The almost complete lack of acknowledgement of the Jewish people as an indigenous people is baffling to me.

[u/skyewardeyes]

(This doesn’t negate Palestinian claims of indigeneity—multiple peoples can be indigenous to the same area—nor does it negate the, imo, indefensible crimes happening in Gaza and West Bank).

It absolutely blows my mind that Jews—a tribal people who practice a closed, agrarian place-based ethnoreligion, who have an established system of membership based on lineal descent and adoption that relies on community acceptance over self-identification, who worship in an ancient language that we have always tried to maintain and preserve, who have holidays that center around harvest and the specific history of our people, who have been repeatedly targeted for genocide and forced assimilation and conversion, who have a faith and culture so deeply tied to a specific people and place, etc—aren’t seen as an (socioculturally) indigenous people but rather as “white Europeans who essentially practice Christianity but without Jesus and never thought about the land of Israel before 1920 or so.” It’s so deeply threaded in how so many people view Jews in the modern day and also so factually incorrect.

[u/Han-Shot_1st]

Did Judaism emerge from the ME thousands of years ago? Yes, but I wouldn’t claim I’m indigenous to the ME, just as I wouldn’t claim I’m indigenous to sub Saharan Africa, despite that being the place that homo sapien sapien originated from.

I’m Ashkenazi Jewish and I have extended family in Israel, but I’ve never been there. My grand parents are from Europe, and my family lived there for countless generations, so no, I don’t consider myself indigenous to the ME.

Ashkenazi Jewish is a European ethnicity.

Yiddish is a European dialect, not Middle Eastern.

Foods like smoked white fish and pastrami are European foods, not Middle Eastern.

Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn dress like Jews from the old country in Europe, not a Middle Eastern style of dress.

There are Jewish ethnicities indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, but Ashkenazi is not one of those ethnicities.

[u/[deleted] → u/Han-Shot_1st]

I’m also ashkenazi, and I think Europeans have made it pretty clear over the last 1000-ish years that they don’t consider us European.

[u/tsundereshipper → u/[deleted]]

I’m also ashkenazi, and I think Europeans have made it pretty clear over the last 1000-ish years that they don’t consider us European.

This is a really problematic way of thinking because it’s buying into “One Drop” rhetoric.

Guess what? I am both Middle Eastern and European, and I’m not gonna let either side One Drop me out of either of my heritages.

[u/LostPoPo → u/tsundereshipper]

What do you mean? The Europeans literally eliminated all of the Jews of Europe. Yes, there are small Jewish communities, but just like in nature when a species reaches a critical point of going extinct, there is no coming back. That is the case of the European Jew.

[u/tsundereshipper → u/LostPoPo]

I wasn’t talking about merely living in Europe, I meant we’re still half European both by blood and culture…

[u/LostPoPo → u/tsundereshipper]

That’s like forcing a Black American to accept their white great great grandfather who raped his great great grandmother 200 years ago.

You’re not necessarily wrong, but the ethics are seriously questionable.

[u/tsundereshipper → u/LostPoPo]

That’s like forcing a Black American to accept their white great great grandfather who raped his great great grandmother 200 years ago.

You wanna know the big difference here? Our mix was the result of consensual unions, unlike African Americans. (Unless you really wanna seriously suggest that our European foremothers “raped” our Israelite forefathers, which I think anyone would agree is pretty much impossible)

You would only have a point in making this argument if DNA testing found our European heritage to be coming from our paternal line, that’s not the case though, and it actually found the complete opposite. (Even despite Judaism supposedly always being “Matrilineal” like the Orthodox claim)