Partially. Egyptians have been there 5000 years and more. Arabs are later arrivals.
What, exactly, do the Greeks and Turks base their distinctive identities on?
Most cultural or national groups existed as religious communities, until relatively recently.
The key event for Jews was probably the Jewish Enlightenment, or “Haskalah”:
Note that this parallels the “Enlightenment” generally in the so-called “Christian” world, and had the exact same effect - the breaking of the millenial-old strangle-hold of religion over (in this case, Jewish) scholarship and education, in the 18th century.
Modern Jewish religious movements, such as Orthodoxy, are is response to the Haskalah.
It’s worth asking what would have happened if European Jews had all converted to Christianity around 1000 years ago.
Would they have remained an ethnically distinct minority to an extent that anti-semitism would still have emereged? Would the Holocause still have happened?
If not, then there’s a good chance that the State of Israel would not have been founded either.
If the Jews had all converted to Christianity, they would perhaps have been integrated and assimilated as a distinct national or tribal identity.
If the Greeks had all converted to Islam 1000 years ago, there probably would have been no Greek/Turk partition disasters, either.
However, Jews merely becoming athiest does not seem to have had the same effect - see above note about the impact of the Haskalah. Jewish “enlightenment” from religion actually fueled Zionism.
As someone whose only allegiance is to my self, my family, my friends and my pets, I just don’t get any of this tribal-religion thang. Why anyone would want to cling to such cultural and historical excess baggage, is hard for me to understand.
Thanks again, Malthus. I’ll look into the material you cite when I get a chance.
And I don’t know what Greeks and Turks base their identity upon. I guess I would have assumed geography.
Was at a program the other day with a secular rabbi as the featured speaker. Tho I agreed with him on so much philosophically, I still had a tough time getting my head around the fact that he said a visit to the western wall meant something to him. And I never got around to asking him whether or not he believed in a supernatural being.
Here’s another stupid question. What is a Jew? (I understand - of course - that many different answers are possible.) But if a significant part of it has to do with the “celebration” of rituals and such that were originally religious in nature, or descent from such people, I have a hard time separating the religion from the culture.
And why is Israel important? Isn’t because some temple was there for a brief period a long time ago?
Is this necessarily so?
Man, that was like 200 years ago! A blink of the eye compared to the history of the religion.
Like I said, I’ll look into it further. But the chronology alone sure supports my uninformed impression of Jewish culture as a relatively recent (and likely less influential) “offshoot” of the religion.
Remember that song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv-KcF3Rkv8
[What is not the capital of Turkey was once the capital of Byzantium - a Greek and Christian empire. So geography doesn’t explain it]
It is a matter of connection to one’s history. The Western Wall was once a retaining-wall of the Temple mount, a very important location in Jewish history.
A Jew is someone descended from a Jew, who has not taken up a different identity by conversion, or someone who has converted (the latter is rare). The exact method of descent necessary is subject to controversy, with some sects holding that descent through the female line is required.
Thus, you can have “atheist Jews” but not “Christian Jews” or “Muslim Jews”, at least according to Jews (non-Jews often felt differently about this - converting did not save Jews from the Nazis, for example). Religions which are more in the nature of philosophical orientations and do not involve formal ceremonies of alligance and do not involve admitting the existence of a competing deity do not appear to strip one of one’s Jewish ethnicity - thus you can be a “Zen Buddhist Jew” or a “Taoist Jew” if you want to be.
Whether one is a good Jew is again a matter of controversy. Traditionally, this depends on adherence to Jewish rituals - the stricter the adherence, the “better” - but this is challenged by those who state that what is important is to be morally, not ritually, correct - these tend to be those who follow enlightenment values, whose “morality” is really a secular morality based on the Golden Rule.
This is however not a new position.
Rabbi Hillel was supposedly born in 110 BCE …
Again, compare to European practice generally.
That’s like saying that France is fundamentally a Christian nation, based on its millenial history as the heart of “Christendom”, and all that stuff since the French Revolution is just a relatively recent and minor “offshoot”.
The Jews of Majorca were forcibly converted to Christianity in the 1400s, becoming a group called the “Xueta” (either from the Catalan for “Jew” or the Catalan for “pork”). They exist as a distinct ethnic group in Majorca to this day, because the older Christians of Majorca wouldn’t marry or interact with them. There was a 2001 poll that showed that, even as recently as then, 30% of Majorcans wouldn’t marry a Xueta, and that 5% said that they wouldn’t even want a Xueta as a friend.
That’s very interesting - I never heard of them.
rubbish?
Egypt is in Africa, not the middle east. Therefore Egyptians are African. North African to be exact. They are NOT Arabs. Less than 10% have Arabic roots.
Their roots are African.
The only thing they share with Arabs is a common language and a religion.
Not being Jewish didn’t help the Romany avoid the Holocaust. Or the Slavs. For that matter, the various Slavs (Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, etc.) have been killing each other for centuries, as have the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans. As have any number of African tribes, etc.
Religion is just an excuse, not a reason.
Well, you do live in a country, and share a language, some traditions and some culture with your fellow countrymen. National identity does influence you, even if you don’t really feel it. But it becomes more relevant when more than one national group are living close to each other, with different and often conflicting ways of life.
I guess this is possible, but I’d kind of like to see a cite for it. And I’d also like to know, is their modern-day culture mostly Arabic, or does it preserve elements of pre- or non-Arabic Egyptian culture? This also serves in defining ethnicity.
It’s certainly possible that Romanians have some Slavic blood, but can they really be described as “Slavs”?
If you don’t care for the term "Slavic, insert any random Central or Eastern European ethnicities. My point is the same.
If you removed religion from the equation it would probably make the Jerusalem issue simpler because noone seems ready to compromise a whole lot on that tiny piece of land largely for religious reasons.
I don’t know if you all are old enough to remember the Cola Wars. It divided the nation in a way we hadn’t seen since the Disco v Rock wars of the 70’s.
I was born in England and have lived here for 47 years, and I’ve yet to hear anyone describe to me what English identity is. We are a bunch of mongrels that settled here after running away from whatever problems we had where we originated. A right that should be allowed to all peoples, unless we with better living conditions have a long-term aim to ensure that nobody has to leave their birthplace unless they wish to.
You mean like the large Asian communities that live in 3 towns to the north of Manchester? Nah, what bothers me more is the stupidity of town planners in allowing these settlements to develop without any thought of integrating them into the general community.
Israe lwasn’t founded because Jews decided in the 1940s that “God wants us to live here.” It was founded because of a well-justified fear that Jews would always be persecuted in Europe whether they were religious or not.
Were the Jews at Treblinka and Dachau released if they said, “I don’t keep kosher, I never go to the synagogue, and I don’t even believe in God”?
No! Which means that even the most secular Jews had good reason to want a homeland where they could be safe from persecution.
You’re lucky enough to live in a society and time where your cultural and national identity isn’t under threat. You’ve never had to worry about having an English identity and what it means to be English.