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Author Topic: Chat with The Mikado about cool history topics that interest you  (Read 14789 times)
Hamster
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« Reply #25 on: July 20, 2014, 08:17:52 PM »

Something which has interested me is Nationalism's relationship to the left-right political spectrum. We all know that is a very simplistic way to schematize ideology, but it's not without its benefits. To me, it seems like Nationalism emerged on what was the left in the late 18th century, but over the 19th century moved to the right, until by World War 1 nationalism was obviously a right-wing position. I'd be interested in hearing your take on why that happened (if you agree with the premise of course).
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Snowstalker Mk. II
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« Reply #26 on: July 27, 2014, 02:47:47 PM »

Bouncing off your answer on Algeria, was there any chance of a France-Algeria solution mirroring that of Spain and Morocco today (a few coastal enclaves like Oran being part of metropolitan France, the rest being part of an independent Algeria)?
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The Mikado
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« Reply #27 on: July 27, 2014, 03:51:51 PM »

Hamster, sorry I haven't gotten around to a serious answer to your question, will post tonight.

Snowstalker: I don't think that was ever seriously proposed.  It would have had some really bizarre implications on French politics, though: over a million pieds noirs in electoral areas without Metropolitan French voters to cancel them out.  I could well see Oran going 80% for the FN in a modern election in that setup.
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Lincoln Republican
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« Reply #28 on: August 31, 2014, 09:38:59 PM »

In your view, why has the Saudi government, i.e. the House of Saud, not been overthrown, and replaced by a more modern government, one in which a family does not own the country?

The family, in essence, owns all the wealth.

Is it because the government keeps the citizens in a good standard of living?

The days when a family rules a nation is a concept from the middle ages.
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Bacon King
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« Reply #29 on: September 01, 2014, 11:28:24 AM »

How did the Great Powers of Europe view post-Meiji Japan and (later) Nationalist China? Were they regarded as equals to any extent or was it more like "oh isn't that cute the natives are pretending to be like us"?
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angus
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« Reply #30 on: September 01, 2014, 02:55:42 PM »

I've been thinking of race relations in the USA, specifically between the black minority and the white majority (but not necessarily including the white elite power brokers) post-1965.  It seems like things were becoming normalized from about the mid-60s through the 70s and into the early 80s.  Then, starting sometime in the mid- to early-80s, things started getting weird.  By the 90s identity was strong.  Society has become increasing fragmented along racial and ethnic lines.  Nowadays, I can't even turn on the television without hearing about some race riot or other, or about racially-motivated criminal or civil actions.  What was the turning point?  Was it a single event 30 years ago?  Was it a series of events?  How did we s start moving in the wrong direction with regard to race relations?
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The Mikado
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« Reply #31 on: September 08, 2014, 03:23:39 PM »

In your view, why has the Saudi government, i.e. the House of Saud, not been overthrown, and replaced by a more modern government, one in which a family does not own the country?

The family, in essence, owns all the wealth.

Is it because the government keeps the citizens in a good standard of living?

The days when a family rules a nation is a concept from the middle ages.

The House of Saud is impossible to understand without looking at its origins as the military wing of the Wahabbi movement.  The austere desert tribes of Nejd and this pious, fierce rejection of any kind of "shirk" or attribution of divine properties to things besides Allah had built up legitimacy in raiding into Ottoman-protected Hedjaz and modern southern Iraq throughout the 19th century, destroying shrines and such, and when Ottoman power and protection evaporated after the First World War, Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his followers quickly conquered and annexed the Hedjaz, the old Islamic holy land, and promptly began demolishing everything they saw as pseudo-pagan. 

The House of Saud's legitimacy (and, remember, king Abdullah is the son of ibn Saud himself...they're still only one generation in despite the kingdom existing for 90 years now) based its legitimacy on its firm commitment to Wahhabi tenets like destroying the shrines of the Prophet's companions and imposing that austere radical monotheism on the people of the Hedjaz, who had traditionally been far more willing to go to the graves of various major early Islamic figures to ask for intercession when praying.  If you wonder why Saudi Arabia's laws are so harsh, it's because, despite how party-animal-ish the Saudi princes themselves are, their entire rationale for power is the imposition of Wahhabi austerity on the Arab holy land.  Their decadent oil-wealth driven lifestyle does erode their credibility, but it leads them in turn to go back to their founding principles to the extent of spending massive amounts of money to promote Wahabbi principles abroad, even to the extent of funding "missionaries" of sorts to other Sunni Islamic countries to tell them about how they've been practicing Sunni Islam "incorrectly" for the past 1000 or so years.  Basically, ibn Saud inspired his followers and conquered the Islamic Holy Land on the principles of commitment to impose radical, austere, absolute monotheism on said Holy Land, and as corrupt as the House of Saud is in its personal conduct, they take care to outwardly pay lip service to that original mission.

How did the Great Powers of Europe view post-Meiji Japan and (later) Nationalist China? Were they regarded as equals to any extent or was it more like "oh isn't that cute the natives are pretending to be like us"?

After 1906 and Japan's defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, there was a growing "Yellow Peril" panic with the fear that the massive manpower of Asia, coupled with their adoption of European technology, would create a "tidal wave" of Asian masses of humanity that would end European supremacy.  You can find very scared rhetoric about the coming "race war with Asia."  Japan's ambitions to conquer the chaotic mess that was China provided a double dose of panic because of similar Japanese technology + Chinese manpower = unstoppable Yellow tidal wave thoughts in the 1920s, and Chiang Kai-Shek was able to leverage that fear of Japan dominating China to China's diplomatic advantage in the 1920s to obtain far better treaties with the West.  On the Japanese side, particularly after World War I, there was a growing disenchantment with the West.  First, the Western governments collaborated to shoot down the Japanese-backed racial equality clause in the League of Nations charter, which the Japanese reasonably took as a very offensive sign that they weren't considered equal, and then growing immigration walls in the USA, Canada, and Australia were seen as signs of intense disrespect by those powers.  The end of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902-1921) left the Japanese feeling left out of the post-World War I international system and the Western condemnation of their conquest of Manchuria in 1930 ensured that Japan would end up in the orbit of other other resentful powers that wanted to overturn the post-World War I international system like Germany.

I've been thinking of race relations in the USA, specifically between the black minority and the white majority (but not necessarily including the white elite power brokers) post-1965.  It seems like things were becoming normalized from about the mid-60s through the 70s and into the early 80s.  Then, starting sometime in the mid- to early-80s, things started getting weird.  By the 90s identity was strong.  Society has become increasing fragmented along racial and ethnic lines.  Nowadays, I can't even turn on the television without hearing about some race riot or other, or about racially-motivated criminal or civil actions.  What was the turning point?  Was it a single event 30 years ago?  Was it a series of events?  How did we s start moving in the wrong direction with regard to race relations?


This is a very tricky question that I'll have to get back to later, but the short answer is that the process started in the 1970s and early 1980s with growing disillusionment about the actual effects of desegregation, as the initial luster of the civil rights movements' legal victories in the 1960s wore off and the reality that there were limits to what the effectiveness of changing the laws would mean.  African Americans were still poorer than average, more widely incarcerated than average, less represented in the white collar professions than average, etc. and it caused the discussion to shift to the question of "if ending legal segregation wasn't enough to fix the situation, what is?"  White figures like Daniel Patrick Moynihan start pointing to the breakup of the African American family as a leading cause of social decay and inner-city poverty, as opposed to legal discrimination, while African American leaders alleged that the end of segregation didn't actually change the economic power structure in America and that, because blacks were disproportionately poor, they were likely to end up disproportionately poor as a self-reinforcing underclass.  The new challenges, though obviously less odious than segregation, are far more difficult to combat because they can't be overturned as easily as passing a law ending active government discrimination was.
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Tetro Kornbluth
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« Reply #32 on: September 08, 2014, 04:10:24 PM »

I'm reading Norman Davies' Vanished Kingdoms atm. I believe you have also read it? Opinions?
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The Mikado
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« Reply #33 on: September 08, 2014, 07:57:07 PM »

I'm reading Norman Davies' Vanished Kingdoms atm. I believe you have also read it? Opinions?

Highly positive.  I'd recommend (as always) remembering that Norman Davies is a colossal troll (see the entire Ireland chapter, also using the Prussia chapter to talk about how pre-Brandenburg union Prussia was a Polish vassal).

I love how chronologically free the book is.  Visigothic Toulouse straight up to the USSR.  Norman Davies can write, and write well.

He did lead me to think that Rzeczpospolita was just the accepted English version of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth before I realized...no, it's just him.
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Lincoln Republican
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« Reply #34 on: September 09, 2014, 03:27:43 PM »
« Edited: September 09, 2014, 08:44:33 PM by Lincoln Republican »

Thank you very much Mikado for your explanation in answer to my question about Saudi Arabia and the House of Saud.  I learned a great deal from your answer.

I am most impressed with your in depth knowledge and understanding of history.
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« Reply #35 on: September 09, 2014, 08:44:46 PM »

Mikado, any good book recommendations from various parts of European history? I doubt I'll have time to do any extra reading this semester, but just in case...
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The Mikado
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« Reply #36 on: September 09, 2014, 11:12:29 PM »

Mikado, any good book recommendations from various parts of European history? I doubt I'll have time to do any extra reading this semester, but just in case...

You'll need to be more specific about the topic, and I'm sure Al would be happy to help out here.

If you needed just a random suggestion, you could do worse than Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies mentioned above.  It's a book about countries that once existed but no longer do, and its 15 chapters are all basically stand-alone (and if you're an e-book guy you can actually get the chapters of that book a la carte).  That nature makes the book go from its rather intimidating 700+ pages to basically a collection of 15 reasonable-length essays.
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Tetro Kornbluth
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« Reply #37 on: September 10, 2014, 10:22:32 AM »

Mikado, any good book recommendations from various parts of European history? I doubt I'll have time to do any extra reading this semester, but just in case...

You'll need to be more specific about the topic, and I'm sure Al would be happy to help out here.

If you needed just a random suggestion, you could do worse than Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies mentioned above.  It's a book about countries that once existed but no longer do, and its 15 chapters are all basically stand-alone (and if you're an e-book guy you can actually get the chapters of that book a la carte).  That nature makes the book go from its rather intimidating 700+ pages to basically a collection of 15 reasonable-length essays.

Personally (having read 13 of the 15 chapters so far) I find the chapters very varying in the quality. The Irish chapter was a trolling exercise which was full of minor factual errors. Some of the chapters - in particular those entitled 'Etruria' and 'Rosenau' - were a bit 'meh' as they focused too much, at least for my taste, on gossip with crowns on disguised as history. He also gets bogged down with detail in long places, especially with the minutiae of trying convince everyone that Poland is/was very important and Historians and commentators are ridiculously biased against Eastern Europe. Both correct, but a bit overdone.

However that isn't to say that I'm not enjoying it. It's a really intriguing work, if a little frustrating.
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« Reply #38 on: September 10, 2014, 11:54:50 AM »

Mikado, any good book recommendations from various parts of European history? I doubt I'll have time to do any extra reading this semester, but just in case...

You'll need to be more specific about the topic, and I'm sure Al would be happy to help out here.

In terms of specifics, if there are books out there that are on post-Fall of Rome and pre-1300, I might be interested. I took a European History course in high school that started off in 1300 and I was quite disappointed by that, given I was hoping for more "dark ages" type stuff (I know this sounds incredibly crude and uneducated, but bear with me).
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Cassius
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« Reply #39 on: September 10, 2014, 12:49:10 PM »

Sorry to butt in to Mikado's thread, but there's a few books that I enjoyed that covered parts of the period in question Cathcon.

The Restoration of Rome - Peter Heather: This, basically, is an overview of European history post the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, and focuses heavily upon the successor Kingdoms of the 'barbarians' (the Visigothic Kingdom and the Frankish Kingdom for example), as well as upon the Papacy.

The Inheritance of Rome - Chris Wickham: More academic, perhaps, than Heather's book, its nonetheless worth a read, and more or less covers the same ground.

I'd also recommend, if your interested, John Julius Norwich's boolks on the Byzantine Empire and the Papacy. Whilst I think opinion of Norwich's merits as a historian is somewhat divided (and he certainly allows his own personal biases to creep into his work), his book are enjoyable to read, and do cover the period that your interested in (although the book on the Popes goes right the way up to the reign of JPII, so maybe not).

Just a couple of suggestions.
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The Mikado
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« Reply #40 on: September 10, 2014, 03:25:00 PM »

Mikado, any good book recommendations from various parts of European history? I doubt I'll have time to do any extra reading this semester, but just in case...

You'll need to be more specific about the topic, and I'm sure Al would be happy to help out here.

In terms of specifics, if there are books out there that are on post-Fall of Rome and pre-1300, I might be interested. I took a European History course in high school that started off in 1300 and I was quite disappointed by that, given I was hoping for more "dark ages" type stuff (I know this sounds incredibly crude and uneducated, but bear with me).

Funny Cassius should mention Peter Heather, I'm currently reading his Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe.  I'm not far enough in to know whether or not I recommend it, but I had previously read his The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and that is pretty good.

Chris Wickham's book The Inheritance of Rome is indeed pretty fantastic and, though long, still reasonably accessible and filled with information.

I'm not sure if I'd recommend it, per se, but a few months ago I read Jonathan Riley-Smith's The Crusades: A History.  It is filled with information on the economic, social, military, and political nature of the Crusades.  All of them.  Right down to every random holy war called down on any random Ghibelline princeling in northern Italy.  It's exhaustive...and exhausting.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #41 on: September 13, 2014, 02:50:23 PM »

If we're just thinking of general works, then one worthwhile book that covers that period (and others but whatever) is another by Norman Davies: his monumental and delightful Europe: A History. The main text is a lot of fun, but the appendices are fantastic (and frankly ideal for anyone who has gone to the bother of registering an account on this forum of all forums) as are the freestanding short essays dotted throughout as 'capsules'.
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patrick1
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« Reply #42 on: September 13, 2014, 05:30:24 PM »

I've been thinking of race relations in the USA, specifically between the black minority and the white majority (but not necessarily including the white elite power brokers) post-1965.  It seems like things were becoming normalized from about the mid-60s through the 70s and into the early 80s.  Then, starting sometime in the mid- to early-80s, things started getting weird.  By the 90s identity was strong.  Society has become increasing fragmented along racial and ethnic lines.  Nowadays, I can't even turn on the television without hearing about some race riot or other, or about racially-motivated criminal or civil actions.  What was the turning point?  Was it a single event 30 years ago?  Was it a series of events?  How did we s start moving in the wrong direction with regard to race relations?


I completely disagree.  There are much more interracial marriages and neighborhood integration. We have a black president and more minorities in positions of power.  Race relations are much better now than 20 and 30 years ago. More locally, NYC was a powder keg and relations are now good.

On news stories much of this revolves around policing stories, no? I think the difference is that in the video age cops are more likely to be taken to task for their bad behavior.  Further, it is a question of what gets reported.  I'm sure the news media has more reports of discrimination now than Jim Crow era Alabama. It is recognized that times are wrong.
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CatoMinor
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« Reply #43 on: September 15, 2014, 03:11:06 PM »

Mikado, have you by chance read Paul Johnson's Modern Times? If so what are your thoughts on it?

(This was one of my texts I had to read last year)
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The Mikado
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« Reply #44 on: September 19, 2014, 02:46:32 PM »
« Edited: September 19, 2014, 02:49:18 PM by The Mikado »

Mikado, have you by chance read Paul Johnson's Modern Times? If so what are your thoughts on it?

(This was one of my texts I had to read last year)

I have not read it.  Reading the Amazon reviews, my assumption is that I'd have a fair amount of characterizations I'd dispute, but often with historical writing one person's positive development can become another's negative by shifting adjectives and using certain key words without disagreeing on the actual course of events.

I'm certainly not of the opinion that right wing figures can't write decent history, or that their works should be discounted: I found Richard Pipes' works about the Russian Revolution an extremely useful counterbalance to the other historians I read on the subject, and I'm quite fond of the late Francois Furet, who, if he wasn't exactly right-wing by contemporary standards, was certainly viciously critical of left wing historians.

From what I can gather by the snippets available on Amazon (always rough to judge a book by that), Johnson's main contention is that the defining characteristic of 20th century thought is the death of certitude and the belief in one single truth, whether the Marxist certainty that the world is dominated by class war or the Christian belief in absolute morality, and celebrates the death of the former while bemoans the death of the latter.  If that's an accurate assessment (and again, I've only just scanned what's available in the free preview), that's not a bad starting point for the intellectual track of the world, though there were serious challenges to moral certainty even before the First World War: Nietzsche is a useful figure to point to, but even figures like the Futurists were preaching a doctrine of the destruction of the art, culture, religion, and morals of the past to make way for superior doctrines of a new age.  If any true benefit came out of the two World Wars, it was to make people far less sure of themselves and of the doctrines they held.

Apparently Modern Times came out in 1985, and I'd be curious to see how its arguments could be presented today, when one more certainty, that of the neoliberal return to free trade dogmatism and economic deregulation and the power of the private sector, can itself no longer be taken for granted quite so easily.  Does the 2008 economic crisis spell the end for the self-confident assumption that Reagan and Thatcher's solutions are always right to the same extent as the late 20th century totally discredited the central planning doctrines of the old Communist bloc?
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The Mikado
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« Reply #45 on: September 30, 2014, 11:15:23 PM »

Anyone else have something?  I enjoy this thread.
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Cassius
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« Reply #46 on: October 01, 2014, 03:30:21 AM »

Do you think that the Crusades sped up or slowed the decline of the Byzantine Empire?
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Vega
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« Reply #47 on: October 01, 2014, 05:07:27 AM »

What are your thoughts on Guamanian statehood?
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Mopsus
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« Reply #48 on: October 01, 2014, 09:48:26 AM »

Which was more important to the development of Jewish religion, culture, identity, etc.: the mythical exile in Egypt, or the actual exile in Babylon?
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The Mikado
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« Reply #49 on: October 01, 2014, 05:10:19 PM »

Do you think that the Crusades sped up or slowed the decline of the Byzantine Empire?

A rather impossible question to answer.  Certainly Alexius was deeply suspicious of the Crusaders and vice versa right from the start, withdrew any real material support for the Crusaders once they got much into Anatolia, and spent much of the aftermath of the First Crusade squabbling with Bohemond, and of course Alexius' grandson Manuel left the Second Crusade to its fate.  The intense bad blood between the Crusaders and the Byzantines was already in existence in 1204 and wasn't a product of the sack of Constantinople: the relatively limited goals of reconquering Anatolia that Alexius had desired Western support in were not at all the same as the Crusader dream. 

Of course, all of this culminates in 1204 and the sack of Constantinople and the destruction of the Byzantine Empire as one political entity.  There is little doubt that this was a near-fatal blow to the Byzantines: despite the Palaiologus family and Nicaea's restoration project and the end of the Latin Empire, the Byzantines would never again be that formidable a power, and would have to share Greece with a variety of Crusader states (they'd never again hold Athens, for example).  The Byzantine continued survival for as long as they did had a lot to do with the many, many distractions the weak and disunited Turkish states faced: the Mongol invasions, first and foremost.  Said Mongol invasions also put off the day of reckoning for the petty states of Outremer until the 1280s-1290s.

I suppose that my eventual conclusion would be that there's no denying that the Fourth Crusade was devastating to the Empire, but the Empire deserves part of the blame for establishing such hostile and acrimonious relations with the previous Crusades and such a poor working relationship.

What are your thoughts on Guamanian statehood?


Guam is tiny, though admittedly its population is far larger than the theoretical minimum size of a US state.  I would have preferred, if this was going to happen, for it to be part of a larger state including the former Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands, but we've since granted them all independence.  I think there's a credible case that Guam is too small to avoid territory status, but I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to statehood.

Which was more important to the development of Jewish religion, culture, identity, etc.: the mythical exile in Egypt, or the actual exile in Babylon?

This is a loaded question, but I think it boils down to the question of whether subjects of the Kingdom of Judah prior to the Babylonian sack were recognizably "Jews" or whether "Judaism" as a religion only developed in the aftermath of that event.  Is this more or less what you were trying to ask?  I'll come back to this one later.
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