I guess it depends how distant. And perhaps the laws have changed recently. But I have several friends who have obtained EU citizenship in the past couple of decades based on one grandparent having been born in Ireland, Spain, etc.
Anyway, i don’t think i, an American Jew, have any particular claim to Israel. But i do think that people who are born in a place and grow up there have a very real claim on it. And that applies to both the Jews and the Palestinians in the middle east. Even when there is a case for reparations based on the sins of your ancestors, i don’t think that strips you of you home. And yes, of course it is complicated and can get ugly.
There are other such ethnicities in Europe, like the Romani, that are so divorced from their ancestral homeland they no longer qualify as indigenous Indians. They arrived in Europe a lot later than many of the Jewish groups, too.
I think it’s disingenuous to claim all Jews are indigenous to Palestine.
That’s like claiming all African-Americans are indigenous to Liberia.
There’s a cultural continuity that’s part and parcel of being indigenous, that isn’t there for most European and North African Jewish culture. They didn’t speak Hebrew or even Aramaic outside religious contexts before making aliyah, they spoke Yiddish, Ladino or just the local language.
Hell, a large portion of Ashkenazi don’t even descend from the Middle East, but from European converts, at least in the maternal line.
Ancestry from a place and indigeneity in that place are not the same thing. There are Jews who can claim to be indigenous to Palestine. But it’s not all Jews, not even the majority.
For instance, I am indigenous to the Middle East .
I live in the Middle East.
I was born in the Middle East.
My ancestors came from the Middle East
I speak a Middle Eastern language.
I worship a Middle Eastern religion.
Therefore, I am as Middle Eastern as anyone else in the Middle East. Nobody has more of a right to be here than I do.
The Romani are a great example of exactly the danger posed by losing your indigenous status everywhere you exist, and they’ve shared precisely many of the tragic experiences that the Jewish people went through.
There isn’t AFAIK a particular land that the Romani feel particularly tied to; certainly not the places in India where their ethnic groupay have originally come from. The Romani don’t base their entire culture off that land and the ideal of returning to it. So, they’re definitely a peoples who complicate the idea of a homeland; but that doesn’t mean their model should be applied to everyone. Most cultures are not likel tbe Romani, and do have ties to specific homelands.
LIBERIA, no, but all* (well, let’s say the overwhelming majority, I’m sure some slaves came from other places, and not all African Americans descend from slaves) ARE indigenous to West Africa.
The lines between individual African Americans and specific West African cultural groups are blurry; most Black Americans can’t tell you that they are Yoruba or Igbo or so on, and this was very deliberately done by the European slavers to erase their connection to their homeland and to each other in order to prevent rebellions. Which makes claims of indigenousness a little trickier.
With that, we also have to consider the African Americans themselves. For the most part, they don’t claim an indigenous African identity, instead identifying with the African American (or Afro-Caribbean) ethnicity that was forged in the crucible of slavery. And, given that fact, I think that’s how we should view them, for the most part.
You also have very messy (and very tragic and horrendous) situations like the Caribbean. On many of the islands, what essentially happened was the complete eradication of the original native culture, and the creation of a new culture that blends together some Native aspects and a bunch of different West African cultural traditions. I think that (again, based on how these people self identify, as well as the fact that - thanks to Europeans - their native predecessors basically do not exist anymore) we should view these people how they identify, as indigenous to the Americas, if anywhere; but if they claimed a connection back to West Africa, I certainly would not seek to deny it or stand in their way.
Yiddish, Ladino, etc - these are all Hebrew inspired variants of the local languages, so I don’t think thay it shows a lack of cultural continuity.
As I said earlier, this view missesa couple of things.
First, the fact that the majority of Jews in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East were not cut off from each other; there continued to be a rich exchange of ideas and thought. This happened during a time that honestly doesn’t get enough attention even in Jewish sources; the Sam Aronow videos touch on this often - Jewish history is often taught up to the Roman conquest, then we skip ahead to the 19th century. But all these different communities were developing, exchanging ideas, and evolving together, in a rich interconnected tapestry. Sometimes a region would fall off the map for a while due to increased persecution; and then those Jews would either leave, spreading their ideas even faster (as at the end of the Sephardic Golden Age) while other times they stay until things got better (as in Poland).
But there was certainly continuity, and continued connection between the different groups.
Second, none of these groups ever gave up on Israel. Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi Jews - they all said “Next year in Jerusalem” at the Sedar table every year. None of them were ever allowed to fully integrate into their local communities (not until the last 100 years or so, maybe a bit earlier in the US).
if you’re talking about matrilineal DNA studies, that doesn’t tell you anything about the frequency of outside genetic sources entering the population; just that it did, and then those genes stayed in the population.
I’m far more interested in how people culturally identify and view themselves than in the contents of their blood. Obviously, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi Jews interbred with their neoghbors. There’s a reason they all look different, and it’s not a Lamarckian response to living at different latitudes. There was intermarriage, and of course, there was rape and pillaging (though that’s less likely to show up in mDNA). But there was also a cultural continuity, and the fact that individuals sometimes join or leave the culture (which is of course true of any culture, not just Jews) does not negate that.
My family came to the US from Ireland (among a lot of other places) in the 19th century, but I’d expect to be laughed out of the room if I tried to claim any sort of indigenous Celtic status.
As noted above, depending on exactly how many generations are involved, you could actually qualify for Irish citizenship automatically.
Even if you didn’t, there’s certainly a country called Ireland, and if you moved there and started studying Gaelic language and culture in order to get more in touch with your ancestry, I definitely don’t think that anyone would “laugh you out of the room”.
And if there was not a country called Ireland, say because it was controlled by a foreign empire called Britain that oppressed the Irish people, and you lived in America in a community with lots of Irish people, say in a place called Boston, would it really be so outlandish for you to support the creation of a free country for your people in their homeland - whether or not you wanted to move there yourself when it was done?
Eta: I actually didn’t have more than a passing familiarity with Irish-American support for Irish independence, but the more I’m reading up on it the more it reminds me of Zionism. Fascinating!
Even a cursory glance will reveal a strong antipathy among the Irish for “Irish-American” identity. They’re confronted with boorish tourists outside Temple Bar who claim a connection not at all authentic.
In part it’s a legitimate gripe. So much went into Irish identity that was forged after the famine and diaspora on both sides that can’t be shared. But OTOH, it rings hollow that its only emerged after the whole Celtic Tiger thing, and neglects the fact that without “Irish-America,” there’d be no independent Ireland.
2016 Irishman: “There’s no such thing as ‘Irish-American’”
1916 Eamon de Valera: “Don’t shoot, I’m Irish-American!”
Why is it strange? I’ve never been to Ireland, I don’t speak the language, I don’t know a ton about the history. My only connection to the place is through some ancestors who didn’t want to be there anymore.
Acting like I have any particular connection to the country is the weird thing to me.
Well, I’d like to think that any country would be welcoming to a person who wanted to live there and learn more about the culture, regardless of where their ancestors came from, but if I tried to claim “indigenous Irish” status, I think my North American birthplace puts a serious crimp in my claim.
It definitely has some parallels to the current situation, although I think I disagree with you about which side bares the closest resemblance to the Irish independence movement.
I don’t think it’s strange that you have no personal desire to grow or enhance that connection, or to go live in Ireland.
I think it’s strange that you believe that if you did have that inclination, you’d be laughed out of the room. In my experience, when Irish Americans do have that inclination, it is respected.
You don’t think that a person of Irish ancestry returning to Ireland would be met differently than an immigrant of a totally different culture?
But I don’t have those inclinations. I’m not doing any of that stuff.
Sure, but, “Would a white Catholic immigrant be treated differently than a black Muslim immigrant,” is not the same question as, “How would an Irish American be received if they claimed to be indigenous to Ireland?”
Cool, but lots of other Irish Americans with no more real connection to Ireland than your own do do those things, every day. And they don’t get laughed out of the room.
The why of Israel’s creation is much more powerful, IMO, than the where. In the late 40s (and really for decades and more before that) it really was quite reasonable for many Jews to believe that there was no place that would welcome them, and that they would be safe in, and thus they must necessarily make a welcoming and safe place for Jews (and at the same time it was also reasonable for many other Jews to think their best bet was moving to the US or Canada). They ended choosing the place that refugee Jews had been fleeing to for decades (and, practically speaking, that was the correct decision since they succeeded in creating Israel there), but it could have been somewhere else, and I don’t think it would have been significantly morally different (in terms of the choices they were faced with). That doesn’t necessarily justify everything that was done, by those first Israelis, the other residents of the region, and the major powers also involved, but the key point to remember, IMO, is that those first Israelis really were driven by desperation and trauma. Morally speaking, it would have been similar if they had tried to create a Jewish homeland in Germany or Alaska or just about anywhere else (though the likelihood of success would probably have differed).
I spent a couple of weeks tramping around Ireland right after I graduated from college. I stayed at a lot of bed & breakfast places, and chatted with the owners. I look kinda Irish, and was obviously American, so many of them assumed I was an Irish American. I told them I was an American Jew, whose family came from Eastern Europe.
I think I got a warmer response with the real answer. They would reminisce about Ireland’s role in WWII, sometimes apologize for Ireland’s neutrality. And they’d talk about unrelated stuff, too, of course.
I wasn’t trying to immigrate, of course. But I didn’t have the sense that they thought of Irish Americans as distant cousins.
Jews DO tend to treat random other Jews as distant cousins. When a relative-by-marriage converted to Judaism, I attended her first public torah reading, and said, “welcome to the tribe”. That may be relevant to this discussion.
Sure, but again, I didn’t say, “Irish Americans who study Irish history and culture get laughed out of the room,” I said, “Irish Americans who claim to be indigenous would get laughed out of the room.”
I think that you might be correct in the broad strokes, yet be painting with too broad a brush here.
Some Jewish communities (especially Orthodox ones other than Chabad [and even that, less so in Israel than abroad]) are not nearly that welcoming.
And I was focusing on the example of Ireland because of specific Americans of Irish ancestry I know, and the experience they had in Ireland.
Maybe Irish people don’t tend to use that word, with that baggage. But if an Irish American went to Ireland and told people “I want to get back in touch with the country of my ancestors, because I feel that as an (ethnically) Irish person, (the country) Ireland is my true home”, I think they would for the most part be enthusiastically welcomed and taught about Irish culture, not laughed out of the room.
I think that if I went to Ireland and told people, “I grew up in an area with a lot of Irish Americans, and have always been interested in Ireland, and I want to get in touch with the country and understand it better”, I would for the most part be enthusiastically welcomed and taught about Irish culture, fwiw.
That’s pretty much what my sister did as an exchange student to Ireland. She still has friends she made there. And it helps that I speak the language (English) that almost all Irish speak.
You’d be mistaken, for the most part. Particularly in my case - less than a quarter of Irish people think I should describe myself as Irish. Less than half approve of “Irish-American” for folks like me.
Absolutely. And if you really wanted to you could also get citizenship there and live there for the rest of your life, without being ethnically Irish or becoming a Catholic. And most people would probably welcome you, especially if you are respectful of their culture.
That is all true of Israel as well. I know a couple of (Christian) Swedish families who spent a summer learning Hebrew at a Kibbutz and then decided to immigrate to Israel, for example.
Based on what Irish American people I know who have lived in Ireland have told me, I think if you were ethnically Irish as well, then there would be a sense that you are also “coming home” in a way that would be absent for you or I emigrating to Ireland.
But I am not Irish and I am speaking from second hand knowledge, so I will drop that point.