26.Juli 2012
Why can Jews not be considered simply Germans or Austrians, etc. who have a religion that is not christian?

Very often we ask this ourselve too.
But still there is a point that makes things a bit more complicated here. Judaism is not only a religion but there is something like the “Jewish people”. For most of their time they haven’t been a “nation”, living on their own territory but dispersed over the world. But still we kept some sense of a tribe.
Though: In the 19th century Jews became part of “their” respective (European) nations in the course of emancipation. And they started to consider their religion more and more as something private, as a cinfession among other confessions.
And if European nations would not have become crazy about nationalism and racism around 1900 history probably would have turned out different. After the shoah somehow we had to start from scratch, with all the errors and misunderstandings and ideological traps on the way. Lets hope that your question can be answered more relaxed in the future.

Hanno Loewy, Freitag, 27. Juli 2012