Brit-Am Historical Reports
Contents:
1. Recommended: Origin of Nations e-mail list.
2. Jews in Medicine.
Extract from Tracing the Path of Jewish Medical Pioneers by RONI CARYN RABIN.
3. The Arabs were Usually Bad and Created deserts. Extracts from Who Really Killed the Pax Romana?
1. Recommended: Origin of Nations e-mail list.
The Origin of Nations e-mail list headed by Craig White of Australia
From: surfer11 <surfer11@iprimus.com.au>
frequently quotes from articles and sources of information concerning the Lost Ten Tribes being in Western Nations and Western Peoples in general.
2. Jews in Medicine
Tracing the Path of Jewish Medical Pioneers
By RONI CARYN RABIN
Extracts:
While some religions place ultimate responsibility for healing in divine hands, "Jews don't see a conflict between faith and medicine," said Alan M. Kraut, a professor of history at American University who helped put together the exhibition and has written extensively about immigration and health.
"The healer is seen as one of God's instruments, not a competing force," he said. "The physician is someone held in the highest esteem, doing God's work, preserving life."
During the Middle Ages, European Jews were instrumental in the spread of medical knowledge, translating many important early medical treatises from Arabic into Hebrew and other languages.
But Jews were not admitted into most medical schools in Europe; they learned medicine through apprenticeships or were self-taught, said Dr. Edward I. Reichman, a physician and rabbi who practices at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and teaches medical ethics.
In 1598, a papal edict issued by Pope Clement VIII reaffirmed edicts by previous popes that prohibited Jewish doctors from treating Christians and barred Christians from seeking treatment from Jewish physicians.
There were exceptions, however. "Almost every pope in history had a personal physician who was Jewish," Dr. Reichman noted.
In the late 1800s, medical schools in Europe started opening their doors to Jews, and many entered the profession, including some of the first women to study medicine, said Josh Feinberg, who curated the exhibition. By the early 20th century, half of the physicians in Berlin were Jewish, as were 60 percent of the physicians in Vienna and 70 percent of the physicians in Warsaw.
Because they were barred entry to established specialties like surgery, Jews flocked to new, less prestigious fields, making their marks in areas like psychiatry (psychoanalysis was for a while called the "Jewish science"), dermatology, neurology, immunology, pathology and gynecology.
In the 1920s and 1930s, as American medical schools like Columbia cut the number of Jews they admitted, many went to Scotland to study. The doors to hospital-based training programs were closed, but new Jewish hospitals absorbed the trainees. The Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, a sponsor of the exhibition, was established in the 1950s.
3. The Arabs were Usually Bad and Created deserts.
Who Really Killed the Pax Romana?
Extracts:
Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited:
The History of a Controversy
 by Emmet Scott
Throughout the coastal areas surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, archaeologists have uncovered a layer of subsoil that was deposited over a period of three hundred years beginning in the middle of the seventh century AD.
This stratum, named the "Younger Fill" by the geologist Claudio Vita-Finzi, covers the ruins of all the major cities and settlements that were established along the Mediterranean littoral during classical antiquity. It stands as a coda to Graeco-Roman civilization. For three centuries after the year 650 the archaeology of the region is all but barren. Wastelands or severely diminished primitive settlements have replaced the formerly great cities of the Roman Empire and the Near East.
One might surmise that the Younger Fill is the result of some yet unidentified climatic trauma that afflicted the entire Mediterranean basin. However, the same phenomenon has been observed in an entirely different watershed: Mesopotamia, the land drained by the Tigris and Euphrates in what is now Iraq, and also including the coastal regions adjoining the Persian Gulf.
During the same period, from the middle of the seventh century until the middle of the tenth, archaeology in the entirety of Europe and the Middle East virtually disappears. This civilizational interruption might be thought a result of the Dark Ages in Europe, except for the fact that it includes areas of the Middle East which were never part of the Roman Empire, and where advanced cultures independent of Rome and Greece had flourished.
What all these areas have in common, of course, is that they were conquered by the Arabs during the initial period of Islamic expansion, when the Near East, North Africa, and Iberia were subjugated within the space of less than a century.
Islam came to the Mediterranean and left as its principal legacy the Younger Fill.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The idea that Islam was the primary cause for the end of classical civilization has been out of favor for the last eighty years or so, ever since the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne first proposed it in his ground-breaking book Mohammed and Charlemagne.
In Pirenne's time it was commonly understood,and still is, that the end of civilization began in the fifth century with the fall of Rome and the barbarian invasions, a full two hundred years before the legions of Mohammed raged across the eastern and southern littorals of the Mediterranean. According to the scholarly consensus, Roman civilization was already moribund by the time the Arabs arrived on the scene, and the Islamic incursion simply tipped the last vestiges of it into oblivion.
Using recent archaeological data, Pirenne concluded that classical civilization did not end in the fifth century, but rather in the seventh, when the fragments of the later Roman Empire were overrun by the Arab invaders. The Islamic predators terminated civilization wherever they encountered it, in whatever form it happened to take.
This thesis was not well-received in its time. It was relegated to the fringe, where it has remained ever since. In the politically correct 21st century, which extols the grandeur of the :Golden Age of Islam in Iberia", Pirenne's stock can only decline further. Our degraded culture is not receptive to the idea that it was Islam, rather than the Germanic barbarians, that destroyed the culture and civilization of Rome.
What happened to Pirenne in the 1920s and 1930s, however, reminds us that politically correct notions about Islam did not originate in the late twentieth century. The myth of al-Andalus was firmly established in the nineteenth century by British and German scholars, who discovered in Islam the "saviors of classical knowledge". By the time of the Great War these ideas were firmly entrenched, so that Pirenne faced an uphill battle in his attempts to propagate an alternative theory.
Fortunately for his modern admirers, a wealth of additional archaeological data has accumulated in the eight decades since Pirenne first published his analysis. More recent evidence not only corroborates Pirenne's assertions, it demonstrates conclusively that no other explanation can reasonably be adduced: the Islamic invasions wrecked the agricultural systems of the Mediterranean basin, all but destroyed literacy, and brought down the vibrant, prosperous, and civilized successor states to the late Roman Empire in North Africa and Iberia.
The destruction was both ideological and physical. When the Arab armies overran the Near East and North Africa, their heedless pastoral practices destroyed the topsoil, and thus the agriculture that sustained the wealthy economies of the region. By pillaging existing infrastructure and permitting complex irrigation systems to fall into ruin, they forced hardship and starvation upon what remained of the indigenous population. Hence the Younger Fill: the tangible evidence of what Arab culture brought to Mediterranean civilization.
Islam also systematically destroyed the ideas that underlay classical learning, bringing into disrepute any corpus of knowledge that did not agree with the Koran and did not further the spread of Islam. Entire fields of knowledge were consigned to the dustbin, further guaranteeing the poverty and backwardness of the Islamic states that displaced their classical predecessors.
Finally, Islamic piracy and predation brought sea trade in the Mediterranean to a virtual standstill. This was not only devastating to the economies of Europe, but it also halted the export of papyrus from Egypt to the rest of the region. The use of papyrus for written material was the major engine of widespread literacy in the Mediterranean. After the supply dried up, parchment proved to be scarce, expensive, and inadequate as a replacement.
Thanks to Islam, the Mediterranean basin was transformed from a peaceful, literate, civilized culture into a violent, illiterate, and backward one, all in the space of a generation or so.
...Dr. W. C. Lowdermilk, compiled an extensive survey of worldwide agricultural practices for the U. S. Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation Service. His paper, entitled "Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years", was eventually published in February 1948.
In Tunisia ...Over a large portion of the ancient granary of Rome we found the soil washed off to bed rock and the hills seriously gullied from overgrazing. The valley floors are usually still cultivated but are still eroding in great gullies fed by accelerated storm runoff from barren slopes. This was in an area that once supported many great cities in Roman times.
There even existed, in Spain and North Africa, at least from the time of the Almohads (early twelfth century), a commission of enquiry, a veritable "inquisition", for rooting out apostates. We are told that the Jews, who had at this time been forced to accept Islam, formed a mass of "new converts" who nevertheless continued to practice their own religion in secret. But the Almohad inquisitors, doubting their sincerity, took away their children and raised them as Muslims.
Medieval Christianity, beginning in the late twelfth/early thirteenth century, adopted the same attitude. Christians now had their own Inquisition for exposing heretics, and the death penalty was now prescribed for such miscreants.