Skin colour is not a distinguishing factor for Jews

The argument

Jewishness is an ethnoreligious identity, and the argument holds that this is precisely what makes the question of whether Jews are white a badly posed one. The category combines two things that usually come apart. Some people identify as ethnically Jewish because of a long history of Jewish family, sometimes traceable to a particular region of the world. Others convert to Judaism, and anyone of any race or ethnicity is able to do so. A single identity that can be entered either by descent or by belief cannot be mapped onto a racial category, which admits only the first route. Because of this, there is no distinguishing visual factor to Jewish identity. If someone is a practising Jew, then they are Jewish, regardless of their skin colour. Jews, whether by birth or by conversion, are of every race and ethnicity, so any generalisation about how Jewish people look is a claim about one community's history rather than about the identity itself. The deciding factor in Jewish identity is participation in the Jewish faith, or in whatever familial cultural practices exist within an individual's life — neither of which is legible from appearance. The conclusion the argument draws from this is deflationary rather than affirmative. Since anyone can technically be Jewish, the racial question has no stable subject to attach to: asking whether Jews are white is asking for a single racial answer about a group whose membership is not determined racially in the first place. On this view the honest response is not to pick a side but to observe that the question is a moot point, and that a person's skin colour tells you nothing about whether they are Jewish.

Premises

Counter-arguments

While skin color may not be the deciding factor in someone’s Jewish identity, anti-Semitism is widely considered to be a form of racism since it targets people of an ethnic and religious minority. To ignore the discrimination that Jews face specifically due to their ethnoreligious identity is to ignore thousands of years of racial persecution. Jews are not considered fully white because they have not been allowed all of the advantages that white privilege gives to white non-Jews.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That Jews come from many backgrounds and that no visual marker defines the identity is not in dispute. What follows from it is that Jewishness is not a colour — a different claim from the one the position asserts. [Rejecting P2] Concluding that the question is moot states the case for a different position in this question, that Jews are not a race, rather than the case that Jews are white. The counter also identifies what the premise leaves out: whiteness here is a social category concerning how a group has been treated and what it has been granted, and that is not settled by observing that the group is internally diverse.