2HousePlague

If you asked me the question, I'd say...

"Yes, yes, I think so."

My claims are...

1. A grandfather born in Russia, Jewish, and

2. A FEELING I have had all my life.



I'm from New York, I move my hands a lot, I get excited and my voice gets high.

I often remind people of Ben Stiller.

I admit, there are moments when I feel an INSUPERABLE difference between myself and legitimate Jews.

But, still, (and I can't explain it at all -- except through the below speculation), still, I WANT something in me to be acknowledged as Jewish by other people.

Here's my theory:

Judaism is, by most descriptions, a Religion.

It is an aspect of culture, passed via experience (nurture) and not by blood (nature).

But, is a Jew, REALLY like a Christian (for example)?

Another complicating consideration is that I was born and raised into a "Catholic" family. My dad's dad died when my dad was still young, and any PRACTICAL Judaism present in the lives of my father and his seven siblings died with him.

My dad (who lived in Colombia until he was 19), was, essentially, absorbed into the Catholic Colombian mainstream -- and so married a "Catholic" girl in New York.

They had me, I was baptized, and even went to Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic School in Corona, Queens.

But, when I got to high school, and met my first Jews, something sprang to life in me. I felt really understood, and the behaviors that I saw in my new Jewish friends reflected something I felt in myself.

To this day, I would say that my very BEST friend (with the exception of my wonderful 3rd wife) was a Jewish kid named Gil Fisherman I met in the 10th grade.

Gil lost his mind in his late 20's, and we lost touch.

But, after high school, and for the rest of my life since, I have moved in the world among people, in school, at work, in public, FEELING and BELIEVING a TRUTH of Judaism inside myself.

And so, the question before you is...

Am I Jew?

But, before you answer...

Let's run a hypothetical genetic experiment.

We begin with a population of *gentically homogeneous* individuals -- by which I mean, every genotype element expressible as some observable phenotype element is present at its mean value across the population.

That is the beginning point.

The second given is a mutative tendency across the population of 10% -- meaning that one in ten births (or, more precisely, one in ten fertilizations) results in a mutation that introduces a never-before-seen geno/pheno attribute into the population.

As with all mutations, those that occur in the expeiment have the capacity to resonate favorably with environment, and become advantages.

The third given is the presence of a cultural influence (based in ritual, idelogy and transferred history), which, in addition to cultivating a separateness of lifestyle (for the pervasivness and importance of those rituals, the intensity of that ideology and the vibrancy of that history), also results in a very low rate of "marrying-outside".

After, even a FEW generations -- much less thousands of generations -- wouldn't there come into evidence some GENETICALLY-DETERMINED attributes, which, for having been segregated within a reproductive pool defined by external culture over a long period of time, become EXCLUSIVELY ASSOCIATED with that external culture -- such that a person, like myself, who never went to Schul, or studied Hebrew or had a BarMitzvah, could be Jewish enough by BLOOD (whether or not his mom was Jewish) to both FEEL Jewish, and BE Jewish, on some essential level (nature) which the circumstances of his birth and life (nurture) could never suppress?

Thoughts?



j-

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tada!