Scrutinizing Finkelstein

Harold Williams recently commented on a post called Who is Dr. Charles Edgbaston?. This has lead to a few amusing if also interesting exchanges. I’ll leave it to the interested reader but the upshot of it is that Harold Williams outrageously slandered and otherwise got almost everything wrong in his apparently all encompassing critique of Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah. This kind of shoddy, irresponsible, and unscholarly form of character assassination is deeply repugnant to me.

Given that Mr. Williams had the audacity to assert such things here, it was incumbent upon me to do what needed to be done - to study the scholarship of Finkelstein in some detail (in Beyond Chutzpah) so that criticisms such as Harold Williams can be revealed for what they are - unadulterated crap.

That will be the last of my name calling but I had to make my position clear, in unambiguous terms because what follows is strictly business. The business of giving good scholarship its due. My response is to Williams, Naomi, (perhaps Jeffe) and any others who aim to dismiss what needs to be addressed, who think letting the truth prevail means not doing honest work: Good research needs to be faced not dismissed because you don’t like the conclusions it draws.

I’ve included all relevant comments here including my lengthy detailed response to the specific points Williams raised in his last comment. Basically, I let Finkelstein speak for himself through his scholarship.

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