Hmm! So! This is just my opinion as a only-sort-of-vaguely Jewish person with a huge "biology=destiny" squick.
But I think a 1-1 correspondence between culture and biology always goes to a bad place. And I feel like even if it started out that way, if these people have anything like human psychology it wouldn't stay that way. There will be adoptions and immigration and pan-species subcultures. If mixed-race children are possible, they will exist, and you will have some who resemble the 'wrong" side of the family. If they're not, you'll still have mixed race families through marriage and adoption etc. You'll end up with whole sub-subcultures of people with the 'wrong' physiology.
I mean I guess you could have the biology affect culture in a way that makes it impossible for people with the 'wrong" biology to join, and not have mixed-race children be possible. But that will create a unique "it doesn't matter if we want to welcome outsiders, we can't" dynamic human cultures never have.
So I feel like either you can have a subCULTURE or you can have a subSPECIES. Jews are a culture, so to be exactly like Jews, your Bat Jews would have to be an at most vaguely physically distinct subculture of a larger bat society. If you wrote a subSPECIES then they could be physiologically distinct and the only bats around, but would differ from Jews in a lot of ways. They could still draw on Jews, I mean I can totally imagine humans treating a distinct sentient subspecies in similarly awful ways to the way Europeans treated Jews, and that in turn leading to some similar attitudes and experiences, but you'd want to avoid the metaphor feeling too...I'm struggling to think of a less mathsy term than "isomorphic".
That said, even beyond Not Actually Being Jewish Per Se my experience of Jewishness is very different to yours: in Australia, coming from an only somewhat Jewish family, a huge part of What It Means To Be A Jew is the constant pressure to assimilate. If you can't assimilate then that changes the whole dynamic, and also means my family's sort of experience doesn't happen. So I may be having a failure of imagination about other forms of Jewishness.
And oh god I am just...empathising with no useful comment on the non binary thing. Because yeah, I am drawn to stories about people who struggle against cultural norms, but also like the idea of writing about cultures with DIFFERENT cultural norms, and it's hard for those to not add up to something unfortunate.
no subject
But I think a 1-1 correspondence between culture and biology always goes to a bad place. And I feel like even if it started out that way, if these people have anything like human psychology it wouldn't stay that way. There will be adoptions and immigration and pan-species subcultures. If mixed-race children are possible, they will exist, and you will have some who resemble the 'wrong" side of the family. If they're not, you'll still have mixed race families through marriage and adoption etc. You'll end up with whole sub-subcultures of people with the 'wrong' physiology.
I mean I guess you could have the biology affect culture in a way that makes it impossible for people with the 'wrong" biology to join, and not have mixed-race children be possible. But that will create a unique "it doesn't matter if we want to welcome outsiders, we can't" dynamic human cultures never have.
So I feel like either you can have a subCULTURE or you can have a subSPECIES. Jews are a culture, so to be exactly like Jews, your Bat Jews would have to be an at most vaguely physically distinct subculture of a larger bat society. If you wrote a subSPECIES then they could be physiologically distinct and the only bats around, but would differ from Jews in a lot of ways. They could still draw on Jews, I mean I can totally imagine humans treating a distinct sentient subspecies in similarly awful ways to the way Europeans treated Jews, and that in turn leading to some similar attitudes and experiences, but you'd want to avoid the metaphor feeling too...I'm struggling to think of a less mathsy term than "isomorphic".
That said, even beyond Not Actually Being Jewish Per Se my experience of Jewishness is very different to yours: in Australia, coming from an only somewhat Jewish family, a huge part of What It Means To Be A Jew is the constant pressure to assimilate. If you can't assimilate then that changes the whole dynamic, and also means my family's sort of experience doesn't happen. So I may be having a failure of imagination about other forms of Jewishness.
And oh god I am just...empathising with no useful comment on the non binary thing. Because yeah, I am drawn to stories about people who struggle against cultural norms, but also like the idea of writing about cultures with DIFFERENT cultural norms, and it's hard for those to not add up to something unfortunate.
Anyway, good luck :)