re: #30 CuriousLurker

Of course, I don’t have the final answers, but the topic is worth discussing so I hope you’ll forgive me a bit more verbosity ;)

While ethnicity is not 100% defined by shared ancestry (obviously), I don’t think there can be an ethnos without significant shared ancestry (statistically speaking; obviously, individual members can belong to an ethnos while having purely “outside” roots; but it’s more of an exception to the rule; also, obviously, members sharing ancestry can “fall away” from an ethnos, e.g. through full assimilation into some other ethnos). Ethnicity is thus a complex interplay between ancestry and culture/self-identification (as well as mutual acceptance). Thus it is understandably hard to define and analyze, and things can get pretty subjective.

Nevertheless, to the question of the Ethiopian Jews.
The example itself is more or less an outlier, and one can always find some outliers which “stretch” the rule. It’s an outlier because of when exactly the Ethiopian Jews became isolated from the main group, which influenced both the very different religious development throughout the centuries and the apparently high level of “mixing” with the non-Jewish Ethiopians. Indeed, the question of the “authenticity” of the Ethiopian Jews, of their Jewish ancestry used to be a controversial topic in Israel. However, that the question of ancestry arose at all, and was so important, underscores what I wrote above.

(Side note: when dealing with hard-to-define concepts, it is always more instructive to first compare not outliers but rather representative examples. In case of Jews it is, I think, crystal clear why e.g. Sephardim and Ashkenazim think of themselves as one people.)

From what I know, the latest analyses confirmed the descent of Ethiopian Jews from ancient Israelites (this need not be an exclusive descent). So, Ethiopian Jews and Polish Jews share ancestry and/or (with maybe some exceptions) at least believe that they share ancestry; they also think of themselves as one people. Bosnian Muslims and Ethiopian Muslims don’t share ancestry. I’m also not sure they think of themselves as one people in the same sense of the word as Jews do. Is the concept of Ummah similar enough?

If we were to assume that a) ancestry doesn’t matter after all, b) the Ummah concept does establish a sort of a Muslim “peoplehood”, then we can accept the existence of a Muslim people as such (not sure this has been done before). In such a case there can be a democratic, fully secular “Muslim state” in the same sense in which there can be a democratic, fully secular “Jewish state”.