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 jewish people, affiliation, claimed, membership, jewish and/or people:
“I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)
“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)
“To be claimed as good, though in an improper style, is at least better than being rejected as no good at all.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“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)
“I think the Messianic concept, which is the Jewish offering to mankind, is a great victory. What does it mean? It means that history has a sense, a meaning, a direction; it goes somewhere, and necessarily in a good direction—the Messiah.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)
“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)