On 6/1/07, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
It's a consequence of the endless debates about these various lists of Jews that have been raging since the dawn of wikitime. It's to counter the criticism that "how can you incontrovertibly declare that so-and-so is Jewish?"
Yeah it's a strange sort of category. I don't know whether it's Jews in particular doing it, but there have been some pretty concerted efforts to go around labelling as many scientists as possible "Jewish scientists" etc. I assume the intent is to promote or recognise the religion in some way, rather than to "out" the people in question, as the first post suggested.
To me, reading that scientist X was of religion Y seems like a useful thing. But I think about all the possible uses for a "list of Y scientists", or category intersections of Y with Z, and, well, most of the uses seem unpleasant, bordering on scary.
Maybe someone can prove me wrong?
Steve