The notion that Judaism is both religion and peoplehood feeds the paranoid suspicions of the anti-Semite that the Jews are slippery customers who change their shape at will and thus hide in plain sight.
A row over anti-Semitism that has erupted in Britain illuminates the problem that bedevils so many in the West over their understanding of what Judaism actually is.
The controversy started with a tweet by the Labour Party’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, congratulating the new head of the Scottish Labour Party, Anas Sarwar, on his appointment. Rayner described Sarwar, who is of Pakistani descent, as “the first-ever ethnic minority leader of a political party anywhere in the UK.”
Sarwar is certainly the first Muslim or Asian leader of a political party. But there have been four Jewish party leaders in the United Kingdom – from Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in the 19th century to Labour Party leader Ed Miliband in the last decade.
So Rayner appeared to have forgotten about the Jews. Or possibly she didn’t actually regard them as an ethnic minority. For it then turned out that a number of people have a problem with designating the Jews in this way.
This erupted on the BBC‘s daily show, “Politics Live,” which chose to respond to protests from British Jews over Rayner’s remark by hosting a discussion with a title card: “Should Jews count as an ethnic minority?”
To many Jews, even to ask this question was demonstrably absurd. How could they not be counted as such? And why were non-Jews suddenly presuming to tell Jews what they were or were not?
Yet not only was there a nine-minute discussion about this on the show involving four non-Jews and one Jew, but this quickly piled much more offence on top of Rayner’s original tweet.
Asked whether the first ethnic minority leader was Sarwar or Benjamin Disraeli, Labour peer Lord Wood demurred on the basis that Disraeli had converted to Christianity. This elicited a protest from the one Jew on the panel, the chief executive of Pink News Benjamin Cohen, who observed that while someone can reject the Jewish faith he cannot alter his ethnic identity as a Jew.
Things then took a turn for the worse. The show’s anchor, Jo Coburn, who is herself a Jew, suggested: “Many Jews have succeeded in reaching high political office, and therefore don’t need to be seen as a group needing recognition in the same way as others.”
But people don’t stop being members of a minority group, or become immune from discrimination or prejudice, just because they have achieved political or social success. As Cohen riposted, the suggestion was absurd.
Unfortunately, however, it illustrates an attitude towards Jews that is no less harmful for being absurd. Indeed, its high level of absurdity shows the lengths to which reason itself has dangerously departed from the issue of the Jews.
For underlying the comment is the belief – widespread on the Left and spread by venomous intersectional identity politics – that the Jews aren’t a minority at all because they are deemed to have power.
By any standards this is ridiculous. Jews constitute some 0.3% of the UK population. Around the world, they number around 14 million in a global population of some 7 billion.
True, Diaspora Jews are disproportionately over-represented in professional and public life. But to equate economic success with political power is a Marxist position.
This is why Marxism-inspired identity politics portrays white people in the West, who created the most economically successful societies in the world, as innately powerful and therefore institutionally privileged at the expense of non-Western peoples. And it’s why the Jews are similarly classified as white and privileged even when their skins are brown or black.
This is a general madness that threatens to bring Western society down. But the word “ethnic” when applied to the Jews is as fraught as is their designation as a minority.
The “Politics Live” discussion reflected what participants described as “genuine uncertainty about terminology” when it came to ethnicity. Responding to the row after the show, the BBC‘s head of politics, Rob Burley, tweeted: “According to the Government – not Politics Live! – Jews aren’t an ethnic group in the UK.”
He followed this up by linking to a government page that lists 18 ethnic groups recommended for official use when asking about someone’s ethnicity.
Jews aren’t included in that list. However, the site makes clear that the government had considered adding “Roma, Sikh, Jewish and Somali ethnic groups” to the 2021 census. In other words, there were reasons why Jews and other ethnicities weren’t included; it’s not that they weren’t actually deemed to be ethnic groups.
As editor of The Jewish Chronicle Stephen Pollard furiously observed, Jews haven’t been included on the census in part because memories of the Holocaust have led to an instinctive fear of such official categorization.
This confusion around Jewish ethnicity is caused in part by a lack of precision over the meaning of ethnicity itself. More profoundly, however, it reflects ignorance over what it means to be a Jew.
After Nazism, the notion of racial differences consisting of inherited genetic characteristics turned into a taboo. Ethnicity became viewed instead as a safer way of describing the identity of a group based on shared ancestry and culture.
Since Jews may be black, brown or pale-skinned and have cultural differences depending on whether they come from East, West or in-between, they actually span several ethnic categories. Yet despite that, they also clearly share a common ancestry, religion, language and certain genetic traits.
Jewishness might therefore be more accurately described as a meta-ethnicity, or as the late Rabbi Lord Sacks put it, a “bricolage of multiple ethnicities.”
It’s most accurate to describe the Jews in terms of peoplehood. What is surely unarguable, however, is that in Britain and the West they form a minority with a different group identity from the ethnic make-up of the majority.
The real confusion, as the beleaguered Cohen observed on “Politics Live,” arises because many people believe Judaism to be instead merely a religion.
They fail to grasp that it encompasses not just religious faith but peoplehood and that in ancient times, the Jewish people also constituted a nation in their own Jewish kingdom. The failure to understand this, coupled with the mistaken view that Judaism is merely a private, confessional faith like Christianity, is partly why so many people believe the Jews are interlopers in Israel.
It’s why they make the false distinction between Zionism, which they condemn as a colonialist political ideology, and Judaism, which they fawningly sentimentalize, disdain or disregard altogether as merely a religion. The fact that this leaves secular Jews stranded in no-man’s-land is why those Jews in particular desperately hang on to the ethnic minority label as their badge of identity.
Rather than acknowledge the unique characteristics of the Jewish people as a source of benefit to the wider world, the difficulty of fitting them into generally accepted categories unfortunately encourages suspicion and fear.
In the West, many assume that ethnic minorities must be dark-skinned and somehow “foreign.” So the fact that most Western Jews are pale-skinned means they don’t fit the template of an ethnic minority. And the notion that Judaism is both religion and peoplehood feeds the paranoid suspicions of the anti-Semite that the Jews are slippery customers who change their shape at will and thus hide in plain sight.
Jewishness is difficult to define at the best of times. Anti-Semitism is not only now running rampant in the West; worse still, both this victimization and the nature of Jewish distinctiveness itself are being widely ignored or rendered invisible.
So it’s hardly surprising that the questioning of the Jews’ minority status that erupted this week has rubbed already exposed Jewish nerves raw.
Reprinted with permission from JNS.org
@ Reader:
Defintely end of discussion. You have a screw loose inside which turns black into white and vice versa. Otherwise you are a good debater. You are the PILPULIST SUPREME. You see what is not there, you impute what is not meant, and you are not even aware that Jewish historical and Biblical continuity are badly interrupted in many places due to wars, destructions and bad guesses by later compilers. The High Priesthood Line, supposedly sacrosanct, and descending without a hitch from Zadok, is missing and distorted in several places. The very same with the Davidic Kingship descent, even the Torah, due to wars, destructions redactions alterations guesses (mostly bad) time after time after time.
{It is not known whether Matityahu or his father Yochanan were the Kohen Gadol mentioned, (according to sacred descent neither could have been) and there is no trace of any supposed Maccabean progenitor named “Hashmon”, which is an adjective, meaning “an exalted person”.} It does not prevent subsequent Jewry from celebrating Chanukah and lauding the Macovim. It suits us to have something to celebrate.
In fact, with all your half-baked knowledge and excellent research abilities, you really know very little about anything. Which, however, does in no way prevent you from expounding on those matters.
You remind me of “Wrong Way Corrigan” of whom you likely never heard.
This exchange is finished and I will answer no more to you, except on another topic-if it’s of interest to me, not meely, as you do, to correct some trifling typo or error. .
{The Maccabees were strongly opposed because they took both Kingship and High Priesthood in the same family and were not entitled, except by force of their power. This is a little info I give you freely in case you didn’t know. t has no bearing on mitzvot or conversion or Tikkun Olam. just froth.}
@ Edgar G.:
OK, this is my last response to you on the topic.
First of all, you are really good at attributing to me the stuff that I neither said nor thought.
From reading your latest post, it seems that it is YOU who is into ” Tikkun Olam balderdash”.
You, basically, dismissed the whole concept of Judaism as a unique way of life and a contract with the Almighty with the Jewish people.
It is really stunning for me to think that what I am doing, i.e., kashrut, Shabbat, etc.doesn’t mean anything and is just an accident of history and “A lot of accreted nonsense” which any goy can do just as well.
If it is true that, as you say,
then most of these people are not true converts because what makes a convert Jewish is NOT his belief in “the TRUE G-D” or someone’s acceptance but his sincerity during the process (this IS normative Judaism) so his soul becomes different (this has absolutely NOTHING to do with any Tikkun Olam, or Reform, etc.).
BTW, it is expressly forbidden in the normative Judaism to convert in order to marry a Jew.
So love for a certain Jew doesn’t count as a good enough reason to become one.
If you had two friends, and one of them was ready to die together with you, and the other only committed himself to live the same way you do (assuming each of them meant it) – who would you consider to be more loyal to you?
OK, end of discussion.
@ Reader:
I know what your point was, and I don’t agree. People do not convert to Judaism with thethou/ght in mnd that they will be killed or otherwise ostracized. They have other reasons, like a belief in the TRUE G-D or love for the intended spouse..
As for Mitzvot. many non- Jews also carry out what could be termed Jewishly as mitzvot. It is not an activity solely for Jews. And, keeping kosher is a way of life not neccessary a mitavah. Nor is eating breakfast, and living a normal life, which includes using the washrooms, although beracchas are said then too. A lot of accreted nonsense. . Mitzvahs, if there are some donewhils t acting normally, are just coincidental.
I think this discussion is becoming far to much off the subject and should cease.
I KNOW what you ar getting at, and I say there is much more to it and that you are not exactly correct in your narrower interpretation. You aseem to be moving into that “Tikkun Olam” balderdash. it is THIS which has substituted itself for normative Judaism in the minds of many. I don’t want this to become the new discussion.
Being a “light unto the Nations” is only to set an example, not to wear yourself out by actually lying sown and letting everyone walk over you.
If the goyim want to follow the example they will, if they don’t they wont..
And even if they do, remember Tikkun Olam does not replace Hudaism. Nor was it ever meant to. It was only a pious utterance of some biblical mashuggener amongst many other pious hopes..
@ Edgar G.:
I don’t get what you just said.
Isn’t “doing” mitzvas (sorry for going back to Yiddish but, as someone said, it’s faster) and “not doing” aveiras what the whole of the Jewish way of life is about (at least if you go by the current Ultra-Orthodox conversion practices)?
My point (which I didn’t want to expound on because I thought it would be pointless) was that the willingness of the potential convert to cross to the other side and become a part of the people “who shall dwell alone” and who everybody always at least dislikes, if not hates, and the realization that by doing so he and/or his descendants may have to die with that people and for that people but deciding to join anyway, is a much better proof of a convert’s sincerity than accepting all the mitzvas upfront and training for years to be “a good Jew” until he is “accepted” by a certain (the strictest) bunch of rabbis.
One of those rabbis got to the point several years ago where he started “unconverting” some of the long-term Jewish converts retroactively because they didn’t behave correctly enough for him.
That’s why I asked what if someone who got tested for years and then accepted gets sick and tired of doing mitzvas after a while (living Jewishly – Shabbat, kashrut, etc., etc, so to speak (even though he still might behave as a saint)) a few years later.
I am not saying that this realization and willingness to join in spite of it is enough, I am just saying that I think it is a better test to start with (as per Talmud).
@ Sebastien Zorn:
COVID testing is not reputable to start with (if it’s the PCR kind – and I don’t know of any other).
@ Reader:
CORRECTION: “Jews who lost their way” not “ews”.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
There is a crazy scientist – Jewish, BTW, not Ashkenazi (I forgot his name, it was a few years ago) who insists that the (Ashkenazi?) Jews are, in fact, Italians.
He uses very questionable reasoning to “prove” it (I actually read one of his articles), and his reviewers (even an Arab one) disagree with his conclusions.
Personally, I don’t trust these tests, I think they are just a marketing, money-making trick to skin the ignorant masses.
There is no such thing as “Italian” genes, “Greek”genes, “Russian” genes, etc.
On the other hand, if you travel around the Mediterranean (Italy, Greece, etc.) you will notice that the locals look pretty “Jewish”.
I call it “the Mediterranean type”.
Why not think about “the Mediterraneans” as of ews who lost their way?
Great discussion everybody.
Adam Dalgliesh Said:
On a dare, I got a Groupon for MyHeritage.com’s ethnic testing kit a couple of years ago. You may recall, this was the company that the Israeli government hired for Covid testing so it’s reputable.
The standard liberal line I grew up with was that the reason there is so much variation in appearance among Jews is all rapes and conversions over the centuries.
Well surprise, surprise, turns out I’m ethnically Italian though all of my ancestors came from Hungary and Lithuania for at least the last 4 generations.
Well, at least the way Obama and Harris are African-American, anyway.
2.8 percent Italian.
3.7 percent North African Sephardic Jewish
93.5 percent Ashkenazi Jewish.
So much for the rape/conversion theory. Anybody else here with a similar story?
Well said, Adam.
Well said, Adam
Reader Said:
Well most people who accept Judaism don’t actu/ally consciously “do” mitzvot….except for the Chabdniks and the always fou/nd in a Communiy a few who are genuinely saintly people ,self effacing doing all sorts of mitzvot modestly and only because they are born with that feeling, and that G-D wants them to. My dear lare other was like that. Always collecting for poor brides, or giving advice to the mentally ill, or visiting the hospitals for the poor, finding some sick, abandoned girl (we had a bedroom especially for such) feeding her, making her well, giving her money, geting her a job, restoring self respect etc. Not neccessarily Jewish. Religion didn’t matter.
@ Edgar G.:
About the sneezing part – no, I haven’t heard that one.
I heard “Genossen afn emes””.
About the conversion stuff – as far as I am concerned, to join the people must be primary.
They should join with the understanding that the convert quite possibly signs his and his descendants’ death certificates by doing so, rather than accepts all the mitzvot upfront and thereby becomes better than all the rest of the Jews.
What if the convert gets sick and tired of doing mitzvot a few years later?
Anyway, whatever way this happens now, who cares.
Reader Said:
READER….I know all about the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds and their relative importance etc. That nonsense about being turned away 3 times only came into being in some areas, during the Later Medieval times, as I have read. It’s a sort of urban legend kind of thing. Like, if you sneeze, pull your left ear, and say “Tzegezunt tze leben, tze vaxen tze kvellen, a hundert und tzwantzig yorr”… Did you ever hear that one…?? I bet not.
And other accrued nonsense that piled up in the highly restrictive shtetl environments. None of those “dictums” were in fashion during the pre Roman periods, even the Talmud requirements. The country was thickly populated with Jews, and there were special arrangements for non Jews. Josephus give that info in freat detail.
I do know that, when the Queen of Adiabene became a Jew, and all her family and people (all perished during the Roman Wars) none of those requirement were even mentioned. Perhaps, with your excellent research talents, you could find out the details of their conversions. It was the same for even much later converts, like the Khazar Royal family and Court-and many of the people. They just adopted Judaism, having found out about it and began practicing as Jews.
You can read the complete correspondence between King Joseph and Chasdai Ibn Shaprut. It tells in brief how the Khazars became Jews. In fact I get a very occasional email on new information on the Khazars from a Society with is involved in excavations at Khazar sites, or keeps watch out for new information on the digs..
@ Edgar G.:
Of course, times change but isn’t the Talmud study still the most exalted part of Torah study one can engage in?
And if so – WHY?
Solely out of respect for the outdated norms which are inapplicable today?
(BTW, the Babylonian Talmud was codified by the year 500CE).
The opinion that in order to become a Jew one has to FIRST accept the performance of all the mitzvot is a minority opinion, and it is a minority of ONE.
The future convert has to be turned away three times by the explanation that he will join a persecuted and beleaguered people, and if he comes back again after the 3rd time, he goes to the mikvah (for the males there is, obviously, a circumcision), and then he is taught the mitzvot, etc. (I don’t have the source in front of me).
So, the emphasis here is on joining the people rather than on the conver’t’s accepting the most perfectionist performance of every mitzvah as done by a certain Jewish sect (I am for Orthodox conversions, BTW)., which is more in line with what Ruth said to Naomi (yes, I know, this is even more outdated than the Talmud).
I have a feeling that this triple warning about joining a persecuted people is treated these days as a mere formality. I hope I am wrong.
As far as my “very unimportant pilpuls” – sometimes a small nuance can change the whole argument or show it to be incorrect – if people care about correctness, that is.
@ Reader:
Well I’m sure that in Talmudic days they didn’t take in converts to Jewish families fo that they could lead a Jewish life, as has EVOLVED in more recent times. That was 2000 or more years ago. Too much else going on, persecution, no communications except by foot or horse and MUCH more. , So although Adam is correct, you are also not wrong.
You have a habit of quibbling over VERY unimportant pilpuls here and there, which, perhaps contributes to the exasperation of others. You do some very gaod, deep research, which I appreciate…..but let’s not get into semantics.
@ Edgar G.:
I didn’t say that Adam’s description of the process was wrong. it’s just what they are doing now, is the opposite of what it says in the Talmud/
@ Reader:
Reader Said:
I don’t think so Reader, how do you come to day that. For instance, conversion in Dublin, where I come from, always took years. Apart from the tuition, and learning, the intending convert needed to move into a totally kosher and Halachically pure family home, where he/she would live for a few years, absorbing the Jewish ways of life.
@ Reader:
Reader Said:
I totally agree with this remark, 100%. And add that regardless of wanting “to be like everyone else”, when trouble looms they will be picked on first. In fact the “picking-on”, has never stopped as we read every day in the news. Jew hate erupts globally, constantly, every hour; somewhere.
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
All the stuff that you wrote about conversion is the opposite of what it says in the Talmud.
The Jews should finally figure out what they want.
Do they want to be treated like everybody else in the countries where they reside (otherwise why do they assimilate like crazy and get upset when someone notices Jews in power, business, arts, etc.) OR do they want to be treated as an ethnic minority, separate from the general population?
If the truth is that if the Jews want to have it both ways, that’s exactly what will make the non-Jews freak out.
The best way to deal with it is just move to Israel and quit getting confused about your Jewish identity and quit confusing everybody else.
In the Diaspora the Jews will always be aliens.
While the characterization of Jews as an ethnic as well as a religious group may be important in diaspora countries, as Melanie points out, it is of vital importtance in Israel. DNA testing has revealed that nearly all Jewish communities have some degree of common descent dating back to very early times. Sephardic, Ashkenzic and Mizrachi Jews each have some genomes that are different, but also some genomes in common. If legally recognized conversions that confer Jewish legal status on individuals are made too lenient, this ethnic element in Jewish identity, the passing of Jewish identity from one generation to another will be lost. Because Jewish national and religious identity are fused into one in traditional Judaism, which teaches that Jews are a nation or “people” and that the Land of Israel is their rightful, God-given national home, converts to Judaism must have these doctrines instilled in them for a considerable period of time, and be required to observe traditional Jewish rituals and practices for this time period, before they will actually feel that they are Jews, and that they have made an irrevocable committment to the Jewish people that they are obligated to pass on to their children. Without such a period of indoctrination and acculturation for converts, a sense of Jewish identity will gradually be lost by a large part of Israel’s nominally Jewish population, and with it committment to the survival of the state will gradually disappear. The Reform and Conservative movements make conversion easy, and do not have much in the way of committment to the preservation of Israel an Jewish state, or to the obligation of Jews to live in the land of Israel if possible, or tothe obligation to transmit a Jewish identity and Jewish cutltural-religious-national values to their children, or to the obligation to marry another Jew. As a result allowing persons converted to Judaism by these sects to be regarded as Jews in Israel and to acquire citizenship though the Law of the Return, will weaken the ethnic identity of Israeli Jews, and the ethnic character of the state.. And that will imperil the survival of the state, which depends heavily on a sense of ethnic solidarity among Jews.
The claim that the Jews are a privileged minority, not an “oppressed” one, ignores historical and contemporary reality. It is true that since Jews were legally emancipated in some countries in the 18th and 19th centuries, Jews have been disproportionately represented, as individuals, in many influential and presigius occupations. However, historically, Jews were denied equal rights or citizenship in nearly all European countries and in all Islamic countries. In England, for example, Jews were legally “slaves of the King” for two centuries–with absolutely no civil rights. Even their property was legally the king’s property. And in fact, English kings often seized the property of a Jew without compensation.One English king expelled all the Jews from his realm in 1291, and seized all their property. Jews were repeatedly expelled from France and numerous German states and their property was always seized when they were forced to flee. And of course there were frequent pogroms, with heavy loss of life.
Legal emancipation seemed to change this situation. It enabled some Jews to obtain social positions which came with high social status and wealth. But in the end it did not alter the reality that the Jews were still an oppressed people. Hitler murdered six million Jews in less than six years while the rest of the world either stood by indifferently or actively facilitated the murders. Of course all Jewish property was seized, either by the Nazis themselves, their collaborators or non-Jewish neighbors.
Today, barely veiled hatred of the Jews is commonplace in England, Frannce and most other European countries, even though there is the anomoly that some Jews as individuals (not as Jews) hold high social
positions. Vioence against Jews and Jewish property remains commonplace. While a Jewish state has been reborn, it is isolated from and condemned by the “international community” for fictitious offenses. It is beseiged by enemy nations that have vowed to destroy it. Jews are subjected to constant libels and hate propaganda thoughout the Islamic world.
In other words, nothing has really changed. Jews are still an oppressed people. And governments should recognize that this is the case.
Baron Lionel de Rothschild was the first Jew to take his seat in parliament without converting and swearing on a New Testament in 1858 after being elected to the House of Lords 3 times and refusing to take his seat because of the rule requiring such.
I’m completely secular but I have been harassed by people who could tell I was Jewish just by looking at me many times.
As far as I am concerned, pretending we are not an oppressed race, just because the Nazis isolated us as a race, does not protect us. I want the same protections as any other racial minority. Antisemites will regard us as a race no matter what we do, say or think, anyway.