patsboston t1_j9etkof wrote
Reply to comment by Tripdoctor in George Santos — who is Catholic — insists he used to say he was 'Jew-ish' as a party joke. Now he says he's taken 4 DNA tests to prove his maternal grandparents are actually Jewish. by Grass8989
That’s not true. If you get a DNA test and you are Jewish, it would say Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jew.
tinydancer_inurhand t1_j9fq8ou wrote
But someone like me with 1.4% Ashkenazi isn’t going to claim being Jewish if raised Catholic and has no real connection to the ethnicity/religion.
mymindisgoo t1_j9farjl wrote
Depends on which company. I get Ashkenazi from my dad. My mom's sephardic but it's a whole smorgasbord of s Italy, north Africa, Levant, Cyprus etc.
Tripdoctor t1_j9ev172 wrote
Which also shows up in DNA tests for non-Jews/anyone living in those regions.
A couple thousand years ago, Judaism would have been absolutely tied to an ethnicity (more accurately, a nationality). But It’s so heterogeneous now that being Jewish does not equate to one’s race. You can be Jewish and be white. Or black.
I guess the important thing is to separate the ethnicity from the ideology. But that ethnicity has been so absorbed by literally every region they’ve inhabited that it’s not very accurate to say there’s a Jewish race. They’re of all races.
patsboston t1_j9ev80x wrote
That’s not true though. If you are simply Eastern European, it will say that you are Eastern European. If you are of Ashkenazi or Sephardic descent, it says that. When Jewish people moved to those regions, they were insular.
Tripdoctor t1_j9ezykt wrote
My main point is that being Jewish doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not white, or vice versa. As they are not mutually exclusive.
It’s one of the most heterogeneous groups there is.
mowotlarx t1_j9f4vue wrote
>It’s one of the most heterogeneous groups there is.
It's not. And if you think that you haven't met many Jewish people. You seem to be unaware that Ashkenazi Jews are not the only ethnic Jewish people that exist on the planet. Sephardic Jews were the first Jewish people to immigrate to New York City as a matter of fact. Mizrahi is also a distinctive group. They come from different regions of the globe and have different languages, often variations of Hebrew.
mymindisgoo t1_j9fav5n wrote
Then there's Indian jews, mountain jews, Chinese jews et al.
PatrickMaloney1 t1_j9f4qa5 wrote
Not in the same quantities though. You’re right that the makeup of Jewish people worldwide is changing, but broadly speaking, due to endogamy, our DNA results are still going to look different than the overall population, even in a hypothetical case like Santos where he is claiming to have two Jewish grandparents.
mowotlarx t1_j9f4otx wrote
>Which also shows up in DNA tests for non-Jews/anyone living in those regions.
No, it doesn't.
Being Ashkenazi or Sephardic or Mizrahi Jewish is a genetically distinctive ethnicity. We'd call it an ethno-religion. These are very distinct groups of people who are able to trace their DNA so easily because they were forced to migrate and were systematically killed keeping the community relatively small. It's not just a cute little DNA marker that will show up on anyone from Europe. The ethnicity hasn't been absorbed in every region. Jewish people aren't homogeneous.
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