Ah someone mentioned ' catholic & jewish ' as religions.
Some, like mentioning features like the " hawk nose " seem to be under the impression the jewish peoples are a race.
Which is it - religion or race.................perhaps both ?
I never really knew.
Gizmo wrote the above.
Of course, Catholicism is a religion, people of any race or national background can partake of that religion and they do.
In the case of Judaism, things are different, very much different. The Jewish people started out as a "tribe" of people in a certain portion of the world inhabited by other tribes with similar racial and national backgrounds. The larger group of people, all tribes combined, tended to consist of what might be called a subdivision of a race, particularly a subdivision of the Causcasian race and that subdivision has become referred to as Semites, consisiting of people of Semitic origin.
Within Judaism, there were subdivisions as well, the Levites or Levi's, the Cohens and others. I am no expert on this. What distinguished the Judaic tribe from the others is their religiosity. The Judaic tribes, through one of their Patriarchs. Abraham, came to believe in just one God , Yahveh, as the source of the world and the universe for that matter; Non of the other tribes held this belief. That is what separated the tribes of Judea. the land on which the Jews dwelt, from the other tribes of similar racial characteristics, i.e. Semitic characteristics. At that point, what came to be known as the Jewish people separated out from their Semitic brethern.
Some parallels may be drawn with other tribal peoples, such as the tribes of the native American Indians. Those tribes appear to have originated from the far North portion of the Earth. You have the Laplanders in the Northern reaches of Sweden and Norway and you find people of similar racial features in Siberia and these tribes appear to have been able to migrate into North America on foot when the oceans of the far north froze over. The area called the Bering Straits in particular apparently froze over and enabled this migration. Those tribes did not divide on such a major issue as there being just one God or many Gods, thus even though those tribes had their differences, no separate religion or totally unique people ever spawned from those tribes the way the Jewish people broke off from other Semitic tribes.
So, getting back to the Jews, believing in Yawveh as their only God, really separated them from their fellow Semitic tribes. Physically, these tribes are of the same race. They are caucasions and yes, they do tend to have hooked noses as a common trait, they tend to have dark hair and dark eyes and their skin tends to be swarthy because those tribes first existed in the Arabian Peninsula and surrounding areas which contained large desert areas.
The Jewish people are unique genetically because they became Nomadic people when their country was totally destroyed by the Roman Empire in 70 AD. At that point their tribe was driven by force out of its homeland and literraly dispersed to all corners of the Earth. However, for a long time, the Jewish dispersion was limited primarily, but not exclusively, to Europe. The Jews initially arrived in Spain, the most powerful country in Western Europe for several centuries. Driven from there by the Spanish inquisition, they went to the Netherlands, a more free and welcoming society which was unique in that they gave the Jews more rights than other countries in Europe did. During this migratory phase, the Jewish people, former tribesmen in Judea, did not fit in with the Europeans. The racial characteristics between Semites and Teutonic type peoples of Europe was significant but much more significant than that were the religious differences. By the time the Jews were well ensconced in Europe, Western Europeans were for the most part all of the Catholic religion. Catholics were taught to convert non Catholics to Catholicism but the Jews were stubborn and resisted conversion.
The Jewish people became yet more unique by intermarrying with the non Jewish populations of Europe. This intermarriage produced mixed race off spring of a sort. True, both Jewish people and non Jewish Europeans were Caucasian but it was Semitic Caucasians intermarrying with Teutonic Caucasians. With these intermarriages going on for hundreds of years, the Semitic features of the Jews. being so much smaller in numbers than the Christians. began to be more like the Christian non Jews. Some Jews began to be born with blonde hair and blue eyes and some Jews were born with a straight or even turned up nose, etc. Meanwhile, back in Judea and Palestine, the Semitic people living there were not intermarrying with Europeans and they retained their original Semitic look. I believe that it is this displacement of the Jewish people from one area of the World to another which tends to confuse people about whether or not Judaism is a religion or a race of people. Clearly it is a religion basically to one tribe of Semitic people who were displaced to another part of the world and did a lot of intermarrying with the populations of the newer parts of the world which they migrated too.
Compounding the fact that Jews looked different and resisted being converted away from Judaism and into Chistianity, the New Testament tended to put blame on the Jewish people for the death of Jesus. This was a very caustic mix for the Jewish people to deal with. Here they were, a tribe who had lost their homeland centuries earlier. They wanted to become part of the new countries where they were living but they looked different and did not accept Jesus as the Messiah and their Bible promised them that some day they would return to their old homeland in Judea. This was a very difficult situation for the Jewish people to deal with. Of course, this spawned hatred towards them from a populace which was not that well educated in mediaval times. In fact, the Catholic Church of those times preferred to keep a monopoly on knowledge within the Church rather than attempt to educate the common people en masse. This state of affairs continued until the Rennaisance.
I could go on much longer with this treatise or mine but it is already too long as it is so I will stop now. I have addressed Gizmo's comments to the best of my ability with only a layman's view of the history of the Jewish people vis a vis the world of Judea and the later world of Western Europe.
I will say this. When people of my generation pass on, it will not signal an end to improper use of perjurative words which tend to slander various minority races but what it will do is further dumb down Western society so that the man or woman on the street will have no concept whatever of why certain things now exist the way they do. Due to lack of knowledge, people of that future society will miss assign various facets of language and societal tribes and their customs to superstitions or wrong causes based on opinions made without knowing any of the facts of a particular situation.
Lakey
PS - this post is also in part an answer to Panda Termint's post above. Some understanding is better than living in a fog. Living without understanding makes life insgnificant. Only with more understanding may any worthwhile significance be brought to bear on life.
