I’m Sicilian-American, and am sometimes mistaken for Lebanese, Armenian, etc. (i.e. other groups from the same region as Jesus would have been). I consider myself white, so I never considered that Jesus would be anything OTHER THAN white.
That picture is your idea of ‘swarthy’? Really? The person depicted therein isn’t dark-skinned and his features are not what I’d associate with a Middle-Eastern person. And the eyes are blue!
But super dreamy!
Seriously. Next thing you know, he’ll suggest that this guy is middle-eastern. Not with those eyes, baby.
One of the mostNordic Jesuses I’ve ever seen is the one shown in the Roman Catholic Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC.
This “real face of Jesus” is based on analysis of skulls and drawings of people who lived near Jerusalem in the First Century.
Crikey! It’s Moloch von Zinzer!
You really shouldn’t have pressed the issue. It’s a complicated subject here.
The Passion of the Chris Hemsworth.
The issue here is that there are two very different definitions of “white” (and please please please, note that while these notions exist in many cultures, not every culture reflects them with the word “white” or its dictionary-equivalent).
There is one that m-w doesn’t list: the most similar one they list is their 2b:
but which if you allow me I’ll list as
(“ok to marry and not only to fuck”).
And then there is the “features-based” definition (m-w’s 1b):
(where not tanned).
By this second definition, the immense majority of Jews are white. People from Southern Europe, from Northern Africa, from India, Travelers, Roma… are white. Irishfolk are glow-in-the-dark white.
By the first one, many people consider or used to consider all those listed above as “not white” or “not white enough”.
The conflict between these two definitions are what caused the breakup between Nzinga and her friend, and what gives rise to questions like those in the OP.
How so?
Because Jews are the epitome of a group which is white at face value but which gets re-labeled “not white enough/eeeek/killkillkill” with additional information.
There’s that. Calling an Israeli “white” in effect groups him with the Europeans, with the gentiles. It’s saying they’re the same race as the Germans. It’s also saying that they’re European colonialists in the Middle East, instead of natives - which is how we prefer to think of ourselves. That’s why a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Israeli such as myself would hestitate before referring to himself as white. I’m not European, I’m Semitic.
But besides that, it can also be about the divisions in Israeli Jewish society, between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi (Oriental) Jews. While referring to the two groups as “white” and “black”, respectively, is not something done in polite society, it’s occasionally used in colloquial speech. If **Nzinga’s **friend was Mizrahi - if his family came from the Middle East or North Africa - calling him “white” would be an insult in that sense, too. After all, why should a Jew from Syria, Algeria or Iran think of himself as “white”, compared to someone like me?
Those are considered sub-divisions of white, in some cultures. To me, redheaded Noone Special, blonde-blue-eyed you or dark-haired Ariel Rot* are all varieties of “white”. But then, my own cultural baggage means I find it offensive to be told it’s not possible to be Hispanic and [insert color here].
- Full name Ariel Rotenberg Gutkin; Argentinian singer, songwriter and musician, has lived in Spain for 30+ years and I wouldn’t know he’s got Jewish ancestry if I hadn’t discovered in the Dope that Roth is a Jewish lastname and tracked that via his sister, whose own artistic name is Cecilia Roth (and who happens to be a blonde). To see pics of him in the link, clic on “FOTOS”; for some reason the different parts of the page don’t have different addresses.
Be that as it may, as you well know it’s impossible to separate race from politics. Not that that’s a bad thing. Seeing as race does not actually exist, a political definition is as good as any other.
Oh yeah, just saying that it’s one of those things that one has to be very careful about when mixing different cultures (with or without a change of language). A term that’s offensive in one is punctilliously exact in another, a term that means the same thing in one context means a very different thing in another, etc. And only because someone’s English is perfectly fine in general doesn’t mean they use socially-loaded terms in the same way.
Which is probably a large part of the issue with “Jesus is white” - regardless of his skin tone, he was Jewish, and Jews have a long history of being treated like “not one of us.”
Same thing with folks from the Middle East - their skin tone is pretty “white”- but right after 9/11 it was tough for people who were “Middle Eastern looking.”
However, I’d lay odds Jesus looked nothing like Chris Hemsworth. And that Saint Nicholas looked somewhat more like a Turkish man than the Dutch looking one on the Coke can. Race is a construct, but people from a region tend to look like people from a region - now, maybe not so much especially in a melting pot country like the U.S. But 2000 years ago, people didn’t travel much - gene pools mixed primarily through conquest (which would have gotten you a few Roman looking Jews, but most Romans didn’t look like Chris Hemsworth either).
I never really thought that referring to an Israeli as “white” could be taken as a way of de-legitimizing his identity as an Israeli/Jew. Now I’ll know better*.
I just watched a 3 min clip of James Baldwin this morning, and it reminded me that people’s perception of you is mostly shaped by their own perception of themselves. Nzinga, Seated’s comment on the “whiteness” of her Israeli (former)friend probably has a lot to do with how she self-identifies as a black woman.
*Personally I have no problem thinking of an Israeli who could be any mixture of “White”, Jewish, “Semitic”, European, Middle Eastern, Asian, African, etc; so there is no need to use ethnicity/religion/ancestry for me to recognize an Israeli as native to Israel. However, I also realize that my personal thoughts are not law, and might not even be the norm.
Even if we were able to:
a) Clearly define which ethnicities constitute “white”
b) Trace back those ethnicities to see which one was the predominant one for Jesus’s demographic
c) Establish that Jesus was entirely of that ethnicity and not a mix
We still wouldn’t be able to say definitely that Jesus was white. It would be a statement with x% margin of error since it’s based on probability.
On top of that, it’s probably as moot a point as there ever was.
Ethnically, he’s Jewish because his mom was Jewish. But who knows what race his dad was. 
Someone who spends years wandering through Judea and the Negev will get quite brown regardless of what color he started with.