Ronya Othmann Is Not Yazidi
Let us make this clear before the usual evasions begin:
Ronya Othmann is not Yazidi.
Not half-Yazidi. Not culturally Yazidi. Not a Yazidi of mixed heritage. She is the daughter of a German mother and a father who was born into the Yazidi community but left its endogamous order by marrying outside it. Under Yazidi rules, their daughter was not born Yazidi.
That is the issue. Everything else is a distraction.
Othmann may write about Yazidis. Muslims have written about us for centuries. Christians, travellers, academics, journalists and politicians have written about us too. Writing about a people does not make somebody part of that people. It certainly does not give that person the right to represent its voice.
I can study Jewish history. I can write about antisemitism, visit synagogues, learn Jewish traditions and feel genuine solidarity with Jewish people. I might even know more about Judaism than some people born into Jewish families.
I would still not be Jewish.
My knowledge would not make me Jewish. My empathy would not make me Jewish. Repeating the word often enough would not turn it into my identity.
The same applies here.
Whether Ronya Othmann feels affection for Yazidis is irrelevant. Whether she learned traditions from her grandmother is irrelevant. Whether she writes movingly about the genocide is irrelevant to the question of who she is.
She is not Yazidi.
She has Yazidi ancestry through her father. That is part of her biography. It is not membership in the Yazidi people.
She writes about us.
She does not speak for us.
Yazidi Is Not a Label to Inherit Selectively
Yazidi identity cannot be divided into convenient pieces.
It is not merely a religion practised privately on certain holy days. It is not merely an ethnicity that can be reduced to DNA. It is not merely a culture consisting of food, music, clothing and stories. It is not merely a surname, a village or a grandparent.
Yazidi means all of these things together: people, faith, ancestry, identity, community, sacred order and name.
Remove one part and you are no longer describing Yazidi identity as Yazidis have preserved it. You are creating a new definition that may be easier for outsiders to understand—but it is not ours.
There is no conversion into Yazidism. Neither enthusiasm nor knowledge can make a non-Yazidi into a Yazidi. Traditionally, both parents must be Yazidi. A child born from a union between a Yazidi and a non-Yazidi is not considered Yazidi.
This is not decided by personal feelings.
It is not decided by German identity politics.
It is not decided by a publisher’s biography.
It is not decided by how many Yazidi stories somebody has heard from a grandmother.
A grandmother can pass down memories, language and traditions. She cannot overturn the boundaries of an entire ethnoreligious people.
Who Gave German Institutions the Authority?
German media and cultural institutions frequently present people with partial Yazidi ancestry as Yazidi voices. They take a complicated biography, remove the inconvenient distinction between ancestry and belonging, and place the word “Yazidi” prominently beside a name.
The label is useful.
It provides authenticity. It signals persecution, minority status and inherited trauma. It gives books, interviews and public appearances additional moral weight.
The Yazidi name becomes cultural capital.
Then the person carrying that label is invited to explain Yazidis to the public. The audience assumes it is hearing an insider. Publishers sell the story as an insider’s account. Journalists repeat the description until it appears beyond question.
But repetition does not create truth.
German institutions do not possess the authority to decide who is Yazidi. A literary jury cannot admit somebody into the Yazidi people. A successful book cannot alter descent. A newspaper profile cannot replace the rules of the community.
The Yazidi name does not belong to the German cultural industry.
It belongs to Yazidis.
Writing About Us Is Not Speaking for Us
Nobody is forbidden from writing about Yazidis.
But permission to write is not permission to represent.
There is a difference between researching a people and belonging to them. There is a difference between inheriting family stories and carrying the obligations of Yazidi identity. There is a difference between observing Yazidi traditions and being bound by them.
Outsiders have described us for centuries. Some wrote with respect. Others produced lies that helped justify persecution. Some treated Yazidis as a curiosity. Others forced us into Muslim, Kurdish, Christian or nationalist frameworks that served their own interests.
This is exactly why authorship must be described honestly.
A person can write about Yazidis as a journalist, novelist, researcher, relative or observer. What that person cannot do is transform access into membership.
Ronya Othmann has access to Yazidi family history through her father. She may use that history in her writing. But she is not a Yazidi voice merely because Yazidis appear in her biography and her books.
She is a writer with Yazidi ancestry.
She is not Yazidi.
The distinction is not complicated. People only pretend it is complicated because the simple answer is inconvenient.
The Father’s Decision Has Consequences
When a Yazidi knowingly marries outside the Yazidi community, that decision does not affect only the wedding ceremony.
It breaks the endogamous order through which Yazidi identity is transmitted.
The person is free to make that choice. Nobody should be forced into a marriage. Nobody should be threatened or subjected to violence. Every adult owns his or her life.
But freedom does not mean freedom from consequences.
If I decide to marry a German, Turkish or Indian woman, that choice is mine. But I would also know what it means under Yazidi rules, and I would have to live with it. Freedom is the right to choose a path—not the right to erase its consequences afterwards.
Prince Harry offers a simple comparison. When he stepped back as a working member of the British royal family, he lost the privileges and authority attached to that position. He may speak for himself, but not on behalf of the Crown as though he still held the same role. A boundary does not disappear simply because someone dislikes what follows from crossing it.
The same principle applies here. Whether Mirid, Şêx or Pîr, a Yazidi who leaves the communal order knows that he or she cannot continue acting as though nothing has changed. Ronya Othmann’s father chose his path freely. His children are not Yazidi under Yazidi rules. Yet this is the recurring phenomenon: people leave, keep the name, and then demand that those who remained reshape the community around their personal choices.
A person cannot reject the central condition of Yazidi continuity and insist that nothing has changed. He cannot create children outside that order and simply declare them Yazidi because the emotional consequences of the rule have become uncomfortable.
He chose another path.
His children did not make that decision, and they should never be insulted or mistreated for it. But compassion for children cannot require the Yazidi people to abolish their own definition of belonging.
A family’s private wish does not rewrite the identity of an entire people.
The Men Who Want Everything
The ugliest hypocrisy appears when Yazidi men demand freedom for themselves and tradition from Yazidi women.
Some spend their youth mocking endogamy. They date non-Yazidi women, live with them and sometimes have children with them. They describe the Yazidi community as backward. The rules are suddenly oppressive, primitive and incompatible with modern life.
They want freedom. Fine.
But years later, some return.
Suddenly, family matters again. Suddenly, being Yazidi matters again. Suddenly, they rediscover the value of the very community they treated as an embarrassment.
And what do some of them demand?
A Yazidi woman.
Preferably young. Preferably a virgin. Preferably “clean”. Preferably obedient enough not to ask why the freedom he claimed for himself is now considered dishonourable for her.
He wants modernity for his own desires and tradition for his wife.
He wants to experiment with non-Yazidi women and build his respectable life with a Yazidi one. He expects the Yazidi woman to preserve the community while he temporarily exempts himself from every rule that she was forced to carry.
They want freedom between their own legs and purity between hers.
There is nothing honourable about that.
It is not a return to faith. It is not cultural responsibility. It is male entitlement disguised as tradition.
The Yazidi community is not a hotel. A man cannot check out during the years when its rules inconvenience him and return when he wants family approval, a wedding and a respectable Yazidi wife.
He cannot abandon the boundary and later demand protection from inside it.
A Rule for Women and an Exception for Men
Diaspora families do not always apply endogamy consistently.
A daughter who marries a non-Yazidi may be rejected permanently. Her name becomes a warning repeated to other girls. Her decision is treated as a wound to the entire family.
When a son does the same, relatives sometimes search for excuses.
He was young. He was confused. He lived in Europe. The relationship was not serious. He has now “come to his senses.” If he eventually marries a Yazidi woman, the previous years are quietly erased.
Sometimes even children from an earlier relationship are treated as an inconvenient detail nobody wishes to discuss.
This is not fairness. It is cowardice.
If endogamy is a binding Yazidi principle, it must apply to men and women equally. A penis is not a religious exemption. A respected family name is not a licence to suspend the rules.
A man does not become Yazidi again simply because his relatives found him a Yazidi bride.
And a Yazidi woman is not a washing machine for a man’s reputation.
When families use women to restore the standing of men who rejected the community, they are not protecting Yazidism. They are protecting male privilege.
That double standard must be attacked as fiercely as exogamy itself. Otherwise, the defence of tradition becomes nothing more than control over women.
This Pattern Exists Everywhere
This behaviour is not uniquely Yazidi.
Many European women know the same story: they spent years with a Turkish or Arab boyfriend who promised a future with them. Then one day he returned to his family and married a woman from his own community.
Muslim men do it. Men from conservative Middle Eastern Christian families do it. Similar contradictions exist among Jews, Hindus and other communities in which marriage carries collective meaning.
A woman from outside the community is considered suitable for sex, companionship and experimentation. A woman from inside it is expected to provide marriage, honour, children and continuity.
The first woman is used.
The second is controlled.
The man congratulates himself for eventually becoming “respectable.”
There is nothing specifically Yazidi about male hypocrisy. But its consequences are especially serious for Yazidis because we are a small and stateless people.
Why Endogamy Is Not Optional
Yazidis do not have a state.
We do not have a government dedicated to preserving our existence. We do not have an army protecting our sacred places and communities. We do not possess powerful international institutions capable of carrying our identity after families stop transmitting it.
We have already lost countless people through massacres, forced conversions, abductions, displacement and assimilation.
Endogamy did not emerge because Yazidis considered themselves better than everybody else. It existed because a small people surrounded by larger and often hostile populations needed a boundary strong enough to survive.
That boundary worked.
Without it, Yazidis would not become a more modern version of themselves. They would gradually become parts of other peoples.
First, one non-Yazidi parent would be accepted.
Then a Yazidi grandparent would be enough.
Later, a surname, a family story or an emotional connection to Lalish would be presented as membership.
Within several generations, Yazidi would no longer describe a living ethnoreligious people. It would describe distant ancestry.
We would survive as a theme in books after disappearing as a community.
We Are Not a Failed Version of Somebody Else
The attack on Yazidi endogamy is often connected to the attempt to absorb Yazidis into Kurdish identity.
“We are all Kurds anyway,” we are told.
It sounds harmless. Sometimes it even sounds generous. But behind the sentence lies a political consequence: Yazidis stop being recognised as a people in their own right and become merely the followers of a minority religion within a larger Kurdish nation.
Then our separate identity becomes negotiable.
Our history is retold through Kurdish nationalism. Our language is claimed as evidence that we must belong to somebody else. Our political interests are subordinated to movements and governments that have repeatedly used Yazidis for their own purposes.
Those who have already left Yazidi communal rules often find this interpretation convenient. If Kurdishness is the real ethnic identity and Yazidism is only a private religion, then marrying outside the Yazidi community appears to change nothing.
They can reject the Yazidi order while continuing to claim the Yazidi name whenever it benefits them.
They can dissolve the people and call it inclusion.
No.
Yazidis are not a religious decoration attached to another nation. We are not an error waiting to be corrected through mixed marriage. We are not raw material for somebody else’s demographic or political project.
Yazidi Ancestors Do Not Make Someone Yazidi
Many Kurds have Yazidi roots because their ancestors were once Yazidi. Some left under pressure. Some converted. Some were absorbed into larger Muslim populations over generations. That history belongs in any honest account of the region.
But Yazidi ancestry does not make their descendants Yazidi today.
It does not give them the right to speak over us, to speak for us or to behave as though they understand Yazidi identity better than the people who remained Yazidi. And it certainly does not give them the right to erase our identity by declaring us Kurdish whenever our separate existence becomes politically inconvenient.
A person may have Yazidi ancestors and still not be Yazidi. This is not an insult. It is the result of a broken continuity.
The same boundary applies to Ronya Othmann and to every similar case. They can speak as loudly as they want. They can publish books, appear on stages and repeat the Yazidi label in every interview. Volume does not create membership. Public recognition does not change Yazidi identity. Neither does a family story.
This is not a private definition invented for this column. It is not my personal opinion about whom I happen to like or dislike. It is the traditional and universal rule by which Yazidi identity has been preserved: a Yazidi is born to two Yazidi parents within the Yazidi community.
Someone who has left Islam may study it, criticise it and write about it. That does not grant him the authority to redefine Islam for Muslims. A person with Jewish ancestors who does not belong to the Jewish community cannot simply announce a new definition of Jewishness and demand that Jews accept it. Knowledge from outside is not authority from within.
The same respect must be shown to Yazidis.
People with Yazidi ancestors may speak about their own family history. They may describe what was passed down to them. What they cannot do is turn ancestry into membership, claim our collective voice or dissolve us into another people.
Our identity does not become negotiable merely because somebody outside it has found a microphone.
Other Peoples Understand Boundaries Too
Yazidis are not the only ethnoreligious community concerned with descent, marriage and survival.
Traditional Jewish law recognises Jewish identity through the mother, although different Jewish movements follow different standards and Judaism accepts conversion. This places a particular responsibility on Jewish men who want their children recognised as Jewish under traditional law: they must have children with a Jewish woman.
The Druze traditionally do not accept conversion and have preserved strict communal boundaries. Parsis have also struggled intensely with intermarriage, descent and the survival of a small population, although their communities do not all apply identical rules.
These comparisons do not mean that every ethnoreligious community is the same.
They demonstrate something more basic: small peoples understand that demographic survival cannot be separated from marriage and descent.
Yazidis have their own rule.
Both parents must be Yazidi.
It is one of the few areas in which the demand is completely equal. A Yazidi father alone is not enough. A Yazidi mother alone is not enough.
The rule does not ask which parent is more important.
It says the community must continue through both.
Empathy Is Irrelevant to Membership
People will inevitably respond that Ronya Othmann has empathy for Yazidis.
So what?
Empathy is good. It is not membership.
I have empathy for Jewish people. I oppose antisemitism. I can defend Israel’s right to exist, read Jewish history and feel grief when Jews are murdered for being Jewish.
None of that makes me Jewish.
I would never introduce myself as a Jewish voice. I would never allow a publisher to sell me as one. I would never treat my knowledge or solidarity as permission to occupy a name that does not belong to me.
Respect begins with recognising a boundary.
If Othmann respects Yazidis, that respect should include accepting that her connection to Yazidi history does not make her Yazidi.
Her feelings do not decide it.
Her father does not decide it.
Her grandmother does not decide it.
German readers do not decide it.
Yazidi identity is not awarded to the person who tells the most moving story about it.
You May Leave, but You Cannot Rewrite Us
Every adult is free to choose another life.
A Yazidi may reject the religion. A Yazidi may marry outside the community. A Yazidi may decide that endogamy is incompatible with the life he or she wants.
But leaving must mean something.
You cannot reject the rules, mock the boundaries and then keep the name as though nothing happened. You cannot demand that the entire community redefine itself so that your personal decision no longer looks like departure.
You cannot produce children outside the Yazidi order and declare them Yazidi because the truth is painful.
You cannot leave and continue speaking from inside.
And your children cannot inherit a communal position that you chose to break.
Ronya Othmann is the daughter of a man of Yazidi origin.
She has Yazidi ancestry.
She has Yazidi family history.
She can write about Yazidis.
She is not Yazidi.
She does not represent the Yazidi voice.
German publishers cannot change that.
Literary prizes cannot change that.
A grandmother’s stories cannot change that.
And repeating the label a thousand times cannot change that.
The Yazidi name is not a souvenir. It is not a literary accessory. It is not a career advantage extracted from one side of a family. It belongs to a living ethnoreligious people with the right to define and preserve itself.
Anyone is free to leave that people.
Nobody is entitled to empty its name and keep wearing it.
Sources
- Petr Kokaisl, “The Influence of the Diaspora on the Transformation of the Main Elements of the Yazidi Religion,” Religions, 2022.
- Ronya Othmann, Die Sommer, Hanser Literaturverlage.
- Qantara, “Fighting the Obliteration of Kurdish-Yazidi Identity,” 2020.
- My Jewish Learning, “Who Is a Jew: Matrilineal Descent.”
- My Jewish Learning, “Who Is a Jew: Patrilineal Descent.”
