In the thread about the Confederate battle flag, I mentioned that Hitler killed people by the millions for their religion and you had to audacity to point out that the jews were killed for their ethnicity.
Here’s my question and it’s a little long winded. You stated that jews are an ethnic group. But this group has been living with ‘whites’ and ‘slavs’ for thousands of years intermixing with them and diluting their ‘ethnictiy.’ To make matters worse, you can convert to judaism. Now, whites and blacks are two distinct ethnic groups. Being white, I can’t convert to being black.
Let me know how the Jews of Europe are a distinct ethnic group from the people that they come from. When you let me know that, let me know how to change from being white to black so I can get some NAACP grants.
If the jews are an ethnic group of their own, then protestants and catholics are seperate ethnic groups.
Well, the minute you mentioned Hitler, you killed the discussion and you lost. No wonder you started another thread…
No. Jewish people consider their direct lineage to be what makes one Jewish. As such, even if I - with a Jewish mother - was another religion or no religion, I would stilll be “Jewish” as far as how Jews perceive it.
If you convert to Judaism, you become someone who practices Judaism, but do not hav the ethicity.
There have been many threads about this here. Ultimately, someone who is ignorant would say, “that’s not right,” and the reply would be, it’s their religion, and they don’t need to answer to you for how to run it."
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Here’s what I don’t understand. Why don’t people ever research items on their own. This is a board, supposedly, devoted to fighting ignorance. If you state a “fact” and someone claims you are wrong, why not do some independent investigation, rather then making yourself look like an even bigger idiot. True, we all make mistakes, but the OP shows plain stupidity.
And to add to Satan’s post. During Nazi Germany, many Jews succesfully converted to another religion and were able to hide it. Many were already converted but, were still marked as Jews and sent off.
Some Jews imigrating to America also tried to hide theior Jewishness, converting to other religions and not telling their children.
history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce - Karl Marx
Whoops, sorry, but you’re totally wrong there. For starters, you are evidently using the word “ethnic” to mean only “racial”. You said, “Now, whites and blacks are two distinct ethnic groups. Being white, I can’t convert to being black.”
As you can see from Merriam-Webster’s definition, it can mean “racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin or background.”
For another thing, “Jews” as a cultural category have only existed for maybe 2,500 years, give or take a century, not “thousands” of years. A minor quibble, yes, but generally the term “thousands” usually means (to me, at least) “three or four or five thousand”.
Also, if there’s one thing that stands out to anybody who bothers to take any time at all to learn anything about the Jews, it’s that they are SEPARATISTS themselves, from way back.
In Jewish culture, law, and traditions, there is “Jewish”–and there is “everybody else.” “Everybody else” is termed “Gentiles”, or less politely, “goyim”.
Far from “intermixing with” so-called “whites” and “slavs” and “diluting” their “ethnicity”, the Jews have very carefully kept themselves separate, ever since what’s called the Diaspora, when the Romans basically kicked them all out of Judea in 70 A.D.
When a Jewish daughter marries a “goy”, her parents “sit shiva” for her for a week as though she were dead. Didn’t you see Fiddler on the Roof?
And actually, even before that, in Old Testament times, there were strict laws handed down by no less a person than the Lord God Almighty Himself, commanding his chosen people to hold themselves separate, to be a “peculiar people”, to have nothing to do with their Gentile neighbors, and certainly not to give their daughters to them in marriage.
Then, when Jews WERE dispersed among the nations of the earth, especially when they got to living among Christians, it was the CHRISTIANS who took charge of seeing that the Jews were kept separate. “The Jews killed Jesus…” etc. Ever heard the term “ghetto”? The Nazis didn’t invent that concept, babe, it was around for hundreds of years. There were laws all over so-called Christian Europe dictating where Jews could live, what kind of clothing they could wear, how much money and property they could possess, and of course, who they could and COULD NOT marry.
If you knew anything at all about Judaism, you’d know that being “Jewish” isn’t an ethnic “racial” thing. It’s deeply stupid to characterize “Jewish” as a racial ethnic group, like American Indian or Japanese.
There are German Jews, Polish Jews, Russian Jews, Spanish Jews, Italian Jews, British Jews, Irish Jews, Scottish Jews, French Jews, Swiss Jews, Austrian Jews, Hungarian Jews, Romanian Jews, Egyptian Jews, Greek Jews (St. Paul, for one), Israeli Jews, American Jews, Ethiopian Jews, South African Jews, Australian Jews, Kiwi Jews, and I’ll bet a nickel there are Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian Jews somewhere, too.
It’s got nothing to do with “ethnic”, if you’re using the word to mean “racial”, and everything to do with “culture”.
You said, “Let me know how the Jews of Europe are a distinct ethnic group from the people that they come from.” Okay, here it is–they are a distinct CULTURAL group from the people that they live among. They have a different religion, for starters. They have different food traditions, which of course vary according to which NATIONAL group they come from. They have different marriage and divorce customs. They have a different language, called Yiddish. They have different songs they sing, in Yiddish. Some of them, the Hasidim, have different hairstyles and wear completely different clothing. They have different ideas about the role of women. They even have (duh!) a different idea about which day of the week people should worship God.
You can go ahead and apply for your grant now.
Oh, and you did get one thing right. According to Merriam-Webster, yes, “If the jews are an ethnic group of their own, then protestants and catholics are seperate ethnic groups.” Good for you.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
Okay, leaving the snide ‘audacity’ out of this, your own argument disproves itself.
If Hitler killed millions for their religion, then the defining criteria by which those people were sent to camps would have been their religion. Ergo, Person A, whose parents/grandparents/etc. practiced Judaism, would have been just fine so long as Person A had converted to Christianity. After all, we’re persecuting because of religion, and Person A is part of our religion, or at least no longer part of the religion we’re persecuting, so Person A is fine.
Except there are several examples of Christians being sent to the camps because they had, at one point, been Jewish or came from a Jewish family. One of them is even up for canonization- Edith Stein? Beatrice? Can’t remember her name off-hand (yeah, sure, I’m a good Catholic boy).
Anyways- had the Nazis been persecuting solely upon the basis of religion, none of those people would have been sent to the camps for being ‘Jews.’ As it was, they were, and therefore the Nazis must have been persecuting the Jews for their ethnicity.
Well, assuming I understand the question correctly (i.e., how is a German Gentile ethnically different from a German Jew), chances are that the German Gentile has a lot less Semitic blood in him (the Semites being, IIRC, another name for the Jewish tribes located in the Middle East); in fact, the ‘true-blooded’ German could probably trace his ancestors back to trouser-wearing tribes that fought against the Romans, while the German Jew would trace his ancestors back to Semites who emigrated into Germany at some point in the Middle Ages.
Does that answer your question?
JMCJ
“Y’know, I would invite y’all to go feltch a dead goat, but that would be abuse of a perfectly good dead goat and an insult to all those who engage in that practice for fun.” -weirddave, set to maximum flame
Aw, geez. The very first Pit thread directed at me, and it’s something as silly as this?
What they said. Thanks, guys. I know those words with multiple definitions are difficult for some folks. :rolleyes:
(But I kinda like the thought of being audacious. . .)