Being a Jew is being a descendant of Jacob. Everyone else is a gentile. I'm not saying you can't "belong to the jewish faith", just that being a jew is all about a particular bloodline.
Being a Jew is not a religion.
- Thread starter Mr. Hamtastic
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Is this really a debate? Or are you just making a statement?
That's a rather selective narrow view. I suppose you are not familiar with the word proselyting?
Just something I've been ruminating about. I've met people who described themselves as Jewish, who had no idea what their lineage was. According to the Bible, anyway, lineage is a very big deal. I was just tossing it out there to see what others thought of it.
you can be jewsih without the lineage i suppose. i someone thinks he is jewish, who am i to say otherwise.
I don't know too much about israelites, as I've only ever met one. My great grandmother was a Jew in Poland, My great-grandfather was a German. We've been able to find lineage through him back to minor nobles of the Holy Roman Empire. Her, not so much.
I've kind of wondered if the holocaust was against true"Jews" or was anyone with "Jewish" features slapped with a star and sent to a camp? Were there any muslims/hindus there? As physical appearences go, most everyone from North Africa to India up to the Ukraine have similar features.
I've kind of wondered if the holocaust was against true"Jews" or was anyone with "Jewish" features slapped with a star and sent to a camp? Were there any muslims/hindus there? As physical appearences go, most everyone from North Africa to India up to the Ukraine have similar features.
the germans killed non jews as well. their definition of jews lineage of blood. if your grandfather was jewish, or grandmother, then you are a jew.
3 generations were enough. there were not so few in the death camps who didnt consider themselves to be jewish at all.
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Cheskichips-Do I have the thing about "being a Jew" versus "acting Jewish" right? Is it a geneological thing?
Cheskichips-Do I have the thing about "being a Jew" versus "acting Jewish" right? Is it a geneological thing?
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Well considering the Torah allows for converts, you don't have to be from Jacob. Following beyond that you only have to receive it from your mothers side. There's parental reasons involved.
However; lineage isn't near as important as people believe it to be. The majority of lineages discussed in the bible are to add elements to a message. Jews believe a 1st child is nothing is like a 2nd child or a 3rd child. And none are similar.
So when assigning a person 1st child roll, they are giving them inherited character traits that are relevant to the specific story. For example, Cain and Able, Esau Jacob, Isaac Ishmael. Ham Shem Jafet. etc etc
When you take into account the different actions each character took throughout the Torah you start to recognize what characteristics are transferable, and you continually gain more knowledge of the event and it becomes clearer what they are discussing. It's hard to understanding how it works in English, but it works in Hebrew.
So the lineage of Jacob really was more symbolic to the characteristics of Jacob...NOT anything else. For example when it discussed how Hagars son would not inherit any of the knowledge, while Sarais wife would...it's implying that the mother mostly molds the child into who he will become. Thus Hagar being straight out of Egypt, couldn't teach any of the moral lessons that Sarai could, who was from Shem (considered moral).
There is such thing as "acting Jewish", which is individual to every single society. A California Jew isn't like a NY Jews and neither are like Israeli Jews. Russian Jews don't act like Ashkenazi Jews...it just has to do with what your family has picked up along the way...Since they usually migrate in communities, often many families will live along side each other for hundreds of years (even though moving 3 or 4 times), thus acquiring individual characteristics.
Cheskichips-THAT answers my question/ refutes my statement. I get what you are saying.
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Being a Jew is not a religion, but its not an ethnicity either, since Kurds and Armenians and Turks are ethnically Jews. Its basically a supremacist notion of having some identity based on the fantasy of land captured by nomadic apirus from Canaanites which apparently gives some 20 generations removed around the world teh right to repeat it in this century by claiming victimisation by other people in a different place in the last century.
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