Jews are an ethnically diverse religious group

The argument

The argument holds that Jews cannot properly be categorised as a race because what defines the group is religious rather than racial. Judaism is a religion, and proponents argue that the classification of a people by their faith does not become a racial classification merely because the faith has been held by families over many generations. The structural claim concerns membership. A race, on the understanding used here, is something a person is born into and cannot join. Judaism does not work that way: anyone can become a Jew by converting, and the convert is considered a Jew in every regard, without qualification or lesser standing. Proponents treat this as decisive, since a category that admits new members by their own decision is not being determined by descent, whatever role descent plays for most of those within it. The empirical claim concerns composition. There are Jews from a variety of racial backgrounds, including African-American Jews, Indian Jews and Latino Jews, so no racial description picks out the group's membership. What its members share is a religious identity rather than a shared racial identity, which makes the group ethnically diverse in the ordinary sense of that term. The argument's final step explains why the categorisation is held to matter rather than being a question of terminology. Racism is described here as the process by which certain characteristics, religion among them, are treated as signs of underlying biological difference. Classifying Jews as a race performs exactly that operation: it converts a set of beliefs and practices into a supposed biological fact about the people who hold them. Proponents therefore argue that treating Jews as a race fuels anti-Semitic sentiment rather than merely describing the group inaccurately, because the racialisation of a religious community is the move on which such sentiment has historically depended.

Premises

Counter-arguments

One counter-argument comes from genetic research. Scientific evidence suggests that Jews are a distinct biological race. The research of Harry Ostrer, a medical geneticist and professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, suggests that Jews exhibit a distinctive genetic signature. This distinction is enough to define Jews by their racial identity. Another point argues that while Jews may not be a bio-genetic race, they are a socio-historical race. Steven Kaplan, a professor of comparative religion at Hebrew University, asserts that the racial identity of Jews is a cultural reality. It forms a major part of their social identity and self-image. Jewish identity is frequently defined in terms of appearance, descent, and, most recently, genetic heritage. We cannot dismiss these categorizations as only popular misunderstandings because they make up the core social-historical constructions of the Jewish identity.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise makes a sound point about how racism operates and draws the wrong conclusion from it. That racial thinking biologises what is not biological is a reason to reject race as a scientific category, not a reason to reclassify Jewish identity as purely religious — and the historical record cuts against the move, since antisemitism treated Jewishness as inherited regardless of belief or conversion, which is exactly why a religious definition offered no protection. [Rejecting P2] The conversion argument establishes that Jewish identity is not settled by descent alone, which is not the same as showing it is religious only. Identity is transmitted through descent in most traditions as well as through conversion; there are large numbers of secular and atheist Jews whom this definition would exclude; and the presence of Jews of many origins tells against a single ancestry rather than against a shared peoplehood. [Rejecting C] The conclusion concedes the difficulty in its own wording, describing an "ethnically diverse religious group" — ethnicity being the category the argument set out to deny. The position that Jews are not a race is well supported on other grounds, since race is not a biological category for any human population; resting it on religion alone makes it depend on a definition many Jews do not accept.

Further reading

The Myth of the Jewish Race (book) by Alain F. Corcos: https://lupress.cas.lehigh.edu/content/myth-jewish-race