With having debunked so many ‘jewish inventions’ claims; there are certain commonalities that you notice. One of the most common I see is where jews seem to blithely claim ‘they invented’ something they patently didn’t.
A water-related example of this – other the similarly stupid claim that jews invented the concept of the air well – (1) is the claim by Rabbi Stephen Wise of Ontario, Canada that jews invented desalination.
He writes that:
‘Making Salt Water Drinkable: Having very little rainfall but plenty of seawater led Israelis to pioneer desalination, which removes salt and minerals from salt water, thereby turning salt water into drinking water. Beyond watering its own agricultural industry, Israel has manufactured China’s largest desalination plant and many others elsewhere.’ (2)
Wise here is being intentionally deceptive since he claims that jews ‘pioneered desalination’ as well as that this is a ‘modern invention’ when in truth it is as old of the hills.
Desalination is first mentioned by Aristotle in his work ‘Meteorology’ where he writes that:
‘The action of this cause is continually making the sea more salt, but some part of its saltness is always being drawn up with the sweet water. This is less than the sweet water in the same ratio in which the salt and brackish element in rain is less than the sweet, and so the saltness of the sea remains constant on the whole. Salt water when it turns into vapour becomes sweet, and the vapour does not form salt water when it condenses again. This I know by experiment.’ (3)
Indeed, desalination was well-known in Europe and China from around the time of Aristotle (fourth century B.C.) onwards and was widely used by European sailors on board ships as a way to create drinking water – for example by the crews of the English explorers Sir Richard Hawkins and Sir Walter Raleigh during the sixteenth century – and the first patents for processes of desalination were issued in 1675 (No. 184) to William Walcot and 1683 (No. 226) to Robert Fitzgerald in England. (4)
Large-scale desalination was first pioneered by the French chemist Alphonse Rene le Mire de Normandy in 1851 – who was awarded a British patent (No. 13714) for his invention that year – (5) while the first land-based mass desalination system was pioneered by the United States in the 1860s and installed on Florida islands of Key West and Dry Tortugas but used established French technology. (6)
Given that Israel didn’t exist till 1948 then no Israel didn’t ‘invent’ or ‘pioneer’ desalination in the slightest.
References
(1) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-water-and
(2) https://reformjudaism.org/israeli-inventions-work
(3) Aristotle, Meteo., 2: 358b: 12-18
(4) Cf. James Birkett, 1984, ‘A Brief Illustrated history of Desalination: From the Bible to 1940’, Desalination, Vol. 50, pp. 17-52
(5) Idem.; also https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Normandy,_Alphonse_Ren%C3%A9_Le_Mire_de
(6) UNESCO, 2010, ‘Desalination and Water Resources: History, Development and Management of Water Resources’, Vol. I, 1st Edition, Eloss: United Kingdom, p. 412
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