -- not so much further into Kabul, where there were few Nestorians), Samarkand, etc.

However, Nestorian Christianity disappeared during the early 2nd millennium, and Iranian lands became fairly uniformly Muslim, so the logic of the Third Way bit the dust as well, so that Jews from Iranian lands are much rarer than in other places as a result.

A fascinating example are the Cochin Jews of Kerala in Southwestern India, which not surprisingly happens to be the only state in India with both a substantial Muslim population (stemming from seaborne Arabian traders, not land-army invaders from the north), and a substantial Christian population (Nestorian, naturally, having received missionaries from Sasanian / Abbasid empires). In the 21st C, Muslims are about 25% and Christians 20% of the population of Kerala. As always, these Cochin Jews speak the same language from their pre-conversion days -- Malayalam (a Dravidian language), not Hebrew, Aramaic, or other Semitic language.

This establishes the tight spatial correlation between a faultline between Christian and Muslim empires, and adopting Talmudic Judaism (or in a few cases, Karaite Judaism -- also not Second Temple, but very much a modern-era LARP to RETVRN to pre-Talmudic ways, in the same way that Christian fundamentalists are thoroughly from the modern era).

But the temporal correlation is there as well. None of these groups practiced any strain of Judaic religion before the Dark Ages, and crucially, before the rise of Islam in the 7th C. Talmudic Judaism itself was only codefied around 500 AD. But there was no initial explosion of Talmudic Judaism in the 6th or even 7th centuries -- more like the late 1st millennium.

That is, after Muslim empires had expanded to such a broad extent, as well as the broad expansion of Christian empires in the west (which did not happen during the Roman days, or even just afterwards -- the major Germanic polity and culture, the Saxons, didn't adopt Christianity until conquered by the Frankish Empire circa 800 AD, also the time that the Slavs began adopting Christianity via the conversion of Bulgarian Tsar Boris I "the Baptizer" in the mid-9th C).

And we can infer the date of their conversion fairly tightly in some cases, like the Sephardic Jews, whose Romance language (Ladino) is a dialect of Old Spanish -- before the Castilian-led ethnogenesis, and imperiogenesis, during the Reconquista of Iberia from the Moorish Empire. It's not a dialect of Iberian late Vulgar Latin or whatever, so it's not from the early portion of the Dark Ages either.

It's from the late 1st millennium, and it is therefore more similar to Portuguese and Catalan, which were not the leaders of Spanish ethnogenesis, and did not radically revolutionize their language in order to signal that this was a whole new ethnic group being born, with a new set of shibboleths by which to identify each other.

E.g., Ladino, like Portuguese and Catalan, still uses sibilant consonants in the places where Castilian ("Spanish") transformed them into "th" at the front of the mouth and "kh" at the back of the mouth.

Which sectors of society did this Third Way strategy appeal to most? Apparently the merchants, traders, financiers, and the like. They are the least political, wanting to be left alone to hawk their wares, supervise trade routes, move the stuff along trade routes, lend money and collect loans, etc.

This government, that government, this state religion, that state religion -- who cares? I just wanna control the trade routes between them, and not get involved in their military or religious disputes.

It did not appeal to the military, which has the strongest interest in picking one side of an imperial fault-line. They're going to be the ones defending or expanding that fault-line. Jewish soldiers and Jewish jocks are the exception that proves the rule.

Nor did it appeal to the religious officials, for obvious reasons. They're there to serve the existing major religion of their empire, not abandon it for some strange foreign religion, and for no good reason (like accepting their conquest by foreigners). Jews for Jesus are another exception that proves the rule.

Didn't appeal to landed gentry / landowners / cultivators either. Perhaps cuz this sector was heavily intertwined with the military and religious sectors during the Dark Ages. The central state was fairly weak, so most armies were fielded by landed aristocrats, and the church / mosque owned a lot of productive land. Jewish hardscrabble farmer living off the land in nowheres-ville is another exception that proves the rule.

This is why Talmudic Jewish adopters were more urban than rural -- and remain so right up through the present day.

I'm leaving aside the genetic angle for the most part, since we're talking about cultural in-groups and their evolution, not tracking genetic populations over time.

But in any case, the genetic evidence is very weak for the view that Medieval Jews (and their modern-day descendants) represent a demographic migration out of Judaea, i.e. stemming from the practitioners of Second Temple Judaism and perhaps the even more distant ancestors of Second Temple Jews.

There has been a ton of admixture in every Jewish group, which confounds attempts to shed light on who their ancestors were, and especially *when* the admixture occurred. Admixture, when two distinct genetic populations start having babies with each other, wipes out a ton of the historical record on BOTH sides, rendering the merged resulting genome a lot more difficult to decipher for historical purposes.

Just like, on the cultural side, when two languages start to heavily influence each other -- a ton of old words are lost on BOTH sides, wiping out a huge swath of the historical record for BOTH languages. While not making it impossible to peer into their respective histories, it does confound the hell out of the attempt.

I think the general pattern can be seen in this recent article on Medieval DNA from a 14th-C. Ashkenazi Jewish cemetery in Erfurt, Germany.

Below the Summary section, is a Graphical Abstract. Note the graph in the middle, showing where the individuals cluster in a simplified genetic space. It shows two distinct sub-populations -- and this is confirmed in the results section by tests of bi-modality, i.e. two distinct distributions with each having a peak of its own, not just one great big happy distribution with a single peak.

In the post-Medieval era, present-day Ashkenazi Jews no longer have a bi-modal genetic cluster pattern, they're a single genetic population, which lies between the two separate ones from the Medieval era.

I interpret this to reflect that at their origins, the Ashkenazi Jews were unified on a cultural basis, like an economic niche of controlling trade routes, developing a pidgin / lingua franca like Yiddish, and being fellow subjects of the same empire (Khazar), who had recently adopted a new religion (Talmudic Judaism). They transmitted these aspects of their culture throughout the generations.

But at first, they were not genetically unified -- that only followed later, after their cultural unification / standardization. They figured, Hey, we're all following the same religion, speaking the same language, practicing similar economic roles, hailing from the same regional roots -- we might as well merge our families and clans, to cement and protect our special status as Third Way religionists and economic specialists.

And so they did -- and nowadays, the Ashkenazis are one single genetic population.

In the Medieval era, one of their sub-groups was more European -- meaning Slavic or perhaps Balkan Greek or West Anatolian Greek, not Germanic. And the other sub-group was more "Middle Eastern" -- a weasel deflecting term to insinuate they're Judaean or Levantine or Semitic without the evidence to back it up. In reality, more of an East Anatolian Greek, Caucasus region, or Iranian strain of "Middle Eastern". Not Semitic, nor any other Saharo-Arabian population.

These two sub-groups both had the same idea in the Khazar Empire -- why don't we specialize in a certain economic role, and adopt this Third Way religion so we remain neutral (but similar to both sides) in international trade routes, diplomacy, finance, and other mercantile and bureaucratic activities? It didn't matter that one was more Slavic and the other more Iranian. Politics makes strange bedfellows -- culturally at first, and later perhaps literally, as in this case.

With other groups of Jews, the story is presumably similar or more extreme.

The extreme cases are unadmixed populations, where we can directly see that they're just converts from the local genetic population. This is the case for Turkic ones, like the Krymchaks of Crimea. And the Yemeni Jews. And the Ethiopian Jews. And the Persian Jews.

The other major case of an admixed Jewish group is the Sephardics, who are a merger between Iberians and Maghrebis, i.e. the two relevant sub-groups under the control of the Moorish Empire, which straddled the Strait of Gibraltar, including much of Iberia and the Maghreb at the same time.

If some researcher discovers Medieval DNA from a Jewish cemetery in Cordoba or Tangier, and compare it to today's Sephardics and Moroccan Jews, the picture will presumably look like the Ashkenazi one linked above -- a bi-modal genetic cluster pattern during Medieval times, and a more uniform one among present-day descendants. Cultural unification and standardization first, then familial mergers and genetic admixture, after they've grown comfortable and familiar with each other within their Third Way cultural enclave.

Forgot to mention the Cochin Jews as another obvious case of conversion among the local genetic population. They look and speak exactly like their non-Jewish neighbors in Kerala.

We have to emphasize all of these extreme cases cuz the propaganda goes that "Judaism does not proselytize or welcome converts easily", as though to suggest that today's Jews are a latter-day Judaean diaspora.

The more examples we find of obvious local converts, the more that propaganda implodes. The main arguments are about the Ashkenazi and Sephardic groups not being Judaean, but there are all sorts of lesser examples from far-flung regions that, collectively, bolster the argument about a wave of conversions across the Christian-Muslim faultline during the late 1st millennium AD, independently of each other but for similar reasons (convergent evolution, not identity by descent). And not a mass migration from Classical Judaea to these many distant lands.

Another major weakness of genetic data is that determining who resembles who else, is highly sensitive to which groups are included in the comparison! Leave out the very diverse genetic populations of the Caucasus region, for example, and you can't conclude anything about Ashkenazi Jews *not* coming from that region. Or don't include many Persians, etc.

Here's an article reviewing these important points, and arguing for Ashkenazis coming from a Slavic, Iranian, and (weakly) Turkic genetic and geographical origin.

When you include a fuller, richer sample of eastern Anatolia, Iran, northern Mesopotamia, and all around the Caucasus, the results returned are Ashkenazis being something like 25% Caucasian, a conclusion that does not appear when this region is poorly and thinly sampled relative to the Levant.

When the Levant is heavily sampled, this makes them the only logical place for Ashkenazis to resemble in their "Middle Eastern" component. It's just baking in the desired result ahead of time, circular reasoning.

And again, admixture confounds the attempt to decipher genetic population history. So even to the extent that Ashkenazi Jews *do* somewhat resemble Semitic-speaking Levantines, we can't infer that this reflects a shared ancient Semitic common ancestor. Caucasus / Iranian DNA began flowing into the Levant well before the Classical era.

So perhaps the resemblance between Ashkenazi Jews on the one hand, and Lebanese or Palestinian Christians on the other, is simply pointing to them both having a very old Caucasus / Iranian bunch of DNA -- in the Ashkenazi case, cuz they're from that very region and didn't migrate, and in the Lebanese or Palestinian case, cuz they received migrants from that region several thousands of years ago.

Clustering graphs in principal components analysis, don't tell us how they came to share their genes, or when their common ancestors lived.

This is where cultural analysis excels, since the record is far richer over history -- whereas finding Medieval or Ancient or Prehistoric DNA is very very rare, in comparison. Especially since the relevant cultural groups here are all literate and from sedentary or semi-sedentary civilizations, with recorded histories.

Ashkenazi Jews are never recorded as speaking Hebrew, Aramaic, or other Semitic language, as their first, everyday language (only for liturgical purposes -- but that no more establishes their deep ancient affinity with Judaeans than the descendants of the Aztecs "preserving" Latin as a liturgical language, connects them genetically to the Romans or Byzantines).

Whereas Lebanese, Palestinians, etc. in the Levant never stopped speaking Semitic or more broadly Canaanite languages, from antiquity to the Dark Ages to the present.

Conclusion: Ashkenazis are not a diaspora that originated in the Levant. Neither are the Sephardics, who also never spoke Hebrew or Aramaic.

What about the genetic argument about "Jews resemble each other more than their local populations"?

Well, first, there are numerous examples against this dum-dum canard -- Ethiopian, Yemeni, Krymchak, Mountain (Caucasus), and Cochin Jews.

This argument really relies on the Ashkenazi and Sephardic cases. Iranian Jews have the lowest genetic relatedness to other Jewish groups, meaning they're another obvious case of local converts.

Ashkenazi Jews resemble each other more than their host populations cuz they are a unique admixture between a Slavic and an Iranian ancestor population -- who the hell else can boast of a similar lineage since the Medieval era? Nobody. Hence why they resemble each other so much, also having been endogamous ever since.

Likewise for Sephardics -- they are a unique admixture of Iberian and Maghrebi source populations, which means they resemble each other more than they resemble the relatively unadmixed descendants of Iberians and Maghrebis, among their neighbors.

So why do Sephardics and Ashkenazis resemble each other, then? They have a different set of source populations that they're admixed from. Well, not so much -- Iberians are western Indo-Europeans from the Mediterranean, and so are Greeks and Southern Slavs. This could be the shared DNA between Sephardics and Ashkenazis, respectively.

They are also highly admixed with a genetic Middle East / North Africa component, unlike Iberians or Greeks or Slavs. So perhaps their similarity is a result of having Southwestern Indo-European DNA, with a notable MENA DNA mixture as well, even if this MENA source is different for Sephardics and Ashkenazis -- it's still a point of commonality between them, which is lacking or less intense in Iberians, Greeks, and Slavs.

Likewise, the Iberian component of Sephardics separates them from other Maghrebi-derived groups, and the Slavic component of Ashkenazis separates them from other Iranian-derived groups. Both of these exceptional sources is Southwestern Indo-European, so the specifics of their exceptionality is also similar.

So, they don't have to come from the same source populations to bear a resemblance, or even more of a resemblance than they do to their neighbors. It's just that they're both highly admixed, within a relatively recent time-frame, and whose source populations are semi-related in being southern and western Indo-Europeans. That's it!

Bearing in mind all the numerous cases of obvious local converts, including the major "Mizrahi" group, Iranian Jews, this means there's no mystery to solve! They were all converts in the late 1st millennium AD, and they only differ in the degree to which they admixed with other converts from other genetic populations -- not at all for most cases, but they did for Ashkenazis and Sephardics. Moreover, one half of the sources for each of those admixed groups was semi-related (Greeks or Slavs, and Iberians, both being Southwest Indo-Europeans).

Unlike the very sparse genetic historical record -- meaning, DNA from various eras over time, not trying to decipher history from present-day DNA -- the rich cultural historical record bears this out. No mass migration, no diaspora, no preservation of Hebrew or Aramaic as the native language.

And the true descendants of Second Temple Judaeans largely became Christian, then Muslim, staying put in the Levant, amply confirmed genetically and culturally / historically.

Why the hell would anyone expect a mass migration and diaspora out of Judaea after the Roman Empire fell, and why would they have abandoned their purported native language of Hebrew or Aramaic, when the whole point is that they were an endogamous ethnic enclave that did not just melt into their host societies?

The Roman Empire included all sorts of territory -- and yet none of them are purported to have been sent scattered to the four corners of the globe as a result of the collapse of their imperial overlords.

In fact, the only recorded -- historically and genetically -- mass migrations after the Roman Empire fell were from *outside* of its territory, and outside of their Persian rivals' territory, for that matter. Namely, the Germanic and Slavic migrations in Europe, and the Turkic and Mongol migrations in Central Asia. The subjects of the Roman and Parthian empires more or less stayed put during the Dark Ages, struggling to defend themselves against these nomadic barbarian invasions.

Nobody else from the Levant, Southern Europe, or North Africa is claimed to have been sent on a mass-migrating diaspora journey after Rome collapsed. So the Judaean purported example would be without contemporary counterparts who shared the same purported causal pressure.

And no, just destroying the Second Temple and expelling Jews from the single city of Jerusalem doesn't force them into a diaspora all over the Old World. It means they hole up in the nearby Galilee instead. Sedentary people tend not to want to roam all over the place and leave their homeland behind forever to live in the wild or among strangers.

Crushing a regional revolt doesn't do that either, a la the end of the Roman-Jewish Wars -- Syria seceded during the Crisis of the Third Century (under MENA baddie Queen Zenobia), this revolt was eventually crushed as well, but it didn't send Syrians scattering all over the place.

And even if there were a Judaean diaspora post-Roman collapse, the purported direction / destination is totally backwards! When your imperial overlords and sponsors and patrons collapse, the LAST place you want to go is their home turf, cuz it's becoming more unstable, impoverished, and socially fragmenting by the day.

This is confirmed in the Roman case, where there was tons of "Eastern Mediterranean" DNA from sites in Italy during the imperial heyday of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. Once they began disintegrating during the 3rd C, who the hell would want to migrate there? And who the hell would want to remain there, if they were of recent Eastern Med immigrant background? They'd want to bail off of that sinking ship, and return home -- or to some other, more promising empire.

I like empires that didn't get disintegrated...

And so, by the mid-1st millennium and after, there is *comparatively* very little Eastern Med DNA in Italian burial sites (there's still some, cuz again we can't infer history from a snapshot, and Italians have had an Eastern Med DNA component for thousands of years previously).

The only places you would want to journey to after Rome fell, would be the Frankish Empire in NE France, the Byzantine Empire around Constantinople, the Bulgarian Empire nearby in Thrace, the Sasanian Empire (counterpart of the Byzantines, as the Parthians were the counterparts of the Romans), the Abbasid Caliphate in the same place as the Sasanians later on, the Seljuk Empire that replaced the Abbasids for that matter, the Khazar Empire around the Caucasus, the Moorish Empire in the Western Med, and maybe the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt.

What do you know? These are exactly the locations where major Jewish groups suddenly appeared in the post-Classical era.

Forgot to mention the Romaniote Jews -- a group of local converts from the Byzantine Empire, who are Greeks that adopted Talmudic Judaism in the Dark Ages, and speak Byzantine-derived Greek, i.e. after the Byzantine era erased much of the case system from Ancient Greek. (In a typical process of imperiogenesis eroding inflection of its language, to make it easier for the shitloads of L2 learners that now must speak it, as the empire expands out from the founding ethnic group.) They are not Second Temple Jews, whose Greek dialect would've still had a fair amount of inflection in it.

The dum-dum argument about the Ashkenazis having "Roman" DNA is that they poured into Italy during Rome's heyday, and also after its collapse as they fled Judaea. Maybe during the heyday -- everyone else did so as well, it was the place to be. But when it collapsed, they would not have moved onto Germany, since that place was a backwater, not a rising prosperous empire (which was further to the western side of the Rhine, in the nascent Frankish Empire). They definitely did not pour into Italy during / after the 3rd C, when it was disintegrating.

If the story was they picked up some Italian DNA from visiting Rome during its 1st and 2nd C heyday, then fled back home, or to some other rising empire where they are documented to have been, after Rome fell, OK. But that's not the argument, which is instead that the Ashkenazi left Italy for Germany, where they later emerged as Yiddish-speakers, and only after that, a portion of them migrated east into Slavic lands.

Bzzt, wrong direction! There was no rising empire in Germany to attract far-flung strivers looking to make a quick stable buck. The only direction could have been from Italy back to the Eastern Med, either remaining in Greece / Anatolia, or wandering through the Bulgarian Empire (Slavic) or the Khazar Empire (multi-ethnic, not Germanic though), or the Sasanian / Abbasid / Seljuk empire to the further east (even less Germanic). And only from these empires, migrating to the north and west to eventually wind up in Germany -- last.

This "follow the money" argument agrees with Wexler's argument about Yiddish not being an entirely Germanic language originally, let alone one from the Rhineland. But beginning as a Slavic language that was later re-lexified to a Germanic vocabulary and perhaps some morphology, while retaining Slavic syntax and phonology.

There was plenty of money to chase in the Bulgarian Empire, as well as among Slavic subjects of the Khazar Empire -- but comparatively far less among the Germanic groups to the east of the Rhine. If they had joined the Frankish Empire, they wouldn't speak a Germanic language anyway -- the Franks quickly adopted a Romance language, leaving behind their Franconian dialect of German. But the Ashkenazi have never spoken a Romance language as their native tongue, so we can rule out an early stay among the Franks as well.

As I said before, Yiddish has very little inflection compared to other Germanic languages, or languages in general. Even less case inflection than Standard German, which is already somewhat lacking in inflection cuz it became an imperial language with lots of L2 learners, during Germany's imperiogenesis.

So either Yiddish began as a lingua franca in a multi-ethnic context, with lots of L2 learners -- in the Khazar Empire. Or it was adopted very late, after German had already gone through the loss of much of its inflection system, and because the Ashkenazi were L2 learners at the outset, it served as a lingua franca and so lost even more inflection by the time it solidified into Yiddish.

In either case, they did not have a Germanic language as their native language in the 1st millennium, when their ethnogenesis took place.

The earliest recorded use of Yiddish is 1272 -- very damn late into the Dark Ages, well after the other major Jewish conversions. And they were literate! This wasn't their first exposure to literacy, and they're just expressing a language that was previously only spoken for centuries.

We know they're in Germany from those 14th-C burials in Erfurt, albeit still genetically separated. They're culturally unified -- buried in the same cemetery, with no spatial segregation within this Jewish cemetery. But they may have only very recently adopted / constructed Yiddish.

What language did they speak during the cultural unification of the previous several centuries? Either some other language that was re-lexified into a Germanic vocabulary and some morphology, or something else entirely. But presumably a Slavic language, given how much Slavic influence there is in Yiddish.

If that Slavic language came from illiterate Slavs from the Khazar Empire -- and not the literate Slavs from the Bulgarian Empire (and adjoining Slavic cultures near Kiev and Moscow and etc, where Cyrillic spread, or Western Slavs where Roman letters spread), then the lack of a historical literate record is not surprising. It was a spoken lingua franca among a multi-ethnic group that had a lot of illiterate Slavs, and official records were kept in Arabic, Farsi, Turkic, etc., as the main bureaucratic and administrative languages.

The whole logic of (purported) diaspora Jews being an ethnic enclave is that they were endogamous, so did not genetically intermix very much with their hosts, and were culturally apart as well -- different religion, attire / grooming, food taboos, residential living areas, and so on. They are purported to be an ethnic enclave of migrants into the host society.

That is contradicted by the absence of the purported ancestral language, in every single one of these Jewish communities outside of Judaea. When migrants show up and form a semi-enclosed enclave, they maintain their native language! Sometimes it's the *only* language they speak, and even if they also pick up the hosts' language, they retain their native one alongside for awhile -- until they start assimilating. But the Jews never did assimilate, they kept their distinctive religion, clothing, grooming, food taboos, and the rest of their purported cultural heritage.

When Chinese migrants leave China, they form Chinatowns -- and they continue speaking Chinese. Before Italians assimilated into America, they kept speaking Italian languages. So did the Germans, Greeks, and everyone else who wasn't already Anglophone.

Languages are hard to sever over time because there are such huge switching costs to adopting a new native language -- a second language, OK, but not replacing the old native one with a new native one. Very rare, and usually not voluntary, but related to imperial conquest.

So it's damning that no Jewish group is recorded to have spoken Hebrew or Aramaic outside of Judaea, when there's so much inertia behind keeping your language, yes even in a diaspora situation. And if you do give up your native language for that of your hosts, you also give up the other cultural distinctions, in a broad process of assimilation. But we know that Medieval Jews were culturally separate from their Christian or Muslim hosts in all sorts of readily identifiable ways -- not the least being their religion.

Genes and language are correlated, if not perfectly. So isn't it strange that the one cultural component that could most strongly bolster a claim for a Judaean origins of Medieval Jews, is the exact opposite of expectation? They speak the languages of their "hosts" -- because they originated from the exact same culture! They're converts, not migrants.

They are like Euro-descended Americans who speak English while adopting Zen Buddhism, yoga, feng shui, green tea, kimonos, flip-flops, vegetarian diets, and other cultural markers of Buddhist East Asia. These cultural markers are easier to fake for converts, compared to learning a new language -- no white American Buddhists speak fluent Japanese, Chinese, Thai, etc. They speak American English! And their community always will!

Language, more so than the relatively easy-to-fake markers, is the main place to look as to a group's history. It's not perfect, but it does shed light.

And in the case of Medieval Jews, and their modern descendants, they are clearly local adopters who altered their religion, clothing, grooming, diet, etc., to fall in line with Talmudic Judaic precepts, while not adopting a Hebrew or Aramaic or other Canaanite language. Just like white American Buddhists.

It's morbidly ironic that the present-day Jewish state is filled with migrants (or their children), NONE OF WHOM can claim a genetic *or* cultural heritage stemming back to ancient Judaea. And that the people they've spent their entire society's history wiping out -- the Palestinians, and at times other Levantines -- are those who have stayed put in that place this whole time!

Genetically, this is settled.

But even culturally, none of the Zionists or their ancestors spoke a Semitic language. The Palestinians and their ancestors did.

The Zionists are not a diaspora which is RETVRN-ing to its ancestral homeland -- anymore than Aztec-descended Catholics who invaded and occupied Rome, or perhaps Toledo, would be RETVRN-ing to their ancestral homeland. Or white American Buddhists who laid waste to Thais in Thailand. It's such a sick obvious joke!

I know, I'm not retarded enough to believe that historical dynamics are shaped mainly by ideas or anything cerebral and nerdy like that. It's material, including social cohesion that is shaped by material militarized invasion near one's physical home turf.

The Jewish state has been propped up by various empires in various states of stagnation and collapse since its inception -- the moribund Ottoman Empire at the outset of settlement, then the British care-takers after the Ottomans bit the dust, then the Americans after the British bit the dust yet only during the late 1970s. America bitchslapped Israel out of the Sinai Peninsula during the Suez phase of the Arab-Iraeli Wars, in 1956, by threatening to annihilate Israel's British imperial overlords economically.

Really the only time Israel had to fight for itself was after 1956 and before 1978, during which it won one war (in '68) and then stalemated in another (in '73), before giving up its autonomous fight and agreeing to vassalage to the American Empire (in '78).

But with America collapsing now, and with new people becoming unified in their struggle against the Zionist invasion -- mainly in Southern Lebanon and Syria -- Israel will have no external sponsor to back it up in reality, and will face ever-mounting forces from their rising-asabiya neighbors, Hezbollah.

These material dynamics are what shape history, not academic debates and evidence about whether or not the Zionists truly have a legitimate claim to that land.

It's just worth emphasizing, for the sake of the truth -- if not for anything that affects the course of history -- how totally upside-down the entire project has been about restoring the Jewish homeland.

Luckily for the true descendants of the Second Temple society, this sick joke is rapidly coming to an end.

The geographic origin of Talmudic Judaism was Iran, not the Levant. The standard Talmud is the Babylonian one, i.e. written near historical Babylon, but administered by Iranian empires ever since the Achaemenids of the mid-1st millennium BC, right up until it was conquered by the Mongols, and then winding up in the Ottomans' possession, a British then American care-taker relationship, etc. Baghdad hasn't been under true local autonomy for 2500 years.

The Palestinian Talmud composed in Jerusalem is *not* the standard one.

So even at the very outset of the Talmudic / Rabbinical era in the mid-1st millennium, before the mass conversions of the last 1st millennium, the source of innovations and standardizations within Judaic religion and culture had decisively left the Levant for Iranian-controlled lands.

If Zionists wanted to RETVRN to Baghdad and restore the glory of original Talmudism, that would be one thing. That's where their particular religion actually comes from, not the Levant. And as it turns out, that's where a lot of their genetic and other cultural heritage comes from -- although more on the Iranian side proper, not Iranian-administered Iraq. Still, closer than their connection, genetic or cultural, to Judaea.

More on Yemeni Jews and the pretzel-twisting nonsense that academics and propagandists talk themselves into, in order to promote the overall grand narrative of a vast Judaean diaspora in the late Roman or post-Roman era...

Autosomal DNA shows that present-day Yemeni Jews are the same as other Yemenis and Arabians, not genetically distinct at all.

Even without this genetic evidence, they don't resemble other Jewish groups culturally, but do resemble their non-Jewish neighbors.

For example, their wedding ceremonies don't have a bridal canopy, they don't walk around anything or anyone ("circumambulation"), and their costumes don't look like any other Jewish group's wedding costumes (highly decorated and elaborate, and really emphasizing the color gold).

Without any blood evidence, I can tell they do not share a common *cultural* ancestor with the Ashkenazis (who are, instead, Indo-European from somewhere near the Caucasus).

Their seder ceremonies are also unique, neither Sephardic nor Ashkenazi.

They don't play egg-tapping games or decorate eggs for their springtime renewal holiday (Passover), which is an Indo-Euro thing that Ashkenazis do (and in some very weakened form, Sephardics do outside of Passover, due to their Iberian heritage).

These three have nothing in common within the past 2000 years, culturally or genetically. Three separate groups who adopted Talmudism, while retaining much of their pre-existing local culture (and genepool -- the only innovation there being admixture among Jewish adopters of different sub-populations, but within the same geographic region, e.g. Slavs and Iranians near the Khazar Empire to yield Ashkenazis).

There is also a risible attempt to portray the rulers of the Himyarite Kingdom which controlled much of southern Arabia / Yemen, as converts to Judaism as of circa 400 AD. If true, this would go against my claim that major conversions to Judaism appeared only after the rise of Islam, and where Islam and Christianity cohabited, opening up Judaism as a Third Way / Non-Aligned Movement.

The only concrete conclusions we can draw from Himyarite religion in the late 4th through 5th centuries, is that it became monotheistic, or maybe henotheistic (emphasizing one senior god above other lesser gods within a polytheistic pantheon). And that this was influenced by both Jews and Christians from the Levant -- they came under Byzantine pressure to adopt Christianity, but they wanted to remain politically autonomous, so rejected Christianity.

But they didn't "adopt Judaism" -- what would that even mean in 400 AD? There was no Talmud compiled until a century later, so Talmudic Judaism is out. The Second Temple was long destroyed, so Second Temple Judaism, with its priestly caste that oversaw the sacred ceremonies of its focal religious site, is out as well. This was a limbo period for the descendants of the Second Temple people -- nothing very defined and elaborated for anyone else to adopt.

References to the "Lord of the Jews" or "Lord of Israel" are epithets that non-Jews use as well, like Christians. Did they have material copies of the Torah or the entire Hebrew Bible? Or at least orally transmitted "copies"? Nope. Did they follow kosher dietary laws? Who knows, probably nope. Did they circumcise their babies? IDK, but no reference that they do. Did they celebrate Passover? These are the kinds of things that would identify them as specifically Jewish in religion, not merely "vaguely Jewish-influenced or Jewish-inflected monotheism".

This was a time of all sorts of syncretic religions showing up, typically with some Abrahamic influence, whether Second Temple Judaism, Christianity, or otherwise. Like the popular Manichaeism. So the most accurate term, given the evidence, is not "Judaism" but "Himyarite monotheism" or "Jewish-influenced Himyarite monotheism".

This was a time of all sorts of syncretic religions showing up, typically with some Abrahamic influence, whether Second Temple Judaism, Christianity, or otherwise. Like the popular Manicheanism. So the most accurate term, given the evidence, is not "Judaism" but "Himyarite monotheism" or "Jewish-influenced Himyarite monotheism".

Even then, this does point to the crucial role of Christianity as the state religion of empires, and the desire for polities seeking political autonomy to adopt some Jewish-ish religion as a cultural marker for their political autonomy. It's just that there was no Islam, let alone Muslim empires, to serve as the other pole, with Judaism being a triangulating strategy. Perhaps Old South Arabian polytheism served as this other pole, but I doubt it. I just don't think the Himyarites were Judaic in religion, just monotheistic and influenced in some ways by Judaean religion.

Soon after this Himyarite monotheism, though, it was conquered by the Christian nation / empire of Axum from Ethiopia, which crossed the Red Sea. Then it became Christian, even as it eventually became administered by the Sasanian Persian Empire -- much like the way they tolerated Nestorian Christianity within the core of their empire.

The island of Socotra, to the south of Yemen and to the east of Somalia, was an outpost of Nestorian Christianity as well.

So in the Dark Ages, Yemen had Christian pressures primarily from the expanding state of Axum from Ethiopia, then internally within Yemen, and from a nearby major island. We think of that whole area as nothing but Muslim today, but it was fairly Christian back then. And of course there was a major Muslim presence after the rise of Islam -- it was near ground zero.

So, the perfect place for a group of locals to adopt Talmudic Judaism as a Third Way, which is exactly what happened. Wikipedia's entry on Yemeni Jews has a timeline that is only legendary for ancient times, overblown BS for the early Dark Ages (equating Himyarite monotheism with "converting to Judaism"), and then absent until the early 2nd millennium, when they become part of an international body of Jewish groups, e.g. corresponding with Maimonides.

So that's a good indicator of their date of conversion -- in the late 1st millennium, well after the rise and spread of both Christianity and Islam within their region.

Worth reviewing the extent of Christianity in Iranian-controlled lands during the Dark Ages, since it was huge. It was Nestorian Christianity, or the Church of the East, headquartered near or in Baghdad, and covering much of present-day Iraq and the western half of Iran proper, then extending in pockets off toward the east, covering the western part of Afghanistan, up into southern Central Asia, including Merv, Samarkand, Bukhara, and Tashkent.

And notice the outposts in Southwestern Arabia & Socotra, as well as Southern India. Once Muslims showed up in these places, it opened the door to Yemeni Jews and Cochin Jews as a Third Way religion.

Eventually it reached into China during the Tang, Song, and Yuan periods. Along the way some Mongol tribes adopted it, including the Kerait clan, who made up the wives of Genghis Khan's sons, and their sons as well.

But it began very early, in the 5th C, in present-day Iraq -- under Sasanian rule, whose state religion was Zoroastrianism, but which tolerated Nestorian Christianity as a counterweight to their Orthodox Byzantine rivals. They were not necessarily Semitic speakers, it stretched up into Northern Mesopotamia which would've been more Indo-European and Iranian. The common factor is -- at the core of the Sasanian Persian Empire. Hence one of its nicknames being the Persian Church, not the Iraqi or Arabian Church.

As Islam spread throughout these Iranian-controlled lands during the Abbasid and later eras, this opened up Talmudic Judaism as a Third Way between Nestorian Christianity and Islam. And that's exactly where Jews are in Iran and to the east.

However, Christianity was late to arrive in the more eastern lands, and so was Islam. Nestorian Christianity went into decline during the 14th C, and was more or less wiped out by Timur, to be replaced solely by Islam. This dried up the Third Way logic in the eastern parts of the Sasanian Empire and beyond.

And so "Persian Jews" have remained more of a presence in Western Iran, where the Nestorian Church had existed since a far earlier time and up to a later date -- and where Byzantine Christian pressures were not so far away to the west, along with Frankish Crusader pressures in the Levant. These two were not exactly right along the frontier, as the Nestorian nucleus in Mesopotamia and Western Iran was, but still a powerful and looming Christian pressure, unlike the void of Christianity to the east after the rise of the Timurid Empire.

Needless to say this Mesopotamian and Western Iranian region was also home to many Muslims as well -- Persian Jews sprung up, and have remained along a local Christian-Muslim faultline, where Talmudic Judaism offered them a Third Way / Non-Aligned religion.

The next big question is -- does this pattern exist elsewhere or at other times? Not where Christianity and Islam are the two poles, and Judaism as the Third Way. But say, Hinduism and Buddhism as the poles, and some other minority / niche religion being the Third Way.

I don't know enough about niche religions in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, or Southeastern India, but those are all places where Buddhism and Hinduism should have opened up a niche for a Third Way.

The Parsis in India, maybe? That would be with Islam and Hinduism as the two poles, in western / northwestern India. They're the only group practicing that religion, though -- not a whole series of converts from across the Muslim-Hindu faultline in South Asia. They arrived with a Third Way religion already, as a fairly well documented diaspora / migration, not local adopters.

The problem with looking for other examples is that perhaps there's something unique about the relationship between Christianity, Islam, and (Talmudic) Judaism, where the niche Third Way is not just any ol' Third Way -- it's one that overlaps decently with each of the two major poles, and in some sense can claim to precede each of them.

That's the ideal Third Way -- it's non-aligned, compatible with both sides, and can demand respect from the two majors, as the elder religion of the trio.

Maybe in other times and places, the Third Ways available are not as ideal -- only similar to one pole, not the other, or maybe not similar to either side. A recent invention rather than preceding them both. Etc.

Hinduism precedes Buddhism, and is related to it, but Hinduism did not spawn another major religion that is territorially close to Buddhist lands, to serve as the other pole, with Hinduism acting as a niche Third Way. Rather, Hinduism is a major pole in its own right, not like Judaism.

Could be something going on in sub-Saharan Africa, or the Americas, I have no clue.

One thing I don't think works, though, is a fusion of the two poles into a Third Way. That's not non-aligned, which is "neither/nor" -- fusion is saying "both/and". Fusion is clearly trying to please both sides disingenuously, while non-aligned is saying I have no dog in the fight, leave me alone and I'll leave you alone, not I'm trying to pledge allegiance to two rival sides at the same time, which is unsustainable.

Judaism really hit the sweet spot in the context of rising Christian and Muslim empires. It's its own coherent religion, not a transparently fence-sitting, both-sides-ing fusion. And yet it's not any ol' non-fusion religion -- it is still similar to each, making it palatable to both without being a deliberate ass-kiss. And it at least partly precedes either side -- so it wasn't recently invented for the purpose of diplomacy, making it more trustworthy. And being older, at least in some sense, it gets respect for being the wise elder.

A looottt of traits had to line up in a single religion for it to see such an explosion of growth in conversions, for a religion that doesn't prosyletize or easily welcome converts. And all doing so independently of each other, at the group level. A very rare event indeed, so that it's the only religion where -- purportedly, but not really -- the majority of its practitioners are in a diaspora, not near where it began.

But that's no great mystery after all -- it's so widespread cuz of adoption, not migration! But to be widely and independently adopted, so many favorable traits had to be working in its favor, within its historically contingent political and cultural environment.

It's miraculous!