Census Year Parsis (All-India) Decennial Change (%)
1881 85,078
1891 89,490 +5.19
1901 93,617 +4.61
1911 99,412 +6.19
1921 101,075 +1.67
1931 108,988 +7.83
1941 114,890 +5.42
1951* 111,791 -0.27
1961 100,772 -10.93
1971 91,266 -10.42
1981 71,630 -27.41
1991 76,382 +6.63
2001 69,601 -9.74
* refers to the partition of India, and the loss of 5000 parsees to Pakistan.
Their average age is very high (30% over 65). From 223 births in 2001, it came down to 174 in 2006. In 2007, the total number of births in the community was a bit over 100. The Government of India has budgeted 1 million crone to foment Parsee population but it seems a lost cause. It is a bad precedent for Jews in the Diaspora, with their numbers also falling rapidly.
23 comments:
The diaspora Haredi communities are growing though aren't they?
Maybe too many of them have the same preferences as the late Freddie.
Zubin Mehta, the conductor, is also Parsi. It's interesting that Jews also often pursue musical careers. The Parsi practice "sky burial" - their dead are put on the roof of a tower where they are eaten by vultures.
K
The parsees's IQ average is similar to Ashkenazi Jews. That explains the music.
Was Freddy eaten by vultures? This idea of donating one's body to the vultures is 100% environmentalist. Total Recycling. Should be copied.
The Parsi (not unlike the Jews) believe that the dead are unclean (tumah) They don't want to pollute the elements that they worship (earth and water) with uncleanliness.
K
You should invite them to Israel.
At least the genes will then survive.
Anon.
If they have no children, their genes will not survive here or anywhere.
If they have no children, their genes will not survive here or anywhere.
It should be noted that, part of the reason for the Parsees' "extinction" is that, like the Jews, they are intransigent in refusing to accept the progeny of intermarriages. As with Jews, there may be more people with significant Parsee ancestry alive than ever, but the hardcore fanatics insist on their way or the highway. Also like some Jewish populations, the Parsee population shows signs of significant ancient admixture with their host population, making the emphasis on ethnoracial purity somewhat odd.
The emphasis on purity is based on the fact that they are the last people on Earth that call itself Arian and that their average IQ is a standard deviation above 100. BTW the Parsees in the last 3000 years were always friendly toward the Jews. The Zoroasthrian religion is very idealistic.
"Also like some Jewish populations, the Parsee population shows signs of significant ancient admixture with their host population, making the emphasis on ethnoracial purity somewhat odd."
You can imagine a situation where a group arrives in a new area - at first, perhaps the community consists of a few adventurous men, who have arrived without wives or children. They marry local women. Later the society becomes more established, more "purebreds" arrive from the Old Country and there are stronger institutions present, clergy, etc. It becomes important to separate the group from the local population lest they totally assimilate and dissolve into the gene pool. Now the emphasis swings back to "racial purity" - yes by now there are some clear signs of admixture but enough remains of the old stock that the population is mostly recognizable as distinct. The fact that interbreeding has occurred in the past makes it even MORE important to prevent it from happening any more in the eyes of the group. In any case, despite the obvious signs, there is widespread denial that interbreeding has taken place.
I remember reading an account of a formal dinner at Jefferson's home (Monticello). It was the custom for a slave to stand behind each person at the table to wait on him. The slave that stood behind Jefferson bore a VERY STRONG resemblance to Jefferson (strong enough to think that he was Jefferson's son) but no one at the table would have ever dared to remark on this resemblance - it is the LAST thing that they would have brought up in polite society. You just had to pretend not to notice such things or question how they came about (or your Zayda's blue eyes, etc.).
K
K, Thomas Jefferson had a wayward brother sowing wild oats, at least that is what I've read.
Parsees are humanity's most intelligent and productive populations. They have never been persecuted like the Jews, yet they are dying out. We should be studying them to find out what is going wrong, because we are on the same path.
It is possible to kill with kindness. For hundreds of years the Jews of Poland were poor and despised and their population grew and grew (and with very little interbreeding because the groups hated each other). In America they were met with acceptance and prosperity and in a couple of generations they will disappear. Maybe we need more anti-Semitism?
K
We too are in the need of an outside danger to strengthen our ranks.
"...They have never been persecuted like the Jews...."
They settled among Hindus, who drink in tolerance of others with their mother's milk.
However, they are the remnant refugees from their nation's encounter with Islam.
rm
Parsees are more educated, smarter and richer than their neighbours. This may account for their declining fertility. The other thing is - from my admittedly limited knowledge - is that they unlike the Jews are not bothered about their race dying out.
Ivan
"In America they were met with acceptance and prosperity and in a couple of generations they will disappear. Maybe we need more anti-Semitism?"
K,
Your account of the history only considers the most recent centuries. That is the only period during which the Ashkenazi Jewish population of the shtetlach grew and grew. In the preceding century (17th), the Jewish communities were brought to their knees and nearly extinguished by Khmelnitsky and the Cossack hordes. That destruction set the ground for the disastrous messianic movements of Shabtai Zvi and Jacob Frank (after Khmelnitsky, it seemed that the end of the world must have been at hand) and mired the Eastern Jews in the poverty and religious fanaticism which even to pre-Enlightenment German Jews set them apart as backwards.
To sum up, be careful what you wish for. I am decidedly of the opinion that it would be better to have prosperity, comfort and survival only of our diluted genes rather than a totally intact culture at the cost of more Khmelnitskys and Hitlers. The risk of the latter path is that the anti-Semites will be so successful that they kill us all and end our culture and genetic continuity. Hitler almost succeeded with that.
Maybe what we need is a "just right" level of anti-Semitism - enough to preserve genetic isolation but not so much that they kill us. Or, barring that, the Zionist solution - our own country.
The German Jews (Germany - that great beacon of enlightenment that produced Hitler and millions of Nazis) can take their condescension and shove it. The eastern Jews found themselves in an area that was generally impoverished and they made the best of it. Read Weizmann's autobiography for an account of the rich cultural life of the "backward" provinces and the coldness of German Jewish culture.
K
"Read Weizmann's autobiography for an account of the rich cultural life of the "backward" provinces and the coldness of German Jewish culture."
I was writing of mid 18th - mid 19th century German Jews, not 20th century German Jews. Prior to the "Jewish Enlightenment," all European Jewish culture had essentially fallen behind the secular culture of the Gentile populations among whom they lived. This was true in Germany as well, but the Polish and Russian Jews were as a whole poorer, more insulated and more religiously fanatical. The German Jews of the 18th century and early 19th century, at only the beginning of the course that would raise them to fleeting legal equality and cultural distinction, do not seem to me to have been such a cold community.
"Maybe what we need is a "just right" level of anti-Semitism"
It would be difficult and exceedingly risky to attempt to modulate that. The stakes are too high for getting it wrong.
"Or, barring that, the Zionist solution - our own country."
If only they had been smart enough to locate that state somewhere with nicer (cooler) weather and more civilized, less violent neighbors. Concentrating so many Jews in the state as constructed may turn out to be a big mistake. And the increasing haredization of the place will soon make it unlivable for anyone who is not a religious automaton.
The problem with assimilation is that it is not a steady state but a exponentially declining slope ending in total dissolution into the surrounding population (see the Kaifeng Jews). You can take a "snapshot" of a community at some point on the slope and say that they have reached some optimal balance of assimilation but the next time you look it will no longer be that way - they will be further down the slope. Weizmann described the German Jews as being exactly like other Germans except that they attended a different "church" (complete with church organ BTW) on Saturday instead of Sunday. Not long after he wrote, there were no more German Jews to describe at all.
K
This is what the Enlightment propaganda said, that Jews were disconnected from European culture and "primitive", living in the darkness of superstition.
Jewish masses accepted and internalized this message and threw themselves into European culture. Jews became the torchbearers of German culture and so on. In Hungary, Jews created the Hungarian literary language (that was unexistent).
What good all that did to us? None.
This goes on to this day. To the rest of the world, Charlie Sheen's boss is known as "Chuck Lorre" but Charlie refers to him as "Chaim Levine".
K
Jews in general out-goy the goyim. Irving Berlin wrote "White Christmas". The Hollywood producers of all those "all-American" movies were mostly Jewish. Ralph Lauren (nee Lipschitz) produces fashions that are quintessentially WASPy. Etc.
K
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