Judaism I: Does Judaism still Exist?

First in a four-part series about Jews. It seems like a lot, but remember that I've been holding this knowledge in because there is essentially no point saying the J-word on iFunny.

When I call Christianity and Islam “Jewish religions”, and point out that Jesus and his apostles were Jewish, many of my opponents will tell me “Oh, but Jesus wasn’t a Jew, he is a CHRISTIAN. Biblical Jews do not exist anymore, blah blah blah, science science science, expletive”. And there is some merit to this claim. The Mishnah, the component of the Talmud known as the “Oral Torah", seems to an outsider like myself that they kind of fudged some things in. I mean, I don’t even believe the written torah is as ancient as they say it is, but whatever. I’m going to make a post about pre-Talmudic Judaism later. I’m here to actually go beyond this and say that “Rabbinic Judaism” or “Talmudic Judaism” has mostly ceased to exist (among so-called Western Jews) as a concrete thing since the early modern period, as a result of the Sabbatean movement and the Jewish Enlightenment.

A majority of modern Jews are either not religious or otherwise non-denominational, or Reform Jews. In Israel, these sort of secular Jewish sects make up around half of the Jewish population, and “Conservative Jews” (I’ll get to this later) make up most of the rest of the population. Actual Orthodox Jews a la Ben Shapiro or those guys who wear those giant hats and have the weird haircuts, they only make up 10% of the American Jewish population today but make up 22% of the Israeli Jewish population. It is important to consider, however, that most of this 22% in Israel is not Western Jews but Oriental Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. As far as Ashkenazi (Northern European Jews) go, I am led to believe that a majority or at least something near half of their Orthodox Jews are Hasidim. As a New Yorker I am all too familiar with both the Hasidim and the Secular Jews. The Hasidim are an odd people, I think a lot of them don’t even know English and just speak Yiddish. Secular Jews are neurotic and not religiously oriented at all, even if they go to some thing they call “Synagogue” and fancy themselves as “Practicing Jews”. Neither, however, are really practicing Judaism but something else entirely at least insofar as Talmudic Judaism is separate from those Jews who only followed the written Torah (AKA the Pentateuch).

Reform Judaism arose in the 19th century out of the Jewish Enlightenment, which was derivative of the European Enlightenment, and was an attempt to transform Judaism into something more digestible for the quasi-assimilated Jewish population of Western Europe. Reform Jews do not believe the Torah or the Talmud are religiously binding, which is honestly enough for me to consider their beliefs not *religiously* Jewish. There is a Jewish aspect to all of these beliefs, but I will get to that later. Instead, their primary body of ideological energy seems to come from enlightenment ideas with maybe some long-decayed influence from 19th century German philosophy. They have very lax conversion standards, have no issues with intermarriage, and are fully accepting of libtardism similar to the Unitarians and the Episcopalians. I have even been told that some go out into the wild Jungle of Afrika to convert dark type people to Judaism so they can immigrate to Israel. How strange! Anyways, yeah. This is just very obviously not religiously Jewish, it’s more like a political party or masonic lodge with extremely weakly guarded but existent ethnic aspects.

Hasidic Judaism is the form of Orthodox Judaism I am most immanently aware of. These Hasidics, they’re all over the place basically everywhere east of the Hudson and down into NYC and in Rockland Country. They seem to all have some sort of collective Autism, like if you’ve seen videos of them they act like flocks of deer. I think many of them don’t speak English and many of them may be recently inbred. So I am told. They also spit on people. Again, very animalistic trait, like they are Llamas embodied into Human form. But I digress. The main feature of Hasidic Judaism is the heavy emphasis on Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism. Basically a very esoteric, ecstatic process of exegesis as opposed to more rationalistic and straightforward views of scripture. It’s complicated, and I’m no expert on it, but basically it espouses a great deal of hidden cosmology in Jewish scripture and espouses much deeper meanings behind certain pieces of doctrine than traditional Rabbinic Judaism of Maimonides. I don’t want to rag on Kabbalah too hard, I don’t personally have any skin in the game and I know it has come under some sympathy in Christian, Islamic, and Pagan (Armanist) circles, although I think that this Kabbalic haze that these Hasidics are left in may contribute to their autism. Like, they are not even in this world.

Anyways, this Kabbalistic element in Hasidism is believed by some to have come from the Sabbateans, and I have heard that many Sabbateans and Frankists converted to Hasidism. For those of you who do not know, Sabbatai Zevi was a wildly successful false (false?) messiah in Judaism who was very influenced by Lurianic Kabbalah. He ultimately converted to Islam (lol). Many of his followers actually joined him in this while many others thought he had only fake converted, but the movement kind of died down after a while. But it created this great controversy among Jews on whether or not Kabbalah was still okay. A lot of these Jews who were Sabbateans still held onto their Kabbalah love while a lot of other Jews said Kabbalah must be strongly limited and gatekept to avoid another messiah disaster. I heard one Quora page saying that at a certain point 2/3 of the world’s Jews were Sabbateans, but I have found no source for this, so I don’t know the exact number of Jews, but it was probably a more influential Messiah movement among Jews than Jesus was if that is the case.

There are also Jews who are ultra-orthodox but are not Hasidics, who may perhaps be considered roughly analogous to Rabbinic Jews proper. And there are Conservative and “Modern Orthodox” Jews, who seem to bridge the gap between the ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Reform Jews. I would assume Ben Shapiro belongs to the latter, since he doesn’t dress up in the retarded outfit that they wear with the sideburn pigtails and the fedora. But the point is, Jews today mostly practice something novel both among the exoteric extreme and the esoteric extreme, so I would be hesitant to call the issue with Jews today a specifically religious thing. It’s rather, a spirit of attitude dating back perhaps to ancient Judaism which I will talk about in my next post, which will be released soon after this one.