US Politics on Sidechat | I refuse to believe that a religious identity has been turned into a racial and/or ethnic identity. You don’t get to claim heritage to a land you colonized in 1948????

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US Politics 8w

I refuse to believe that a religious identity has been turned into a racial and/or ethnic identity. You don’t get to claim heritage to a land you colonized in 1948????

Anonymous 8w

Many ethnicities are distinguished by their religions. Jews are one example, where the Jewish ethnic identity is heavily tied to the religion, and most members of the religion are of that ethnicity. But there’s many other examples. The primary difference between Croatians, Bosnians, and Serbs is religion (Croats are Catholic, Bosnians are Muslim, Serbs are orthodox). Similar for the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland. Or the Coptic Christians in Egypt.

Anonymous 8w

I wanna preface this is not a defense of Zionism (quite contrarily actually). But it is much more complicated than that. The three major Jewish ethnic groups today (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi) all trace their ancestry and DNA to the Levant. That part is true. But at the same time, those groups had been in diaspora for millennia. The Ashkenazi inhabited mainland Europe, Sephardic the Iberian peninsula until the inquisition. Much of their dna and culture had been mixed with the locals

Anonymous 8w

jewish people are actually not a religion, or ethnic group, or race. they predate all of those concepts. in the ancient world, people lived in tribes that blended national, religious, and ethnic identity into a single tribal identity that was also political and joinable. most of the world sort of stopped identifying that way with the rise of empires and nation-states. jews never did. in hebrew, jews are an “am”— a people bound together

Anonymous

#1 8w

… interestingly (or terrifyingly), the Y chromosomal DNA is much more strongly linked to each other than the X chromosomal or any others, suggesting that throughout history the male line disproportionately valued. As if they could “claim” local women, but if any of their daughters married local men those lines quickly lost their ethnically Jewish heritage

Anonymous

#1 8w

So, from a sense of reuniting the various ethnic groups in a single place, the levant does make sense. What doesn’t make sense is why the world felt a need for that to be the case specifically for Jews. Like pick pretty much any modern day nationality/ethnicity. 99% of them have ethnic roots in entirely different regions thousands of years ago. The Turks of Turkey would be in Central Asia. Hungarians and Finns would possibly be as far west as Siberia. Celts (Irish) would own Spain.

Anonymous

#1 8w

So in summary: it makes sense that there was a desire for a state where ethnic Jews can be free. What doesn’t make sense is for that state to only be for ethnic Jews.

Anonymous

#1 8w

I mean there was a large diaspora of Jews around the world, but I would also argue that they still had a strong community and culture due to the antisemitism they faced

Anonymous

#4 8w

also, the original tribal identity was closely tied to land/homeland. to this day, the jewish calendar follows the agricultural cycles of the land of israel. the sacred plant species in judaism are native to israel. etc etc

Anonymous

#4 8w

the traditional name for jews in Hebrew is “Am Yisrael”

Anonymous

#1 8w

also, no, the paternal line was not particularly valued. culturally, judaism is matrilineal, largely because the rape of jewish women by non-jewish men was so common. men from the levant are likely to have started the ashkenazi diaspora by converting and marrying south italian women, but after that the community was very insular

Anonymous

#4 8w

communities in ethiopia and india are thought to have started similarly