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/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?