well jewishness had become so unhomogenous because of diaspora...being scattered all over the place. that's one of the intentions of zionism like a center for jewish culture....like making hebrew the official language etc. i am reading 'the seventh million' by segev and there was a good part where in the beginning none of the isreali jews could speak hebrew..but it was the official language so you would have like say a german jew writing to someone in the government in german and he'd have to get it translated into hebrew and the politician who couldn't read hebrew either would have to translate it back to german to read it. it had to be officially in hebrew etc.
>I know of no other identity that is so ambiguous in its construction as
>Jewishness is,
again because of the diaspora thing.
>The nazis apparently thought that someone who had one Jewish grandparent
>(whatever that means) was a Jew and therefore eligible for the
>concentration camp and extermination. As someone who had a 'Jewish'
>grandparent (not religiously so I believe), I obviously have some small stake in this matter.
jewishness is an ethnicity and a religion....in the same book i was reading there was much division in israel between the eastern european jews and the 'yekkes' (upperclass german jews) and one of the stereotypes of the 'yekkes' was that if the nazis had persecuted the jews as a religion instead of a race the 'yekkes' would have just converted to christianity to stay german. so in a way it was really good for israel that the nazis did that.
>Incidentally I also believe that the nazis were enthusiastic zionists: the
>idea of a Jewish homeland was seen as part of the final solution, and I
>understand that some leading nazis actually visited Palestine to check out
>the possibilities. An irony is that many Arabs bought into the nazi
>ideology regarding Jews, with this difference, that presumably they would
>have wanted the homeland to be somewhere else than in their midst.
>
the arabs aligned themselves with germany and italy because they saw them as fighting against their oppressors...britian, france and the U.S. (the enemy of my enemy is my friend type thing). the leading nazis you refer to one was Baron Leopold Itz von Mildenstein, one of the first members of the SS. he went there to write about palestine for Goebbels paper 'Angriff'...and promoted zionism among the nazi leaders. he was head of the 'Office of Jewish Affairs' he was later replaced by Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had contacts with various members of the jewish defense force that were also nazi agents one of them Feibl Folkes reported to Eichmann that the zionist leaders were "pleased" by the persecution of german jewry "since it would encourage immigration to Palestine"....
~M.E.