Denying Jews Are an Ethnic Group

Example 44: Denying that Jews are an ethnic group, and claiming that they are just a religious group:

Many antisemites claim that being Jewish is only a matter of religion, not of ethnicity. This, they believe, helps them to deny charges of racism against Jews, since they are merely prejudiced against – or they would say aiming justified criticism against - a religious group. Some of these people question the foundation or existence of the state of Israel on the grounds that a country should not be reserved for or necessarily have a majority of, those practising a particular religion. Other people, however, are genuinely ignorant about Jewish identity, and easily misled by this false claim.

Jews are not just a religious group – in modern times there are many secular Jews – but an ancient people, or ethnicity, originating in the Middle East and with a millennia-long history. An ethnic group is defined as ‘a social group that shares a common and distinctive culture, religion, language, or the like’, but in addition to this, many Jews share genetic characteristics, and this bears witness to the history, over thousands of years, of limited intermarriage with non-Jews, and only limited conversion to Judaism by non-Jews in many areas and eras. Certain illnesses, such as Tay Sachs disease, affect almost exclusively those with an Ashkenazi Jewish background. Some have called Jews an ‘ethno-religious group’ to reflect the complexity of definition by religion and/or ethnicity.

Perhaps the most hurtful aspect of being misdefined by religious practice only is this: neither the Pogroms against the Jews nor Nazi persecution were conditional on Jews following the Jewish religion; Nazi persecution was based on Jewish ancestry and equally affected religious Jews, secular Jews, and converts to other religions including Christianity. Indeed, all streets and buildings named after the composer Felix Mendelssohn were renamed by the Nazis, purely because of his Jewish ethnicity, even though he was baptised a Christian and never practised Judaism during his life.

Denial that a particular ethnicity even exists is in many ways one of the most fundamental forms of racism; it seeks to erase a people, in this instance Jewish people, and throw doubt on what for many is a central part of their identity.