[lsc]

>I’ve heard about converting to Judaism. If it is an ethnicity how can that be possible?

I am not qualified to offer an opinion on Judaism specifically, but people have been "converting" to different ethnicities for all of recorded history.

I personally have a Scottish last name; but that branch of my family is catholic, which is a little unusual, but not impossible. Tracing back the paperwork, my "Scottish' ancestor arrived in America on a boat that came from Ireland during the famous famine in the mid 1800s. Now... maybe it was a Scottish person who just happened to be living in Ireland... but it seems a lot more likely to me that it was an irish dude who looked around, saw the difference in how people were treated, and gave his landlord's name to the immigration agent. I'm imagining the guy running around new york hamming up a brogue James Doohan style. But, I mean, today? I get to claim I'm as Scottish-American as anyone else, and there's not a lot you can say otherwise.

But there are countless stories like that where a person integrates themselves into another ethnicity to the point where they are accepted and they (or their children) become indistinguishable from other members of that ethnicity.

This is one of those major problems of racialism; most people define ethnicity by "looks like X" which often doesn't really line up with, well, anything.

[pbhjpbhj]

Scots are a people group, Irish Scots are a thing. Indeed, my understanding is that Irish Scots invaded Gwynedd in N.Wales after the Roman departure. The Tudors -- the English Royal family, Henry VII & VIII -- hail from Gwynedd, so they're Welsh English Irish Scots (from Scandinavia before that I imagine?).

Anyway, lying and converting seem different. Assuming an identity as a Jew and being a Jew are surely different.

[lsc]

sure, but my point is, who decides what ethnicity you are? I mean, your average man on the street, when asked to identify ethnicity is still pretty much with Blumenbach; "what do you look like?"

Functionally, there is what ethnicity you say you are, and what ethnicity other people see you as.

I don't have a complete picture of my genealogy, and even if I did, even if I could say I was descended from some ur-scott and you could say the same of all of my other ancestors, you're still just pushing the problem back in time. People migrate. People have been migrating for as long as people have been people; You could, with enough work, figure out that some of my ancestors were in country X at time Y... but I don't think that is going to line up with your common definition of ethnicity.

If I think I'm ethnicity X and if most people perceive me as ethnicity X... well, then I very clearly am ethnicity X... regardless of what my great great grandparents may or may not have been.

It's more complex if I think I'm X but others perceive me as Y... but it's still all about perception, as far as I can tell.