Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2018 July 17

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July 17

Medieval Hinduism

I was surprised to discover the existence of Category:Medieval Hinduism, since the European Middle Ages didn't have a significant effect on Hindu regions. I was more surprised to discover that Medieval Hinduism is a redlink (why create the category if there's no article), but later I discovered Medieval India. So...is medieval Hinduism simply the Hinduism of medieval India, or is it more complicated than that? Nyttend (talk) 02:18, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

It seems there should indeed be an article, cf: The Medieval Period of Hinduism lasted from about 500 to 1500 A.D. (etc.) per:

• "Hinduism - Facts & Summary". HISTORY.com. —2606:A000:1126:4CA:0:98F2:CFF6:1782 (talk) 02:33, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

The term "medieval" is pedantically used for only European historiography, but is still frequently used outside of European history to refer to similar time periods in other cultures which either a) occurred over roughly the same time frame (i.e. 500-1500ish) or b) lie in the same place in that culture's historiography, that is in the "middle ages" of that culture, or between the "ancient" and "modern" periods of that culture's history, and it's used often enough to be common, i.e. here used in reference to Africa, This article, and several of its sources "Medieval Korea", This journal uses the term "Medieval China" frequently. The point is, don't get caught up in the pedantry of the Wikipedia article writer who restricts the term "Medieval" to a period of European history. Language is more fluid than that; while it is most common to use it in the European context, the terminology is well attested to refer to a similar period of history in any culture. --Jayron32 02:34, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

Nyttend -- linguistically, 500 A.D. is conventionally about when Prakrit is considered to give way to Apabhramsa among living Indic languages. It was also probably roughly around the time when it started to become respectable to write down the Vedas and other Hindu holy texts (earlier there had been strong resistance among Brahmins to writing down the Vedas). And it was around that time that the synthetic philosophers who reconciled divergent manifestations of Hinduism arose (though the most famous of them Adi Shankara, was a few centuries later)... AnonMoos (talk) 19:09, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

Sticking with “medieval” as referring to Europe from perhaps 500 to 1500 CE, did European scholars or leaders know that India and environs existed and that many there were Hindus? If so were they regarded as another major religion, or just regarded as pagans or heathen who were prospects for missionary work? Were there any Hindus in Europe openly practicing their religion? Or would the Church have forcibly converted them or killed them as a matter of course? Edison (talk) 14:03, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

During that period, first the Persian empire, then afterwards Muslims, were interposed between the Mediterranean and India, so direct up-to-date information would not have been easy to obtain. At least some in Europe would have known of ancient Classical texts which spoke of "gymnosophists", "Sarmanes", and "Brachmanes", but without much information about Hindu doctrines as such. Any Hindus in Europe would likely have been perpetually itinerant merchants or sailors who were adept at blending into surrounding cultures. I doubt that most European scholars spent much time thinking about Indians, when the questions of what Muslims were up to, and who and when the next wave of Altaic horse-nomads into Central Asia would be, were much more immediately pressing issues. Many medieval European people's "knowledge" of India would have been pretty much limited to the legend of the Gold-digging ant... AnonMoos (talk) 15:09, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

Medieval Europe probably knew a little bit about Buddhism, at least indirectly (like the story of Barlaam and Josaphat which is apparently ultimately about Buddha), but not really anything about Hinduism. There were lots of travellers/diplomats going as far as China, once the Mongols become a threat to Europe, as you said. I don't know how many of them visited India specifically. Even Marco Polo never really went to India, assuming he went anywhere at all. Europeans were interested in the ancient Christian communities they found along the way, and that would include India if they went there, but they typically ignored everyone else.

By the way, to expand on what Jayron said, there is such a thing as the "global Middle Ages", but it probably hasn't reached a wider audience yet. I'm not even sure there are publications that could be cited...it's more like an idea bounced around in conference sessions at this point. It's not meant to suggest that other parts of the world have a "middle ages" exactly - it's still true that the Middle Ages occurred specifically in the post-Roman world of Europe, the Near East and North Africa. But it does mean that medieval Europe did not exist in a complete vacuum, it was still in touch with the rest of the world. So for example, "medieval Indonesia" is seemingly anachronistic as there was no Indonesia at the time and it wasn't the Middle Ages there, but it's a way for historians of medieval Europe to recognize that history was still occurring in other parts of the world and there were connections between places that were very distant. (I use Indonesia as an example because there's a fascinating Twitter account about it!) Unfortunately the much narrower understanding of the Middle Ages is still the one used on Wikipedia, which is kind of arbitrary and frustrating for the moment. Adam Bishop (talk) 01:24, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

Of course I spoke too soon, because Wikipedia informs me that medieval Hindus and Hindu festivals are mentioned by Jordan of Severac and Odoric of Pordenone. Adam Bishop (talk) 01:50, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

European-Asian cultural syncretism was well documented; there were Greek Buddhists in Central Asia, for example. --Jayron32 11:37, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

There were also documented Greco-Hindus, though less so. See, for example, Heliodorus (ambassador).--Jayron32 11:46, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

And we have Buddhist influences on Christianity and other associated articles. Adam Bishop (talk) 12:14, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

Jayron32 -- such syncretism took place mainly in the period before the rise of the Sassanid empire, when the Hellenistic Greeks were in direct contact with India (that's when those texts about gymnosophists that I mentioned were written). However, the question specified the period after 500 A.D., which was rather different... AnonMoos (talk) 14:57, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

How many Jews were evacuated from Minsk in 1941?

It states here that only 7,000 out of 72,000 Minsk Jews (less than 10%) were evacuated from there in 1941 (which was when Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union):

https://books.google.com/books?id=S7YsDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA79&dq=minsk+holocaust+7,000&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiamM3mwaDcAhXBOn0KHZCYBfEQ6AEILjAB#v=onepage&q=minsk%20holocaust%207%2C000&f=false

However, the same link also states that much higher percentages of Jews were evacuated from both Vitebsk and Bobruisk during this time. In turn, this makes me wonder--is the data for Minsk in this book accurate? Or is this a typo?

Indeed, does anyone here have any additional information in regards to this?

Also, for what it's worth, this book does provide a source for its data for Minsk. However, I don't actually see the source itself. Futurist110 (talk) 03:21, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

The same link in fact indicates a date very late for evacuating civilians (July 7), knowing that 320,000 troops were to be captured at the issue of the siege (July 11). --Askedonty (talk) 16:00, 17 July 2018 (UTC)

'In early July 1941,. a former official of the Minsk regional party committee wrote to Stalin, asserting that "the evacuation [of Minsk]... took part in such a disorganised fashion, that one is forced to reflect and pose the question, why did it happen this way"' From The Evacuation and Survival of Soviet Civilians, 1941-1946, Rebecca Manley, University of California, 2004 (p. 79) - Google "snippet view" - that's all I could see! Alansplodge (talk) 16:29, 18 July 2018 (UTC)