helln00 wrote:Thanks for the sauce
Dolan wrote:The scientific one.
No No, give an actual answer here, what science and academic fields are you are you actually basing your models and definitions on. Biology, sociology, genetics, historiography, ethnography, linguistics, economics....etc. Like what is your definition you are using for and ethnic group and how they form
Two elements would need to be present for a population to become an ethnic group:
- sharing a common language (doesn't have to be standardised across all regions, it could feature some local dialects, regionalisms, etc)
- referring to themselves using a demonym (could be either how they call themselves - endonym, or how they're called by others - exonym)
However, just like every natural process, ethnogeneses don't all happen following rigid patterns, lots of variations exist. The formation of the Jewish ethnic group is very peculiar, since they aggregated around a religion. They even linked ethnic identity either with being born from Jews or with adopting the religion, becoming a convert. This pathway to becoming Jewish through conversion has existed for probably more than two thousand years. To someone modern, it seems very unusual that adopting a certain religious belief could qualify you as Jewish. I can't think of another ethnogenesis in which religion played such a core role. This might explain why they were able to survive living in diasporas for almost two thousand years, after their ethnogenesis took place and were forced to leave the land where their people formed. It's interesting that one branch of Judaism that adopted Greek around the time when Jews were driven to exile eventually disappeared and became assimilated in the Greco-Roman world. It's as if what made Jewish identity survive was keeping the core around which the people was formed: the religion and the language.
Anyway, I don't have time to look into other cases to see how my definition holds, but it'd be interesting to check with cases of people who have a common identity, but never got their own country, like the Kurds. Does it make much of a difference if a people never get their own country, do they have to develop special survival tactics to avoid assimilation, etc. I know that some types of Balkan Romance speakers, like Aromanians, are on a trend toward seeing their language going extinct, probably because there's not much investment in an education system that uses their own language.
