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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • The first quote is real, but out of context. It is from a book by a young Jewish author reacting to antisemitic racial theory with… Jewish supremacist racial theory. It straddles the line between satire and seriousness; it’s intentionally provocative.

    The second is certainly not real. It’s wildly out of character for Menachem Bagin, no attribution for it exists, it isn’t mentioned in any reporting of any event he appeared at or in any biography of him… it’s straightforwardly made up to suit an antisemitic fantasy.

    The third quote is also fake; it was made up in the early 2000s, about a decade after the rabbi in question (who was very prominent to hasidic Jews) died. It doesn’t make any sense in the context of Jewish theology or this particular rabbi’s teachings, but it does sound something an antisemitic conspiracy theorist would imagine a Jewish rabbi saying.

    Here’s the thing: I’m sure there are plenty of very real quotes by Jews saying awful stuff about non Jews – at the same time, whenever an Irish person says something idiotic, you don’t expect every other Irish person to have to prove to you they don’t share that opinion; that kind of behavior is basically the definition of bigotry.





  • Interestingly, while French was the lingua franca of Europe for several hundred years, it wasn’t the origin of the term ‘Lingua Franca’.

    That term meant the “language of the Franks” and was the Mediterranean trade language in the medieval through Renaissance eras. It was actually a pidgin of Italian, French, Greek and Arabic adopted as being roughly mutually intelligible among Venetians, Byzantines and North Africans.

    The reference to the ‘Franks’ is because the generic word for a western European (in the Byzantine, Greek world) had long been “Frank”.