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| Authored by: Yaacov on Monday, December 13 2004 @ 07:36 PM CST |
Are you retarded Yaacov?
I don't believe so.
You think someone who moves to Asia and marries an Asian becomes Asian?
I'm making the point that the word Asian can mean two different but related things. It can mean someone who possesses a genetic heritage from a group of people who have lived in Asia for many generations. It can also mean someone who lives in Asia, just as American can mean someone who lives in America.
Judaism similarly has two related meanings. It refers to those who follow and practice a certain religion. It also refers to those who share a particular common genetic heritage (resulting in a recognisable set of features). These two meanings are obviously related, as for millennia the vast majority of people who were followers of the Jewish religion also had Jewish ancestry. However, as I pointed out in my previous post, many who are genetically Jewish, but do not believe in or practice the religion still identify themselves as Jewish, and are identified by others as Jewish. Richard Feynman is a prominent example. On the flip-side, racists have have long identified those who have Jewish heritage and genome as Jews when persecuting the Jewish people. From both of these reasons, we can see that the working definition of the word Jewish includes people based on genetics as well as religion. This is different from the case of Christianity, Islam and other religions that proselytize, and thus gain many followers who are not children of previous followers. That is why Judaism is both a race (or ethnicity) and a religion.
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"an ideology is a thought—economizing device" - Moisés Naim[ Parent ]
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