Okay, first off this is NOT a bashing thread, not racist, and I don’t want to start a flame war. This is just a simple question. We are not racist whatsoever.
My drunken boyfriend has started an argument and the 5 of us cannot seem to come to an agreement.
He claims that being “Jewish” is a race AND a religion. Our argument is that it is NOT a race. It’s a religion. A “race” is caucasion, African, Asian, ect…
He claims that anyone on the face of the earth can be Jewish if they chose and that someone can be jewish (religion) and not be Jewish (race) because the ‘Jewish’ people have distinct characteristics that seperate them from other races. And anyone else who is not born into jewish linage can convert to Judism but they are not in fact Jewish.
I ask you… is Jewish a completely seperate race of people?
It is not a race, but being Jewish can be ethnic, say like being an Italian, Greek or Swede. One does not have to be a believer in the Jewish religion to be a Jew. If you convert then you become a Jew, as in the case of Sammy Davis Jr. It can become confusing, thus the fact that your argument has been inacted many times, in many places.
I’ve already asked this and received mixed answers.
I’ll tell you this (and this is why I asked it in the first place):
in some places (including the U.S.) “Jew” and/or “Jewish” is typed in the RACE section on birth and death certificates. I noticed this when I saw a copy of some death certificates of some Jewish people.
Over, and over, and over. This has been brought up so many times, I find it hard that you haven’t seen it here already. Search for “Jewish” and “race.” The “search” button is at the top right corner of this page. Yes, there – no, next to that – yeah.
Judaism is a religion; everyone who believes in it, including those who convert to it, is Jewish.
The Jews are a people; all who are of Jewish parentage are Jewish, no matter what they believe. They have a common ancestry going back thousands of years.
It’s wrong to call Jews a race, but I’d say your drunken boyfriend is more right than wrong.
According to http://www.torahbytes.org/sechel/contradiction.htm
the term Jewish refers to both race and religion. While I don’t quite agree with the definition of race in this situation (ethnicity is more appropriate) The term Jewish, at least in my opinion, definitely refers to both a religion AND a population of people religious or not…
When refering to the Jewish “race,” one must remember that the word race in that context is actually older than the Linnaean use of the word–and, in fact, Linnaeus coined his word based on the older meaning.
Long before race was used to indicate (an erroneous) classification of humans at a level below species, the word was used to indicate any group that had a real or legendary founder. The Jews were the race of Abraham. the Irish were the Milesian Race. The Romans were the Race of Romulus. it was, in fact, this attributed aspect of race to indicate “common descent” that led Linnaeus to borrow that word and reuse it with a new meaning when setting up his arbitrary four races.
Thus, you can find people refering to the “Jewish race,” but they are not talking about the divisions that people find in older biology books that describe the “five races” or the “three races” or the “sixty races.”
Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin, in his work, To Be A Jew, (1972), said:
Threads on this subject tend to degenerate into debates, so I’ll close this thread. Further discussion would be more appropriate in GD if you want to debate the question, or CSR if you want to comment on the above report.
