The Phenomenon of Hijacking Ethnic Identity and Projecting “Fakeness” On Those Appropriated From
People who want to be the “Children of Israel” are usually those first to call real Jews “fake Jews.”
You can argue with them till you are blue in the face.
You can provide them historical and archeological proof, as well as – obviously – anthropological.
Nothing you do or say will change them.
Like all people narcissistically focused on themselves, they project their own insecurities and failings in personal identity on those they see who have knowledge and confidence in those same things.
As they saying goes: i am not what you say i am, you are what you say i am.
This isn’t just limited to Jewish stuff, my advisor and the woman who interviewed me for my PhD program was a well known Native American scholar (may her legacy be for a blessing) and i discussed at length her chairing of a dissertation on my father’s father’s Anigilohi Cherokee Melungeon community (another student’s dissertation who was also Melungeon). She had noted the irony in a class with me and the student doing that dissertation, that another student who was Latino who commented on spurious claims of Cherokee ancestry in America, was also making the same claims of their own even more distant Native ancestry.
My professor noted my own history and had me speak about the community then she went on about her own anthropological and historical research into it. She commented that “Just like you” Latinos, Melungeons are a tri-racial isolate and the documentation of Native identity in Melungeon communities is not only in the Dawes Roll, but predates it in centuries of case law where white Americans used the courts to rob land from Melungeon “White Indian Negros” who were considered like any other Native mixed community: not able to be legally enslaved – though acknowledged as mixed with Africans distantly as well in said case law – but also not afforded rights of white people. This gave rise to the first use of the term “Free Persons of Color” in American legal parlance.
Because of the humiliation of this calm, and honestly kind response from the scholar, the student apologized and explained they just didn’t know.
Face to face it is harder to hide from documentation and citation. Online juvenile personalities run wild and reject and deny any historical facts that do not conform to their undereducated assumptions about how the world and communities are.
From Trump and the Alt-Right calling documentation they disagree with “Fake News” to Black Hebrew Israelites calling actual Jews “fake Jews”, someone who projects this idea of fakeness upon others is usually very insecure about their own identity and origins.
As they saying goes: i am not what you say i am, you are what you say i am.