Category talk:Lists of Jews

message: Why is this category needed since it's all covered by :Category:Jews ? IZAK 09:38, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Question

message: Jews are not a nationality. They are a religion. Why are Jews listed on List of nationalities? Why are Jews considered a nation when no other religion is given that status? --Islamist 15:04, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Because they're a nationality. Read Jew. Jayjg (talk) 22:55, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Judaism is a religion, Jews may be an ethnic group, but just because some Jews claim to see  themselves as a nation doesn't make it true. Some people claim a sense of their own nationhood as Assyrians, Phoenicians, Minoans, Cretans, Kurds, Elbans, Corsicans, Sicilians, etc. Doesn't make them a nation either. I am deleting Jews as a nation. --Islamist 17:38, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text: I agree. There is nothing consistent about having Lists of Jews categorized as a List of nationalities when no other religion is listed as a nationality. Jews are not special in that way and they shouldn't be allowed to impose their warped self-image on the rest of us in Wikipedia or the world at large. --Islamist 17:58, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Per consistency, will you also remove List of Palestinians from :Category:Lists of people by nationality? My point above wasn't to stake out territory on either side of this argument... just to push for consistency. Feco 18:01, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Palestinians are a nationality (represented by the Palestinian Authority and recognized by the UN, just as Israelis are a nationality. Muslims are not a nationality just as Jews are not a nationality. It isn't that hard to comprehend. Religions are not nationalities despite what some religious nationalist bigots pretend. --Islamist 23:28, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Jews practice many different faiths, and Judaism is practiced by all sorts of different "races". Judaism and Jews are not the same thing. Jayjg (talk) 06:14, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Judaism is a religion, not a nationality 

message: *(User:Islamist says that "there is no Jew nation just like there is no Christian nation, Muslim nation, or Hindu nation"  and so feels obliged to de-categorize :Category:Lists of Jews from :Category:Lists of people by nationality and start a revert war about it to boot.) My response is that: Yes, Judaism is a religion, true, BUT, the Jews in the modern State of Israel and all those in the Jewish diaspora today are not just those who believe in the faith, and practice, the religion of Judaism, they are also historically considered to be the descendants of the Hebrew Biblical patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jacob was re-named "Israel" (see Genesis 32:29  and confirmed by God at Genesis 35:10 ) , and from his (i.e Jacob=Israel) sons then come the Israelites who, eventually led by Moses, then receive the Ten Commandments and the Hebrew Bible outlining their beliefs and laws in the Written Law of the Torah (and later in history formalized within the Oral Law of the Talmud) and they then eventually establish the Kingdom of Israel, which was survived by the Kingdom of Judah, which continued as Judea, and even though it was destroyed by the Roman Empire, the Jews survived neverthless for two thousand years. Therefore, today's Jews continue as BOTH a nationality (or ethnicity or people) AND as followers of the Jewish religion, (i.e. the "ethnic" group of Jews -- today's "nationality" -- were believers in Judaism AT THE SAME TIME that they were also a Jewish PEOPLE. [Note, Judaism at the same time is not a religion that requires "exclusive ethnicity" because it does accept converts.]) This is unlike Christians, Moslems and Hindus who are PURELY members of a FAITH or religion alone and NOT an ethnic group or nationality at all, which does understandably seem to confuse many people, but if you look at the Timeline of Jewish history and look at the articles within the "Jew template" (See :Template:Jews and Judaism sidebar, it should help to kick-start your Jewish education... be patient though...Jeruaslem was not built in a day...and if you have questions don't revert articles for the heck of it, you'd be better off asking and learning rather than acting out of frustration. IZAK 06:12, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The religious mythology that leads some Jews to think of themselves as a nationality does not make it true. You will notice that every single nationality on this list is represented by a geographic area, usually a nation-state. The Jews are not represented by any geographic area because Judaism is a faith, a religion, practiced in many countries. Jews are not a race or nationality. They are a members of a religious group whose nationality is from many different countries as evidenced by Lists of Jews grouping Jews by the country of their nationality. Judaism itself is not a nationality.  --Islamist 15:48, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not religious mythology but millenia of shared history that make Jews, like all peoples, consider themselves a nationality, much like Kurds, Armenians, Druze, Parsis, etc. Jayjg (talk) 19:23, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The Kurds and Armenians are not religions, they are geographiclly defined ethnic groups. The Druze and Parsis are religious groups and believers are citizens of Lebanon, or Iran etc. they do not make up their own nations. Instead of just making bald assertions or promoting false "facts" without evidence, why not contribute some knowledge and references? The concept of a Jewish nationality is one harbored only by Zionists (Jewish nationalists) and Nazis (who saw Jews as a separatenationality, not German citizens). See these links  
 
Israel's policy of recognizing Jewish nationality over Israeli nationality is a form of religious bigotry that should not be replicated in Wikipedia becuase Wikipedia is not an Israeli encyclopedia. 
"...Israel's registration law... classifies Israel's citizens as either of "Jewish nationality," or of "Arab nationality." Israel has no Israeli nationality. Citizenship and nationality are not equivalent in Israel. 
The fourth basic law is Israel's status law, which gives Israel's citizens with "Jewish nationality" certain rights and privileges which are denied to Israel's citizens with "Arab nationality." Several of these rights and privileges have been enumerated in this year's and in prior years' reports. Chief among these rights is the ownership or use of the very land which was expropriated from the Palestinians. 
It is these laws which compelled the UN in 1975 to describe Zionism as a "form of racism and racial discrimination" in view of the 1965 UN resolution 2106, which defined racism as "any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference based on race, color, descent or national or ethnic origin." The denial of citizenship to Palestinians reported by the State Department is based on descent and is thus patently racist. The Department of State does a grave disservice to "advanced Western democracies" by suggesting that Israel, with its legalized racist structure, can be favorably compared to them."  --Islamist 04:03, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Please stop trying to turn Jewish ethnicity and Wikipedia into another Israeli-Palestinian battleground. Jayjg (talk) 04:05, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Please answer the question and stop trying to evade issues. --Islamist 04:08, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Jews are an ethnic group, like the other ones mentioned.   Moreover, ancient sources of Jewish thought, including the Talmud, Midrashim, Codes of Jewish law, medieval religious and philosophical works, all consider the Jews to be a nation; so too did the non-Jewish societied in which the Jews lived.  To claim that the concept of Jews as a nation is a Zionist invention is political revisionism, nothing more. Jayjg (talk) 15:00, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text:  Jews are among groups who belong to both (or either) a religion and ethnicity/nationality. This has nothing to do with the State of Israel. ←Humus sapiens←Talk 04:30, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Judaism and Jews: Both a religion/faith and a people/nation/ethnicity

message: I must admit: this list (and others of similar kind, too) is rather puzzling. I don't see the criteria for inclusion. For instance, V.I. Lenin is listed on the Russian Jews list (one grandparent)-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_Jews. Following the same line of thought, the list of, say, Germans or English, would swell to mammoth proportions: if one would to list just a few Americans of English descent (say, Abraham Lincoln or Robert E. Lee) on the list of English people-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_people, or Dwight Eisenhower & Chester Nimitz on the list of Germans- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germans -these (and others) wikipedia list pages would become undownloadable. Maybe Dante Alighieri should be listed as «German» or «Austrian» (Aliger is a «Teutonic» name)? So much for common sense.
I think that only people with some kind of Jewish identity should be listed (the Othodox Judaism criterion is especially weird when pushed to the limits of imagination- one could be termed "Jewish" if his grandmother's grand-grandmother was Jewish). In the current form this is, at least in part, a misinformation page. Who gives a hoot about some cloudy ancestor one actually doesn't care about ? Mir Harven 14:09, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Very, very shaky criteria

message: Unless notability and fame are self-explanatory, List of Jewish Nobel Prize Winners say, any list like these here requires "famous" or some other adjective. There is nothing inherently notable or encyclopedic about a list of Jews in the Military of Performing Arts. The list of Canadian Jews could, logically, have 300 000 names. Marskell 12:55, 9 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Rename