18 Feb 2014, 7:11 pm
daydreamer84
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Joined: 8 Jul 2009
Age: 41
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,001
Location: My own little world
19 Feb 2014, 4:11 pm
naturalplastic wrote:
Bodyles wrote:
Jojopa wrote:
yellowtamarin wrote:
Sorry this is kinda off-topic but I'm confused by the people saying "Jewish"...what does that mean? Where is "Jewland"? Do you mean Israeli? Is Jewish used to refer to a person from a particular region? I've never really understood it.
Since Judaism generally encourages marriage of Jews with each other and they have been a minority in every country they lived in (until the refounding of Israel in the 20th century), over time a separate Jewish ethnic identity has emerged. It's not necessarily the same as being Israeli, a citizen of Israel who can be any colour and not always of the Jewish religion. There are plenty of Jews who have never lived in Israel and whose ancestors haven't lived there for almost 2000 years.
That's correct.
I regard it as an ethnic identity, although Jewish can also reference people who believe in and follow the tennants of Judaism.
Both my parents were Jewish in this sense, and I was raised that way and had a bar Mitzvah, although I am non-practicing and never believed, even as a child.
I do, however, believe in, respect, and embrace my ethnic heritage as a Jew.
Also, I love Passover seders, because they're historical, inclusive, participatory, tasty, and you have to slouch and get drunk.
Best religious holiday ever, imho.
Yes.
Saying "you look Jewish" is not comparable to saying "you look Baptist", or "you look Buddhist".
It IS comparable to saying "you look Italian", or "you look Irish", because the Jews are both a religion, AND an ethnic group. Jews are supposed to have a certain common ancestrial origin despite their wide geographic dispersal.
Supposidly the modern Jews dispersed throughout the world today are all descended from the people of ancient Biblical Judea (more or less the same place as modern Israel/Palestine). And indeed modern DNA studies confirm that Jews of the diaspora are more like each other than they are like their non Jewish neighbors of the host country they live in ( Jews in Russia are genetically more like Jews of South Africa than they are like Gentile Russians), and (perhaps ironically) Russian Jews are also genetically more like modern Palestinian Arabs than they are to their Gentile Russian neighbors. But I digress. The point is that Jews do tend to have a mediterranean look that stands out in the northern parts of europe, and in places settled by north european colonists (like the USA and Australia) because of their ancestry.
Thanks for posting that explanation. Yes, the studies on mitochondrial DNA show that we do indeed have middle eastern ancestry. I was thinking I should explain all of that but was just too lazy.
19 Feb 2014, 4:16 pm
