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)
“Women will not advance except by joining together in cooperative action.... Unlike other groups, women do not need to set affiliation and strength in opposition one against the other. We can readily integrate the two, search for more and better ways to use affiliation to enhance strength—and strength to enhance affiliation.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“In contrast with envy, which usually occurs between two people and is focused upon another person’s qualities or possessions, jealousy occurs when a third person becomes a threat to a dyad. Jealousy involves the loss or the impending loss of a relationship that one wants to hold onto, a relationship that is vital to personal fulfillment and claimed as one’s own.”
—Carol S. Becker (b. 1942)
“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)
“For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application—why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.”
—Howard Nemerov (1920–1991)
“All over France, in every city there stand cathedrals like this one, triumphant monuments of the past. They tower over the homes of our people like mighty guardians, keeping alive the invincible faith of the Christian. Every arch, every column, every statue is a carved leaf out of our history, a book in stone, glorifying the spirit of France.”
—Sonya Levien (1895–1960)