December: the best month for fruitcakes

[Quixote]

And how is someone "Jewish-born"? It's a religion!

Then please explain why a number of Jews seem to have to a genetic disease called Tay-Sachs? You trying to tell us that reading the Torah is contagious?

One factor seems to be that their ancestors were genetically isolated from the surrounding population. Tay-Sachs also occurs among Cajuns and Old Order Amish. A similar, but distinct mutation is found in Quebecois. Tay-Sachs does not occur in the Sephardic or Ethiopian jewish populations.

I assumed "Jewish-born" simply meant that his parents were Jewish, as when someone says, "he was born a Christian, but converted to Islam in college."

[The Observer]

And how is someone "Jewish-born"? It's a religion!

Then please explain why a number of Jews seem to have to a genetic disease called Tay-Sachs? You trying to tell us that reading the Torah is contagious?

One factor seems to be that their ancestors were genetically isolated from the surrounding population. Tay-Sachs also occurs among Cajuns and Old Order Amish. A similar, but distinct mutation is found in Quebecois. Tay-Sachs does not occur in the Sephardic or Ethiopian jewish populations.

I assumed "Jewish-born" simply meant that his parents were Jewish, as when someone says, "he was born a Christian, but converted to Islam in college."

My point is that being Jewish is not simply a matter of following Jewish beliefs, but that it is an ethnicity based on genetics; that people are born with genetic markers that would allow individuals to be identified as having Jewish progenitors.

My argument in no way was trying to imply that Tay-Sachs was limited to people of Jewish origin only.

[grixit]

Actually, it isn't that there is a jewish ethnicity, rather that there are ethnicities that are associated with Judaism. And in the US that's central and east european. But not all jews are of those ethnicities, and not all the people of those ethnicities are jews.