# What are the real racial origins of today's Jews?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-real-racial-origins-of-todays-jews/250374>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [June 14, 2004, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-real-racial-origins-of-todays-jews/250374 "2004-06-14T22:36:34Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![GilaB](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/8e7dd6/32.png) [@GilaB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GilaB)\
**Post date:** [June 18, 2004, 4:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-real-racial-origins-of-todays-jews/250374/41 "2004-06-18T04:25:29Z")

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What **Eva Luna** said about Yiddish having a German grammar with some Slavic vocabulary thrown in matches both my own limited knowledge and what many Yiddish speakers have told me. My very minimal Yiddish definitely has a very Germanic grammar; I can understand baby German, particularly in terms of pronouns and verb conjugation. (So I don’t know what we’re talking about, but I know if the subject is you, me or him.) Just as an example, Yiddish conjugates ‘to be’ as follows: Ich bin (I am), du bist (you are), er/zie/es is (he/she/it is), which is very close to the Google translator’s German Ich bin, Sie sind, er/sie/es ist. There are variable amounts of Slavic languages mixed in, depending on which regional variant of Yiddish we’re talking; the German Yiddish dialect has much less than the Polish or Lithuanian. Most Yiddish speakers can understand nontechnical German quite well; they don’t understand Slavic languages that they haven’t learned separately.

FWIW, I’m fairly typically Jewish-looking, but have been mistaken for Dutch by Dutch people, Hispanic by a whole bunch of people, and have been referred to (by my own cousins!) as having ‘an ethnic face,’ whatever that means.

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**Author:** ![The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/9fc348/32.png) [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Flying_Dutchman)\
**Post date:** [June 18, 2004, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-real-racial-origins-of-todays-jews/250374/42 "2004-06-18T05:16:46Z")

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> [@PaulFitzroy](#):
>
> **SO, WHY ARE TODAY’S JEWS WHITE CAUCASIANS?** \*

These Jews [,the Lemba tribe in South Africa](http://www.freemaninstitute.com/Gallery/lemba.htm) don’t exactly look like white caucasians.

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**Author:** ![PaulFitzroy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/2acd7d/32.png) [@PaulFitzroy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PaulFitzroy)\
**Post date:** [June 18, 2004, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-real-racial-origins-of-todays-jews/250374/43 "2004-06-18T15:31:57Z")

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I think my general point was well understood by most people. I was referring to the “typical Jewish look” which I guess is Ashkenazic. When people say someone looks Jewish, in America, they usually aren’t referring to the African Lemba tribe.

I should have made myself clearer.

I have always know that there were Jews in China that looked Chinese, Jews in India that looked Indian and Jews in Africa that looked African. I think that marriages and intermixing between Jews and non-Jews in those areas, however, was MUCH more accepted than Jewish/Christian marriage in France and Spain.

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