>That was really addressed to Bill, who seemed more inclined to refute the notion that there are Jews than to understand who is Jewish.
Yeah, holocaust denial is too tame for me, I deny there are any Jews to start with. ;-)
Seriously though, I'm not bothered if people want to identify as Jewish or not. I'm much more upset about people identifying as "middle-class". I feel that matters. Yet it obviously doesn't matter to most other people, so its not exactly a certainty that I'm right.
> Neither religious belief nor cultural practice are necessary, and in fact neither of them are sufficient by conventional standards.
I can see that. But what I'm suggesting is that the lack of a definition can lead to problems. It doesn't mean that there is no such thing as Jewish though, it just means there is no way of being sure what it means. Which is only a problem for those who want to attach some kind of penalty, or privilege, to being Jewish.
> Some Jews might think otherwise. My own "Humanistic" (atheist) congregation might accept someone with a pretty minimal amount of conversion, and it's not clear to me that what Beth Or does counts as "religious" belief, although it looks to me (raised in Reform Judaism) like Reform Judaism without God. The Orthodox, that's another story. They would regard me as Jewish only in virtue of the fact that I am matrilineally descended through people who, 100 or so years ago, were probably Orthodox like them. jks
But do you care, and if so why?
Anyway, this isn't an issue that is confined to Jewishness. My point is that subjectivity is almost universal amongst cultural, religious and racial identification concepts.
There's a current example here is Tasmania, identification of Tasmanaian Aborigines. There's a couple of groups of people who claim to be Tasmanian Aborigines who are completely rejected by the rest of the community. They can't produce any evidence whatsoever that they have any Aboriginal lineage, yet they seem to genuinely believe they are descended from a supposed "lost tribe". They have even attained legal recognition.
Now the usual definition of Aboriginality here involves a strong element of being accepted as such by the aboriginal community. The problem with that, now, is accepted by *which* aboriginal community. there are some minor practical issues at stake, eligibility to vote in election of aboriginal representatives, eligibility for some benefits, etc. Otherwise it wouldn't be a big issue.
It seems to me that these identifications are largely artificial. Yet they are self-perpetuating in their very nature. Divisions beget division, they seem to be essentially about privilege and exclusion from privilege. Either way, this tends to re-inforce the identification.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas