I wanted to write something about the Pew Report
called A Portrait of Jewish Americans, which seems to be showing that American
Jewry is in a flaming tailspin and that the rate of intermarriage and
assimilation is at an all-time high, and that at this rate, the only American
Jews who will be identifiably Jewish in a few decades will be the Orthodox. And
I have been reading opinions and commentary by people who are by far smarter
than I, including the always interesting Dennis Prager, who has written a piece
called ‘Why
Orthodoxy is Growing’. He says it has to do with
ritual observance, with living among other Orthodox Jews, with sending kids to Orthodox
schools, with valuing marriage and having more children (not buying into the
‘nihilistic nonsense- and the Jewish dead end- of the zero population growth
movement’ that ‘many non-Orthodox have’), of believing that G-d chose the Jews
and is the author of the Torah, with the centrality of Israel to most Orthodox,
and with non-Orthodox accepting, in fact being ‘steeped in leftism’. And as
usual, Dennis does not wave the flag for anyone, he is just stating the truth.
Make of it what you wish.
So I started thinking. What other groups can I
think of who would fulfill some of these criteria? And how are they doing? And,
of course, I immediately thought of the Amish. You can’t get past the beards
and the hats!
So I started looking up stuff about the Amish, and
it seems that they are doing very well. New Amish communities are being
established, in fact, 60% of existing communities
have been established since 1990. There are about 500 settlements each of 40-60
families, about 251,000 people.
I don’t know that much about the Amish beyond a
few books and the movie Witness, but it seems that they are fairly insular,
live largely agrarian and simple lifestyles, have their own schools, speak a
German dialect called Pennsylvanian Dutch as a first language and English as a
second and keep largely away from technology. As there is only a limited amount
of farmland, they also work as artisans, crafting furniture and selling it, and
they take jobs in surrounding towns. They travel by horse and buggy but they
are allowed to ride in cars and trains, and they play baseball and they like
in-line skates. Some communities are more stringent than others about
technology. They marry young, after their rumspringa,
which means ‘running around’. After 16, the young Amish are allowed to go out
into surrounding communities or wherever, and they have some time to decide if
they want to return to their own community and be baptized into the faith,
after which it’s for keeps. That’s the whole shtick, you see, they believe that
baptism should be a decision made as an adult, not something done to a clueless
infant, which is why they and the other Anabaptists had a broygess with the mainstream Protestants in der Heim, and ended up in North America.
And the interesting thing is that the vast
majority of Amish kids come back from their rumspringa.
And marry young, and have 6-7 kids. And there is a bit of a problem with
certain genetic conditions as they are pretty inbred; most of today’s Amish
descend from 100 original migrants. They do accept converts but they don’t
evangelize.
So: Insularity- check. Amish schools- check.
Valuing marriage, large families-check.
Quite a few parallels with Orthodox Jews, you might say, and they are
doing OK.
But then my research to a left turn, because I saw
an article entitled ‘Why
don’t the Amish have Autistic Children?’
They don’t? thought I. So I had a look, and the
second I opened it I could see that it was an anti-vaccination website and I
was going to be treated to all sorts of information which, on further study,
would prove to be the usual hodge-podge of facts and diatribes and dodgy
‘research’ with people commenting in the threads, saying things like ‘you have
given me some intresting things to think about’ and ‘I knew there was a
conspirassy’ etc.
And I was not disappointed. This site really looks
persuasive though.
Anyway, according to the learned writer, of course
the reason that the Amish don’t have autistic children is that they don’t
vaccinate their children.
Not that they live hard-working simple lives
eating simple food, not smoking or drinking, and eschewing modern farming
practices of using artificial fertilizers etc, or that they don’t spend their
lives breathing in car exhaust, or that they marry when they are young and not
when they are 30-40, or that the pregnant women don’t drink diet Coke, or that
they give birth with traditional practices with little medical intervention. Or
that they don’t sit in front of screens all their lives. No, none of those
things even figured in this learned analysis. I didn’t even mention that the
writer’s information on the scarcity of autistic children was based on a field
trip in 2005 among some of the 500 communities. Population unspecified, methods
unspecified, diagnostic criteria unspecified. 3 autistic children were found!
One adopted from China, who had been vaccinated, a second who had been
vaccinated and ‘developed autism soon after’, and the third child- err, umm,
vaccine status unknown.
Bullshit piled on bullshit. But vaccination causes
autism! All the clues are there!!!
Amish also have lower
cancer rates, according to a real study.
Considering the inbreeding problem, one would have expected higher rates, but
the opposite is true. Probably nothing to do with the clean living, probably
because they don’t vaccinate, right? Whatever.
So that’s how you go from the Pew report to the
Amish to another critique of stupid pseudo-medical opinion (doesn’t deserve the
title of ‘research’).
Actually, I can pull it all together! Someone I
knew, a secular Jew, once joked that he had had only a little bit of Jewish
education, and as with a vaccine, where a tiny bit of the disease prevents
getting the serious disease, the tiny bit of Judaism he was exposed to ensured
that he would never catch the real thing. He married out. Not such a funny
joke, really.
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