" It should be noted that Jewish communities in Muslim countries haven't struggled with this issue in the same way, largely due to the construction of those societies."
Is it so? What construction precisely? Or is it because they were Arab Jews trading with neighbours for centuries already before Islam? The languages are so close that even the scribes who wrote the OT realized it and described the relations between people using the names of Arab kingdoms which they inserted in the Noah genealogies, all set in a frame corresponding to neo Assyrian administrative geography (the one they were taught as part of their scribal training).
These are wars between cousins, the worse kind. But in the age of DNA and AI it makes zero sense to pretend we can accept the chronology offered by some scholars who are just corrupt and die-hard fundamentalists.
If there was any kingdom of importance, why wasn't it mentioned by Greek historians? Or the Egyptian archives?
The reality is that in 400bc they were still polytheists (see the Elephantine papyri).
Maybe secular jews should first wonder if Genesis is not a bit too misogynist for the modern world? If the OT is not plainly racist and genocidal? I mean that the more we know about archeology and the fact that Edom and Moab are indeed kingdoms of "Arab" populations (as attested by the onomastica and its continuity) and the more it is clear that people reading only the OT and Talmud become fundamentalists if ever they project what they read in their life.
These are ancient texts supposed to be studied with their contexts, as fragments of larger literary traditions that were compiled by scribes at the request of their patrons and for political reasons.
And to return to the Talmud, at least in the Babylonian one, how did they manage to insert resurrection there while it is not in the OT? Why even call it a single religion then?
“Jews exist in all our complexity and contradiction, and that existence requires no external justification.”
Trouble is it does require external justification or at least acceptance not from Jews as you suggest but from non-Jews.
In the European context, yes and such is the crux of the Jewish question. It doesn’t always have to be this way though.
We secular Jews arguably need either the religious ones or Israel to keep us tethered to something that doesn’t dissolve into air.
" It should be noted that Jewish communities in Muslim countries haven't struggled with this issue in the same way, largely due to the construction of those societies."
Is it so? What construction precisely? Or is it because they were Arab Jews trading with neighbours for centuries already before Islam? The languages are so close that even the scribes who wrote the OT realized it and described the relations between people using the names of Arab kingdoms which they inserted in the Noah genealogies, all set in a frame corresponding to neo Assyrian administrative geography (the one they were taught as part of their scribal training).
These are wars between cousins, the worse kind. But in the age of DNA and AI it makes zero sense to pretend we can accept the chronology offered by some scholars who are just corrupt and die-hard fundamentalists.
If there was any kingdom of importance, why wasn't it mentioned by Greek historians? Or the Egyptian archives?
The reality is that in 400bc they were still polytheists (see the Elephantine papyri).
Maybe secular jews should first wonder if Genesis is not a bit too misogynist for the modern world? If the OT is not plainly racist and genocidal? I mean that the more we know about archeology and the fact that Edom and Moab are indeed kingdoms of "Arab" populations (as attested by the onomastica and its continuity) and the more it is clear that people reading only the OT and Talmud become fundamentalists if ever they project what they read in their life.
These are ancient texts supposed to be studied with their contexts, as fragments of larger literary traditions that were compiled by scribes at the request of their patrons and for political reasons.
And to return to the Talmud, at least in the Babylonian one, how did they manage to insert resurrection there while it is not in the OT? Why even call it a single religion then?