Affiliation Claimed in Membership With The Jewish People
Until recently, there were many diverse Jewish communities scattered around the world. For the most part, the Jewish communities known to each other over the millennia maintained an at least nominal interaction with one another and together formed what could be seen as the world's wider Jewish community. The network served not only to maintain a certain degree of awareness of the happenings in the disparate communities, including most importantly different religious legal rulings (relating to areas such as marriage, polygamy, conversion, kashrut, etc.), but it consequently also served as a way to validate the status of Jewish membership of one another's communities. However, there were may other scattered communities which for centuries, even millennia, had lost all contact with this main body or network of world Jewry. Their claims as Jews, especially from the more recent "rediscovered" ones, are difficult to ascertain.
While many groups have been able to show their Jewish connection and membership, other groups have not yet done so. Some groups that have only recently been accepted as parts of lost tribes.
The following list compiles some of the groups whose altogether existence or re-emergence has either come to the knowledge of Jewish communities in the last hundred or so years, or whose existence was known but where no formal interaction existed (as limited as it sometimes may have been even within the network). They are divided into those whose claims have been confirmed, and those who have not yet been, and among these, those accepted as Jews and those that are not.
Read more about this topic: Groups Claiming Affiliation With Israelites
Famous quotes containing the words affiliation, claimed, membership, jewish and/or people:
“Men seem more bound to the wheel of success than women do. That women are trained to get satisfaction from affiliation rather than achievement has tended to keep them from great achievement. But it has also freed them from unreasonable expectations about the satisfactions that professional achievement brings.”
—Phyllis Rose (b. 1942)
“Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1948)
“The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)
“Jesus was a brilliant Jewish stand-up comedian, a phenomenal improvisor. His parables are great one-liners.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“In the capsule biography by which most of the people knew one another, I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it.... I sometimes believed what I said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert D’Or with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)