|
To: <anthroposophy_tomorrow@yahoogroups.com>
References: <20040312192053.19740.qmail@web14422.mail.yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [anthroposophy_tomorrow] agreement and disagreement
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:40:14 -0500
Peter Staudenmaier:
I asked Daniel: "Do you think that no Jewish people means
no Jews, or don't you?"
And Daniel replied: "No."
Okay, so you don't agree that no Jewish people means no Jews.
Could you (or Frank) explain how there can be Jews if Jewry
as such has disappeared and the Jewish people has dissolved
and ceased to exist?
Daniel:
I did? I really said that? (Just like Steiner talked about
"root races" in GA 121, I suppose).
Peter, you seem to have an extraordinarily difficult time
with subtlties. For the third (and hopefully final) time,
here is my thought. Try reading it.
Daniel wrote:
And I repeat: "I find nothing in Steiner's statement
to preclude Jews from maintaining some form or their religious
practices and assimilating precicely as they desired (and
as you claim Steiner was against)." Perhaps there are
different ways of understanding what the phrase "as a
people" might mean. You seem to imagine that Steiner
meant that Jews would no longer be Jews. I tend to think that
Steiner wanted Jews not to be recognizable as Jews by any
external or cultural cues, so that you could not tell whether
a person was or was not a Jew merely by talking to them in
a cafe. I don't think he was intent on abolishing all religious
practices, religion being an area that he felt to be the responsibility
of the free individual. This type of assimilation appears
to me to be the goal of a large number of liberal Jews during
that time period, and something that has been achieved to
a large degree in the US today.
In approaching this paragraph, the subtlties of the German
word "Volk" should be observed. I read the statemet
of Steiner's to indicate that he wanted the "Folk"
element of Jewishness to cease being a point of self-identification.
As I have pointed out, Steiner wanted the "Folk"
element of German-ness to disappear as well; he wanted the
"Folk" element of every nationality and ethnic group
to disappear. Steiner most emphatically did not want the individual
Jews to cease to exist. This can be confusing by rendering
the German word "Folk" as "people" as
I'm sure you realize with your excellent command of German.
|
