Before getting to my actual question, let me qualify that I am a Protestant Christian, born and raised. One who has actually read the Bible, interpreted it for myself, and who believes that Jews are God’s “chosen”, if for no other reason than they are the people to whom my God decided to first reveal Himself. (And, yes, I realize that He revealed himself to “Hebrews”, long before they came to be called “Jews”.)
My question is inspired by the various brands of racists out there, amongst whom I include antisemites.
Just how “racial” is “being Jewish”?
Like I said, I’ve actually read the Bible, including the Old Testament, but I can’t quote chapter and verse, but I remember stuff I’ve read. And, while I know that Judaism does not actively proselytize, I seem to remember that the Law of Moses made specific provisions for “outsiders” who wished to follow Yahweh/the god of the Hebrews/Jews. And it seems to me that race had nothing to do with those provisions. If somebody who was not a Hebrew, even somebody who was traditionally an enemy of the Hebrews/Jews wanted to follow and worship Yahweh, the Law made provision for them, and if they followed the Law, they could be included.
So. Jewish Dopers, is my interpretation correct? “Jewish” isn’t any more “racial” than “Christian”.
There are two points, here. On the one hand, yes, it’s possible for a non-Jew, of any race, to become a Jew. On the other hand, though, you’re also automatically a Jew if your mother is one, and that accounts for the vast majority of Jews.
So it’s not completely “racial”, but it’s a lot more “racial” than Christianity, which doesn’t have such a thing as “Christian by birth” (the closest equivalent would be infant baptism, but that’s still an initiation).
It’s similar to becoming a Freemason. They don’t recruit - you have to ask.
Right, and only matrilineal ancestry is relevant for determining Jewishness by descent. This means that a person could be 127/128 Australian Aborigine and 1/128 Jewish, but if that one Jewish ancestor was the person’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother, then the person is 100% Jewish under Jewish law, despite the fact that they almost certainly look like a typical Australian Aborigine.
Another way of thinking about this is that Christianity is a religion, while Judaism is an ethnoreligious movement that has aspects of both a religion and an ethnicity. Other well-known ethnoreligious groups are Parsis (Zoroastrians), Hindus, Yazidis, and the Amish. Some of these groups permit outsiders to join, but typically the process is more involved because it combines a religious conversion with an adoption into the ethnic group.
By contrast, most forms of Christianity (excluding the Amish), Islam, and Buddhism are not ethnoreligious - anyone can join without needing to adopt a new ethnic identity. A person can be a Japanese Muslim, a Ukrainian Seventh-Day Adventist, or a Cherokee practitioner of Zen.
Why would that be “racial”, rather than “tribal” or “cultural”? There were other tribes around Canaan who had some ancestral relation to the Hebrews (other Semitic peoples, the legendary descendants of Shem), but who weren’t Hebrews or Jews. Arabs consider themselves to be descendants of Abraham, don’t they? There were also other tribes of Hebrews ( = descendants of Eber) besides the line of Abraham.
Yes, traditionally, Jews consider themselves to be descendants of Abraham’s son Isaac, while Arabs (not Muslims, but the Arab ethnic group) consider themselves the descendants of Abraham’s other son Ishmael.
I used the word “racial” because that’s the word the OP used, and put it in quotes because the meaning wasn’t the usual meaning associated with the word nowadays. “Tribal” or “ethnic” would work, too.
I saw someone claim that it’s because your mother could have been unfaithful and so you can never be 100% if that’s your real father. I didn’t see any real evidence backing up that claim, though.
Judaism means more than one thing. It is an ethnic identity held by many people born Jewish, who often further identify as Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Mizrahi, or one pf a few smaller subgroups of Jews. Jews who are atheist, or even Jews who have converted to another religion may still identify culturally as Jews.
Converts are religiously Jewish. They usually participate in the cultural traditions of whatever synagogue they choose, and come eventually to identify with one of the subgroups either by marrying into a family of one, or joining a community primarily of one type. Sometimes other life choices may dictate choices: a vegetarian may choose to follow Sephardic traditions for Passover, because they are much easier for vegetarians.
20 or 30 years after a conversion, a convert may feel fully Jewish, even in a cultural sense, especially if the person has married a Jew and is raising Jewish children. They may still buy Christmas gifts for family members, but many Jews buy Christmas gifts for close friends.
People who are religiously but not culturally Jewish are recent converts, and people who are Jewish by matrilineage but have not been raised with any religion. The latter could be spoken of as Ethnically Jewish, and are Jewish in the sense that they are welcome back at any time, and no conversion or initiation is necessary.
The word has more than one meaning. You can plot the meanings on Venn diagrams, and they overlap, but they are different. There are lots of words that have different, but overlapping meanings. Just accept that this is one.
Well now Jews don’t proselytize. But in the pre-Christian/pre-Islamic era, Jewish evangelization was very widespread. Jews largely saw themselves as a lone monotheistic outpost surrounded by polytheistic pagans. That’s why the Law made such provision for Jewish converts.
It’s a characteristic of Rabbinic Judaism, which emerged (I think) in about the second century CE and is now the dominant (but not the only) form of Judaism. Karaite Jews, by contrast, still hold to a patrilineal understanding of what it is to be born Jewish.
I don’t think Rabbinic Judaism simply plucked it out of the air. It was probably a growing tradition over a period up to the second century. But so far as I know there’s not much support for it in the Hebrew scriptures, either in the Law or in the attitude evidenced to the offspring of Israelite men and foreign women who feature in the scriptural stories - i.e, no issue seems to be made about whether they are properly Jewish, or whether they have to convert.
Related question, if an Arab muslim that lives in the occupied territories and is not entitled to Israeli citizenship then converts to Judaism, can he then gain Israeli citizenship?
As I understand it, in theory any Jew can apply for and obtain Israeli citizenship, or does that not count for conversions?
Yes, converts to Judaism can claim migrate to Israel and claim citizenship under the Law of Return.
I think you have to have lived as a practising Jew and participated in a Jewish congregation for a period after your conversion before you can rely on your conversion to claim rights under the Law of Return. Presumably, this is to ensure that your conversion is a genuine and substantial one, and not a token exercise undertaken to claim citizenship. There would, presumably, be flexibility about this in a case where you were being actively persecuted on account of your conversion.
(You’ll be aware, of course, that conversion to Judaism is not simply a matter of professing belief in the tenets of Judaism, or repudiating your former faith. It involves entering into a relationship with the Jewish community, satisfying the religious authorities about your motivation, your knowledge of the Law, your commitment, etc, before they accept you. The Israeli civil authorities will defer to the religious authorities on the question of whether you have, in fact, converted to Judaism. So to claim the benefits of the Law of Return you do have to convert to Judaism in this fairly demanding way; it’s not enough to declare that you wish to be Jewish or that you now consider yourself Jewish.)
If matrilineal descent were followed strictly, then most of us Ashkenazi would not be Jewish. This is determined by DNA studies.
Mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) is inherited exclusively from the mother (as with most things in biology, there are apparently exceptions, but they are extremely rare). It turns out that most Ashkenazy have European MtDNA. On the other hand, the Y chromosome in men is inherited exclusively in the male line (standard disclaimer) and Ashkenazy males have middle eastern Y chrosomes.
The simplest explanation is that a lot of Jewish men traveled, married local women, and had their children raised as Jews. Certainly, it was unlikely that they underwent formal conversion and therefore the families were not Jews by the rabbinic definition.
Zoroastrianism used to a religion of conversion, as did Judaism (there was a significant population of Jewish or quasi-Jewish converts in the late Roman era, and there have been examples of large scale conversion since then). My understanding is they both embraced more of an identity as ethnoreligious movements after they found themselves as minority religions in exile who had to avoid stirring up antipathy from the majority religion (Christianity/Islam and Hinduism/Islam respectively). More recently there has been a small movement of some people in central Asia to embrace Zoroastrianism as an alternative to Islam, since they perceive it as their pre-Islamic tradition.
Zoroastrianism and Judaism of course did have offshoot religions (Manichaeanism and Christianity/Islam) that were major religions of conversion.