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From the Prayer thread in reply to Brooklynborndad.
Quote:
Originally Posted by brooklynborndad
Did you live in the middle ages? 10 to 12 kids with 7 to 8 survivors is not what we are talking about. 10 to 12 kids with 2 to 3 survivors is what we are talking about. In most preindustrial societies, EXCEPT those that had a sudden relaxation of hunger constraints (like settlers in the new world, or any people just after a major agricultural advance) hunger and illness acted as a check on population. population growth over time was slow
Nope this was early 1900's and the link you posted is not really any better than my theory.
Of course famine and water would be governing factors together with disease and plagues. However, these factors were taken into consideration.
Although the models here look at births and deaths/1000 I was taking individual couples and the likelihood of survivors of offspring of 15 or so taking an age of survivability of 40 years of the parents. This easily allows for 15 conceptions and taking a third of that as survivable is how I modelled my predictions on.
What makes the Jewish nation unique is the low numbers and WWII cannot be the only reason for that number, this of course looking at it from a cultural perspective. Furthermore, this a culture that is known to have been widely dispersed globally and as such, were not all exposed to the same conditions.
Observations in my short life in Africa I have seen the decline in fertility of the black folk but when I was young, their offspring were typically 3-4 times that of the white settlers. The survivability of parents increased as the mortality rates dropped. In the three African countries I have grown up in, the white man's influence could not have been the only governing factor. They out bred the settlers and their numbers were already very high w/o the white mans medicine or the new diseases they introduced.
In Africa, not all land is conducive to mass agriculture and even where land was annexed, the local folk served as laborers. A high population led to bigger farms and bigger crops pre the mechanization of farming. As the white man was forced out of the lands, the farming skills amongst the "native" folk is non existent and were it not for mineral wealth still being exploited by the west, they would starve.
I saw 1st hand in Ghana farm lands that had been allowed to return to fallow and there were no more than fishermen and folk had in rural areas regressed to the hunter gatherer; their population so big now that seeing even a domestic dog is a treat. It was really weird not to see birds other than crows and vultures, no doves and sparrows. Really sad as it is a relatively nice country with nice folk. They even import their milk; all my life fresh milk has been the norm yet there, you only get processed canned milk with your coffee in hotels.
Seeing their numbers purely from a racial aspect, history of armies numbering in the 100's of thousands making war with each other seemed very plausible. The Zulu wars where the Brits saw their backsides in spite of modern weaponry bears testament to this.
When I read of the exploits of the Hebrews in the bible, place this graph on the stories as a template;
One can only question the claims of the numbers of exodus and the exploits of the kings in the bible as being over exaggerated or never having happened at all.
Having grown up in a third world environment for most of my life, which by accounts of the link suggest they lag the rest of the world, you could say I have been a privileged observer in recent history that mirrors an earlier time in history.
Even in SA which is considered industrialized by 1st world standards, agriculture barely caters for the local population, we still need to import. One season of drought and it is almost pandemic. We have even seen that rice in Asia is being exported less as they need it themselves.
These are all the sub routines happening when I evaluated my model.
From the Prayer thread in reply to Brooklynborndad.
Nope this was early 1900's and the link you posted is not really any better than my theory.
Of course famine and water would be governing factors together with disease and plagues. However, these factors were taken into consideration.
Although the models here look at births and deaths/1000 I was taking individual couples and the likelihood of survivors of offspring of 15 or so taking an age of survivability of 40 years of the parents. This easily allows for 15 conceptions and taking a third of that as survivable is how I modelled my predictions on.
What makes the Jewish nation unique is the low numbers and WWII cannot be the only reason for that number, this of course looking at it from a cultural perspective. Furthermore, this a culture that is known to have been widely dispersed globally and as such, were not all exposed to the same conditions.
Observations in my short life in Africa I have seen the decline in fertility of the black folk but when I was young, their offspring were typically 3-4 times that of the white settlers. The survivability of parents increased as the mortality rates dropped. In the three African countries I have grown up in, the white man's influence could not have been the only governing factor. They out bred the settlers and their numbers were already very high w/o the white mans medicine or the new diseases they introduced.
In Africa, not all land is conducive to mass agriculture and even where land was annexed, the local folk served as laborers. A high population led to bigger farms and bigger crops pre the mechanization of farming. As the white man was forced out of the lands, the farming skills amongst the "native" folk is non existent and were it not for mineral wealth still being exploited by the west, they would starve.
I saw 1st hand in Ghana farm lands that had been allowed to return to fallow and there were no more than fishermen and folk had in rural areas regressed to the hunter gatherer; their population so big now that seeing even a domestic dog is a treat. It was really weird not to see birds other than crows and vultures, no doves and sparrows. Really sad as it is a relatively nice country with nice folk. They even import their milk; all my life fresh milk has been the norm yet there, you only get processed canned milk with your coffee in hotels.
Seeing their numbers purely from a racial aspect, history of armies numbering in the 100's of thousands making war with each other seemed very plausible. The Zulu wars where the Brits saw their backsides in spite of modern weaponry bears testament to this.
When I read of the exploits of the Hebrews in the bible, place this graph on the stories as a template;
One can only question the claims of the numbers of exodus and the exploits of the kings in the bible as being over exaggerated or never having happened at all.
Having grown up in a third world environment for most of my life, which by accounts of the link suggest they lag the rest of the world, you could say I have been a privileged observer in recent history that mirrors an earlier time in history.
Even in SA which is considered industrialized by 1st world standards, agriculture barely caters for the local population, we still need to import. One season of drought and it is almost pandemic. We have even seen that rice in Asia is being exported less as they need it themselves.
These are all the sub routines happening when I evaluated my model.
The link i posted was to a description of the demographic transition, which is conventional wisdom in demography.
as for growing up in south africa, unless you are much older than I imagine, death rates had already declined substantially by the time you were born.
this site has data only going back to 1968 I am afraid - I would be very surprised if there had not been earlier substantial declines.
I am not addressing BIBLICAL demographics here, but your question wrt to growth since 70 CE.
look at the total population of the world in the year 500. it is esimtated at about 300 million. by the year 1810 - after 1300 years - it was about one billion - it had slightly over tripled. Yet by your "model" that level of growth should have been exceeded in two generations. Think about it.
The issue here is not the bible, or jewish demography. Its that you need to need learn some basic things about historical demography. Read some books and look at some data, dont just make up models in your head. Science advances by building on science that has been done, not by attempting to reinvent the wheel.
I was born in what is now known as Zambia in 1958.
I did not reinvent the wheel, I took this model into consideration and looked at the observed evidence in my area of the world and trends. Central Africa is even worse.
Maybe my model is not perfect but there is no ancient history to model it on in Southern Africa. The tribes here are essentially all mixed now and folk self identify from a region they or their grandparents came from. Only when we see migrants from places like Mozambique and far northern African countries do we see differences in facial features. I have grown up with them and to me they do not all look the same, there are definitely different traits.
I suppose taking a neighbor of Egypt as a rough comparison we have a population that is ±83M in three main centres. Applying the models you claim resulted in the low numbers, was Egypt more conducive to population growth than Europe? They seem to have gone through similar histories barring the holocaust. Their migration to elsewhere in the world appears to be proportional to the Jewish people.
Would it be fair to assume that during the middle ages, the Jewish folk also interbred and lost their cultural identity to the countries they were in? I have heard a few folk in the USA particularly xians that claim have some vague trace of Jewish heritage but are for all intents and purposes Caucasian.
Taking my own lineage from my grandparents side, French, Dutch, German and Irish, hows that for a mixed salad? Never been able to trace it back further than that as we are late 19th century when they all were born.
I suppose taking a neighbor of Egypt as a rough comparison we have a population that is ±83M in three main centres. Applying the models you claim resulted in the low numbers, was Egypt more conducive to population growth than Europe? They seem to have gone through similar histories barring the holocaust. Their migration to elsewhere in the world appears to be proportional to the Jewish people.
Would it be fair to assume that during the middle ages, the Jewish folk also interbred and lost their cultural identity to the countries they were in? I have heard a few folk in the USA particularly xians that claim have some vague trace of Jewish heritage but are for all intents and purposes Caucasian.
Taking my own lineage from my grandparents side, French, Dutch, German and Irish, hows that for a mixed salad? Never been able to trace it back further than that as we are late 19th century when they all were born.
Egypt wasnt 83 million when I was growing up. It was more like 50 million. Like most of the "less developed" world, it had slow or no growth till the 20th century - then a rapid fall in death rates, and very rapid population growth.
heres what i found in some quick googling
"Dominic Rathbone estimates that Roman Egypt had a population of 3 to 5 millions, and Bagnall and Frier concur"
So, in over 1500 years, the population of Egypt doubled.
As you can see, the slow growth of the world Jewish population since the Roman era is quite in line with slow growth of other nations and peoples.
as for losing their culture - probably relatively little during the middle ages (other than widely noted cases of forced conversion like Spain in the 1300's) In the middle ages and early modern era, due to segregation of Jews in ghettos, a jew who converted to christianity was cut off entirely from family and community. Much more after 1750 or so, as europe liberalized.
OK it seems we are coming too the initial observation that prompted this all, if we take your figures of 5M Egyptians, ignoring substantial migration to neighboring Arab countries, we are essentially left with a relatively small original Jewish/Hebrew population circa 100BCE.
One of the concepts I have always challenged mentally from a similar stance is the taking of the land of milk and honey followed later by the invasion of the Roman empire and ruling that area for considerable time. Granted we have not much outside of the bible to base this on but IMO the exploits and numbers claimed were highly exaggerated wrt to conquests and battles.
I have always asked myself, in the theme of the bible that the Jews are the chosen, they seem to have been dealt a pretty sh***y hand suffering a number of Diasporas and defeats.
I guess we shall never know the truth unless someone invents a time machine and we could go back and verify what really happened. From this analysis I have to draw a conclusion that it was not all that it made out to be and highly embellished. That however does not deter anyone for holding onto their cultural identity, whatever that may be.
Just really odd to me that in a new world like SA, folk came from all over and in a matter of a few centuries, interbred and lost the identity of their forefathers. The only thing we have as far as the white folk go is the Afrikaans language which is derivative of Dutch, German, French and English. Only the later immigrants like Italians, Portuguese and Germans managed to maintain some semblance of their heritages. Folk like the Asians also still have strong ties to India and Pakistan but identify primarily as SA rather than Asian. Under the old dispensation they were denied this. We also have biracial folk and here they are still referred to as coloreds on census forms. For a long time inter racial marriage was disallowed. These folk grew as a demographic and the majority of them are Afrikaans speaking oddly enough.
In a new SA we are all simply South Africans and even in schools, no big deal is made of either the black or white heritages in history classes, the monuments remain, some statues removed but for the most part they all still exist, our new identity is only 15 years old.
My roots came from SA as both my parents were born here but my cultural roots are more British as that was the culture I grew up in. My father even renounced his SA citizenship to vote in the then Rhodesia. He got it back when he returned to SA as it was his birthright.
As for my children, they only identify as South African, the roots of French, Dutch, German and Irish are of no consequence to them. Their kids will be even less affiliated.
I had to learn the Afrikaans language when I came here as even though I had heard my parents talking it and understood it, I never spoke it and our conversations were bilingual or they spoke to us kids in English. My wife is Afrikaans and my kids too, but we are fully bilingual, all of us can switch between the two w/o carry over of an accent.
OK it seems we are coming too the initial observation that prompted this all, if we take your figures of 5M Egyptians, ignoring substantial migration to neighboring Arab countries, we are essentially left with a relatively small original Jewish/Hebrew population circa 100BCE.
As far as I know there was as much migration to Egypt from other arab countries as from Egypt in the period between Roman times and 1800. And I suspect if we looked at numbers for any neighboring country we would find the same thing. Its simply a fact that preindustrial population growth was either nonexistent or slow EVERYWHERE except for exceptional times and places where food was unusually abundant (which obviously did not last long)
As for what the jewish population was in 100 BCE, I dont have time to look into that now. It was smaller than the Jewish population of circa 1800, but was not just a few individuals, by any means.
Would it be fair to assume that during the middle ages, the Jewish folk also interbred and lost their cultural identity to the countries they were in?
No, it would not be fair to assume that, since European Jews in the Middle Ages were frequently confined to particular sections of the cities where they lived, and were thereby kept deliberately separate from the general population. That's the main reason why Jewish identity was preserved--exactly the opposite of your assumption.
Those sections, by the way, came to be known after the part of Venice to which Jews were confined: Ghetto. (Yes, it's true. If you're using the word 'ghetto' in its historically accurate sense, you're actually talking about the Jewish section of a city!)
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