Reply to Is the refernece "he/she looks very Jewish" benign or an insult?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
See the post above yours. That person absolutely disputes it. 
 [/quote]

I am the PP above.

I did not dispute it - I problematized it.

Because it is, you know, problematic.  The very term "Ethnic" as used today, tends to conflate culture with origin with "Race".

Is there an Ashkenazic culture? Sure there is.

Is there a group of people whose immediate ancestors come from Jewish communities that followed Ashkenazi religious rites, regardless of whether those immediate ancestors were religious or not?  Sure there are.

Is there evidence of some genetic distinctiveness such that you could take 100 people with such descent and tell them apart from 100  gentiles, or 100 Mizrahi Jews - sure   (but its not clear to me you could tell them apart from 100 jews descended from Ladino speaking Sephardic rite communities in Italy or the Balkans)

Ashkenazi as "ethnic" group is problematic BECAUSE it conflates this last with the two earlier (and also with ashkenazi religious practice) . And also because, like racial thinking in general, it identifies a genetic correlation across a population with membership in a "group".   But that gets into the whole issue of how narratives about such statistical correlations hide the genetic diversity within said "groups" and create not particularly useful narratives about them.  [/quote]

You realize I'm far from the only one recognizing that Ashkenazi Jews are an ethnic group, right? It's a generally accepted fact within the anthropology, geneticist, and sociology communities.

This study further speaks to the genetic distinctiveness of our community: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1336798/[/quote]

I searched that for "ethnic" and found zero uses of the word.

again, you fail to note that "Genetic distinctiveness" is not what is problematic, but the notion of "ethnic group" and how that is used to conflate unlike things.[/quote]

Did you not see the excerpt from Wikipedia that I posted (which cites expert studies and assessments)? If not, here it is again. I'll boldface the parts that speak to this group being a distinct ethnic group:

In an [b]ethnic [/b]sense, an Ashkenazi Jew is one whose ancestry can be traced to the Jews who settled in Central Europe. For roughly a thousand years, the Ashkenazim were a reproductively isolated population in Europe, despite living in many countries, with little inflow or outflow from migration, conversion, or intermarriage with other groups, including other Jews. Human geneticists have argued that genetic variations have been identified that show high frequencies among Ashkenazi Jews, but not in the general European population, be they for patrilineal markers (Y-chromosome haplotypes) and for matrilineal markers (mitotypes).[115] Since the middle of the 20th century, many Ashkenazi Jews have intermarried, both with members of other Jewish communities and with people of other nations and faiths.[116]

A 2006 study found Ashkenazi Jews to be a clear, homogeneous genetic subgroup. [b]Strikingly, regardless of the place of origin, Ashkenazi Jews can be grouped in the same genetic cohort – that is, regardless of whether an Ashkenazi Jew's ancestors came from Poland, Russia, Hungary, Lithuania, or any other place with a historical Jewish population, they belong to the same ethnic group.[/b] [b]The research demonstrates the endogamy of the Jewish population in Europe and lends further credence to the idea of Ashkenazi Jews as an ethnic group.[/b] Moreover, though intermarriage among Jews of Ashkenazi descent has become increasingly common, many Haredi Jews, particularly members of Hasidic or Hareidi sects, continue to marry exclusively fellow Ashkenazi Jews. This trend keeps Ashkenazi genes prevalent and also helps researchers further study the genes of Ashkenazi Jews with relative ease. It is noteworthy that these Haredi Jews often have extremely large families.[14]

Of course, culture and religiosity also binds Ashkenazi Jews, but ethnicity is one component that is not really in dispute. In the literature, ethnicity and genetic distinctiveness are intimately connected. I don't know why you continue to refuse to acknowledge this.[/quote]

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