Timeline of World Religions

[jokerman]

I have often wondered about the origins of Zoroastrianism.  Its emergence seems to strangely coincide with the emergence of Judaism in the region, and all fact clearly supports the notion that the Jewish faith came first.  While monotheism is not entirely unique in the world, it is still a rarity.  I wonder if Zoroastrianism, with its teachings not all that dissimilar from those of the followers of Yahweh (or even later Christians) is, in fact, another (distant) branch of the Jewish faith.

I think you would find The Decline of The West by Oswald Spengler, in this instance Chs. XIV & XV "Problems of the Arabian Culture" very enriching.

[jokerman]

The Jews were not provincial people, by any stretch of the imagination, after all.  They got around.

I haven't studied this part of history much, but I've always been under the impression that Jewishness became more and more narrowly defined over time. Is this true?

I should revise my statement some, there was always a heavy prejudice against non-Jews seeking to become followers of Yahweh.  What I meant was that the Jews were heavily involved in the trade of the region, and many of them traveled around alot more than what is mentioned in the Bible.  It was a very commercial culture.

They had a presence as far as China, in fact.  Indeed, the problem is many in the West confuse our ghettos of secluded Judaism with the historical Jewish spirit, which was often as dynamic as its spiritual contemporaries (i.e. Zoroastrianism, early Christianity, Manicheanism).

[jokerman]

Jokerman: wasn't Spengler a half-crazed Nazi-type? I believe I read something to that effect just last week.

Not really.  Some of his philosophy was first assimilated by the Nazis in the crudest form, but they rejected the man himself in the end, and Spengler's last book was a polemic against the Nazis.

Spengler, in his morphology of civilization, does describe (and thus for the West, prophecy) a period in which an immense race-feeling rises up in the last stage of civilization to establish formless power over everything, the process he calls Caesarianism.  However, he devotes an extended section to describing his view of race in The Decline of the West, and ridiculues the kind of anthropological or linguistical definitions later used by the Nazis to establish their hierachy of humanity.  Rather, for Spengler, race has little to do with biology and everything to do with the spirit at a core of society.  In this way, there is an American race, decisively forged by events like the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.