Re: If there was no religion, would we still fight? As much?

Darwin123 wrote:

Well, that makes no sense at all. What other cultures speak Yiddish? Otoh,
having Hebrew as the official language is only natural in Israel.

Yiddish is a form of German. I think it is similar to the "low
Deutch" dialect, but someone might correct me. Yiddish is German the
way Cajun is French. A person who knows Yiddish can speak with a
German, maybe with some difficulty.

I can't claim any expertise in this area, but it seems like an oversimplification to characterize Yiddish as "a form of German", especially considering that there are several dialects of Yiddish, some of which (Eastern?) have nothing to do with Germany.

Just after WWII, when Israel officially form, there would have
been a strong bias against mixing Hebrew and German cultures.
Another motivator was that Zionists were trying to recruit from
the Sephardic community, which includes Jewish Arabs. I am not sure
the Jewish Arabs really wanted to be part of a country that was
explicitly European, as in having a German dialect as the national
language.
The idea of banning Yiddish in Israel makes good sense in terms
of Jewish separatism. Whether Jewish separatism makes sense is another
issue.

Thanks for the info. Like they say, if you're not careful, you can always learn something new.


--
Come down off the cross
We can use the wood

Tom Waits, Come On Up To The House
.

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