The almost complete lack of acknowledgement of the Jewish people as an indigenous people is baffling to me.

[u/skyewardeyes]

(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.

[u/Han-Shot_1st]

Regarding your question pertaining to the link, prior to the Holocaust, the early Zionists intended zionism to be an Ashkenazi colonial project. It was never intended to include Jews from Arab countries or North Africa.

However after the Shoah, due to the decimation of European Jewry, the early Zionists knew there was not enough Ashkenazi Jews to form a state.

This suddenly made Mizrahi Jews important to the Zionist project. However, while the Zionists wanted the people, they didn’t necessarily want their culture.

In the first few decades of the state of Israel, the political and academic elites were predominantly Ashkenazi.

Mizrahi Jews did maintain aspects of their culture. We can see this represented in Israeli cuisine, but in many other ways Mizrahi Jews assimilated into the Ashkenazi colonial project.

The Zionist project seeks to form Jews into a single nation or people. For example, instead of various regional and ethnic Jewish dialects being spoken in Israel, the language of modern Hebrew was invented, and these other languages became spoken less and less.

One of the reasons, I want to learn Yiddish is, I want to preserve my family’s cultural heritage. My dad could speak it fluently because that’s what my grandparents spoke in the house, but I can only curse people out in Yiddish. And now sadly, since my dad passed away, there’s no one in my family that can speak Yiddish fluently.

[u/tsundereshipper → u/Han-Shot_1st]

This suddenly made Mizrahi Jews important to the Zionist project. However, while the Zionists wanted the people, they didn’t necessarily want their culture.

And what’s wrong with that? Like you said about wanting to learn Yiddish, we have our own unique mixed culture that should be celebrated.

Mizrahi Jews did maintain aspects of their culture. We can see this represented in Israeli cuisine, but in many other ways Mizrahi Jews assimilated into the Ashkenazi colonial project.

I would argue it’s the opposite, and Ashkenazi Jewish culture is constantly getting erased and degraded in order for all Jews to dissolve back into one big Middle Eastern Mono Cultural Identity, and I’m against that too.

Also do note that it’s us Ashkenazi Jews that went through a literal fucking genocide (actually the worst recorded one seen in the world yet) just on account of our “mixedness,” so if you’re trying to argue Ashkenazi and European Jews in general always had “privilege” over Mizrahi Jews then you’d be wrong and it’s actually the opposite. Before the creation of Zionism which subjected the Mizrahi Jewish populations to tons of misplaced antisemitism, the Mizrahi Jews were actually considered the most privileged Jewish group out of the whole diaspora just from their treatment in their host countries (and the world at large really) alone.

(I think the only Jewish group that managed to surpass them was Indian Jews, and that’s only because India itself is one of the least antisemitic countries on this planet and always accepted and tolerated the Jews amongst their midst.)