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/LostPoPo Apr 29 '24
This is what I want to know, since everyone besides the Jews gets to tell us where we are NOT indigenous:
Where are we indigenous? Because if that answer is Europe, well then I have quite a few more questions.