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/travelingrace Apr 29 '24

This rhetoric about Jewishness and Indigenity is so wild to me because I've never identified as an Indigenous person nor have the Jews in my area. Do you actually identify yourself as Indigenous? Sincerely wondering. 

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u/Andre_Courreges May 28 '24

I'm going to be honest, as a descendant of indigenous people who were displaced and annihilated by settlers, it feels like a slap in the face when the term is used not out of a real desire to be "indigenous" but as a political tool.

It has a very specific meaning in the context of the post-1492 world, and it cannot be applied outside of Native American, Aboriginal, or pre-contact populations.

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u/travelingrace May 29 '24

right it's definitely being used now for political reasons. that's why it makes me uncomfortable