You are definitely right, I have a lot of research to do. My usual process is to develop the character before identifying their background, but in this case there are so many particulars (and so many hypotheticals) that it may be better to work in the opposite direction.
The way I'm seeing it now, the char is an outsider within the community they are currently attached to. They eventually wind up leaving a young age. I started out researching Hebrew-language names (as opposed to Biblical and/or Spanish/Portuguese names) because my initial conception was that of a rootless child embedded in a Hebrew-speaking community. I figured that they'd be named in a fairly noncommittal fashion.
Is this at all plausible? Assuming that this setting lacks large, cohesive groups of Diaspora Jews, would it make sense for a person of this description to lock on to an Israeli Jewish community?
In response to your last point: by "identifiable quarter," I assume you mean a segregated district? The setting has very little in the way of centralized government, so I picture it more as a patchwork and less of a society divided into majorities and minorities. Overarching power structures are much less pervasive than they are in the present day, so racial politics wouldn't look exactly the same. Unless that's not what you meant? I'm happy to be corrected.
Regardless, thanks go out again for your time, and apologies if my lack of knowledge on basic concepts is causing frustration. I've saved the specifics of your responses so I know what to look into.
Most present-day (and past ~100yr or so) Sepharadi Jews are not culturally Hispanic in a way that would come with Spanish/Portuguese names, or even language proficiency. So... yeah. For a Spanish/Portuguese name you want a South American Jew, and they are largely three-generation-later Pole (Ashkenazi) Jews. It's diasporas within diasporas.
Okay, so the city isn't actually broken down into quarters, though high-concentration areas may occur. (And will likely occur if you have a Jewish community, because some of them will be observant or will take up some observance to help them feel Jewish, and you pretty much need to live close for things like going to the mikve or walking to the synagogue on a Saturday and I have not yet said a word about eruv - you have an active Jewish community, they will tend to mostly live in one or more walking-distance clusters. i.e. each cluster is walking-distance within itself, but clusters may not be walking-distance from each other.)
The history of Jews living in non-Jew-dominated goes back 2,000 years so, y'know: if your world's history only breaks apart in the last one-two hundred years, a lot of the underlying suspicion will be the same. Yes, it's possible your world will set off fewer than those triggers, but you may want to know what triggers are there; being a Jewish person or sub-community in a community that so much as doesn't run on the Jewish calendar can be incredibly hostile without anyone ever meaning it to be hostile. All you need is a stupid neighbour's kid on a bike riding through the wrong neighbourhood on Atonement Day. (<- stuff that causes riots in Israel, no really.)
Which is all stuff you don't have to focus on or directly illustrate, but if you're going to have any kind of a Jewish community, you probably want to be able to think about the way that community will relate to the society around it and the history that plays into that - because a person raised in that community will be affected by that, so. (Maybe they've been affected by it by being exasperated with the community's attitudes, but that's something, too; or maybe they're conscientiously exasperated but some of that baseline they-will-kill-us is there as a basic outlook, even if with a different "they" and "us".)
Also, have you heard of "Two Jews, three opinions? You'd better believe it. Also note that this is sometimes quoted with minyanim (quorom; the minimal number of adult men necessary for prayer) or synagogues used instead of opinions, which means that if you have two Jews they will still manage to break down into at least three communities, with all the sibling squabbles ever. So if you have more than a handful of Jewish families, you can assume there is more than one community or that the community is split and squabbling somehow. And that is part of the context that a person raised in any of those communities will be raised on. And it also means that the question is why this baby/child ended up with this sub-community and not the other. (And whether there is any history there.)
I'm also... not sure how I feel about the idea of a child raised by a community, without an identifiable parent. With an Israeli-origin group in particular, it's difficult for me to imagine that. Israelis are highly familial; and for all that we're famous for independent thinking, we're pretty damn communitarian. Unless the community went Kibbutz and there is a Children's Home (which is a possibility! But then you will need to research that and explain how it happened and why is it still a viable model, because the Children's Homes proved nonviable), then there will be identifiable parents. For Diaspora groups, you will probably need to research that particular group and their history and ambient culture.
In the above I'm assuming that this person arrived at your city as a baby/small child. If they arrive as a teen, things change. Specifically, an Israeli community is likely to be the most ethnically varied. Which, if the other Jewish communities are primarily Ashkenazi, or the kind of Mizrachi that true Sepharadi tend to look down at, then your character might choose to align with the Israeli community, and then we get the slight alienation, where it's like putting up with a cousin that you love and won't abandon, but who you also don't really get. This is also where the split-point from our world becomes really important, and you'll have to research the relationships and the history of the relationships between ethnic subgroups among Israeli Jews because whoa, complicated and highly dynamic and thorny.
And, well, the big question: what did you want a Sepharadi Jew to begin with? What was it that made you think this will be a good fit for what you want to do with your story?
As I mentioned above, I usually figure out the character before I figure out their background, and a huge part of this MC's story is their attempt to reconcile individual and collective identity. They are living in an unstable and almost entirely isolated society. Acceptance by a community and adherence to its cultural/religious norms are vastly important factors in survival, and the MC, as a disenfranchised individual, is aware of this. Part of it is their gender identity, part of it is their attitude toward religion, and part of it is their history as a person who has been self-sufficient from a very young age.
I am, admittedly, writing this from a position of personal interest. My experience is that of a person of color growing up in a very tight-knit and very religiously conservative immigrant community. It is comparable in some ways, not so much in others. If nothing else, I do understand triggers, infighting, and the kind of "them vs. us" mentality that you've described.
I decided to research Jewish communities for two main reasons:
1. Because it would make sense for them to exist in the setting, given the geographical and historical time frame. 2. Because-in most basic, most simplified terms-Judaism has a lot of overlap between nationality, ethnicity, religion, and culture. I thought that it would be a good fit for the type of personal narrative that I wanted to tell.
Like I said in my original post, I'm not set on the Sephardi alignment. But it did seem to make the most sense given the character's language proficiencies and ethnic background.
Secondly: I was thinking more along the lines of a street child/local vagrant than one that was being actively communally raised, but I'm going to guess that would also not fly in a group with very deeply instilled familial values. Nonetheless, I will look up Kibbutz communities and see what I can find on them.
Thank you again for your patience and help; all of this is proving invaluable. If you have any recs as far as books or resources, I'll add them to my list.
a huge part of this MC's story is their attempt to reconcile individual and collective identity. They are living in an unstable and almost entirely isolated society. Acceptance by a community and adherence to its cultural/religious norms are vastly important factors in survival, and the MC, as a disenfranchised individual, is aware of this.
Oh, yes, a Jewish community will give you this in spades. Something that may be of interest to you here - and which really highlights this - is that the point of many of the mitzvot is to distinguish Jewish persons from goyim and to make it difficult to live together: Kashrut (no pork, seafood or meat/dairy combos), she'atnez (no weaving together of cotton and wool), and more. It really, really shows in the common joke that Jewish persons make aliya (literally "ascend", immigrate to Israel) so that they can be "lazy Jews" in the country where the Shabbat is law and Jewish Holy Days are state holidays.
You get fantastic variance in that there are so many ways to be Jewish, so many different kinds of communities. Somewhere there is a kind of a Jewish community that will have the profile ideal for your story, or you might be able to make up a believable one.
Judaism has a lot of overlap between nationality, ethnicity, religion, and culture.
Oh god here it gets complicated - but complicated is Interesting, and you actively want this complexity, so great.
Judaism is understood as a religion, an ethnicity and a nationality. These facets of this identity are not identical and do not always overlap. For example, Jewish persons will also have an ethnic identity based on where their families have historically lived. For example, I'm Ashkenazi, and more specifically a "yeke" - my family two generations back is primarily from German-speaking countries. Within the context of a Jewish community, I'm of a different ethnicity of someone who's family is from Tunisia, or Iraq - or someone whose family has stuck in out in J-m all these years.
It makes life and language Complicated when Israel (a ~80% majority Jewish state) tries to deal with issues of ethnicity-based discrimination. Any other country would call it racism, but we're all Jewish here, and that makes it difficult to talk about.
And as much as ethnicity is a multi-diasporic Jewish community is ugly, nationality is uglier. Traditionally, Jews have been suspect of being "bad citizens" of their host countries (with which they identified as strongly as any other citizen); this form of antisemitism is still common today. (Interestingly, Jewish communities from Muslim countries took less of this shit; this is more particular to historically Christian background, e.g. Europe and North America.) It makes Jewish person and Jewish communities from these countries... leery and wary of inquiries into their national identity and loyalties. (This is unhelped by real-life cases like Jonathan Pollard and, more recently, Ben Zygier.)
In Israel, this gets ugly in a different way. Israel has some ~22% minority of Arab persons (of whom the vast, vast majority are Muslim). There's a tendency to conflate "Israeli" and "Jewish" as labels of nationality; this is exactly as ugly as you think it is for Israeli Arabs. (Many of whom identify as Israeli Palestinians. Yeah. Note: those are not the Palestinians of the Bank or the Strip, who are not Israeli nationals.) To make matters worse, "Arab" is a label of both ethnicity and nationality (never call a Turk or an Iranian "Arab", just don't) - and it's often conflated with religion: Being an Arab Christian sucks.
So when you have, say, an Israeli community and at least one diasporic community, and probably also Jewish persons choosing to live with other communities (e.g. Canadian Jews living with the Canadians, not with the US East Coast Jews), you get the Israelis and the Diaspora people arguing about who is a Real Jew, you get the Assimilated Jews (<-"assimilated" is a strong insult, use with care) blaming everyone else of making it difficult for them to be Just People. More nuance depends on the particular communities and their history - and I haven't yet said a word about the epic, epic fights of various observance-level communities. (See: the flack that the Reform people catch - and note that they catch different flack from same-nationality Orthodox and from Israelis of all observance levels. Israeli Seculars are still liable to think that Reforms are not Real Jews, which the Reforms are justifiably pissed off about.)
...and I haven't said a word of atheist Jews. And Buddhist Jews. (All it takes is one Buddhist Jew and you will have inter- and intra-community arguments. Atheist Jews are more likely to fly under the radar if they don't deliberately start fights.)
I was thinking more along the lines of a street child/local vagrant than one that was being actively communally raised, but I'm going to guess that would also not fly in a group with very deeply instilled familial values. Nonetheless, I will look up Kibbutz communities and see what I can find on them.
Possible, but not likely, and would require explanations - i.e. what's wrong with this community that they can't take in a child, since this will totally be perceived as a failure of responsibility by a healthy community. (Mutual responsibility, aarvut: biiiig deal.) Kibbutzim are pretty neat - there's a communitarian form of living that was Israeli elite for several decades or a hundred years or so. Traditionally agrarian, but urban kibbutzim exist. Israeli communities would be more likely to default to a kibbutz-like mode of living, but Diaspora groups might do it as well.
I'm afraid I'm not much good for English-language reading material; a lot of my knowledge is lived, or in my native tongue. But if LJ ever stops being a comfortable medium for whatever reason, you can totally email me. I love working on this stuff with people, seriously.
Sorry for the delay in response-been a bit ill these past few days.
You basically said in much more eloquent words what I was trying to get across. That there are a lot of ways to be Jewish. That there are many facets, all of which differ from person to person and all of which interact in different ways. So I'm certainly seeking out complexity, because complexity lends itself to flexibility, and I'm writing a story first and foremost.
I'm all for accurate and respectful portrayals (I can see that I'm going to need to do massive amounts of research before I can even narrow down the kinds of questions I want to ask), but I can't claim the right to represent any collective experience in my work, or anything larger than the journey of one person. For me, I think, it is only possible to reflect the experience of an individual; not that of any given group. Even with demographics that I am a part of, I have never met anyone who relates to their identity (cultural, religious, racial, sexual) in exactly the same way I do.
I think I'm going to start out researching kibbutzim, as a concrete beginning point, and maybe also look into other types of Jewish communities. Hopefully from there I'll be able to get some history down, figure out whether an Israeli or Diaspora group would make more sense, and then start looking into differences in practice between different subgroups, as well as the relationships between them.
All of this has been incredibly educational. I'll definitely take you up on your offer of e-mail if things get kind of gnarly for Livejournal. But even so, I can't thank you and the other two respondents in this thread enough for all your help.
everything hagar_972 said, But very important to note: *all* these sub-communities will band together against any and all forces from outside trying to interfere with one of them. And if at least one of the sub-communities is Israeli you'll get pushback(I think that's the term? boundary pushing of all sorts, and really aggressive reactions to pressures from outside) like you don't believe: Israelis are almost clannish in their outlook, outsiders are suspect by default, and rules are considered a polite recommendation, especially if an outsider is considered a threat to the community.
Also second the part about no identifiable parent. Unless there are Children's House style arrangements then the more likely script is either a family adopting the child or if there is a specific orphan's home of the community then zie ending up there. Jewish culture is hugely familial, and someone without parents is someone people will pity and will be considered very ill treated by fate
Thank you, that's very useful to know. Is the emphasis on family more pronounced in Israeli groups than in others? And if the parents couldn't be identified, would the character be categorized as Jewish in the first place?
If we're more familial, it's mostly via not being embedded in a larger, less-familial culture. (North America again. US Jews will be more familial than many US non-Jews - and often less familial and familiar than Israeli Jews.) But this is a generalization.
If parents cannot be identified, it... depends. If the child showed up old enough to speak and with Jewish markers, zie'll be assumed Jewish and taken in, though some giyur may be necessary. (Depending on the particular community.) If it was a flat-out baby... with a male, you at least have the brit as some indication, though Muslims do it too. With a female, goooood luck, and it's a much bigger deal, because Judaism is matrilineal. (Again, depending on community! In recent years, some North American communities decided to accept paternal lines. See: Law of Return. It's messing Israel up, a lot.) Some measure of giyur will definitely be necessary, but giyur of a baby is much easier than an adult and is pretty much being brought into the brit if male, and being raised by a Jewish family. This can potentially raise the sort of identity questions you want to get at, in which case research giyur (conversion to Judaism).
Also, some things you might want to get at with regards to observance level is that the family who can and want to take the baby in might not be observant enough that the people who are community gatekeepers feel comfortable allowing them to raise zie without having them giving an obligation that they will do some specific things. Please note that the future adoptive parents will be as insulted about this as you can imagine, if you decide to go that way.
Another variation is if they are quietly secular (i.e. outwardly doing everything right, but secular/atheist at home) people might not know it but they will be watched more closely by the community once they become adoptive parents. With your own child you are assumed competent, with a child the community entrusted you with, less so.
Also the issue that if the child is born to a Jewish mother, that child is Jewish, period, and nothing will ever change that. (Even a person declared meshumad, apostate - which you pretty much need to become a priest of another religion to earn - is still Jewish.) But when the child is of goy or dubious parentage, that's when people get fidgety. (And you know we're extra bad about this here, because of the way Israel mixes observance-as-state-law with a secular Israeli-Jewish conflation.)
Which sucks if you're the person whose giyur is constantly called into question, but may be pretty neat if you're an author who wants to poke at this kind of a problem.
The way I'm seeing it now, the char is an outsider within the community they are currently attached to. They eventually wind up leaving a young age. I started out researching Hebrew-language names (as opposed to Biblical and/or Spanish/Portuguese names) because my initial conception was that of a rootless child embedded in a Hebrew-speaking community. I figured that they'd be named in a fairly noncommittal fashion.
Is this at all plausible? Assuming that this setting lacks large, cohesive groups of Diaspora Jews, would it make sense for a person of this description to lock on to an Israeli Jewish community?
In response to your last point: by "identifiable quarter," I assume you mean a segregated district? The setting has very little in the way of centralized government, so I picture it more as a patchwork and less of a society divided into majorities and minorities. Overarching power structures are much less pervasive than they are in the present day, so racial politics wouldn't look exactly the same. Unless that's not what you meant? I'm happy to be corrected.
Regardless, thanks go out again for your time, and apologies if my lack of knowledge on basic concepts is causing frustration. I've saved the specifics of your responses so I know what to look into.
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Most present-day (and past ~100yr or so) Sepharadi Jews are not culturally Hispanic in a way that would come with Spanish/Portuguese names, or even language proficiency. So... yeah. For a Spanish/Portuguese name you want a South American Jew, and they are largely three-generation-later Pole (Ashkenazi) Jews. It's diasporas within diasporas.
Okay, so the city isn't actually broken down into quarters, though high-concentration areas may occur. (And will likely occur if you have a Jewish community, because some of them will be observant or will take up some observance to help them feel Jewish, and you pretty much need to live close for things like going to the mikve or walking to the synagogue on a Saturday and I have not yet said a word about eruv - you have an active Jewish community, they will tend to mostly live in one or more walking-distance clusters. i.e. each cluster is walking-distance within itself, but clusters may not be walking-distance from each other.)
The history of Jews living in non-Jew-dominated goes back 2,000 years so, y'know: if your world's history only breaks apart in the last one-two hundred years, a lot of the underlying suspicion will be the same. Yes, it's possible your world will set off fewer than those triggers, but you may want to know what triggers are there; being a Jewish person or sub-community in a community that so much as doesn't run on the Jewish calendar can be incredibly hostile without anyone ever meaning it to be hostile. All you need is a stupid neighbour's kid on a bike riding through the wrong neighbourhood on Atonement Day. (<- stuff that causes riots in Israel, no really.)
Which is all stuff you don't have to focus on or directly illustrate, but if you're going to have any kind of a Jewish community, you probably want to be able to think about the way that community will relate to the society around it and the history that plays into that - because a person raised in that community will be affected by that, so. (Maybe they've been affected by it by being exasperated with the community's attitudes, but that's something, too; or maybe they're conscientiously exasperated but some of that baseline they-will-kill-us is there as a basic outlook, even if with a different "they" and "us".)
Also, have you heard of "Two Jews, three opinions? You'd better believe it. Also note that this is sometimes quoted with minyanim (quorom; the minimal number of adult men necessary for prayer) or synagogues used instead of opinions, which means that if you have two Jews they will still manage to break down into at least three communities, with all the sibling squabbles ever. So if you have more than a handful of Jewish families, you can assume there is more than one community or that the community is split and squabbling somehow. And that is part of the context that a person raised in any of those communities will be raised on. And it also means that the question is why this baby/child ended up with this sub-community and not the other. (And whether there is any history there.)
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I'm also... not sure how I feel about the idea of a child raised by a community, without an identifiable parent. With an Israeli-origin group in particular, it's difficult for me to imagine that. Israelis are highly familial; and for all that we're famous for independent thinking, we're pretty damn communitarian. Unless the community went Kibbutz and there is a Children's Home (which is a possibility! But then you will need to research that and explain how it happened and why is it still a viable model, because the Children's Homes proved nonviable), then there will be identifiable parents. For Diaspora groups, you will probably need to research that particular group and their history and ambient culture.
In the above I'm assuming that this person arrived at your city as a baby/small child. If they arrive as a teen, things change. Specifically, an Israeli community is likely to be the most ethnically varied. Which, if the other Jewish communities are primarily Ashkenazi, or the kind of Mizrachi that true Sepharadi tend to look down at, then your character might choose to align with the Israeli community, and then we get the slight alienation, where it's like putting up with a cousin that you love and won't abandon, but who you also don't really get. This is also where the split-point from our world becomes really important, and you'll have to research the relationships and the history of the relationships between ethnic subgroups among Israeli Jews because whoa, complicated and highly dynamic and thorny.
And, well, the big question: what did you want a Sepharadi Jew to begin with? What was it that made you think this will be a good fit for what you want to do with your story?
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As I mentioned above, I usually figure out the character before I figure out their background, and a huge part of this MC's story is their attempt to reconcile individual and collective identity. They are living in an unstable and almost entirely isolated society. Acceptance by a community and adherence to its cultural/religious norms are vastly important factors in survival, and the MC, as a disenfranchised individual, is aware of this. Part of it is their gender identity, part of it is their attitude toward religion, and part of it is their history as a person who has been self-sufficient from a very young age.
I am, admittedly, writing this from a position of personal interest. My experience is that of a person of color growing up in a very tight-knit and very religiously conservative immigrant community. It is comparable in some ways, not so much in others. If nothing else, I do understand triggers, infighting, and the kind of "them vs. us" mentality that you've described.
I decided to research Jewish communities for two main reasons:
1. Because it would make sense for them to exist in the setting, given the geographical and historical time frame.
2. Because-in most basic, most simplified terms-Judaism has a lot of overlap between nationality, ethnicity, religion, and culture. I thought that it would be a good fit for the type of personal narrative that I wanted to tell.
Like I said in my original post, I'm not set on the Sephardi alignment. But it did seem to make the most sense given the character's language proficiencies and ethnic background.
Secondly: I was thinking more along the lines of a street child/local vagrant than one that was being actively communally raised, but I'm going to guess that would also not fly in a group with very deeply instilled familial values. Nonetheless, I will look up Kibbutz communities and see what I can find on them.
Thank you again for your patience and help; all of this is proving invaluable. If you have any recs as far as books or resources, I'll add them to my list.
Reply
a huge part of this MC's story is their attempt to reconcile individual and collective identity. They are living in an unstable and almost entirely isolated society. Acceptance by a community and adherence to its cultural/religious norms are vastly important factors in survival, and the MC, as a disenfranchised individual, is aware of this.
Oh, yes, a Jewish community will give you this in spades. Something that may be of interest to you here - and which really highlights this - is that the point of many of the mitzvot is to distinguish Jewish persons from goyim and to make it difficult to live together: Kashrut (no pork, seafood or meat/dairy combos), she'atnez (no weaving together of cotton and wool), and more. It really, really shows in the common joke that Jewish persons make aliya (literally "ascend", immigrate to Israel) so that they can be "lazy Jews" in the country where the Shabbat is law and Jewish Holy Days are state holidays.
You get fantastic variance in that there are so many ways to be Jewish, so many different kinds of communities. Somewhere there is a kind of a Jewish community that will have the profile ideal for your story, or you might be able to make up a believable one.
Reply
Judaism has a lot of overlap between nationality, ethnicity, religion, and culture.
Oh god here it gets complicated - but complicated is Interesting, and you actively want this complexity, so great.
Judaism is understood as a religion, an ethnicity and a nationality. These facets of this identity are not identical and do not always overlap. For example, Jewish persons will also have an ethnic identity based on where their families have historically lived. For example, I'm Ashkenazi, and more specifically a "yeke" - my family two generations back is primarily from German-speaking countries. Within the context of a Jewish community, I'm of a different ethnicity of someone who's family is from Tunisia, or Iraq - or someone whose family has stuck in out in J-m all these years.
It makes life and language Complicated when Israel (a ~80% majority Jewish state) tries to deal with issues of ethnicity-based discrimination. Any other country would call it racism, but we're all Jewish here, and that makes it difficult to talk about.
And as much as ethnicity is a multi-diasporic Jewish community is ugly, nationality is uglier. Traditionally, Jews have been suspect of being "bad citizens" of their host countries (with which they identified as strongly as any other citizen); this form of antisemitism is still common today. (Interestingly, Jewish communities from Muslim countries took less of this shit; this is more particular to historically Christian background, e.g. Europe and North America.) It makes Jewish person and Jewish communities from these countries... leery and wary of inquiries into their national identity and loyalties. (This is unhelped by real-life cases like Jonathan Pollard and, more recently, Ben Zygier.)
In Israel, this gets ugly in a different way. Israel has some ~22% minority of Arab persons (of whom the vast, vast majority are Muslim). There's a tendency to conflate "Israeli" and "Jewish" as labels of nationality; this is exactly as ugly as you think it is for Israeli Arabs. (Many of whom identify as Israeli Palestinians. Yeah. Note: those are not the Palestinians of the Bank or the Strip, who are not Israeli nationals.) To make matters worse, "Arab" is a label of both ethnicity and nationality (never call a Turk or an Iranian "Arab", just don't) - and it's often conflated with religion: Being an Arab Christian sucks.
So when you have, say, an Israeli community and at least one diasporic community, and probably also Jewish persons choosing to live with other communities (e.g. Canadian Jews living with the Canadians, not with the US East Coast Jews), you get the Israelis and the Diaspora people arguing about who is a Real Jew, you get the Assimilated Jews (<-"assimilated" is a strong insult, use with care) blaming everyone else of making it difficult for them to be Just People. More nuance depends on the particular communities and their history - and I haven't yet said a word about the epic, epic fights of various observance-level communities. (See: the flack that the Reform people catch - and note that they catch different flack from same-nationality Orthodox and from Israelis of all observance levels. Israeli Seculars are still liable to think that Reforms are not Real Jews, which the Reforms are justifiably pissed off about.)
...and I haven't said a word of atheist Jews. And Buddhist Jews. (All it takes is one Buddhist Jew and you will have inter- and intra-community arguments. Atheist Jews are more likely to fly under the radar if they don't deliberately start fights.)
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I was thinking more along the lines of a street child/local vagrant than one that was being actively communally raised, but I'm going to guess that would also not fly in a group with very deeply instilled familial values. Nonetheless, I will look up Kibbutz communities and see what I can find on them.
Possible, but not likely, and would require explanations - i.e. what's wrong with this community that they can't take in a child, since this will totally be perceived as a failure of responsibility by a healthy community. (Mutual responsibility, aarvut: biiiig deal.) Kibbutzim are pretty neat - there's a communitarian form of living that was Israeli elite for several decades or a hundred years or so. Traditionally agrarian, but urban kibbutzim exist. Israeli communities would be more likely to default to a kibbutz-like mode of living, but Diaspora groups might do it as well.
I'm afraid I'm not much good for English-language reading material; a lot of my knowledge is lived, or in my native tongue. But if LJ ever stops being a comfortable medium for whatever reason, you can totally email me. I love working on this stuff with people, seriously.
Reply
You basically said in much more eloquent words what I was trying to get across. That there are a lot of ways to be Jewish. That there are many facets, all of which differ from person to person and all of which interact in different ways. So I'm certainly seeking out complexity, because complexity lends itself to flexibility, and I'm writing a story first and foremost.
I'm all for accurate and respectful portrayals (I can see that I'm going to need to do massive amounts of research before I can even narrow down the kinds of questions I want to ask), but I can't claim the right to represent any collective experience in my work, or anything larger than the journey of one person. For me, I think, it is only possible to reflect the experience of an individual; not that of any given group. Even with demographics that I am a part of, I have never met anyone who relates to their identity (cultural, religious, racial, sexual) in exactly the same way I do.
I think I'm going to start out researching kibbutzim, as a concrete beginning point, and maybe also look into other types of Jewish communities. Hopefully from there I'll be able to get some history down, figure out whether an Israeli or Diaspora group would make more sense, and then start looking into differences in practice between different subgroups, as well as the relationships between them.
All of this has been incredibly educational. I'll definitely take you up on your offer of e-mail if things get kind of gnarly for Livejournal. But even so, I can't thank you and the other two respondents in this thread enough for all your help.
Reply
Also second the part about no identifiable parent. Unless there are Children's House style arrangements then the more likely script is either a family adopting the child or if there is a specific orphan's home of the community then zie ending up there. Jewish culture is hugely familial, and someone without parents is someone people will pity and will be considered very ill treated by fate
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If parents cannot be identified, it... depends. If the child showed up old enough to speak and with Jewish markers, zie'll be assumed Jewish and taken in, though some giyur may be necessary. (Depending on the particular community.) If it was a flat-out baby... with a male, you at least have the brit as some indication, though Muslims do it too. With a female, goooood luck, and it's a much bigger deal, because Judaism is matrilineal. (Again, depending on community! In recent years, some North American communities decided to accept paternal lines. See: Law of Return. It's messing Israel up, a lot.) Some measure of giyur will definitely be necessary, but giyur of a baby is much easier than an adult and is pretty much being brought into the brit if male, and being raised by a Jewish family. This can potentially raise the sort of identity questions you want to get at, in which case research giyur (conversion to Judaism).
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Also, some things you might want to get at with regards to observance level is that the family who can and want to take the baby in might not be observant enough that the people who are community gatekeepers feel comfortable allowing them to raise zie without having them giving an obligation that they will do some specific things. Please note that the future adoptive parents will be as insulted about this as you can imagine, if you decide to go that way.
Another variation is if they are quietly secular (i.e. outwardly doing everything right, but secular/atheist at home) people might not know it but they will be watched more closely by the community once they become adoptive parents. With your own child you are assumed competent, with a child the community entrusted you with, less so.
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Which sucks if you're the person whose giyur is constantly called into question, but may be pretty neat if you're an author who wants to poke at this kind of a problem.
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