White identity is predicated on historical anti-Semitic white privilege

The argument

This argument holds that Jews are not white because of what the category 'white' historically meant: white identity was built in part on the exclusion and persecution of Jews, so Jewishness was defined as the very thing whiteness was not. The historical record, proponents argue, shows whiteness as a constructed status conferred through inclusion and denied through exclusion — and Jews were among those it excluded. For centuries in Europe, Jews were treated as an alien presence, subjected to ghettos, expulsions, exclusion from professions and recurring violence, marked as outsiders to the Christian European mainstream that whiteness came to encode. This reached its annihilatory extreme in the racial ideology of Nazism, which defined Jews as a separate and inferior race precisely to place them outside the 'Aryan' or white community — and murdered six million on that basis. Antisemitism, on this account, is not incidental to white identity but partly constitutive of it: the white in-group has historically defined its boundaries by casting the Jew as the threatening other beyond them. The inference is that a people whose persecution helped define whiteness from the outside cannot coherently be folded into whiteness today. To call Jews white erases that history — the centuries in which they were emphatically excluded from the category, and were targeted for that exclusion — and ignores that the privilege whiteness conferred was, for most of its history, a privilege defined against them. Whatever the complexion of individual Jews, the historical architecture of white identity placed Jewishness outside it. From this standpoint, the category was built on Jewish exclusion. Because white identity is predicated on a history of anti-Semitic exclusion from white privilege, this argument holds, Jews are not white.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the argument establishes a historical claim and then draws a present-tense conclusion, and the two come apart. That whiteness was constructed partly by excluding Jews describes how the category operated in a particular period; whether it includes Jews now is a question about the present, and a category that is socially constructed can be reconstructed. The scholarship the argument leans on generally makes exactly that point in the other direction: work such as Karen Brodkin's on how Jews came to be counted as white in the mid-twentieth-century United States, and comparable accounts of Irish and Italian Americans, treats the boundary as having moved, and takes the earlier exclusion as evidence of the category's mutability rather than of permanent placement outside it. Critics also argue that the case conflates racialisation with racism. Being subject to antisemitism is not the same as being outside the white category; the two coexist, which is why many Jewish writers describe themselves as both white and targeted, and why antisemitism has taken forms directed at Jews understood as insiders whose assimilation was itself the object of suspicion. Nazi racial classification is a poor guide to a category's boundaries in any case, since its taxonomy was rejected as pseudoscientific — citing it as authoritative about who counts as white grants it a descriptive accuracy it does not possess. A single answer is finally hard to sustain given internal diversity the argument does not address: Mizrahi, Sephardi, Ethiopian and Ashkenazi communities are situated very differently in different societies, which points toward the sibling position that Jews are not a race at all.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics reply that whiteness being constructed through exclusion shows where the boundary was drawn in a particular period, and constructed categories can be redrawn — which is the point of the scholarship on how Jewish, Irish and Italian Americans came to be included. [Rejecting P2] Being subject to antisemitism is not the same as being placed outside the white category, since the two coexist and antisemitism has also targeted Jews understood as insiders; and Nazi racial classification is a poor guide to a category's boundaries given that its taxonomy was rejected as pseudoscientific. [Rejecting P3] A single answer is difficult to sustain given that Mizrahi, Sephardi, Ethiopian and Ashkenazi communities are situated very differently across societies, which points toward the sibling position that Jews are not a race.