Here was a topic that I was not sure that we would cover. But, I guess it was bound to come up one of these days. Before I came to college, I was never really around many Jews (that I knew of) and nobody really ever talked about Jews as a group of people or race. I was never around any kind of stereotype or anything like that. The point of this is to say that I before college had no idea what a Jew was supposed to look like. Why is it that these kinds of stereotypes exist? Stereotypes are dangerous because of their overly-general natures. But, as much as we hate to admit it, stereotypes are often based on a SLIGHT shred of truth. If there is any truth to stereotypes and the physical characteristics describe are applicable to a majority of the group described, than this would imply that there may be some genetic traits that bind an entire group of people. The whole point of this would be to say that the whole argument of the Jews being a race of people may in fact be based in some kind of truth.
Much of the discussion in my Jewish Identities class this day was centered around "Jewish diseases" and used this as an argument for the possible race factor that could bind Jews together. Among the evidence was the whole issue of Tay-Sachs disease, which is an illness prevalent among the Ashkenazi Jews (because they are a group who on a large scale allow themselves to be research participants).
Interesting questions could derive from this whole issue of race and Judaism. One that I have is that, if a man who, having no Jewish blood within his family line, converts to Judaism and marries a non-Jewish woman and they have a daughter, does she now have Jewish blood flowing in her veins? What makes this such a tough area of debate is the whole dichotomy of Judaism as a spiritual identity as well as a physical/cultural identity.
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2 comments:
I must say that before Monday's class I had never put a lot of thought into the matter of the "Jewish gene." I grew up knowing about Tay-Sachs but neveltr looked to the "Jewish panel" as a defining characteristic of one's identity. But now that it's been mentioned, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it and mainly as a result of the question you asked in class and reitereated in the end of your blog.
There are so many types of Jews, even within the large Ashekenazi American Jewish community in which these diseases are contained, that this immediately becomes an impossible question. What about the cultural Jews or even the Messianic Jews (and I wouldn't be afraid to claim that the overwhelming majority of American Jews don't even believe they're Jewish...but several of them sure identify as such). Goodness...this just complicates the defining characteristics of Judaism that much more. I will end now in fear of writing a book...
This was a great idea to write a comment on this subject. Like Becca said I had never really thought of the gene issue dealing with Jews. I had figured that because being Jewish is a religion and not exactly responsible for the skin color or the dna that is in my body I had never really figured that genes could ever be connected to religion. I now see after the discussion in class that it is possible but I think that it is a very loose relationship.
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