Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 March 5

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March 5

How did the Nazis treat converts to Judaism

I write this question with much trepidation. Given that I get the impression that we have a Nazi troll regularly posting on this page (I haven't kept up with the details), I'm a little cautious about asking questions about the Nazi regime. But it's a sincere question (check my contributions if you worry that I'm the troll), so I take the plunge, and here it is:

As my title suggests, how did the Nazis treat converts to Judaism? Particularly converts of "aryan blood / decent" (fellow Germans in particular, and perhaps the Scandinavian countries. I focus on this particular group, as I doubt the Nazis would have much hesitation in summarily executing a convert to Judaism if they came from a race the Nazis despised anyways). Were they gassed and shot en masse with equal ferocity and zeal as "sub-human" "born" Jews? Or were they treated like Jehovah's witnesses, merely needing to renounce their Judaism in order to regain their place as a "fellow aryan"? Or some other approach?

Given that Jews in general do not actively seek to convert non-Jews to Judaism (it's against Jewish beliefs), I'm guessing that the number of such converts would have been relatively small. To convert to Judaism (or at least orthodox Judaism), one must be pretty determined. But there have always throughout the centuries been a pretty small but pretty constant trickle of non-Jews actively seeking to join the Jewish people (and succeeding in getting accepted by them), so logic suggests they would have been at least a handful in Nazi Germany too. I'm also speculating that it would have boggled the average Nazi's brain that anyone would voluntarily choose to become a Jew. But do we have any actual historical records of how the Nazis treated such converts, either in terms of official policy - or even anecdotal stories of a Nazi encountering a convert to Judaism, and how the Nazi in question reacted? Eliyohub (talk) 15:59, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Not quite so easy (since a lot of sources are about Nazis or descendents of Nazis who converted to Judaism after WW2 and many of the rest are about how Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendents were treated), but again a search for 'jewish converts under nazi germany' should find [1]. This perhaps isn't the best source but it does mention another source. The same search should also find [2]]. And even worse source but again it links to [3]. P.S. The only followups to the first post appear to be [4] and [5]. Nil Einne (talk) 17:00, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Indeed, a difficult question to answer. Thanks for those links, Nil. More here at mischling. Perhaps more info via asking a research question of the curatorial staff at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum? Submit a Research Question-- Paulscrawl (talk) 18:42, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

The Nazi position was that Jews were genetically inferior, so in that case having converted to Judaism obviously wouldn't change your genes. On the other hand, they also made the argument that there was a vast Jewish conspiracy to undermine German interests, and I suppose they might have imagined that converts would have joined in to that conspiracy. StuRat (talk) 22:43, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Do you have some source for that StuRat? I mean, the bit of converts being treated as part of a conspiracy thing.

Long story short, German court cases of individuals' status did declare at least some German converts to Judaism, to be "Jewish" with all the persecution that entails.

The "Nuremberg Laws" had some complex spots. Interpretation was decided over time on more obscure combinations. That is, the German state could decide who was Jewish, too Jewish, or kind of Jewish.

Also it was illegal for a German to have personal relations with a Jew - which most, if not all, converts did. So that law could be used too.

"The Law for the Protection of the German Blood & Honor" prohibited marriage or sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans, among other things. Llaanngg (talk) 02:22, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

"I suppose they might have imagined" means I am not claiming it as fact, only suggesting the possibility. StuRat (talk) 15:19, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

The question of just how many jewish ancestors one should have in order for a convert to christianity to be called jewish must have been a similarly difficult thing. I'm reminded of the One-drop rule in the USA - which was around at roughly the same time in history. (See, for example: Racial Integrity Act of 1924.) It's also interesting to see modern native American groups struggle with the reverse problem of determining eligibility for various benefits when so many people are of mixed descent. For example, in the Cherokee nation, the rule is that you have to be descended from a person named on a specific list that was created back in the early 1900's. By now, you could be six generations descended from that - and over time, the amount of "approved" Cherokee genetic material in eligible individuals will be heading towards homeopathic dilutions. SteveBaker (talk) 17:56, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

UK EU Membership referendum

In the June 23rd UK referendum on EU memberships, and in UK elections more generally, what requirements are there to be eligible to vote - do EU migrants and asylum seekers automatically get the right to vote, or do they have to attain citizenship or naturalisation first? --Andrew 17:48, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

You have to be 18, a UK citizen or qualifying Commonwealth or Republic of Ireland, and not subject to any legal incapacity to vote. So Asylum seeker and EU citizens, not covered from a Commonwealth county or Ireland, cannot vote. Dja1979 (talk) 18:34, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Yep, the only other EU citizens who can vote in the referendum are Irish, Maltese, and Cypriot. [6]. Residents from other EU countries can vote in local council elections and European Parliament elections, but not General Elections. Unlike in an ordinary general election, members of the House of Lords and Commonwealth residents of Gibraltar will also be eligible to vote in the referendum. -- Arwel Parry (talk) 20:10, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Child soldiers photo

Are there any sources on this photo? The first caption I saw said these are Viet Cong child soldiers in 1967. A Reddit thread says they have M1 carbines and American WWII helmet with net cover, and the photo maybe from the early 50s. Perhaps they captured trophies. Brandmeister^talk 18:07, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

More likely an american photojournalist gave two South Vietnamese kids a couple of cigarettes (where 's the lighter?). The helmets where in service until 1985 M1_helmet. The rifles could have been borrowed for a few minutes – and they are not welded to ones hand so why are the kids holding them in a nicely composed shot (M1 are heavy and a burdern to keep hold of all the time). The background shows tarps coverings – were did the Viet-Cong import those from? Maybe the photographer thought he could get more money by suggesting he ventured into Vietcong held territory and risked getting staked over and anthill to get these shots but forgot to swap the neckerchief for a Vietcong black and white check and Vietcong garb. Call me skeptical if you like. --Aspro (talk) 19:21, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Interesting to observe that it's the cigarettes which are the horrifying element today, not the rifles... Tevildo (talk) 19:56, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm a bit concerned about the helmetless kid. Did Jacques Plante teach them nothing? InedibleHulk (talk) 22:47, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

The suggestion that the photo dates from the 1950s is possible. this photo shows a French soldier during the First Indochina War with a US helmet and M1 Carbine. A large amount of French Army equipment fell into the hands of the Viet Minh at that time. I also found this photo of a South Vietnamese Army child soldier in 1968, so it wasn't just the Viet Cong who employed them. I drew a blank on finding any sorces; a TinEye search only brought up a lot of blogs and image sharing sites. Alansplodge (talk) 22:41, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Causes of death

A serious question, based on the above. Have cigarettes killed more people than rifles? I suspect that figures for rifle deaths may be difficult to disentangle from war casualties in general, but order-of-magnitude numbers might be available. Tevildo (talk) 20:04, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Hard to disentangle smokers who got deadly cancer, emphysema or heart disease from something else (spinach?) from those "killed by cigarettes", too. Nobody only smokes. InedibleHulk (talk) 22:57, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

But if you want to make things simple, just go with half of the cancer. InedibleHulk (talk) 23:00, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

That's a mixed metaphor. For better comparison, the question should be, "How many people kill themselves with tobacco, as compared with rifles?" — Preceding unsigned comment added by Baseball Bugs (talk • contribs) 12:11, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Bear in mind that "rifle" typically doesn't include pistols, and as it's quite awkward to shoot yourself with a rifle (pulling the trigger would be quite hard if the rifle's pointed at your head or other vital sections), the number of people who kill themselves with rifles is rather small. Nyttend (talk) 15:27, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

It might be helpful to try to answer the question, rather than adding other irrelevant information. The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in the US alone, there are more than 480,000 deaths per annum attributable to smoking. Wikipedia has a page List of wars by death toll. If we take all the wars since 1560 and take the highest estimates of deaths, there are almost 335 million in the approximately 450 years, or about 750,000 per annum. Many of those will be by means other than firearms. In the USA there are about 12,000 firearm-related deaths per annum, so in the grand scheme of this question (though not for the individuals involved) this figure can be ignored. So it would seem likely that the number of firearm related deaths in the world is significantly less than the number of smoking related deaths, since the smoking figure for the USA alone is around half of all the deaths in war by all causes.--Phil Holmes (talk) 17:23, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

The trouble with that approach is that the population of the world was very much smaller in 1560 than it is now. So the average number of deaths due to war over 450 years is necessarily much lower than the average number over (say) the last 200 years. On the other hand, the period when cigarette smoking has been commonplace is over a period when the world population has been much higher - and includes the two bloodiest wars in human history. So the number of war deaths is being severely under-estimated by your approach. This is a very tricky problem, statistically speaking. If we instead suppose that tobacco smoking has only been common over the last (say) 100 years, and to be fair, we only look at war deaths over the same period, then the number of war deaths become severely biased by the fact that 100 years back from 2016 is 1916 which includes half of the first world war (16 million deaths)...if you ask the same question over the last 110 years (all of WWI), or the last 90 years (none of WWI), you'd get a wildly different answer for average deaths per year from warfare.

This entire question only makes any kind of sense at all if you carefully delineate the years over which you're asking it. If you say "Were there more cigarette-related deaths than rifle-related deaths over the past 10 years?" - you'll get a drastically different answer than if you ask it over the past 100 years, or the 10 years between 1940 and 1950 when there were maybe 80 million deaths due to warfare.

Without such a delineation - I call "bullshit" on any more general answer. I bet you can make the answer come out either way by picking the right span of years to support your claim. Have more people been killed by rifles than cigarettes during the past 5 minutes while I've been typing this answer? No, I very much doubt it. Were more people been killed by rifles than cigarettes during the American civil war? Almost certainly, yes. SteveBaker (talk) 15:08, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

One confounding aspect will be that, generally speaking, rifle deaths tend to occur when the person is at a younger age. The effect of this would be that many people who would likely have died of smoking related illnesses end up getting shot to death before that had a chance to happen. I was thinking of WW1 and WW2 in that regard, but taking it even further, the countries where a lot of people die from getting shot also tend to not have great social nets, again skewing results. Matt Deres (talk) 19:23, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

The question is the total killed by cigarettes and by rifles, so we shouldn't attempt to make the time periods match up. Rifles have been popular since the Napoleonic Wars (although during those wars they resulted in only a fairly small minority of deaths), while cigarettes have been popular since the 1880s; for whatever reason, the OP is not asking about deaths caused by guns other than rifles, or by tobacco other than cigarettes. I suspect that we would find that the absolute number of cigarette-caused deaths is higher, but that more years of life are lost to rifles, since cigarettes tend to kill the aged and rifles disproportionately kill the young. John M Baker (talk) 19:57, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Well, if you're narrowly reading the OP's question - and we're truly asking about the absolute numbers killed in those two ways - then, of course, you're right. Total number over all history - that's what we're being asked. HOWEVER, I'm very sure our OP isn't interested in that answer because (as we're gradually realizing) it's kinda meaningless. If you're trying to prove a point (either about gun rights or about banning smoking in public places) by comparing the relative risks of these two things - then using the "over all time" statistic is grossly misleading as a predictor of what reduction in mortality those two legislative changes might produce in the near future. Of course some people are extremely happy with grossly misleading statistics if they confirm their preexisting point of view - but here at the ref desks, we should be more open-minded! If the true question is "Should we put more effort into banning rifles than into banning smoking?" - then the answer turns out to be extremely nuanced.

The question of the age at which these deaths tend to occur brings up an even trickier question: If the answer did turn out to be that more people are killed by cigarettes - but typically only when they were fairly old (50's, 60's, whatever), but rifle deaths happen predominantly to the young (late-teens and 20's) - then is it even reasonable to count the absolute number of deaths compared to the number of years of healthy life lost? A 60 year old who dies of lung cancer probably only lost 20 years of their life - but a 19 year old who dies in battle lost 60 years. So perhaps we should mentally triple the 'damage' done by rifles to account for that fact? From an economic standpoint, maybe "Productive work years" is a better metric - and a 4x or even 5x multiplier might be appropriate.

Then we could go further and say that death-by-rifle might (might) be a fairly 'clean' death - no years of slowly dying, chemo and radiation treatment? Should we include "quality of remaining life" into the mix? Should we count people who lost limbs by rifle fire versus amputations due to poor circulation in cigarette smokers? Should we also count the cost to society to treat such people? A cancer death is probably going to be a much bigger drain on healthcare systems than a rifle death - so should we count the damage to society as a whole?

SteveBaker (talk) 17:39, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

So there are many questions that the OP could have asked, some of them easier than others to answer. If the OP, instead of asking a historical question, had asked whether tobacco or guns kill more people, then the answer is easy: tobacco, and it is not close. The American Cancer Society estimates that, worldwide, six million people per year die of tobacco use. According to this World Health Organization Report (pp. 9 - 10), 1.6 million people died from violence in 2000, and gunfire obviously is a subset of that. Using the OP's terms, cigarettes and rifles, makes the contrast even starker, since most contemporary tobacco deaths are from cigarettes, while death from rifles is only a fraction of deaths from violence. Note that these facts, in and of themselves, do not mean that we should ban either rifles or cigarettes, since they do not take account of reasons why we might want not to do that, although they would be relevant considerations in such an analysis. John M Baker (talk) 21:15, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. There is also the point that in almost every case, persons being killed by rifles had little choice in the matter and were not the active agent of their own demise. People killed by cigarettes have no such excuse - the reporting on the dangers is prominent, every pack tells you how dangerous this stuff is. The entire matter lies in their own hands. So the degree to which legislation can help here is tricky. It's interesting to imagine what would have happened if smoking hadn't been discovered until today - and this was a brand new product being announced. I'm pretty sure it would have been banned in a heartbeat! So this is largely a matter of history rather than what's "right" for the general public. SteveBaker (talk) 17:30, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Be careful with what you hear from doctors. Medical errors are the third-leading cause of American death. Or so that study figures. It might be dead wrong, too. InedibleHulk (talk) 18:23, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

I do not believe that. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm The Quixotic Potato (talk) 07:20, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

I believe the correct statistic is that it's the third largest cause of death in American hospitals...not in general. But I rather doubt that too. SteveBaker (talk) 16:26, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Taking another stab at Tevildo's question: According to the American Cancer Society, 100 million people died of tobacco use in the 20th century and currently 6 million people die of tobacco use annually. That's probably a fairly good proxy for cigarette deaths, since cigarettes became popular in the 1880s and now make up the overwhelming majority of tobacco use; there would have been some non-cigarette tobacco deaths since 1900, but there would also have been some cigarette deaths before 1900, so these should cancel each other out to a first approximation. Thus, about 190 million people (100 million in the 20th century plus 6 million per year times 15 years for the 21st century) have died from cigarettes in history. Getting an estimate of rifle deaths is harder. Rifles have been the most popular kind of long gun since the mid-19th century. As per the World Health Organization report cited above, there are about 1.6 million deaths per year from all types of violence (suicide is the most common). Deaths from violence have been dropping, but the population is increasing, so I'm going to assume (probably wrongly) that these two factors cancel each other out. That implies about 265 million deaths from violence over the past 165 years, to which we should add maybe 95 million additional deaths to account for the World Wars. So maybe 360 million deaths from violence in the period of rifles' popularity; let's say half are from gunfire and, of those, half are from rifles. Thus, maybe 90 million deaths from rifles in the history of the world, which would be fewer than the number of cigarette deaths. Obviously that's a very low quality number, even for a first approximation. It does suggest, however, that my speculation above may have been correct: likely cigarettes are responsible for a larger number of deaths, but rifle deaths have resulted in more years of lost life. Since cigarettes currently account for more deaths per year and their use is growing, while gunfire deaths are decreasing, we may expect cigarettes one day to be the champion on both fronts. John M Baker (talk) 15:56, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for all the helpful answers. "Cigarettes have killed more people than rifles" seemed like a plausible but not self-evidently true statement, and I'm happy to see that there is evidence to support it. Tevildo (talk) 20:40, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

madrasas at Sultan Hassan's Mosque in Cairo

Hello, I am researching a project about Cairo in 1900, and cannot find specific information I need about the madrasas at the Hassan (Hasan) mosque: Were they still being used as schools in 1900? Are they in use currently? Any help you can give or steer me to will be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Smsbooks! (talk) 23:39, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm sorry no one has leapt to answer this intriguing question. I notice that our article Mosque-Madrassa of Sultan Hassan doesn't offer much in the way of references. Do you read Arabic? The parallel article here might provide some ways forward. Have you tried contacting the mosque itself? Presumably it has some sort of archive. Or there's always the modern "Great Library of Alexandria", more properly Bibliotheca Alexandrina. (Wikimania 2008 was held there.) They offer "library information services" at infobib@bibalex.org. There's also the Arab World Institute in Paris - I can attest that their staff are trilingually helpful. The website is here, and then you need to go to the "bibliotheque" (because "librarie" is a false friend meaning "bookshop"). The library has a reference desk: ask a question here in French or Arabic, but I'd be surprised if they'd reject out of hand a thoughtful question in English. Good luck! And when you find the answer, please come back and tell us here, or add it to the article, so future readers can benefit. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 21:16, 6 March 2016 (UTC)