Comments by "Sam Aronow" (@SamAronow) on "Overly Sarcastic Productions" channel.

  1. To say that medicine was Maimonides' "fallback job" is to misunderstand the Jewish context. Until fairly recently, being a rabbi was a part-time, unpaid position. Technically speaking, it isn't a position at all but rather a qualification, like a JD, that enables one to perform any number of duties relating to the practice of Jewish law. Some rabbis at this time were practicing professionally, but it was rare until the 19th century and Maimonides himself disapproved of it.
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  2. As an only child and only grandchild, "last of their kind" hits way too hard.
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  3. Fun fact: A Christmas Carol is the main reason why Christmas is almost always depicted in the northern hemispheric English-speaking world as snowy. Dickens' childhood was during both the tail end of the Little Ice Age and an extreme volcanic winter due to the eruption of Mt. Tambora, and thus incorporated it into his work. In England and especially London today, white Christmases are very rare, so white Christmases in Britain basically exist as an anachronistic legacy of this work. However, many Britons I've come to encounter assume this is equally true of the US if not more so for how much further south the country is and how much hotter the summers are. Many have been shocked by the reality of a midwestern winter.
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  4. Basically Isis is Captain Marvel.
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  5.  @Gala-yp8nx  And those types of folks really hate it when you put Jesus’ life and sayings into the Jewish context of the period. I get daily hate comments telling me that Judaism is an elaborate hoax invented to conceal Jesus’ divinity because Christianity is the original version of Judaism.
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  6. Have you ever noticed how certain understandings of time travel come in and out of fashion? The 2000s were the decade of the closed time loop (Timecrimes, Blink, Lost, Harry Potter), but now most new fiction scoffs at that, says "time is a river," and happily indulges alternate timelines.
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  7. For a good while after the Almohads, Christian Spain was actually the engine of Jewish thought. While it is true that Muslim countries were somewhat more likely to allow religious toleration, there was no shortage of exceptions on both sides. The simplified narrative of "Muslim Spain good, Christian Spain bad" seems to date back to the 19th century, when Spanish Liberals in support of Queen Isabel II began extolling the virtues of the Sephardic Golden Age as a rejoinder to the ultra-conservative Carlists. Suffice it to say that for a good few centuries, Christian Spain had inherited Muslim Spain's legacy of toleration before gradually abandoning it due to complicated European power politics.
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  8. Pope Fights X: Now with Nazis Pope Fights XI: Lorne Michaels vs. Sinead O’Connor Pope Fights XII: Rod Dreher complains about Francis
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  9. Oh, very much so. It's called the Northern Cities Shift, and it shares qualities with St. Louis, Upstate New York, and other places on or near the Great Lakes. My hometown of Pasadena, CA actually has something closer to a Chicago accent than to the rest of California. Look up clips of Brian Doyle Murray, Joan Cusack, Gene Siskel, Bonnie Hunt for reference.
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  10. There's a Ramesses-Era fortress a mile from my house. It was called Gath Rimmon and there was an archeological dig in the '90s, but there's not much to look at today unless you want to go spelunking in a giant well.
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  11. Note: Yugoslavia became communist on its own, as it was the Communists who spearheaded the partisan movement, and aside from some border areas, there was no Soviet troop presence there.
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  12. YORKSHIRE! YORKSHIRE! YORKSHIRE!
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  13. Crisis of the Third Century: "Hold My Beer."
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  14. Merritt Animation Israel actually has that. Most sports teams were founded by political parties and are politically affiliated. That’s why so many of the tea,s all have the same names over and over.
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  15.  @LiliKiabey  And that's what got the Menorah sent back to Jerusalem.
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  16.  @TerenceClark  There were at least two contributing factors: 1. The 2000s saw a big vogue for string theory. 2. The 2000s saw a big vogue for anti-heroes, and the closed time loop is very conducive to stories where the protagonists are horrified (or at least surprised) to discover that they are responsible for everything that's happened, which you can only do so much of before it gets old.
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  17. I'm smiling but I'm very fooking furious.
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  18. Quick note on the Jewish War: most of the Jews were already living outside of Judea at the time as a result of the Hellenistic period. Some of the defenders of Jerusalem were sent as slaves to Rome (and the Jews of Rome today can still trace their specific ancestry to them!), but most of the general population stayed. In fact, after the Kitos War, Hadrian had many of the Jews of the Diaspora repatriated to Judea, only to betray us again by building a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount. This led to the Bar Kochba revolt, the bloodiest of all the Roman-Jewish wars in which hundreds of thousands died. At this, the Romans forbade the Jews from entering Jerusalem and spitefully renamed the province Syria Palaestina after the ancient Philistines. That was it for a while, but the Sanhedrin kept operating out of Yavne and later Tiberias. In the last big revolt, the Jews with Persian assistance began building a Third Temple but were stopped short when the Byzantines retook Judea. By this point, the Jews of Judea were only a small minority of the Jewish population worldwide, but Judea remained majority-Jewish or nearly so until being almost wiped out in the First Crusade. A small but visible community called the Old Yishuv remained present until the Napoleonic Wars, when diaspora Jews began returning in larger numbers, leading to the Zionist movement in the late 19th century.
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  19. Wood for the US, brick for the UK, concrete for Russia, jade for China.
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  20. Oh my God Red's hair really is that long.
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  21.  @jlokison  As a Californian who attended elementary school in the dark days before anyone cared about La Soberanía, I had something of the opposite experience. I was taught from an early age that we were bizarre Mediterranean aberrations who barely deserved to be called Americans. We learned all about East Coast nature and weather and indigenous peoples, and all we ever learned about California was Missions->Gold Rush->Japanese Internment, the end.
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  22. This is Eccleston Erasure.
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  23. *Correction: the PLC was never home to 3/4 of the world's Jews. Its former territories did eventually become home to a slim majority of the world's Jews, but not until the late 19th century, by which time an independent Poland was a distant memory. At the time of the First Partition in 1772, Poland topped out as home to just under 1/3 of the world's Jewish population.
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  24. We've found a meme god.
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  25.  @TerenceClark  For a time in the mid-2000s there was no getting away from Brian Greene.
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  26. 3:45 buncha bucket boys. They're still using traditional wells!
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  27. Congratulations to Blue & Cyan!
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  28. The way I heard it, Andromeda was the princess of Jaffa and thus Samaritan.
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  29. Have you watched Patrick Willems' video about Sam Raimi and the "ordinary people" in his Spider-Man trilogy? There's a lot of overlap between your points and his.
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  30. "Jeff Dunham!? What year is this!?" Iceland.
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  31. THANK YOU. SHAZAM DOES NOTHING.
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  32. 9:45 HORON SENSES TINGLING
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  33. There's one in the Talmud, and that was written during the time of the Western Roman Empire.
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  34. “The Scottish Parliament is hereby reconvened.” God I wish my country had thought of that. And probably almost every other former British colony.
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  35. And Andromeda's Rock is in Tel Aviv.
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  36. OMG Blue. I’m about to start work on my new video about Hellenistic Judaism and Greco-Jewish relations before Alexandrer and this is exactly what I didn’t know I needed.
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  37. I find myself missing the hygge of the library.
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  38. Theology Note! Heaven as a paradise for God's chosen is not a thing in Judaism. The only person taken "to the heavens" is the prophet Elijah, who canonically is still alive up there and waiting to come back. Sheol is a holdover from the Old Gods as the domain of Horon, who later migrated into Greek paganism as Hades, but beyond the oldest parts of the Old Testament, the afterlife only becomes more ambiguous. By the time we get to Second Temple Judaism– i.e. the non-beta version of Judaism– there was open debate as to whether there even is an afterlife. Eventually, the House of Hillel prevailed with its belief that there was an immortal soul, but the fate of that soul was ambiguous, and it's been there ever since. Many schools of Jewish thought even believe in reincarnation, but unlike in Dante's own Roman Catholicism with its universal doctrines and Papal infallibility, Judaism doesn't have any central authority to decide what's what, and every idea about the afterlife out there is emphatically a hypothesis, and nobody claims to be certain. Generally speaking, Judaism teaches that our actions always have consequences in this world, both for ourselves and for the next generation, and that's what's most important. Anyway, shameless plug: if you like what I have to say, I have a channel that's all about ancient Jewish history. Come check it out!
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  39. Update: Andromeda seems to have been a princess of Ethiopia who just happened to be chained to a rock in Jaffa.
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  40. Nobody tell Blue about Monophysites.
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  41. Sweet Lion of Zion!
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  42. I assume you're the one behind Project Revolution?
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  43. Is that the same Cardenio as the lost Shakespeare play!?
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  44. Minor quibble: Egyptian is Afroasiatic but not specifically Semitic.
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  45. Tired: El Dorado Wired: Z
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  46. Those Byzantines loved a good gouging.
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  47. They say of the Acropolis where the Parthenon is
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  48. Confirmed: Longcat beats Thor
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  49. You know in Boston loyalty is everything. Say hi to your motha for me.
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  50. What about in France, where the painted eggs are brought over by a giant hovering bell from Rome?
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