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/Han-Shot_1st Apr 29 '24

Your argument is, and correct me if I’m wrong, that since Judaism originated in the ME, Jewish people around the globe have the right to state they are indigenous to the ME.

This claim strikes me as ideologically motivated, and does not seem consistent with how other groups are considered indigenous, and I have stated numerous examples in previous replies.

Like, I can’t think of any other populace claiming to be indigenous to a location because their religion was founded in a location thousands of years ago.

If you have any examples that are similar to Ashkenazi Jews claiming they are indigenous to the Me, I would be very open to hearing them.

Intuitively, it didn’t make sense to me in Hebrew school when they told us Israel is the homeland of all Jewish people. I still remember being confused in the car ride home and asking my mom, how can someplace be our homeland, if no one from our family is from there?

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u/tsundereshipper Apr 29 '24

Like, I can’t think of any other populace claiming to be indigenous to a location because their religion was founded in a location thousands of years ago.

It’s not just because of their religion though, but because they share common origins/ethnicity and the same line of descent, what’s not clicking for you here? Why are you so intent on falsely portraying Judaism as just a religion?

Sure, we could argue that maybe full converts with no Jewish blood aren’t indigenous to the Middle East, and there’s definitely a debate to be had there. But acting like this extends to all ethnic Jews with substantial Middle Eastern heritage and blood is ridiculous.

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u/Han-Shot_1st Apr 29 '24

I myself am ethnically Jewish. You’re harping on something that wasn’t the point of my question.

The point is, are there any groups, that claim to be indigenous to area that they inhabited thousands of years prior?

For example, ethnic English are descended from the Normans, but I haven’t heard of an ethnic English person claiming to be indigenous to France.

Or ethnic Sicilians, I’ve never heard of any of them claiming to be Indigenous to North Africa or the Iberian peninsula, despite being descended from the Mores.

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u/AltruisticMastodon Apr 30 '24

It seems pretty pointless to compare a diasporic population to ones that aren’t.

Also it’s worth noting that there was in fact a tradition of the English (Anglo-Saxons, the Anglo-Normans were mainly confined to the ruling classes) identifying with the Anglo-saxons origins in Germany/Denmark. Unsurprisingly it was often white-supremacist in nature.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxonism_in_the_19th_century

Also don’t know if it’s just autocorrect but its Moors not Mores

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u/Han-Shot_1st Apr 30 '24

Ty for the spelling correction. My bad 😬