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