Happy holidays! Hope everyone enjoys hanging out with their family 😉

Posted by razib at 03:52 AM

In my previous posts I introduced the use of Jews in 19th century Europe as an analogy for the assimilation of Muslims in the United States, and conversely the problems with any attempts to do this in Europe[1]. Basically, the Reform Jewish movement, and the secularization and "Christianization" (to some extent belief system and a great extent practice) of the Western Jewry, allows them to acculturate more easily and hopefully in the long term melt into the greater society.

On the latter point, some have objected that this idea, that Jews would assimilate and disappear, is pie-in-the-sky, and that it has been predicted for thousands of years. I believe that social circumstances are greatly alterted in the 21st century vs. the first 2 millennia after Christ-so this argument does not apply.

But, some perspective, the idea that Jews have never assimilated into host cultures is to some extent a myth. After all, many conversos in Spain eventually became orthodox Catholics, as did a great many Jews in medieval and modern Europe (the discovery of the Lemba connection to the Jewish people almost certainly is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to "lost" fragments of the House of Israel).

Recently, I read the book One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism, by Rodney Stark[2], and one chapter is devoted to why the Jews have remained with us to this day after 2,000 years. One group of Jews that Stark focuses on are the Jews of China, who were centered around the northern city of Kaifeng. This Jewish community, unlike many in the West, disappeared not through persecution, but simply through intermarriage and assimilation into their Chinese surroundings. Here is a portion of the book that I found very interesting (page 198):

As it happened, Chinese Jews excelled at Confucian scholarship, and "beginnning in the fourteenth century a large number of Jews from Kaifeng did join the scholar-official class in increasing numbers as years went by" (Rhee, 1973:120). Thenceforth the community’s "most brilliant and ambitious" young men spent long years in "Confucian indoctrination," to the detriment of their orthodoxy (Pollak, 1998:341). These were the young men from whose ranks rabbis would have come. Instead, their devotion to Confucian study resulted in their ignorance of Hebrew, and in their being very inclined to reinterpret Judaism according to Confucian concepts.

The similarity between the success of European Ashkenazi Jews in entering gentile professions after emancipation and the depiction of the Kaifeng Jews making use of the semi-meritocratic rules of admission into the Chinese bureaucracy struck me as fascinating (the Kaifeng Jews seem related to a branch of Jews that originated in Persia). Stark compares the Chinese community to the modern Reform Jewish tradition and the ancient Hellenistic Judaism of the philosopher Philo of Alexandria (some modern Reform thinkers explicitly make connections to the Hellenistic Jews-giving their tradition an ancient patina). Stark points out that Hellenistic Judaism disappeared, while the more exclusive and "backward" Talmudic Jewish tradition continued to the modern day without interruption. Additionally, like many scholars he asserts that it was the Hellenistic Jews who were the most enthusiastic converts to Christianity, which allowed them to keep their belief in God and respect their Jewish ancestry and abandon the practices that set them off from other peoples. Stark points out that while at the time of Constantine (330) Jews formed about 10% of the Roman Empire’s population, by 1000 they were about 1% of Europe’s population[3]. Obviously Jews have been converting to other faiths since the rise of the religion, though a core group has continued to be true to their ancestral God down to the modern age and keeps the perception up that the Jewish people are a permenant fixture of European life.

In any case, what is crucial about the Jews of China, the modern West and classical Europe, is that they attempted to preserve their own religious traditions, while absorbing and espousing non-Jewish ideas. In other words, the Chinese Jews became Jewish Chinese! Roman Jews became Jewish Romans. And of course, American Jews are becoming Jewish Americans. Once the core ideas become that of the host society the tendency to be a people set apart dissipates. There is no point in being a "light unto the nations" when the flame flickers in the same region of the spectrum. Some of my Jewish friends have a saying, "There is no such thing as third generation Reform." Of the eight grand-children of the great Jewish German philosopher Moses Mendelsohn, who encouraged secular learning, one was Jewish. His last Jewish descendent died in the late 1800s. The rabbis of the older tradition were right, secular learning is poisonous to the Jewish soul.

My point: Once Muslims accept the premises of the West, they will become an echo, not an alternative. Many people know about the Hui Muslims, who speak Chinese dialects and usually "look Chinese," but there were also many Muslims would became absorbed into Chinese society. Back when I was a college I remember reading a small article titled, "The ancestors don’t eat pork," which surveyed a group of villages on the coast of Fujian that seemed to have been founded by Chinese Muslims, but today the only remnant of their Islamic past is that they do not offer pork to the grave-stones of their founding fathers. So there is hope, Muslims may yet one day eat halal pork and drink some whisky at the end of the day, though not during Ramadan of course!.

Next up: problems with the Jewish-Muslim analogy.

fn1. Importing an immigrant group that slots into a very low SES position in society, with mixed future prospects of advancement, is pretty dicey overall. That’s why some of us at GNXP are worried about Mexican immigration into the United States, in the short term, great for the immigrants (work) and the upper-to-upper-middle-class natives (cheap labor), but a cost to the middle class and contributor to possible future structural inequalities. In Europe, the equivalent of Mexican Americans happen to have a very tight and ideological religious framework to channel their resentments with and dissents from their host culture.

fn2. Yes, I’m reading all of Stark’s books, and will be writing a rather large essay reviewing his work. I think this is important for several reasons. First, Stark tends to give lots of interviews to the press. Second, his rational choice theory is a good stab at making the study of religion systematic. And third, some of his ideas can have practical implications in the examination and prediction of the interaction between Islam and Christianity that is occurring now.

fn3. Caveat, the 1% figure is for Europe, while the 10% figure is inclusive of the Africa and Middle Eastern provinces of Rome, so the disparity is somewhat understandable, though it is still great enough enough to warrant comment.

Posted by razib at 12:51 AM

In The Washington Post there is an article on the revival of public polygamy in Indonesia. A few things to note:

The Western observers who extoll the liberal pluralism of Indonesian Islam need to realize that this version of Islam, tolerant, relaxed and almost syncretic is giving way to a more “orthodox” form that looks more directly to the Koran and Hadith.Also, this “debate” is almost certainly do to the public emergence of a practice that has been maintained underground during the years of secular authoritarian rule under Suharto.

It is interesting turnabout to note that the Islamists are making utilitarian arguments in favor of this practice, that the nature of men and women is accommodated by polygamy, while the non-Islamists are arguing in terms of sacred principles of love, fidelity and chastity. This is one situation where the strict interpretation of Islam does not impose a hedonistic cost, but rather enables the full sexual expression of men.

Some have argued that gay marriage will undermine monogamous heterosexuality. I don’t know how polygamy fits into making marriage more or less inviting to young men-but the negative outcomes of the practice, least judging by the social correlates in cultures where it is widely practiced, makes me rather wary of allowing it to have any toehold in this country.

Finally, please note this assertion by a “progressive” Islamic scholar in Indonesia:

Today, he said, the Koran, read according to the principles of modern justice, bars polygamy.

When you begin to read your Holy Book by the principles of modern justice, rather than reading modern justice from your Holy Book, that is doing nothing but inviting secularism. I’ve got my finger’s crossed….

Posted by razib at 11:32 PM

Missed this story, An apparent order to evolution slowly emerges: New evidence seems to show that evolution repeats itself and is not as random as first thought, in The New York Times a few weeks ago (I got this from the Taipei Times). Funny thing, the central crux of the article seems to be showing that the evidence is disproving Stephen Jay Gould’s ideas (big surprise!):

Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard paleontologist, crystallized the question in his book Wonderful Life. What would happen, he asked, if the tape of the history of life were rewound and replayed? For many, including Gould, the answer was clear. He wrote that "any replay of the tape would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the road actually taken."

OK, what does the science say?

…In 1988, Lenski and his colleagues set up a dozen genetically identical populations of E. coli bacteria in bottles of broth and have followed their evolutionary fates.

Now, more than 30,000 bacterial generations later, Lenski and colleagues have what is becoming one of the most striking examples of repeatability yet. All 12 populations show the same patterns of improvement in their ability to compete in a bottle and increases in cell size. All 12 have also lost their ability to break down and use a sugar, called ribose.

You can go to Richard Lenski’s website to get more information on this topic. Of course, a standard Creationist response would be that this is "microevolution." But you don’t have to look at bacterial studies to see that Gould was exaggerating.

Here is an image of the extinct Tasmanian TigerHere is an image of the "Dingo" that replaced them on the Australian continent:

My point is not that evolution can’t take another path from the ones that we know, after all, the kangaroo doesn’t quite look like herbivores on other continents[1], but common physical motifs reappear many times in any survey of the history of macroevolution. Gould knew this, he was a paleontologist, but he chose to give the masses a different impression by shading the emphasis in another direction.

In any case, nice to see evolutionary biology being presented as a science where people actually do experiments in a lab, rather than just a montage of artists sketches of reconstructions of extinct creatures that we only know from fossils (of course, also a fan of theoretical evolutionary biology that uses some maths)….

fn1. Note the similarity in appearence of the Icthyosaur, bottle nosed dolphin and swordfish, obviously these were creatures of various phylogenetic origins who were constrained by functional necessity into a certain body plan. In contrast, there has been no reprisal of the Plesiosaur body plan. Perhaps its particular niche disappeared? Well, there is some evidence that ammonites were the main food of this creature. Ammonites were very large cephalopods, bigger cousins of the nautilus, and, they became extinct during the late Cretaceous (concurrent with most big animals like the dinosaurs, flying and marine reptiles). That string of conjectures and suppositions took me 5 minutes, a combination of logical thinking, google and a few basic facts regarding how evolution works. I am probably wrong on the details, but it seems a much more frutifull way to go than encapsulating the idea that "evolution is random and without constraint" in flowery literary prose….

Posted by razib at 02:10 AM

Both Dienekes and Abiola pointed to this release in Nature suggesting that the Indo-Europeans were Anatolian farmers (see my links to recent papers on demic diffusion). Here is the abstract of the paper. I am prone to believing the rigor of evolutionary biolgoists, though molecular clock controversies make me cautious, I assume that the authors used the Hittites as the “out group.”

Posted by razib at 05:04 PM

While I’m attacking S.J. Gould (so easy), I have a question for readers. Physicist Brian Greene wrote The Elegant Universe, just did a documentary of the same name for PBS and has been written up in Scientific American recently. I’ve read the book and watched the documentary and found it entertaining. Nevertheless, the whole idea that Stephen Hawking was the “greatest physicist since Einstein,” and the subsequent disabuse of that notion on the part of anyone that scatches beneath the surface, makes me a bit curious-is Greene a brilliant quack?

Unlike evolutionary biology, string theory is a bit removed from immediate social implications, aside from a few PoMo weirdos who try to spin it into their theories of nothing. While the background, beliefs and possible ideological perspectives of evolutionary biologists regular comes on the radar of the curious, we tend to give physical and mathematical scientists a pass on these issues as long as they aren’t too blatant about politically incorrect extracurricular activities.

In any case, for those of you who understand the physics (the math of it), is Greene worth reading? Is he an S.J. Gould, passing himself as an expert to non-specialists? (his website says he works in string theory, but of course, Gould worked in evolutionary biology!) The NOVA documentary gave a lot of face-time to Ed Witten and Steven Weinberg, so I’m pretty willing to assume that Greene isn’t out to make a quick buck as a popularizer.

Posted by razib at 02:48 AM

I don’t have much time now, so I am going to offer that I will elaborate on this much more in future posts. I started this series last week with a general sketch of my thesis: that Reform Judaism in 19th century Europe after emancipation offers a good model for a Muslim compromise with modernity. I also hinted that this applied only to the United States.

To see why, here is an excerpt from Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge’s A Theory of Religion (page 150-152):

…If sect membership also entails a very distinctive ethnic or racial marker, defection is impeded thereby, for two reasons…the surrounding society will still tend to code the defector as a member of the sect. Second, because of the bond of loyalty – not merely religious but also racial or ethnic. There is a further barrier if the high tension group does not belong to exactly the same religious tradition as the low tension relgious groups in society, as has often been the case for non-Christian groups in predominantly Christian societies….

Further on, they point to Reform Jews as an example of the response to these conditions:

…they had lost status among other Jews…They lacked the influence to transform Judaism into a state of lower tension. The result was the Reform Movement. This new movement discarded the bulk of Jewish traditions as "superstition and antiquated custom"…Tension between Reform Judaism and its surroundings was very low….

The basic point is this: Jews bound by the traditions of their faith since the times of the Roman Empire broke with those traditions in exchange for acceptance and advancement into gentile society. The Jews who remained true to halakah and clung to the shtetl remained unaccepted and economically deprived. Various compromises with gentile Christian society were formulated, from Christianized "Messianic Jews," secular "cultural Jews," mildly religious Protestantized non-Orthodox Jews, the "orthodox" revival movements around chasidism and of course the traditional orthodoxy of the Jewish people for the past 2,000 years.

To Muslims: Over half of Muslim immigrants to the United States have graduate degrees! These are people who have much to gain from assimilation with the rest of society. In the lingo of Stark & Bainbridge (they are rational choice theorists), they would benefit from trading "compensators" (pie-in-the-sky-promises) for "rewards" (tangible goods and services). Liberal, well connected ethno-religious groups tend to be able to offer rewards, while closed sects offer compensators. To leverage the full power of advanced degrees in the United States, especially professions that require interpersonal relationships, transformation to a lower state of tension is critical for Muslims. The other option is defection, but as noted above, there are ethnic-racial markers that prevent this. As an example, I am an atheist Republican, but it sure takes a long time for me to make it through security at an airport, my profession of disbelief in my natal religion matters little to much of society that does not know me. For many, onversion to Christianity might not remove the costs associated with being "Other," and would incur the negatives of social ostracism from your natal community[1].

Of course, the whole point is that transformation to a state of lower tension, liberalization, is in the interests of groups with high socioeconomic status or aspirations. American Muslims, especially immigrants, can make that claim. European Muslims usually can not. While American Islam might produce a liberalized form of Islam, European Islam is shaped by a low socioeconomic group experience. Stark & Bainbridge predict that they will favor "compensators" over "rewards," because the latter are simply not available in those societies, and the existance of copious rewards in their environment will lead them toward extreme preference to the compensators only they are willing to make the sacrifices for to raise their own self-worth. European lslam therefore should be more like the faith of Baptist fire & brimestome preachers. Of course, one caveat is that I think Stark & Bainbridge’s rational choice theory of religion is much less well tested, and frankly, less well supported, by the European religious marketplace.

fn1. Interesting side-light: since South Asian Hindus and Sikhs are regularly confused with Muslims, and Sikh men in particular "stick out," it is in the interests of the former to encourage the liberalization of the latter. The "costs" incurred by Islamic estrangement from the greater society to some extent overflow into the communities that Muslims get confused for!

Posted by razib at 03:46 PM

One thing that many Americans (and Germans too as well[1]) find confusing is that Iran is not an Arab country. Mainstream publications have had to offer corrections for decades after mistakenly including Iran in a list of Arab nations or terming it an Arab nation. Here is the ethnic break-down in Iran: Persian 51%, Azeri 24%, Gilaki and Mazandarani 8%, Kurd 7%, Arab 3%, Lur 2%, Baloch 2%, Turkmen 2%, other 1%.

The two big groups to note are the Azeris and the Persians. Persians obviously are the core ethnic group and Farsi is the national language[2]. Azeris though are not an oppressed minority, and I have read that they are over-represented in the power elite. Azeris are a Turkic group and their language is very close to the Turkish of Turkey proper, the main difference is that they are Shia rather than Sunni Muslims. Ethnic affiliations are to some extent fluid between such close groups like the Azeris, Turkomans and Turks, and even with more distant ones like Persians[3].

Persians often take great umbrage at being confused with Arabs. Authors like Robert Kaplan and V.S. Naipul have documented the Persian antipathy toward the Arabs, all the while espousing the Arab religion enthusiastically. It is rather understandable for reasons of history, geography and religion why Iran is bracketed into the Arab world in the minds of many.

But back to specific issues of language: Iran uses a modified Arabic script. If there was one thing that is practically possible in distancing and differentiating Iranians from Arabs, is the option of replacing Arabic script with a Roman alphabet. Tajikstan, which uses a form of Persian (Dari) as its national language has done just that[4], and Turkey’s conversion to the Roman alphabet surely helped to distance their identity in the mind of Westerners from that of their former Arab subjects.

So my prediction, within two generations Iran will switch to a Roman alphabet. In fact, I would not be surprised if many non-Arab Muslim peoples switched to a Roman alphabet. Additionally the various peoples of the Indian subcontinent also might switch at some time in the future, something not difficult for certain groups who have low levels of literacy in any case.

fn1. Recently a German acquaintance introduced me to a friend (from Germany) who thought I was "Arabic," since I looked a bit (very vaguely I assume) like an Iranian friend of theirs.

fn2. Between the fall of the Sassanids around 650 and the rise of the Pahlavis in the 1920s native stock Persian speakers were never very militarily prominent. Persia was mostly ruled by Arabs, Mongols and Turkic groups.

fn3. Basically, I’m trying to say that post-French Revolution Western concepts of "nation" and "ethnic group" have less salience in this area of the world, as we learned in Afghanistan. And before Zack Latif chimes in-yes, the big chasm is between agriculturalist and nomad.

fn4. More accurately, they went from Arabic to Cyrillic to Roman.

Posted by razib at 09:45 PM

Forget gay marriage for a moment and note something that is a less concrete, but still powerful, indicator of the tides of culture:

“Squeaky clean” Jessica Simpson, whose father is a Baptist youth minister, and was a virgin until she got married, on the cover of Rolling Stone….

Her father notes that now that she’s married she’s “doing it until she’s blue in the face”. Is this how we expect a Protestant evangelical youth pastor to speak of his daughter? In 2003 it’s not outside the bounds of normality….

Posted by razib at 04:52 PM

dd

Posted by razib at 02:30 AM Comments