Who Gentiles Think Jews Are While What Jews Think They Are

 Nadene Goldfoot                                               

     Jews being herded down a Lithuanian street at the beginning of WWII in 1941 and will be taken away.  

We already know that Nazis thought that Jews were an inferior race that needed to be removed from society.  Quite a few Christian churches have been involved with this attitude ever since Jews were accused of killing Christ.  I had a personal experience once in a small eastern Oregon town when I visited a church with a "friend," and the Preacher spoke, looking directly at me, of all the reasons Jews were bad, going on and on the whole time until I was able to get out of there, something I haven't ever forgotten.  It was a traumatic experience.  My "friend" saw nothing wrong, smiling through the whole experience, as I remember.

Because of Hitler's frenzy against Jews, I grew up hearing that we were not a race but a religion.  We were the same color as other white people.  Most of us had dark hair while a few others had lighter hair, even blonde on occasion.  Some even stood out with red hair, and a lot had curly hair. 

Since then, DNA has been invented, and I find that we have become an endogamous people, having married into each other's tribes over all these years.  I read where we may be 20th cousins to each other without knowing it.  We originally started with Abraham and Sarah, and this multiplied into Jacob and his 12 sons who were the fathers of 12 tribes, and we Jews are the descendants of the tribe of Judah with a few Benjamin and maybe Simon's tribes included in the mix.  

Our Cohen line has been found to be the man carrying J1 haplogroup.  Are we a race, then?  We're a race made up of several haplogroups, and have found that our females are descendants of 4 Jewish women. After all, Moses freed ALL THE SLAVES OF EGYPT, the 12 tribes and others who wanted to join them.  Who didn't want to be a freed slave?  They must have all left at the call. We're a race who believes in ONE G-d and laws governing our behavior toward our fellow man.What are our rules?  The Golden Rule; not to do things to people we wouldn't want done to us.    That's our religion.  We take responsibility for our actions and in a group plea to God, ask for forgiveness once a year on Yom Kippur.    

 "Masha Gessen, Russian-American journalist, born in the Soviet Union,  has claimed that American Jews are the only people in the world who believe that Jews are not a race.  She has stated, "It's lovely to think that being Jewish is a religious tradition, but you sort of have to have the luxury of the United States of America to be able to do that.  Elsewhere, it is actually whom you're born to.  

The Soviet Union's politics demanded that the people give up their religion so have done everything to wipe out any religion.  It's a country of atheists.  In the 1970s Jews were put in prison for learning Hebrew.  My Hebrew teacher, Sarah in Haifa, Israel,  told us about communicating with a man who would later  make aliyah to Israel, and  that she was teaching Hebrew to in her personal letters, hoping he wouldn't be caught. 

Gessen was listed as Jewish on her birth certificate, because she was born in the Soviet Union to parents who themselves were listed as Jewish on their birth certificates.  They felt they weren't religiously observant.  It was looked upon as a race. They were already becoming assimilated Jews as it was. 

That's what has happened to American Jews.  It's natural that Jews have wanted to be wanted, like, by their neighbors and peers.  Alan M. Dershowitz wrote his book, THE VANISHING AMERICAN JEW-in search of Jewish identity for the next century  in 1997.  

"During Einstein's era of 1879 to 1955, anti-Semitism was common in the USA and had its own cohesive force among Jews.  Jews were excluded from universities, clubs, gyms, and professions." Though we are now 2% of the population, far more were meeting the criteria of attending medical school but couldn't get in because of the quota system.                                 

Israel's Ethiopian Jewish population, descendants of the Queen of Sheba and her handmaidens when they visited Solomon.  I was in Safed when they arrived, living right across the street. They have suffered for their religion from the Christian Ethiopians, always being attacked.  

       A lawyer of Kenya, Africa, my friend who traveled from Africa to Israel every year to serve his Milueem month of army service after his 3 years and has finally moved his family to Israel and lives there full time.   Testing showed that he and others had the J1 cohen gene showing they were definitely Jewish which was his religious practice before the testing.   

The difference between Jews and Blacks was great but they were both treated  just as badly in the USA.  Jews came from an ancient Middle East where writing and reading were invented along with trading, and most Blacks came from undeveloped Africa who remained connected to their different religion, some of which had been converted to Islam.   Here we thought there were 3 lines of Jews, the Ashkenazi who after 70 CE's burning of Jerusalem wound up in Germany speaking Yiddish; the Sephardi of Spain who spoke Ladino and the Mizrachi of the Middle East.  Now we have found the 4th group of African Jews as well, both North Africa and Central Africa.                                   

Europe's Migrant Crisis  took many years for the League of Nations-era world to find places for the refugees of the 1930s and ’40s

Sometimes this anti-Semitism was the official policy of the US government, as typified by the refusal to accept larger numbers of European Jewish immigrants at the Evian conference on Jewish immigration from Nazi-occupied countries in 1938.  The first concerted effort to find homes for those displaced by Nazi aggression came in July of 1938, when 32 nations sent representatives to Evian, France, on the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Germany had just recently annexed Austria, and it was obvious to all involved that many thousands of people—primarily Jews—would soon need new homes, if they did not already have one. As TIME noted that month, the conference got off to a bad start: though the opening speeches were lofty, it took a full two days to elect a president of the conference, as each attendee feared that his name would be thus linked with what would likely be failed attempt to solve the problem.

 Or anti-Semitism showed up  by the refusal to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz in 1945 to prevent Jews from being transported to the death camp. Sometimes this anti-Semitism was part of everyday social contact, such as that described in the popular novel and subsequent move, GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT.  

Here, Gentile Philip and his son took on the role of Jews and suffered from anti-Semitic remarks with the little boy being called a "dirty Jew" by his schoolmates. They were of the same race as their peers, but seen as a religion, to them an unacceptable religion, not only different from theirs but had harmed their Son of a G-d himself.  This is how anti-Islamists see the difference between Jews and Muslims and how churches support Muslims but are against Jews. 

Just as the Greek Jews started assimilating in biblical days, so have American and other Jews of the world.  I'm so pleased to find pockets of orthodox Jews  keeping our religion.  Israel is doing just that, knowing who they are.  Religion is taught in their public schools.  They are living in the very places that are described and talked about in the "Old Testament", our Tanakh. This is why they must keep their 80% Jewish population to 20% others. 

                                    

 For a long time, Jews were told they were a religion, for it is a religion in contrast with Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. We were told emphatically by our parents that we were not a race, like Hitler was saying.  Now I'm finding everyone accepting that we are indeed a race.  I'll accept that we  are a people with the unique religion of Judaism and who is related to each other more often than not to some degree. Our religion also has standards of who we are.  We are Jewish if our mothers were Jewish.  If our mothers weren't born Jewish, they would have been converted to Judaism.  I certainly have an abundance of 4th and 5th cousins.     

Resource:

Book: Legacy-A Genetic History of the Jewish People by Harry Ostrer

https://time.com/4030159/evian-conference/