April 01, 2019 Monday
Bedtime Story
Yuri Slezkine's take on Jews
In fact, Mercury is supposed to be the
guide of the souls that dwell in the underworld.
Thus Mercurians signify those people who
live and survive by their wit and who instead of settling down and blending in actively
and intentionally tend to keep themselves apart from the rest by cultivating
strange customs, languages and strangeness in general.
Slezkine also considers the Jains of India
and the Parsis of Bombay and Gujarat - descendents of Zoroastrians who fled
Persia after the Muslim conquest, practiced endogamy and stayed out of the
wretched caste system of native Hindus, turned into money lending,
jewelry-making, shop keeping and eventually ventured into banking and industry
– as Mercurians.
The Mercurians appear - at least
superficially - to be weak and effeminate as they usually avoid confrontations
with their more numerous hosts rather than actively engaging with them or
challenging any of their practices.
The Mercurians have this strange property
of remaining in complete harmony with the new environment and yet retaining
their distinctiveness.
This trait, he claims, is responsible for
giving them both great socioeconomic successes as well as at the same time
attracting great resentment and hostility.
In the former book (The Jewish Century) he
gave a detailed statistics that gives a comprehensive assessment of the status
of Jews in the Interwar years in the Hungarian society.
“Jews represented one-fourth of all
university students and 43% at Budapest Technological University.
In 1920, 60% of Hungarian doctors, 41% of
lawyers, 39% of all privately employed engineers and chemists, 34% of editors
and journalists, and 29% of musicians identified themselves as Jews by
religion.”
Their success became a source of envy for
the rest of the Hungarians.
Just look at the kind of sentiments Miklos
Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, had towards the Jews of Hungary (who by the way
openly declared himself to be an anti-Semite):
“I have considered it intolerable that here
in Hungary everything, every factory, bank, large fortune, business, theatre,
press, commerce, etc. should be in Jewish hands, and that the Jew should be the
image reflected of Hungary, especially abroad.”
These words were not spoken but are on
record as a written correspondence of Miklos Horthy to one of his ministers.
Horthy, let me remind you, served as the
Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary from March 1st, 1920 to October 15,
1944 and is among those tragic European leaders who were caught up in the
middle between three major powers Hitler’s Germany on one side, power Communist
Soviet Union not too far away and the Allies on the other.
So the Hungarian Jews in spite of being a
mere 5% of the nation’s population had become the most visible minority (there
were others too) for the reasons described above and which I shall recapitulate
once again:
This I shall do in the nights to come.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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