Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: mnottertail Much as we all like to bandy it about, Jews are not a race, any more than Muslims are, other than human. Sort of. Ashkenazi are used as a reference population in some studies, for instance. There has been very limited interbreeding, whereas the Arab world generally had a lot of slaves out of Africa that were interbred (about 30% of their genetic material is from that source). Jews, historically, did not mate much outside their own, and others kept apart from them. As a result, there are distinct lineages in terms of culture, language and genetics. The term race is pretty useless to begin with, and applying it to Jews would be questionable at best. It can unambiguously be used in reference to Sub-Saharan Africans, but not the rest of us, where it's more a question of clustering, with more arbitrary lines being drawn in the sand to delineate the distinctions made (e.g. for medical purposes). Health, al-Aswad.
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"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way. We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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