In April 2020, at the height of COVID-19, I set up a weekly online gathering meeting and named the Zoom series Decameron. That was the start of a beautiful intriguing regular intellectual conversation among about thirty close college friends of ours. We shared our thoughts and experiences about all the things we were curious about. This series has been running lively up to this day.
One of the best presenters used to be a very successful chief marketing officer for a few prominent semiconductor component manufacturers in the Bay Area. He retired ahead of us and then put all his energy into becoming a world history historian and gave us a few talks about the five thousand years of history of China and then world history. We were amazed by how great his presentations were, and how deep he went to get his data right and thorough. His presentation was better than many of the subject masters’ talks.
Now with the crazy manifest of the Isreal-Hamas War, we beg our newly established world history pundit to give us a talk about Isreal’s Middle East history.
Our historian agreed and within less than a month’s preparation, he said he was ready and also warned us he needed two 3-hour sessions to finish the talk.
“It is too complicated.”
I had the best time in that first three hours’s presentation to get my very first serious knowledge about Isreal and Jewish history.
First of all, two very familiar phrases now shed new (contrasting) light on my newly acquired history knowledge. “Anti-Semitism” is a bit ironic because Semitic languages were meant to be equivalent to the most common languages that the entire Middle East is using. But nowadays “antisemitism” is almost equivalent to “anti-Israel”. The second phrase, “Good Samaritan”, also has this ancient biblical and history implication of second class regards of a “Samaritan”, while I had always been treating “Samaritan” as a word close to an “angel”, especially a “Florence Nightingale” like “angel”, thanks to all the “Good Samaritan Hospitals” in California.
Also, I found out that one of my all-time favorite 80’s disco songs, “By the River of Babylon” lyrics were 100% recited from the Bible. It was about the first time Jewish people were granted rights to go back to Israel, almost like what happened after the WWII in 1945.
Our pundit did not answer the question of why Hamas and Israel hate each other so much nor who is the real owner of that piece of land. He just listed out the exchange of rulers in the last 5000 years.
“To put into perspective, during the same time, the entire China was only taken by ousters twice. The first was between 1270 to 1368 by the Mongol Empire from the Borjigin clan; the second time was a Manchu-led gang that lasted between 1636 and 1912.” Our pundit pointed out.
I chucked in disbelief.
For those Chinese raised and died behind that longest brick wall built by Qin Shi Huang 秦始皇 more than two thousand years ago, we have long lost comprehension of how harsh and cruel the outside world had been and still is.
We had an easy ride through the last two thousand years thanks to that mighty emperor who unified China for the first time and built a long wall to fend off all the barbarians from the north and west.
We only lost the entire country to the invaders from the north of the wall twice. The first time was extremely cruel that all the Chinese brides had to sleep with one of the invader’s clan members to bear a child of their race before the new family could have their own children raised. That dynasty lasted less than a hundred years. The second time was a bit more complicated. The invaders were so eager to absorb the Chinese Han culture that by the end of the era, people could hardly tell who were these invaders anymore. They abandoned their own language, their own clothing, and many of their own tribe traditions and nomad lifestyles. They all became Han people in the end.
Looking at how frequently the change of hands had happened in the land of Isreal, I suddenly felt that our Chinese may need to give our longest brick wall of 2000 years old some extra credit.
Another callout is that China has been a land of atheists. China lost the opportunity to develop any fundamental religions before the iron fist Qin Shi Huang built a then very modern totalitarian nation system and took the entire China under his wing. The empire in rule had always be the de factor God of the entire China ever since, till this day.
For a Chinese like myself, it is very hard to comprehend that there are ethnic people being living multiple generations without a home nation. And they were the easy target of mass genocides for more than once on history especially when things gone bad for the nations they inhabited.
The powerful story of how Jewish people survived thousand years crossed the world without a nation is a showcase of the complexity, the inspirations as well as the dark side of the mighty Christianity and Judaism as a religion. Why had there been these intolerance and exclusiveness of faith and believes lingered till this day, when 99% of the global civilization are out of famine and deadly death threatening illness?
But the land of Israel is a problem thousands of years in the making and now it is just yet another round of reciprocation.
Should we Chinese give more love to the Great Wall that prevented so many invasions in that 2000 years of time? Perhaps we should.
