According to the Mormons, they came from Israel! 
It is very dangerous to discount events like the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In my experience, a lot of Americans these days expect war to look like it does in the movies. The good guys are unambiguously good and will bend heaven and earth to prevent a single civilian casualty, the bad guys are cartoonishly evil and kill women and children for fun, nine times out of ten the fighting takes place in a field somewhere far away from where anyone lives, and if there is urban fighting all the buildings are miraculously already evacuated when the fighting starts or there’s a dramatic scene where the protagonist gets everybody out just in the nick of time. If there’s any hint of moral ambiguity to the good guys, it’s because the director is explicitly trying to tell you that this war is unjust and immoral and wrong and our heroes are actually bad guys (e.g. almost every movie ever made about Vietnam). There might just be six Avengers fighting off a full-scale alien invasion in the middle of lower Manhattan, but the generals who want to use a nuke to seal the portal are Wrong Wrong Wrong because good guys never cause collateral damage. The Federation admiral who wants to launch a preemptive strike on the Klingons is in league with Khan and created a false flag attack to justify a war, because good guys never fire the first shot. And so on.
When reality doesn’t look like we expect it to because our perception of reality is based on fiction, we freak out. It ties right into how we demand that our politicians promise the impossible, then let them get voted out when they fail to deliver.
Legit question, and not a gotcha: are converts to Judaism considered indigenous to Israel?
Are adopted children considered part of a family?
But you’re asking questions about individuals, and with individuals, there will always be edge cases and exceptions. I’m not talking about that. I’d talking about the Jewish People as a whole, which is more than the sum of its parts.
Yes, I asked a genuine question about individuals in good faith. If you aren’t able to answer that question, that is fine. I will leave it up here in case anyone else can come along and provide an answer.
To answer your question to me, I would say that adopted children are part of a family, but they certainly do not gain the ethnicity of the adoptive family. However, they could well be raised with certain traditions that would provide them with a better understanding and appreciation for the ethnicity of their adoptive family.
Judaism is an ethnicity as much as it is a religion, in many ways. I don’t like the word “indigenous”, but to the extent that any Jew is connected to the land of Israel, converts are, too. (And that extent will vary from person to person, for any number of reasons. But the range of connection for converts will overlap with the range of connection for people born into the tribe.)
Also, while an adopted child might not fully acquire the ethnicity of their parents, they do generally acquire their parents’ nationality.
Which are we talking about here? The lines between religion, ethnicity, and nationality used to be a lot fuzzier than perhaps they are to an American Christian today.
You would have to ask Alessan where they are going with the whole adoption thing.
I get that Judaism is both an ethnicity and a religion. I also understand that converts to Judaism can be citizens of Israel and have the right of return. I’m not even looking to join the debate on whether Jews are indigenous to Israel, though I do appreciate that my question could be viewed as a way of trying to crack that argument.
All of that aside, the assertion was made that Jews are indigenous to Israel. My question still stands as to how the admittedly small percentage of converts to Judaism and their descendants fit into that system.
That might be true if white parents adopt an asian or black baby in the United States.
On the other hand, my wife’s dad was adopted, and whenever his ethnicity comes up the response is “he was half Irish, half German”. Then, like 20 minutes later, “Oh, I guess he was actually adopted, so we don’t really know?”. There’s always that technicality, but for all intents and purposed, people considered him ethnically Irish/German.
In the American context, ethnicity is super clearly defined - but only along lines that basically boil down to skin color. Which is why the classification system breaks down when it gets even a little more complicated - see the way the census asks about whether or not you are “Hispanic”.
Like others have said - Judaism is a holdover from much older system, one that barely exists anymore thanks to Christianity and, to a lesser degree, Islam taking over the world and replacing older religious systems.
I’m completely disinterested in Indigenousness as some kind of Blood and Soil nonsense. Indigenous people are indigenous to a region because of the culture they practice, not because of their ancient DNA.
We study DNA not because we care about where people’s bloodline comes from, but because we want to understand the spread and flow of cultures, but culture doesn’t leave a trace in people’s bones, and DNA does. And since people tend to have children within their own cultural group - especially in the past - we can use the spread of DNA to trace the spread of culture.
If we embarked on a clandestine operation to swap every single baby born in Germany with a baby born in France, and vice versa, for an entire generation - the French people would remain French, despite the influx of German DNA, and the German people would remain German. Because those babies would be raised to be French or German in culture, and that’s what we really care about.
There might be genetic diseases that were more common in one country that would suddenly be more common in the other country, or other slight differences; but - unless you think we are all far less racist than we ought to be - I don’t believe we’d see any significant change in either culture.
(The same would also apply if we swapped out German babies with Japanese ones, except for the fact that people might* notice the different appearance, which would change their behavior and thus culture.)
*Most understated “might” in history
Sorry - I came across as unnecessarily combative. That was not my intention.
Anyway, to answer your question: maybe, sort of, I’m not sure. All the converts I’ve known were married to Jews who were Jews from birth, so there was no real issue - they were considered to be part of an “indigenous” family.
If you’re a convert and your entire family line is converts I don’t think you can be crowned King of Israel. 
Thank you all for your replies. I appreciate that there may not be an official answer.
@Babale I sometimes work with the local Native American tribes, and they are very much of the belief that Indigenous people are indigenous to a region exclusively because of their ancient DNA. I’m not denying your statement about culture vs genetics in any way, and I’m not trying to declare one view or the other as the correct one, but the two definitions of what makes someone indigenous are so completely different I wanted to ask.
Because of DNA? Really? Not because of ancestry, or tribe membership - because of deoxyribonucleic acid?
Are you sure that they aren’t using DNA as a marker for measuring something else?
I think you’ll find that the modern focus on DNA is actually just meant as an objective means to establish direct descent from a tribe member, and that tribe membership is what really matters.
Remember that even before the arrival of Europeans, native American tribes fought each other, sometimes enslaved each other, and sometimes assimilated those captives into the capturing tribe. If a modern day person claims descent from members of an Indian tribe A, but those members were originally captured from another tribe B and then assimilated into tribe A, do you think that they’d be prevented from joining the tribe because they lack “ancient tribe A DNA”?
In actual fact, at some point in history the US government made the tribes come up with a list of tribe members, which was done on the basis of “who do we currently consider members of our tribe”, and today membership in most tribes is based on who is descended* from those people. DNA is simply a way to verify that you do in fact descend from one of those people.
*Descended can mean different things to different tribes in this context; from “at least 1/4th descended from tribal members” to “direct linear descent from one of those people” etc.
I was using a shorthand by saying DNA, but membership is strictly based on direct ancestry.
I won’t speak for them, but I work with four different tribes over a fairly small geographic area. They all refer to their overall relationship, and there is an acknowledgement of cross relationships not only among the four tribes and neighboring tribes, but also of other genic additions over the past 400 years.
That being said, having a direct, physical connection to their homeland is a crucial part of their identity. Their language has a critical word that means my land and me are one. And their formal names go into great detail about exactly where they are from, almost down to the level of someone being named John 123 Main Street. Also, they have oral history tradition about their feet always being in direction connection with the ground of their homeland, and how when they lose their land, they are literally knocked off their feet.
I’m sure that resonates with you. Where the difference comes in is that to them, a direct physical connection to the land through some sort of direct ancestry is part of tribal membership, even for those who have moved to another place. I’ll be glad to ask the next time we meet about how they would consider an adopted member of a family, but from everything that I have been told in some rather lengthy trainings, I don’t believe they would consider them to be indigenous to the tribal lands. There is no way that I could ever “convert” to join their tribe and gain indigenous status.
Again, not saying that either view is right or wrong, just interesting how two different groups define their indigenousness.
And a convert is always a convert, but their children are just plain Jews. Likewise, if you were captured by that tribe in a war 400 years ago and assimilated into it - which happened to both men and women, but for obvious reasons was more common for women and those captured as children - you would be part of the tribe, or at least your children would be.
Likewise, many modern tribe members are of mixed heritage. You may not be able to join the tribe, but if you have children with the right tribe member, your children will be full tribal members.
That may very well be true, because of the incentives placed upon tribal membership by the fact that this is a system with real implications in US Law, not just personal ideology and preference.
But it is undeniable that at least some of the people they trace ancestry from were only tribal members because they themselves had been adopted, willingly or otherwise, into the tribe.
Yup, but going back to my original question I could convert to Judaism, and I would be fully recognized as Jewish, but would I be considered to be indigenous to Israel? I will add that to the best of my knowledge, I have no ancestral ties to the lands there. Also, I would argue that if I were to convert it would not automatically make my three existing children indigenous to Israel. I won’t even begin to get into a discussion if it would make them Jewish too.
I’ll stop there, I don’t want to derail this thread further. Perhaps a thread on how one qualifies as/defines indigenous is in order.
It would mean that you are a part of the Jewish people, who as a people are native to Israel, whether or not you personally are.
It would not make them Jewish, they’d have to convert if they wanted to be Jewish as well.
You’ll note that in the case of both Jews and Indian tribes, the portion made up of people who were brought in to the group from the outside is relatively negligible. Judaism isn’t Christianity, with routine mass conversions.
If conversions make up a trickle of new people entering an existing continuous cultural lineage, I don’t think that makes a big difference.
Now, if a certain culture completely dies out, and hundreds of years later some people read about them in a history book and decide to cosplay as them - that’s a new culture, not a continuation.
Israel is just a place; you don’t need to prove you are “indigenous” to move there. Now, I do know someone who moved there and supposedly had lots of paperwork problems because she is not Jewish, I don’t know the details though. Not sure if she is trying for naturalization or not. OTOH another friend who took a job in Israel did eventually get it sorted out (pro tip: never, ever get a visa or green card, in any country, on the basis of being related to someone; after you get divorced you will be screwed)
That one is easy. You are born a Jew if you are born from the womb of a Jewish woman. You don’t become Jewish after birth except by converting yourself.