08-20-2008, 08:04 AM
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#6 (permalink)
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Junkie
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The problem is Jews are an ethnoreligious group. Meaning the group is defined by both ethnicity and religion. You have the ethnicity but not the religion so it is partially correct to call you jewish.
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The term Ethnoreligious (or ethno-religious) refers to a group or groups of people unified by a common religious culture but displaying distinct characteristics of an ethnic group. Ethnoreligious communities define their identity neither exclusively by ancestral heritage nor simply by religious affiliation, but often through a combination of both.
The Jews are today perhaps the largest and most familiar ethnoreligious community. Ascertaining and defining membership in the Jewish people (the question of "who is a Jew") involves both a traditional religious component and an ethnic one.
Other, smaller or lesser known ethnoreligious communities which combine ethnic identity with religious belonging include the Samaritans, the Parsis, the Assyrians, the Nasranis, the Yazidi (more often considered a religious minority within the religiously-diverse Kurdish ethnicity), and the Mandaeans, among others.
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Who is a Jew?
Main article: Who is a Jew?
Judaism shares some of the characteristics of a nation, an ethnicity, a religion, and a culture, making the definition of who is a Jew vary slightly depending on whether a religious or national approach to identity is used.[18] Generally, in modern secular usage, Jews include three groups: people who were born to a Jewish family regardless of whether or not they follow the religion, those who have some Jewish ancestral background or lineage (sometimes including those who do not have strictly matrilineal descent), and people without any Jewish ancestral background or lineage who have formally converted to Judaism and therefore are followers of the religion.[19] At times conversion has accounted for a substantial part of Jewish population growth. In the first century of the Christian era, for example, the population more than doubled, from 4 to 8–10 million within the confines of the Roman Empire, in good part as a result of a wave of conversion.[20]
Historical definitions of Jewish identity have traditionally been based on halakhic definitions of matrilineal descent, and halakhic conversions. Historical definitions of who is a Jew date back to the codification of the oral tradition into the Babylonian Talmud. Interpretations of sections of the Tanach, such as Deuteronomy 7:1-5, by learned Jewish sages, are used as a warning against intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews because "[the non-Jewish male spouse] will cause your child to turn away from Me and they will worship the gods of others." Leviticus 24:10 says that the son in a marriage between a Hebrew woman and an Egyptian man is "of the community of Israel." This contrasts with Ezra 10:2-3, where Israelites returning from Babylon, vow to put aside their gentile wives and their children. Since the Haskalah, these halakhic interpretations of Jewish identity have been challenged.
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