When growing up a JW, I was always confused as to world history, geography and religious development. It didn't make sense, because what we were told was simply untrue...
The spread of religion through history
by snare&racket 5 Replies latest jw friends
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disposable hero of hypocrisy
Very interesting, thanks for posting snare.. How's the leg? More importantly, how's the bike! -
snare&racket
Hey buddy,
yeah leg is still in plaster, thankfully healing in good alignment. Another 3 weeks to go! I was due to leave for a music festival today, in Spain, but can't go...lame,
The bike is perfect, I never got to pick it up. I broke my leg on the Wed, was picking it up on the next Mon. It is sat waiting for me in Cardiff :(
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freemindfade
fascinating, thank you! -
Vidiot
Interesting.
I had no idea Islam had spread so far, so (relatively) fast.
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CalebInFloroda
Yep, Islam spread quickly. Very quickly.
Remember the “Dark Ages”? Well they existed only in the sense that the World Series held at the end of each baseball season here in the United States is really crowning the “world champion.”
If you watch the animated map, you will see Islam spread into what is now Spain but at the time was known as Seferad. When that happened my ancestors (members of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin) lived among them (if you watch you will see tiny blue spots appear before the 15th century). Jews and Muslims lived in peace and prosperity, an era of scientific and medical advances we call “the Golden Age.” (But like everything else, Christendom decided that since they were experiencing darkness and plague at the same time that history should be named after what they experienced instead.)
When the animation shows the “age of discovery,” which began in 1492, you will note that Spain is now covered by Christianity. That’s because the Spanish Inquisition managed to push out all Muslims and Jews from the land.
If you follow the lines from Spain into the Caribbean, you will note some of the islands there turn blue for a bit. While too small to probably include, tiny spots of blue should appear in Mexico where is now the city of Monterrey. That is because Sephardic Jews got chased all the way across the Atlantic into Mexico by the Catholic Church. My family was actually among the founders of Monterrey, but the moment of rest in the “new land” was not long as the Catholic Church invented the “Mexican Inquisition” and decided to continue with the witch hunt.
It did not last long, however. The government of Mexico and some good Catholics stopped the Mexican Inquisition by legislation. My ancestors, now in the country of Tejas (which would become the state of Texas) had by then settled in what is now known as Laredo, and moved toward the Valley of South Texas, helped create the beginnings of King Ranch and eventually into Corpus Christi.
The other reason those little islands turn blue for a short time is because it is theorized that Christopher Columbus was also a Sephardic Jew and carried many Jews with him on his voyage. As a result Cuba has a significant Sephardic community to this day.
Of course now I live on the East Coast and Jews make up only about 0.2% of the entire world’s population, mostly divided in half between the United States and Israel.
At one time I had about 2.5 million direct and distant relations spread across Europe down into Budapest, but they practically all disappeared within 5 years due to the Holocaust.
I recall trying to explain to elders once I found out about my family history that I was Jewish (it had been believed up till then I was merely Spanish…which most of them still got wrong and kept thinking I was Mexican). They denied that such a historical movement or type of Jews even existed, and even if they did it didn’t matter anyway because Jews were 'Christ killers and living a life of suffering because of rejecting Jesus as the Messiah,' as they put it.
Today I am one of around 100,000 people on the planet that speaks a dying language: Ladino. It is a combination of Spanish, Arabic (from the Muslims), and of course Hebrew. Because of this I understood Hebrew to a large degree while still a JW, but of course some thought I was pretending (I don’t know how you pretend to read and speak a language in front of people without getting caught). The Spanish-speaking congregations were always sending people over to try to get me to join their groups, but when I told them I didn’t speak Spanish and preferred to remain in the English-speaking congregation, they would call me “vanilla wafer,” meaning a Mexican who acts like a “white person.” (I actually have light olive tones in my skin, like someone from the Middle East, and not the reddish-brown skin of someone from Mexico--and people who actually live in Mexico can spot me right off as Sephardic.) When some of the Spanish-speaking brothers heard my Ladino, they told me that it was the language of “bad” or “lower class” people and that I should never speak it again.