This is the second time now that somebody has directly accused me of ‘antisemitism’. I am guessing that the offending remark was ‘I know that it has always been perfectly natural for Jewish people to consciously and unconsciously borrow from the cultures surrounding them’, but I would be very surprised if any Jewish historians disagreed with that statement.

Still, I guess that I should have omitted ‘Jewish’ when I said ‘Jewish people’, because it almost sounded like I was calling it a uniquely Jewish trait, when really it applies to humans in general when different cultures surround them. Irish people do it. Chinese people do it. West Africans do it. Everybody does it when they’ve been living in a ‘foreign’ land for a while, not only Jews. I didn’t think that clarification would have been necessary since the community has known me for a while and it would have been most unlikely that I meant ‘nobody does this other than the Jews’.

I would have approached a moderator about the removal—I can see how my comment was a tad insensitive—but it would have been too troublesome to be worth the effort.