Fact-Checking -- clearing up a lot of ignorance part 9

There's a sucker born every minute. Twitter has turned up three new pieces of ignorantly desperate pretense that there was once a nation called Palestine.

As usual, two are newspapers that refer to Palestine which was under Arab attack. Think about the logic of making that claim: the Muslim Arabs were attacking a place full of Muslims. 

One is dated May 1, 1948. The British Mandatory period did not end until May 15.

The other is more subtle. The masthead date is May 16, 1948. The people making this claim are too young to know how print newspapers work. To get out a morning edition, the editor(s) and typesetters worked all the afternoon and night before that. The first print copy went to an editor who looked it over for gross errors. At this point, even if somebody reminded him about the end of the British Mandate, he would probably say, "I'm not going to pay a typesetter to tear apart the entire first page just because of a name nobody cares about."

They were so rationally naive in those days that they could not imagine pro-terrorists using this one piece of business rationale out of irrationally ignorant desperation.

The new example is two coins struck with the word Palestine on them. The date on one coin is 1927. Yes, people put dates on coins. If you have any lying around, check them out. Anyway, 1927 is well within the British Mandatory period. So is the date on the other, 1942.

I keep hoping that this will stop but when you're dealing with nutjobs, you have to shoot them down every time or they claim victory.

UPDATE: proof positive that you have to answer every nutjob. A third coin has turned up. The date on it is 1939, again, within the British Mandatory period. There never has been a self-governing nation called Palestine.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- DH's mischsprache mishegas

So I was reading Devarim last Shabbos in my own version, Narrating the Torah, and came across a comment I made. I've seen it before but obviously my brain cells were too occupied to realize what it meant.

It is a comment on Samaritan Pentateuch, which is available free online in two versions, Walton's "London" Polyglot (uses the Gezer script) and August Freiherr von Gall's critical edition (uses the Aramaic ("square") script).

The comment has to do with the Documentary Hypothesis' claim that Biblical Hebrew is a mischsprache incorporating Aramaic forms as a result of hybridization during the Captivity.

In fact, Biblical and Talmudic Aramaic or Neo-Babylonian is a hybrid of real Aramaic and Akkadian. It uses the lettering of Aramaic, with the full guttural set that Akkadian lost during the Gutian takeover, but the conjugations use their Akkadian vowels. On the other hand, Neo-Babylonian never did recover the nifal binyan present in Akkadian and Biblical Hebrew from the start. It gained words from Hebrew, but not grammar.

Biblical Hebrew, on the other hand, is an ancient Semitic language with many of the features of Old Akkadian, such as epistemics and other modals. I discuss this in detail in my Hebrew lessons.

So Biblical Hebrew is not a mischsprache formed from the collision of languages in the Nebuchadnetsar era; Neo-Babylonian is the mischsprache.

And Samaritan Hebrew is also a mischsprache. The Samaritan Pentateuch has all the same narratives as Jewish Torah. It has about 90% of the same words. One reason for the difference is something called regularization. When you transmit material verbally instead of in writing, each narration risks changes that make sense to the narrator and audience, because all languages change over time. When a narrator forgets the exact word to use, she is likely to use something similar that has a high frequency at the time she is retelling the story. She may also re-use a word from nearby in the story she is re-telling.

When enough time has gone by, grammar also begins to change, often to simplify. For example, English conjugations are simpler than their Norman-French or Anglo-Saxon ancestors. During hybridization, as with Neo-Babylonian, conjugations look like both their parents for a while, and then the new descendant develops its own characteristic grammar. 

This never happened in Biblical Hebrew. The grammar of Chronicles is the same as the grammar of the rest of Pentateuch -- that of the ancient Semitic languages, not Neo-Babylonian or Mishnaic Hebrew.

It did happen in Samaritan Hebrew. The surviving manuscripts have grammatical changes in them compared to Jewish Torah; the changes do not reflect either Mishnaic Hebrew or Neo-Babylonian. A classics scholar named Ze'ev ben Hayyim worked with Samaritans and the description they gave him led him to think that the way the manuscripts used Hebrew was a survival of the Second Temple period.

That made no sense to me. I thought it might be a survival of Assyrian, so I studied Delitzsch's book, which is online. It was no help at all.

Not until I went through several books on Arabic grammar that I found online, did I find the features that ben Hayyim described for verbs in Samaritan Hebrew.

One issue he did not discuss, is changing the spelling of el, alef lamed, to ayin lamed. The Hebrew spelling looks like the Arabic definite article; it is never agglutinated, which is required for the Arabic definite article. The changed spelling resembles Arabic ila, "to". The manuscripts have altered spelling that people who spoke Arabic could not tolerate, it was just too disconcerting. 

The Masoretic text of Jewish Tannakh footnotes vowel issues and qeri, it does not change the body of the text. The Jews regarded the text as canonical; the Samaritans did not.

All the surviving Samaritan manuscripts date after 1000 CE, that is, 300 years after the Muslim conquest. 300 years is how long it took English to develop out of the hybridization of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. 300 years is how long it took the Pelishtim/Ahiyyawa to develop Ionian Greek out of the language that they wrote in Linear B. 300 years is how long the post-Exodus Israelites had for developing the Gezer script out of Ugaritic before the Sea Peoples destroyed Ugarit. 300 years is a reasonable period for the Samaritans to hybridize their version of Hebrew with Arabic.

I'm pretty sure the people who invented Documentary Hypothesis never accessed Samaritan material. It's not just the wording or language; there are other claims in DH that don't work, because the Samaritans are ideal candidates to produce the E text -- and they did nothing of the kind. I did a verse by verse comparison of Jewish Torah to Samaritan Pentateuch that I call The Real Difference, and if the DH people had seen what I saw, they could not logically have said what they said.

But there's precious little logic in DH. It's an absolute Conjunction Fallacy or Linda problem based on false factual claims and false logic. Nobody can tell me differently without proving they've done the homework I've done.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Clearing up a lot of ignorance part 8

I should have known there'd be a part 8 in here somewhere. This week's event, in the current environment of Jew hatred, is Twitter posts about Judaism as a religion. They come from poorly educated Jews who are selling Judaism short.

Judaism is a complete culture. It always has been. It had to be the whole way back before Abraham left Haran for the Holy Land. Why?

It's codified in Exodus. Courts run by oaths. Oaths are taken in the name of something so awesome, nobody would take that oath falsely. But what is awesome in one culture is shekets in another. You can't take an oath by a shekets. 

And you can't run a culture without a court. People get sideways to each other all the time. You have to settle disagreements with the help of impartial people. Not relatives. Not the people who already have the disagreement. And for thousands of years, the people who testify to help resolve these disagreements have taken oaths. 

But it's not just that. Every culture has its own way of doing things. The American ignoramuses shocked by a French woman proposing to her fellow after winning Olympic gold were proof of that. So there's a million and one things that are OK in one culture when you run a trial, that are a shekets in another culture.

So when a number of places in Torah warn about how to deal with judges and other officials (or not) we find that Jewish law has always prohibited a lot of things that are going on right now in America.

If you have not studied Jewish law as the basis for a complete culture, you don't know anything about it.

If you have studied Judaism as a religion, not a culture, you don't know anything about it.

There are a million and one places on the net where you can start to get your head set on straight. My blog is one of them, especially the first part on law, which will show you how many urban legends you believe about Judaism and how many fallacies have gone into that belief.

If you're not willing or don't have the guts to admit that maybe you are ignorant, you will never improve, and what you say about Judaism or Jewish law is a waste of everybody's time.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- my fellow language geeks

Me and Rachel Weisz: "YES, I am... a language geek!"

Although some of you already know that.

For the last few years I've been trying to chase down hardcopy of a specific version of Tannakh. I forget now where I first heard about it.

It's in Ladino. Fine, Internet Archive has the Ferrara Ladino edition, but it uses Latin characters.

This one is in Rashi script. It was produced in Constantinople, in a number of editions. I was looking for the 1905 edition, but the only thing being advertised was volume 2 of a two-volume set.

NEVER SAY DIE.

I was googling for it again a couple of months ago, not expecting to find anything new, and I struck gold.

Volume 1

Volume 2

The downside is that if you want to put this on your own storage, you have to download every page image, copy and paste it. Unlike the 1342 Munich Talmud manuscript, which you can download as a PDF.

Rashi script is not hard to learn but then you have to realize that Ladino is based on Spanish. So having one of the Latin script versions is a good idea, and then you can type lines into Google translate for some idea of what the Ladino says. There are online resources for learning Ladino, the standard text and a website. You can also listen to programs in Ladino on Israel's Kan radio and on Radio Nacional de Espana.

So there, my fellow Bible and language geeks, is something new to errrr spend your time on.

Mendel Beilis -- the YIVO records

This turned up in a google search over the weekend. YIVO is the Institute for Jewish Research, concentrating on eastern Europe.

https://digipres.cjh.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE12125685

I have given this link to Jay Beilis, Mendel's grandson. You can download the file for your private use but I have to make one thing crystal clear. On page 28 is a typed letter between two people interested in the case.

It unequivocally declares that Mendel Beilis was acquitted by the jury.

Anti-Semites will try to persuade you otherwise, but the same conclusion comes out of the trial transcript, if you read Russian. Which I do. My translation is here.

https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2013/11/mendel-beilis-verdicts.html

Page 31 shows that Pranaitis' claims were "exploded" years before Beilis was arrested, let alone tried. Because Pranaitis plagiarized Eisenmenger, this means Eisenmenger is also exploded. Since Laible and by derivation Herford used Eisenmenger, they are also exploded. What they say about references to Jesus in the Talmud is a lot of malarkey. Anti-Semites will also claim the contrary of this.

Several of the letters show that physicians and psychologists all over Europe debunked Prof. Sikorsky's claims about ritual murder and blasted him for saying what he did.

Several letters are addressed to a Mr. Montefiore, who was not the philanthropist and Zionist Moses Montefiore, who died in 1885. It also could not be his heir, Sir Joseph Sebag-Montefiore, who died in 1903. It is clear that the Montefiore referenced in the letters worked with Lord Rothschild, who obtained Vatican copies of bulls and encyclicals which refuted part of Pranaitis' testimony. Page 98 from October 21st (Gregorian) 1913 confirms Cardinal Merry del Val's answer to Rothschild.

Page 149 refers to a leading article in the London Times on November 13, 1913, about Russia, which reflected western condemnation of Russia for the Beilis case. You have to have an account to access this article. Anybody who does can find a link to it here, if Google turned up the right result.

https://www.thetimes.com/archive/find/russia/w:1913-10-31~1913-11-14

Many of the YIVO papers are in German and in handwriting at that. I can read German but I didn't stop to absorb them. You're welcome to them.

Every new bit of evidence in this case is precious and this set of records makes one thing clear. Anti-Semites believe that everybody who is not Jewish agrees with them, secretly if not publicly. There is always massive evidence to the contrary and these records give some of it, including the Times article.

I'm just saying -- the long hot summer of 2024

People, we still have half of July and all of August to go and if you still don't have your hot weather routine straight, here it is.

1. Hopefully you have at least double pane windows. Close them before you leave the house in the morning, AND close the curtains, especially on a sunny side of the house. This can keep the house TEN degrees cooler even if you don't run the AC while you're gone. If you have a storm door, open the glass panes so as not to trap the heat from the sun against your inside door.

2. SET YOUR AC TO 80 degrees. This is the most energy efficient temperature, and it is much cooler than outside in a heat wave. Using windows and curtains properly will avoid stressing your AC and the grid.

3. A dehumidifier can be the equivalent of five degrees of AC. My home can't have HVAC and mini-splits don't handle these heat waves well. But my through-the-wall unit has a dehumidifier and when it's 100% humidity but not hot, that's the ticket. 

4. USE CEILING FANS. Air movement is crucial to keeping cool, as you know from experience. It will also make you feel cooler when you are trying to sleep on a hot night.

5. Make sure your pets are inside if you're not home during the day or night. Talk to your veterinarian about ways to keep nervous pets from tearing up the house, but leaving them outside in heat that would kill you is just abuse.

6. If temperatures are going to drop below 85 at night, turn off the AC and open the windows. Ventilation is crucial to sleeping well. Make sure internal doors are open so rooms don't get stuffy. 

7. COLD SHOWERS. A cold shower just before bedtime cleans and refreshes. Start with mildly warm water and then turn the temperature down every half minute or so. Then only dry your butt to avoid diaper rash, and let your ceiling fans blow you dry. It's cleaner than a swimming pool and you don't have to get into your hot car or run through the heat wave to use it. Also running cold water over your wrists, or splashing your face with cold water, are refreshing. And if you're not at work, pouring cold water over your whole head also works.

8. DRINK YOUR WATER. Not iced coffee, not alcohol, not caffeinated soda. These will all drain fluids from your body, removing your coolant. 

9. Put bottles of your emergency water in the freezer, at least 5 of them. In a heat exhaustion emergency, put one against each side of the neck, one in each armpit, and one in the groin while you wait for emergency services. You can also run cold water in the bath and put the person into that, but put in the ice bottles because I know from experience that cold water doesn't stay cold in this kind of heat.

10. Keep FOUR ice cube trays frozen. I'm just one person and I know I go through at least one tray each day.

11. Prepare cool foods in advance to eat when "it's too hot to cook". Make large batches; freeze some of it if it's more than a week's worth of food. Get vegetables, fruit, cheese, milk if you can tolerate it, and juice (not juice cocktail or fruit drink which are sugary). Yogurt is great: you can mix two tablespoonfuls with flavoring like cocoa powder and sugar or fruit preserves, and stick it in the freezer for about 15 minutes. Chex mix with raisins and carob chips is another good choice.

12. Dress as lightly and loosely as you can. If you have to run in and out of buildings, wear light colors. Dark colors absorb light and heat up.

13. Linen bedding is the best, it is historically known for its coolness. It wicks heat away from you. It cools off rapidly once you roll over onto the other side of the bed.

14. Hopefully your bed is two people wide. When you have heated up one side, you can roll onto the cool side. Pillows are the same way, once the one you are lying on gets warm, especially if the pillow case is linen, you can move it so the cool side is under your head.

15. Have a downstairs sleeper. It can be as much as FIVE degrees cooler downstairs than up. This will help you get to sleep. Sometimes if I wake up around 2 a.m. I will then go upstairs and finish the night in my bedroom.

16. PLAN FOR THE ELECTRICITY TO FAIL. This can happen if the drain of AC is too high or a storm shreds the grid. In 2012, a derecho storm took out power to some 2 million people in the DMV who had my same power company. It lasted 22 hours. The heat index was about 112. My only ventilation was the windows on the north side of my house. My only air movement was a Victorian type wooden lady's fan. 

I keep my freezer packed with food. You cannot open your freezer when there's no power or things start to defrost. In 2012, mine stayed frozen and I didn't have to throw anything out. When Hurricane Isabel came through in 2003, my power was out for THREE DAYS but my packed freezer stayed frozen. Some things in your refrigerator freeze well. Throw them into the freezer the minute the power goes out and you might save even more. 

If you don't need electricity to run your shower, you can still use cold water in case you start to develop heat exhaustion, but you will need to keep the water running because, like I said, it doesn't stay cold long in severe heat.

You may need to leave your neighborhood to find cooling. The derecho took out power to such a wide region, I probably would have had to go 200 miles to central Pennsylvania to find a hotel that still had AC. KEEP YOUR CAR GASSED UP so you can evacuate in such an emergency. 

Keep your phone charged and plan to use it only for communication, not entertainment. HAVE A DEVICE SPECIFIC CHARGER THAT USES YOUR CAR TO RECHARGE, whether it plugs into a cigarette lighter or in-board Wifi/USB port. Some chargers come with multiple plug ends to suit most outlets.

Also since shit happens, buy one of those multi-charger boxes that you can recharge from house power. Mine has an AC/USB recharging port useful for phones. Its charge stays good for over a month; I can use it to power my laptop for 5 hours. I have a flashlight that will recharge from this box or from my laptop using a USB port -- and so it will also recharge from my car's USB port. Some multi-charger boxes can also pump up a tire. Mine has already paid for itself by saving me two towing fees.

Nobody is immune to weather emergencies, and that includes wildfire seasons in the Pacific Northwest. Emergency assistance is always stressed at first and you need to prepare to be your own first responder. But even when there's no emergency -- wildfire, derecho, hurricane, tornado -- you need to prepare to deal with hot weather, if you want to behave like a responsible adult.

Clearing up a lot of ignorance -- Part 7

They're still doing it. People are still trying to prove there was a nation named Palestine where Israel is now.

They offer up bits of yellow paper. 

But they haven't read those papers very well.

Because every single one of them falls within the British Mandatory period, the only time there was an entity called Palestine.

1929 birth registry.

Passport for somebody born in 1920 during the British Mandatory period.

Tax receipt from 1943, DURING THE BRITISH MANDATORY PERIOD

Newspaper from 1936. The masthead is hard to read and could be 1930, but the reference to Stessen says it's 1936.

So don't expose your foolishness on Twitter or anywhere else. Find the date. If it's within the mandatory period, it's not a nation called Palestine, it's the British once again confusing everybody by assigning names randomly.