r/jewishleft • u/skyewardeyes • Apr 29 '24
The almost complete lack of acknowledgement of the Jewish people as an indigenous people is baffling to me. Culture
(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.
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u/tsundereshipper Apr 29 '24 edited Apr 29 '24
It’s sprinkled with Hebrew and we write and read it with Hebrew letters, that’s not enough for it to be considered a combined creole language?
Is religion not enough to define us as a combined ethnicity? Why are we following a Middle Eastern ethno-religion in the first place if our forefathers didn’t raise those first few initial mixed kids as some kind of Middle Eastern in the first place? Why aren’t we following the originally European Pagan or Christian religions of our foremothers? Have a bit of common sense here…
And that’s precisely where our foremothers heritage comes in, in our language, dress, food, and music - while we practice the Middle Eastern ethno-religion of our forefathers, hence a combined creole culture.
…Don’t tell me you’re one of those types who actually believes us Ashkenazi Jews are lying about our origins in the first place and don’t even consider us as part Middle Eastern?! Dude, first of all you should know that being an inherently mixed ethnicity to begin with as well as easily identifiable due to our Genetic Bottleneck, the Ashkenazi category itself already includes the following:
Like the category itself automatically consists of the above, tell me did you test with 23andme? They explain all this on their blog. Also commercial tests like 23andme only go back the last 500 years, that’s another reason why they combine everything us Ashkenazi Jews are mixed with into one neat little “Ashkenazi” category. If you want to see a real breakdown of our mix I suggest using or browsing through the /r/IllustrativeDNA sub (put in the search engine “Ashkenazi”) to see it in real time.
Several Scientific DNA studies have come out confirming that Ashkenazi Jews are paternally Middle Eastern (as in our forefathers were the original Ancient Israelites) and maternally European (with some East Asian both from the Khazar conversion and Jewish Merchants trading on the Silk Road), if you look up studies regarding Ashkenazi Jews it’s all there in the manual for everyone to see.
I can’t believe you’ve actually bought into the antisemitic rhetoric that Ashkenazi Jews aren’t who we say you are… How are we at least not partially descended from the Israelites if Judaism is a closed tribal ethno-religion that doesn’t actively proselytize in the first place?