Hello friends. If this post is inappropriate, please tell me how to fix it or feel free to remove it. I am here because sometimes The Algorithm presents me new information, but especially when it’s about Judaism in the current global climate, I want to make sure I’m not being told something inaccurate or harmful.
- When I was a kid, I thought Judaism was a religion
- As I got older, I learnt people also treated it as an ethnicity, it was both
- Now I am seeing some people (I am unsure of their intentions) say Judaism is not an ethnicity, it is a religion
For example, this guy: https://www.tiktok.com/@yuvalmann.s/video/7317661422694026529
Who is a Jew, from Israel, who is now an anti-Zionist. He says “a Jewish person from Morocco, a Jewish person from Ethiopia and a Jewish person from Germany or Hungary have absolutely nothing to do with each other but one thing, religion”. And later explains that the idea of Judaism as an ethnicity itself was an idea of Zionists.
I’d be curious to hear what people here think about that take, whether it’s accurate, if it’s harmful/inaccurate, etc. Thanks very much!
Excellent question and I’ll preface with the “two Jews, 3 opinions caveat.”
I think the short answer is no, but perhaps the growth of zionism encouraged that definition of Jewishness as an ethnicity (I’ll use Judaism for the religion).
I think Judaism has always existed to some extent as an ethnicity, with Jews throughout history calling themselves “a people,” “a nation,” or “a family.” But that ethnicity was held together with a set of religious texts and practices, until Moses Mendelson (Before him you had Solomon Maimon and Benedict Spinoza, but both were excommunicated for heresy). But the enlightenment in Europe and the extension of national rights to Jews made Jewish citizens explore for definitions of Judaism that would allow them to participate in the civic society of those nations, and also to maintain some sort of Jewishness if they didn’t believe in Judaism religiously.
I think Judaism has always existed to some extent as an ethnicity
The problem here is that the concept of ethnicitiy has existed fpr a much shorter time than Judaism has. When Moses says “let my people go!”, “people” is not meant in the same way that somebody who has grown up with nation states and various racisms as culturally pervasive concepts understands the word “people”. I’m not saying this to nitpick, i agree that there has always been an idea of Jews being a people, but that did not mean what it means today and we cannot fully understand modern antisemitisms and how Zionism developed as a political strategy against them without taking a look at how ideas like race, ethnicity and nation were framed in the last two centuries, and how that affected how Jews were seen by the socieites they lived in and by themselves. 19th century antisemitism saw in large parts a racialization of Jewishness that was previously imagined largely among religiously anchored narratives. And Zionism specifically took the core political project of 19th century liberalism, the nation state, and tried to turn that into a cornerstone of Jewish liberation. Which in turn meant that it came with a large part of the baggage of European national chauvinism when it was turned into praxis.
tiktok is designed to make you dumber. i appreciate what this guy is trying to do (and I’m curious about the book he’s apparently cribbing from), but a number of unquestioned premises and oversimplifications lead him to a confused conclusion.
Nationality, race, and ethnicity are all constructed categories. Accepting them as completely ontologically distinct is a fallacy. It’s true that no one is inherently a Jew, any more than one is inherently an American or inherently European. The notion that Jews were another people (that is, other than Christians) was obviously not invented by Israel, but central to the identity of Christianity. After all, if Jews and Christians aren’t a separate thing, then Jesus didn’t form a new covenant with God, establishing His church and dying to redeem humanity, but instead just founded a new sect of Judaism that happened to get popular within the empire. Fast forward through most of the history of Europe and of antisemitism and we find enlightenment-era Christian Europeans, in the process of conquering the world, developing new scientific taxonomies of human difference, thereby inventing the races that would be inscribed in relationships of enslavement, subjugation, and economic domination. If you want to pick a time when Jews became an ethnicity as well as a religion, this works okay. Zionism would follow a few centuries later, but remain a fringe movement until the middle of the 20th century, when its goal was not to racialize Judaism, but to reracialize it, form it into a new identity independent of both the multiplicity of Judaisms held and practiced by Jews around the world as well as the initial racial category theorized primarily by Christian antisemites.
any more than one is inherently an American
I just had a huge and uncontrollable flashback to this assigned cop at birth image
Assigned Nurse or Cop at Birth.
No, there’s a much longer history to that, which has to do with the theological concept of Jews as the chosen people and that among the early Jewish communities of the Diaspora, Judaism was more of a social/ethnic organisation with a religious basis.
Here’s what the rabbi has to say about it https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/committing-high-reason/id1549088377?i=1000512769051
Basically Jewishness was never an ethnicity or a nation in the sense of modern political theory and the creation of that idea was a key part of the Zionist project.
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Ethnicity is a social construct, it’s only tangentially related to biology, and to think otherwise is to fall for 19th century racist pseudoscience. It’s partially based on culture, a shared sense of community, how one identifies in relation to the group amd others perceive you. It’s also not a fixed thing, new ethnicities can arise, and people who previously were part of different communities can come to think of each other as members of the same group. You see this all the time throughout history: how, for instance, half of Europe came to think of themselves as Roman, and then when Rome fell a bunch of new “peoples” arised.
Jewish people have always been an ethnicity, it’s just that the religion was also an important aspect of that ethnicity. It’s a religion that one is born into, which is why Jewish people do not proselytize. In fact, they find converts to be extremely odd and historically never understood why they exist. There are also several “sub-ethnicities” inside of it (like any other, this isn’t specific to Judaism) like the ashkenazi and the sephardi.
I think the reason why this confuses some people is that 21st century people, especially from the US, tend to increasingly think of human groups as “races”, rather than smaller communities.
I don’t know if I agree with this. Most Roman subjects during the Roman Empire did not consider themselves ethnically Roman in the sense we use ethnicity. While some people from some remote cultures may have fully assimilated into a more uniform Romaness over the generations, Rome was always a multi-cultural empire that retained distinctions between what we would now call ethnic groups as subjects. Just like Asian Americans, African Americans, European Americans, etc are all “Americans” we don’t consider them the same ethnicity even if they have been in the US for centuries. David Duke and Angela Davis are both Americans (and both named after the same, Jewish, biblical figure) but I’d be surprised if anyone said that they shared an ethnicity.
The second paragraph is not consistent with the rabbinic tradition of Judaism, which, before Zionism, was more simply called “Judaism.” King David’s grandmother was a convert. Converts have always been a part of the religion and the Jewish religion makes very little distinction between a person who was born Jewish and a person converted. And the child of two converts is just as Jewish as King David. Even the Convert is just as Jewish as any other Jew despite having no Jewish bloodline. I linked a podcast episode in another comment chain here that goes into much more detail and cites historical sources for these claims (that particular podcaster is much more qualified to speak on this issue than me).
Obviously that was an oversimplification. But ethnogenesis is very much a real thing, every human community is predicated upon an imaginary shared past, but it’s never perfectly homogeneous. The idea of nationality is also a very modern one and can’t be compared to what being a citizen of an ancient empire was like. Most of my information I had on this comes from The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine (2011) as well as The Inheritance of Rome (2009).
On converts, of course its not literally impossible, but it’s not particularly encouraged. In fact, people who seek to convert to Judaism most often will be discouraged from doing so, because there is no need for gentiles to convert to Judaism, according to the Jewish religion itself. If you are particularly insistent, conversion is possible, but it goes beyond a simple religious conversion, you basically become “adopted” into the Jewish community.
But doesn’t that just lead us back to the whole point of this post? That within the construct of ethnogenesis, the Jewish ethnicity is a modern and artificial construct of Zionist ideology? That prior to Zionism, ie the movement to create a Jewish nation amongst the nations and a Jewish ethnicity amongst the ethnicities, Jews from Russia were no more the same ethnicity as Jews from Morocco than Catholics from Croatia were the same ethnicity as Catholics from Ireland? Or Muslims from Saudi Arabia are the same ethnicity as Muslims from Chechnya?
Alternatively, isn’t it just mostly tautological? “Jewish” is an ethnicity because ethnicities are anything that someone can posit is an ethnicity regardless of historical context? So Jews 250 years ago almost uniformly did not think of Jewish as an ethnicity but Zionists decided they were so they are? Or the concept of ethnicity as such didn’t exist prior to the nationalist movements but now we must accept the sociological constructs of nationalism to decide whether Jewish fits in to what is already a flawed framework?
Nationalism is a modern phenomenon, ethnicity is not. Zionism was conceived at the same time as the national movements of Europe were being developed, and like the rest of the nationalist movements, was conceived to be a secular project, by secular, non practicing Jews. The very fact that one, even before the foundation of the zionist movement, could be considered Jewish despite not following the religion proves that it’s not merely a religion. Just lookat how Marx was considered Jewish despite his atheism, and despite the fact that his father was a Christian convert. The comparison with catholicism is also inadequate, since Judaism is an ethnoreligion (and not the only one, mind you), while catholicism is not. Before the 19th century European Jews lived on enclaves, partly by choice, and partly due to religious persecution, and they have always considered themselves to be separate from the gentiles around them, making them an ethnic group by definition.
I do not know, however, if different ethnic groups of Jewish people thought of themselves as the same people prior to the 19th century. In ancient times different Jewish groups definetely thought so (see, for instance, the history of the Greek Jewish diaspora and their relationship with native Judeans), but things can change a lot in a few hundred years.
And historical context is definitely important, a group of people can consist of an ethnicity now, but not 100 years ago, and so on. Just because they have come to be part of the same community now doesn’t mean that their ethnicity is “fake” however, since it’s by definition a social convention, a cultural concept, not a biological one. I also do not agree that Zionism is responsible for the modern concept of jewishness.
We may be splitting hairs here but I think that still fundamentally misunderstands how Jews have defined Judaism for at least the last 500 years. Karl Marx is considered Jewish because his mother was Jewish and the Jewish religion says that if your mother is Jewish you are Jewish whether you follow the religion or not. However, had Karl Marx’s father been Jewish and his mother been something else, he would be considered 0% Jewish. Traditional religious Jewish communities still believe this. Had Karl Marx’s parents been Protestant and converted to Judaism before he was born, he’d be 100% Jewish. And that would have been true for thousands of years. The Jewish religion defines who is Jewish and it only coincidentally coincides with genetics much of the time.
Different ethnic groups of Jews did not, and generally still do not, consider themselves the same ethnicity except in the Zionist construct. But even Zionists in practice cannot remain consistent on this issue because of their extreme chauvinism. Hence the utter revulsion with “Ostjuden” by the western Zionists themselves and the current discrimination in Israel faced by non-white Jews. Hell, just look at how Israelis describe Haredi Jews in Israel.
If you read my above comments to suggest that I think the Zionist definition of Judaism is valid, I did a really bad job of writing them. My point is that Zionism has been trying to construct an ethnicity out of what was considered to be only a religious grouping for thousands of years.
When you say they separated themselves from the gentiles making them their own ethnicity, I think you are right to a point but it is not a global ethnicity. So German Jews who lived in ghettos did not see themselves as the same as the gentiles around them, but they did not consider themselves to be the same ethnicity as Jews living thousands of miles away. They didn’t share common language, clothing, food, living styles, marriage customs, etc with, say, Moroccan Jews, just a common religion. So there may have been micro ethnicities everywhere that were predominantly Jewish but they didn’t form a world spanning single ethnicity.
Maybe a great example of what I’m talking about, and one particularly well suited for hexbear, is the example of the Lithuanian Jewish community and the Bund in the late 19th and early 20th century. This massive population of Ashkenazim rejected Zionism, they were formed into a Jewish workers party but because historically the Russian empire forced Jews into their own little box. Following the creation of the USSR, the Bund voted to merge itself into the communist party and stated as its reason for doing so that there was no distinction between the proletariat of the categories that the Russian empire put everyone in. Importantly, they kept their religion but rejected political separation of the working class on artificial ethnic grounds.
Our hair splitting though gets to the point that I agree that there are ethnicities that are largely associated with Judaism. Just like the French ethnicity is largely associated with Catholicism. But the lump all Jews into a single ethnicity makes the concept of ethnicity lose any coherence the same way lumping all Catholics into a single ethnicity would. While I agree that you can identify ethnics groups of Jews like, say, the Lithuanian Ashkenazim (who spoke a different dialect of Yiddish that what was called Polish Ashkenazim), blending all Jewish ethnicities into a single one stretches the concept beyond any meaningful use. It is the project of Zionism to do so, but it is based on a false premise and an evil motive.
But for real, I know listening to links stranger post on the internet is a huge waste of time generally, but that pod episode I posted elsewhere on here goes right into it. It’s a Haredi Rabbi in Brooklyn who has spent decades meticulously debunking the Zionist proposition of a uniform Jewish ethnicity.
How people look isn’t what defines ethnicity
Do you really mean to say all aspects of human culture is a social construct???
There are differing opinions on the historicity of the Jewish scriptures, but I believe the broad brush-strokes are sufficiently agreed on for our purposes.
So a little ancient history:
- there was a group of people, descended from one family (obviously plus intermarriage), called the Israelites or the Hebrews
- Around 1500BC (give or take a few hundred years?) they settled in the land we now call Palestine/Israel.
- But not them exclusively in that area, nor were they the first - and to some extent they remained an ethnically-exclusive group but it’s a bit complicated.
- the Israelites/Hebrews comprised of 12 ‘tribes’ each tracing their ancestry to one of the sons of Israel. (Or one of two grandsons… There’s always added detail!)
- they split, though keeping some shared identity. The southern half was the tribes of ‘Judah’ and ‘Benjamin’ and became known as Judah; the other tribes were the Northern half. The people of Judah are called the Jews.
- around 500BC (give or take some hundreds) all the Israelites were conquered and most of not all moved to other lands for tens or hundreds of years
- some returned, keeping their identity intact (in their eyes)
- some returned but intermarried and we’re considered only dubiously Israelite.
- some other communities in other parts of the world believe they are descendents of some Israelites who didn’t return.
- around 0AD (give or take) the Romans occupied that land and then again the Jews/Israelites were scattered.
- still various communities, from that scattering, continued to identify as Jews.
That takes us - very crudely - up to the present day of the Jews/Israelites joining together again as the nation of Israel, in that land.
On the religious side:
- the Israelites believed in one God (and the gods other people worshipped as either complete lies/nonsense, or created by their God, or something more nuanced)
- they believed God had chosen them, as a nation / ethnic group, to be in special relationship to him, and that his connection to other people in the world would be through them.
- the idea was (with some exceptions) that joining the Jewish religion (i.e. worshipping their God on His terms) essentially meant the same as joining in the Israelite ethnic group.
- after the split between Jews and other Israelites, the Jews came to believe the others had compromised the religion so it wasn’t true any more; hence now Jewish religion (Judaism)
- when Jesus of Nazareth came (around 30AD) his followers believed he was the fulfillment and continuation of the Jewish religion and in a way that could now include people from all the world, without becoming Jewish. (hence Christianity being a religion not defined by ethnicity)
- Obviously, other Jews did not believe this! Hence Judaism continuing separately
- Islam (7th century?) believed much of the same tradition as Jews and Christians, but that the details recorded by Jews and Christians were wrong/lies, and Mohammad was the true final person bringing the truth from God
So then there’s kind of three main identifications of ‘Jews’, all connected but looking from different perspectives.
- Ethnically: the people who are descended from the Kingdom of Judah (the tribes of Judah and Benjamin). Obviously that openes the question of whether people can join into said group, and whether intermarriage includes or excludes you.
- Ethnically II: the people descended from the whole nation of Israel. I believe they sometimes still get called Jews these days.
- Religious: the people who worship the Jewish God according to Jewish religion. Obviously this opens many questions of what counts as genuine/acceptable worship/religion.
And an extra note on the ethnic side: because the people identifying as Israelite/Israeli have been scattered for so long, even if you were to have a clear definition of what fits within the ethnic boundary (e.g. maitriliniage), it is hard - if even possible - to know when a community of individual claims Israeli descent what their genetic/ancestral descent really is. So there is necessarily some flexibility for the traditions of communities that claim certain lineage, and that flexibility is argued over. One might put a fourth option for identification:
- Community: the communities that trace themselves as descending from Jewish/Israelite community. Meaning the continuation of a community, which usually involves a large component of ethnic/familial descent as well as a large component of cultural/religious continuity.
P S. I’m on mobile so can’t risk double checking egregious typos/etc without losing this long post. Apologies if I’ve put something really badly. I’ll try to be attentive to comments and you can all downvote me to hell/Hades/Gehenna if it’s too awful!
