Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.228 February 10, 1994 1) Rumi in Konya (Michael Shimshoni) 2) Rahel Varnhagen (Leah Jenschke) 3) "Jewish" diseases (Yosel Berman) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Feb 10 07:47:25 1994 From: Michael Shimshoni Subject: Rumi in Konya (was: Re bloodtyping) Jascha Kessler wrote inter alia about his visit to Anatolia: >What communities were like once is very hard to imagine. An >illuminating example: Marco Polo (what or who were they in that >family?) says he stayed about 6 months in a city in what is now >Anatolia, where I have been, only two years ago, to visit the tomb >of the gre at poet Rumi (blocked by memory lapse, though I see it in >thge mind's eye, the Mosque, and have the Sufi tapes, and all that, >and have translated Rumi!), and Polo says, What a dirty dusty empty >place! And yet that is the place where at the same time Rumi held >court, lived, founding the Dervish order! and wrote 1000s of lines >of the greatest poetry in the tradition of Persian. Polo had not >the faintest! And he was there. I would assume, as a Venetian >traveller waiting for his caravan, he was kept in restricted >quarters; but, not a whiff of local conversation and news and >gossip? Amazing! I think the city is Konya (previously Iconium) a very religious place even to date (and the only all "dry" city I encountered in my driving through "secular" Turkey). Actually one of the names of that city was Rum and Rumi chose his name after that of the city. I wonder if Marco Polo visited the city during Rumi's life, if he did he must have been rather young, but anyhow Rumi's influence should have been still strong whenever he was there. So Kessler's point is well taken, that travellers in foreign lands can get a completely wrong impression of its culture. I realize that all the above has very little to do with Yiddish, Jews etc., sorry. Michael Shimshoni 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Feb 10 10:08:10 1994 From: Lisa A Jenschke Subject: Rahel Varnhagen I am interested in any information about or copies of Yiddish letters or even Jewish-German letters written by Rahel Levin Varnhagen. Rahel was an intellectual Jewish woman who lived in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century. She had a salon where other intellectuals gathered to discuss art, literature, politics, etc. and she was also a close friend of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia. After her death her husband published her letters (written in German), but there has been some speculation about the letters that he did not publish. German was not her first language, though, and there are several mentions of Yiddish letters written to her brother. I would really love to get a look at these if they still exist. a sheynem dank-- Leah Jenschke 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Feb 10 10:30:39 1994 From: BERMAN Subject: "Jewish" Diseases It is always very difficult to address a topic such as this one, because many have used Genetic and racial terms to define Jews in the past, and rarely for our benefit. Of course, there is no Genetic basis whatever for Judaism. There are many ways to define who is a Jews (and no doubt there can be much debate on this issue), however, I think that you will all agree that Jews can be found all over the world and as part of many (until recently) non-mixing groups. So, since there are obviously no diseases that can detect a person's faith or culture, there are no "Jewish" diseases of this sort. However, when a large enough group of individuals tends to reproduce within its own numbers for a period of several generations (as, for example, was the case of many Eastern European Jews) the frequency of certain genes within that group can begin to differ from that of the general population. This is in fact what happened in the case of Tay-Sachs disease. The disease is caused by a flawed gene which is by itself not dangerous, because humans carry two copies of most genes - one from each parent. However, if the frequency of this flawed gene is greater in a given population of individuals (for example Jews of Eastern European descent) then there is a greater chance that two carriers might mate and each pass this flawed gene to an ofspring. I want to stress, however, that this situation should not be taken to suggest that Jews are in any significant way genetically different from people of other cultural backgrounds. For one thing, Eastern European Jews are genetically closer to their slavic neighbours that to the sphardic Jews. More importantly, the genetic variation WITHIN any given Jewish population is GREATER that the average variation BETWEEN that community and ANY OTHER GROUP OF HUMANS, no matter how that group is selected. This statement holds true whenever ANY two human breeding populations are compared. It is now fully acknowledged within the serious genetics community that the concept of "race", as applied to Humans, is not a valid one. Jews, Blacks, Whites...none of these groups is a "race", and thus it is not appropriate to group them on that basis. This is why it is dangerous to speak of "Jewish", or "Black", or "White" diseases. To term them in this way (even with quotations) does seem to some- how imply that the adjective ("Jewish", "Black", &c.) is part of the reason for the association. This, of course, is not the case. Tay-Sachs does not affect people BECAUSE they are Jewish. Some African populations show a higher than average incidence of the condition Sickle Cell Anemia; yet this fact has no connection whatsoever to their skin colour. I hope that my (longer than expected) submission has not offended anyone. I look forward to hearing further discussion on this point. Yosel (Jason) Berman. ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.228 To subscribe, send SUB MENDELE FIRSTNAME LASTNAME to: LISTSERV@YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a Subject: line. 2. Sign your article. Send submissions/responses to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Other business: nmiller@starbase.trincoll.edu Anonymous ftp archives available on: ftp.mendele.trincoll.edu in the directory pub/mendele/files