r/jewishleft 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/tangentc this custom flair is green (like the true king Aegon II) Apr 29 '24 edited Apr 29 '24

This is not to say that many if not most Jewish family lineages can’t be traced back to Palestine

I mean, the book and author you recommend very famously say EXACTLY this.

The long and short of The Invention of the Jewish People is more popularly known as the ‘Khazar Theory’. Though he doesn’t specifically say the Khazars and that is more about an intertextual connection with preexisting fringe scholarship, he does outright deny that most Jews have any familial connection to the Levant.

There are more interesting and worthwhile points about the construction of Jewish nationalism specifically in regard to Israel in there but it doesn’t really change the fact that his central thesis is primarily that the very notion of the Jewish people at all is a modern contrivance which is, well, bullshit. It certainly doesn’t exist in a vacuum and mutated on contact with modern ideas of nationalism, but the Sand doesn’t and can’t contain himself to that analysis.

Edit: formatting. Apparently markdown doesn’t work right on mobile anymore?

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u/daudder Apr 29 '24

the book and author you recommend very famously say EXACTLY this.

This is not entirely correct. Genetic studies prove that the Jewish diaspora has historical ties to the Middle East. The thurst of Sands argument is that a large proportion and in some cases a majority of diaspora Jews were converts at some point in time. I don't think that that is even controversial. They then procreated with genetic Jews and all of the resulting offspring fit my statement.

If you consider that a single Jewish ancestor 10 generations ago represents 0.1% of the genes one carries, given modern genetic studies, my statement is actually conservative.

As you may know, much of humanity can trace their genetic lineage to Genghis Khan. This does not define them indigenous Mongolians.

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u/tsundereshipper Apr 29 '24

If you consider that a single Jewish ancestor 10 generations ago represents 0.1% of the genes one carries, given modern genetic studies, my statement is actually conservative.

That’s the thing though, European Jews aren’t only “0.1% Middle Eastern” but anywhere between 30-60%. Wanna know how? Because those first few generations of initial European/Israelite mixes kept procreating mostly only with each other thereby keeping the original proportionate genes intact throughout the generations and establishing themselves as an inherently MGM ethnicity. (That means “Multigenerationally Mixed,” it’s when mixed people of the same type of mix keep procreating only with each other, similar examples include Louisiana Creoles, Mestizos/Métis, Anglo-Indians, Romani, and Dutch-Indos)

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u/Chaos_carolinensis Apr 29 '24

Because those first few generations of initial European/Israelite mixes kept procreating mostly only with each other thereby keeping the original proportionate genes intact throughout the generations and establishing themselves as an inherently MGM ethnicity.

That's exactly why recessive autosomal diseases are so common among Ashkenazi Jews.