what makes a Jew

["Eriberto P. Lozada Jr." <elozada@fas.harvard.edu>]

I'd like to make a correction on Pitt's discussion about what makes a Jew.

When it comes down to it, neither the ritual practice of Judaism nor Hebrew
defines who is and who is not a Jew.  According to Torah (or midrash,
Jewish codified custom that serves as a kind of record of legal precedent
-- I don't remember which), a Jew is a person whose mother was Jewish.
Among Jews, descent is calculated matrilineally.  Whether they practice
Judaism or not, such as Americans who say they are "culturally Jewish" and
don't speak a word of Hebrew, if their mother was Jewish, they're Jewish.

This is why among many Jews, the marriage of their daughter to a non-Jew is
of less concern than the marriage of their son to a non-Jew.  

I agree with Pitt, that what is key to Hakka identity is self-ascription --
ethnicity is a cultural reckoning of descent, according to anthropologists,
and that the viability of ethnicity starts with people's claim.  Lau
Chunfat from HK Polytechnic had an interesting paper on Hakka ethnicity and
dialect at the Hakka conference at the Academia Sinica, and I would
recommend it.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eriberto P. Lozada Jr.                 http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lozada
                 at Yonsei University, Korea for 1998
Department of Anthropology                 email: elozada@fas.harvard.edu
William James Hall 360                      tel (in Korea): 82-2-738-4781
Harvard University                              fax (in US): 617-496-8355
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA