If I tell you of a man named Patrick O’Brien, and tell you that his favorite food is colcannon, the way his grandmother used to make, and that his favorite song is “O Danny Boy”, would you be able to make a guess as to his ethnicity?
Now what if I told you of a man named David Cohen, and that his favorite food is gefilte fish, like his grandmother used to make, and that his favorite song is “Hava Negila”?
Please…
The Spanish Inquisition is better than gefilte fish.
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I was speaking of population.
Good catch. I should have looked it up, but I thought India had already passed China in population.
India and Hindus are a slightly a oddball to this question.
India and Hindus are western/middle-eastern words that were ascribed to people living on the other side of the Indus River. Historically India was inaccessible except through a narrow pass in the Himalayas which is open only a few months in a year.
There was no religion (as far as religion is defined by the western concept) but a very loose framework of beliefs.
So Hindus was the word used to describe the people of India historically. This included Jains and Buddhist. As time progressed and Muslims invaded India followed by the Christian rules, Hindu started being the word to show you were not Muslim or Christian .
So you’re saying that “ethnicity” is defined genetically?
That’s one way. Another way is: “the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition”.
Jews have a common national or cultural tradition, so “Jewish” is an ethnicity. The fact that a Ashkenazi Jew is genetically more closely related to their Polish neighbors while a Mizrahi Jew is genetically more closely related to their middle eastern neighbors doesn’t change that.
Ethnicity isn’t the same thing as race, it isn’t the same thing as nationality, it isn’t the same thing as a language community, it isn’t the same thing as religion. It’s just a belief by people that they share a common heritage. It’s a thing that exists in human minds, and is not an objective fact.
If you define ethnicity as a belief by people that they share a common heritage, then would you say Rachel Dolezal’s ethnicity is Black? She apparently believes she shares a common heritage with African-Americans. Or does the belief have to be from others within that ethnic group?
Yes, it has to be a shared belief. I can call myself Cherokee, but that doesn’t make me Cherokee. I’m only Cherokee when all the other Cherokees agree that I’m Cherokee.
And of course since ethnicity only exists in the human mind, it’s an inherently fuzzy concept. How many signifiers of Polish identity do you have to have and still be ethnically Polish? Lots of people who consider themselves part of an ethnic group might find other people who disagree, both in and out of the group. If you have three white grandparents and one black grandparent, are you white or black? In America, you’re black.
Would the Old Order Amish meet your requirements?
“Indian” isn’t an ethnicity though. There are tons and tons of ethnic groups in India.
(Ethnicity in the European sense doesn’t have a perfect equivalent in India, since people identify by their language, region, religion and caste and all of these partially map onto what I would think of as ‘ethnicity’. “Telugu speaking Hindu resident of Madras from the Mudaliar caste” might identify by any of those four things). In any case though, however you categorize ethnic groups in India, there are lots of them which share the Hindu religion, not just one).
There are also Hindus outside of India (in Bali for example, and the Cham community in Vietnam). Hinduism isn’t a religion of conversion today, to any great degree, but that wasn’t the case in the medieval era, much of Southeast Asia was converted to Hinduism.
Isn’t the same thing true both of Jewish people and those living in Israel? I mean, some in Israel are Holocaust survivors or their descendants, some are from Syria or India or Ethiopia, and so forth. The whole premise that the Jewish religion and ethnicity are closely linked seems false to me.
Of course there true of Jewish people as well. None of that proves that religion and ethnicity aren’t closely linked, obviously they are (in India as well as in Israel, and for that matter in Eastern Europe as well). They don’t have to be perfectly correlated to be, well, linked. I just pointed out that “Indian” isn’t an ethnicity any more than, well, “European” or “Native American” is.
If you’re a Hindu you’re almost certainly going to belong to one of the many Indian ethnicities, or else you’re going to be Balinese or Vietnamese Cham.
I would argue that ethnicities are not mutually exclusive. Some overlap, and some are subsets of others. I’m perfectly comfortable with saying that “Jewish” and “Ashkenazim” are both ethnicities, as are both “Native American” and “Cherokee”.
Already mentioned by zimaane in post #2 about Parsis: almost all modern Zoroastrians are Parsis.
I think the linkage between ethnicity and religion are common when the religion doesn’t try to convert people (or at least have not done so for a very long time). People typically become [insert religion here] because they were raised by their parents into that religion.
The Druze were my first thought.
My second thought, the Bosniaks, is on the list along with some of the other Slavic groups they fought an ethnic war with. It’s really a different case than the Serbs and Croats. Those two ethnic groups could point to old kingdoms as unifying influences that separated them from other Slavic peoples. The Bosnian Muslims, as they were called before ethnic cleansing pushed a growing ethnic identity, were just the Slavs in the area that converted when the whole area was under the Ottoman Empire. They would have been from one of the various Slavic ethnic groups in the area before conversion. They shared a common culture, except for religion, with their ethnically different neighbors. The sense of separate ethnicity grew out of the religious difference. That religious difference was pretty minor pre-war due to the Bosnian Muslims being pretty secular. (To quote one Bosniak interpreter from my deployment there, they were “Ham eating, cigarette smoking, alcohol drinking Muslims” and “Who has time to pray five times a day?” )Even at the time of the civil war when the new term for the ethnicity was being crafted a common ethnic slur used by Serb paramilitaries conducting ethnic cleansing was Turk despite them not being Turkish.
It’s a really interesting case of an ethnic identity being created and strengthened based solely on religious affiliation. Important parts of that process even played out during many of our lifetimes.
My thought is that is groups that make up the former Yugoslavia are actually the opposite (or at least something very different) they are ethnically identical groups distinguished only by religion. Same language, same (or very similar) cuisine, racially identical (I challenge any foreigner to tell the difference between a Serb, a Croat and a Bosniac without knowing their name or religion) everything you would normally associate with ethnicity, EXCEPT religion.
That is different to Judaism, where there is clearly something called being ethnically Jewish (however hard that is to define exactly), that does not just mean “my or my family practice or used to practice the Jewish religion”
But what unites, say, Chinese Jews, Yemenite Jews, and Galician Jews all with different languages, cuisine, etc., if not precisely a history of practicing the Jewish religion? How is Judaism special in this respect? On the other hand, groups living in the same country, like Yugoslavia, may eventually develop a common ethnicity due to geographical proximity rather than religion. That can also work backwards as in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
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I don’t think Judaism is unique in having people who still identify with the group despite having fallen away from the religious practice that defines the group. Heck, I know people who think of themselves as “Catholic” because that’s their culture. Maybe they had a grandmother who was actually a practicing Catholic, and maybe they go to Easter services with the family, because it’s a tradition, but that’s about it. I have a friend who thinks of herself as Muslim despite not practicing. But being the Muslim family in the neighborhood set her apart as a kid, and she still thinks of herself that way. And those are both religions that technically demand belief.
The Yemeni Jew didn’t grow up eating gefilte fish. A
NM: Double Post.