Jews:
A Religious Community,
a People, or a Race?
By Mark Weber
Defining "Jew" has never been simple. Is he someone who practices
Judaism, the Jewish religion, or is he identified by his ancestry?
While many Americans assume that Jews are essentially a religious
group, Jews themselves take for granted that their community is much
more ethnic-national than it is religious.
Benjamin Netanyahu, until recently Israel's prime minister,
frankly regards Jews as members of a racial group. Speaking in
February to a gathering of nearly a thousand Jews in southern
California, he said: "If Israel had not come into existence after
World War II than [sic] I am certain the Jewish race wouldn't
have survived." (Daily Pilot, Newport Beach/ Costa Mesa, Feb. 28,
2000, front page)
The Israeli leader went on to exhort his audience: "I stand before
you and say you must strengthen your commitment to Israel. You must
become leaders and stand up as Jews. We must be proud of our past to
be confident of our future." (Similarly forthright appeals by
non-Jews to racial-ethnic pride are, of course, routinely condemned
as "racist" Or "neo-Nazi.")
Echoing Netanyahu, an influential Jewish community paper with a
nation-wide readership recently referred to Jews as a racial group.
An editorial entitled "Some Other Race" in the March 17 2000, issue
of the New York weekly Forward urges readers to fill out the federal
government census form. It goes on to suggest: "...On question eight
[of the form, which asks about race], you might consider
doing what more than one member of our redaktzia [editorial
staff] has done: checking the box `some other race' and writing
in the word `Jew'."
Charles Bronfman, a main sponsor of the $210 million "Birthright
Israel" project to "sell Jewishness" to American Jews, expresses a
similar sentiment. He is co-chairman of the powerful Seagram company,
and brother of Edgar Bronfman, Sr., president of the World Jewish
Congress. "You can live a perfectly decent life not being Jewish,"
says Charles Bronfman, "but I think you're losing a lot - losing the
kind of feeling you have when you know [that] throughout the
world there are people who somehow or other have the same kind of DNA
that you have." ("Project Reminds Young Jews of Heritage," The
Washington Post, Jan. 17, 2000, p. A19)
Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement,
stressed in his seminal book Der Judenstaat ("The Jewish State"),
published in 1896, that Jews around the world constitute a yolk, that
is, a people or nationality, with interests different than those of
the non-Jews among whom they live. Accordingly, Israeli political
figures and Jewish community leaders in the United States routinely
speak of "the Jewish people."
Consistent with that, Jewish leaders express alarm that so many
Jews are marrying non-Jews (an attitude that is denounced as "racist"
if expressed by non-Jews). Charles S. Liebman, a professor at
Bar-Ilan University in Israel, bluntly declares that intermarriage
"violates the most basic norms of Judaism [and] threatens
Jewish survival." (Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2000)
For decades a small number of American Jews - notably Alfred
Lilienthal, author of The Zionist Connection, and Rabbi Elmer Berger,
leader of the American Council for Judaism - worked hard to persuade
fellow Jews to reject Jewish nationalism (Zionism), and instead
regard themselves essentially as a religious group. Overwhelmingly,
though, Jews have rejected such pleas. Indeed, some of the most
prominent Jewish personalities of the past century - including Albert
Einstein, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Israel's first prime minister, David
Ben-Gurion - have been non-religious.
As a matter of basic state policy, Israel actively encourages
immigration of Jews - defined by ancestry - from around the world,
while at the same time strongly discouraging settlement by non-Jews,
even forbidding immigration of non-Jews who were born in what is now
Israel.
- M.W.
Reprinted from
The
Journal of Historical Review,
(March/April 2000)
The Journal of Historical Review:
P.O. Box 2739 , Newport Beach, CA 92659, USA. Subscription: $40 per
year (domestic).
