Continued from here ...

Most people are familiar with the Jewish population in North Africa, the Sephardic and Mizrahi, often called "Black Jews", and remember when many, mainly Ethiopian Jews, emigrated to Israel some years ago. Those represented just a fraction of the population, however. Ethiopian North Shewa Zionist Organization was founded recently to preserve Jewish identity for those 50,000 or so members of the Beit Avraham community remaining in Ethiopia, and that's only one group.

And the Jewish population is not limited to North Africa.

Over the centuries there have been substantial Jewish communities in Ghana and Mali, and the Lemba people in southern Africa, "although they speak Bantu languages similar to their neighbours, ... have specific religious practices similar to those in Judaism, and a tradition of being a migrant people with clues pointing to an origin from Yemeni Jews."

The Igbo of Nigeria have 26 synagogues and some 30,000 people practicing Judaism. The Yoruba people of the Bnai Ephraim are another Jewish group in that country.

In Zimnbabwe, the Jews of Rusape claim that the Bantu people are actually of Ancient Hebrew Origin, and have been practicing Judaism since the early 20th century.

Think India is all Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist or Sikh? Think again.

The Bnei Menashe of the Northeast of the country built themselves a mikvah, a traditional ritual bath, in 2005 for use by their community.

Even the Philippines has a small, but well organized Jewish population.

The first permanent settlement of Jews in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial years began in 1870 with the arrival of three Levy brothers from Alsace-Lorraine, who were escaping the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War ... By the end of the Spanish period, the Levy brothers had been joined by Egyptian Jews (Mizrahim), and Sephardim from Turkey and Syria, creating a community of about fifty individuals.

What does this little exercise prove?

Even without international adoption, it appears that mixing and blending and converting and combining has been going on for just about as long as there have been people on the planet. Chinese can be Jewish, Koreans can be Irish, Cambodians can be Seychellois and American and British, all at the same time, and the world won't collapse, and cultures, although they will come and go and evolve, will not evaporate into the ether at the first spin of the blender.

Even when the world was huge ... when it took months to get where it now takes hours and when communication was by boat or mule, people moved and mixed and merged and mingled ... so why the big flap these days over kids becoming family to people that may not have lived next door or grown up eating the same things for breakfast?