SV: Yadavas (jat community)

[Guest guest]

INDOLOGY, Lars Martin Fosse <lmfosse@o...> wrote:

>However, I see some people out

> there in cyberspace who claim that the word comes from Hebrew. Is there

> anybody on the list so conversant with Hebrew that they can explain this

> fanciful etymology, or are there no words in Hebrew that look like Dalit?

 

Perhaps, an effect of the missionary work among dalit castes.

 

Reading an interesting book: Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in

Judaism- An anthropology of Israelite religion and Judaism, Indiana univ.

press, 1990. There are many pages on comparing and contratsing Savages and

Jews.

 

For example, on p. 37, Eilberg-Schwartz (Stanford) in a section starting

"Savage and Jew: A shared steriotype

 

The ability to see resemblances between ancient Judaism and savage

religions was a result, at least in part, of the the overlapping

steriotypes of savages and contemporary Jews in the European imagination.

Sifting through the writings on Judaism and heathenism during the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one finds striking similarities

between the European conceptions of the Jew and the savage."

 

p. 38

" The fact that Jews and savages were similarly stereotyped in the

European imagination helped nourish the theory that the American

Indians were originally of Jewish stock. ..."

 

p. 67

"Ch. 3 Romanticism, relativism and the Rehabilitation of the Savage

 

Had the savage not served as an anti-type in European imagination

the opposition between Judaism and savage religions may never have

arisen. At the very least, that opposition's history would have been

different. As discussed previously, the negative image of the savage

overlapped with the European stereotype of the Jew. These interacting

images helped generate the theory that the American Indians

were descendants of the ancient Jews and thus enabled Christian

travelers and missionaries to see similarities between Judaism

and the religions of American savages. Once recognized, however,

these commonalities turned problematic. Rationalists reasoned that

if Judaism and Christianity shared features with savage religions,

they too fell into the category of superstition. Such arguments

called forth the defensive strategies examined in the previous chapter,

and so the opposition between Judaism and savage religions

was born."

 

I strongly recommend Eilberg-Schwartz book. The bibliography lists

many old tracts where American Indians were claimed to be Jews.

The dalits, the indigenous priests in village India, are perhaps

said to be Jews by the same paths of imagination.

 

Regards,

N. Ganesan