Many people I know refer to blacks as a ‘race.’ I also know people who refer to Jews as a ‘race’. Not all blacks have the same religion, but all Jews have the same basic beliefs (aside from the Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Hasidic, and anything else). So why are Jews called a race? What about black Jews? Are they considered to be of two races?
The use of the word race to refer to the Jews is the older meaning of the term. Prior to the eighteenth century, the word race, in English, meant any identifiable group of people, with special meaning if they looked to some common distant ancestor. Jews looked back to Abraham. The Irish looked back to Milesius (in one tradition) and called themselves the Milesian Race or to the Tuatha de Danaan and the Firbolg if looking back before the Milesian conquerors.
When Linnaeus began categorizing plants and animals, the notion arose to separate humanity according to certain perceived traits and the word race was transferred in usage to the groups that came to be called Mongoloid, Caucasian, and Negroid. (Later ethnologists broke up these three categories to among five groups and later to as many as 60 groups).
Then, through the 1980s and 1990s, enough genetic evidence was collected and analyzed to determine that the biological notion of race that had been attempted by the ethnologists following Linnaeus was not valid. There were simply not enough distinguishing characteristics among the various groups (that did not also occur in other groups) to justify the concept of race in a biological sense.
In rough usage, the terms of the ethnologists have continued in use as cultural identifications of roughly similarly appearing people.
So, we have (at least) three separate meanings:
- a group descended from some real or mythological person (including all the people who were accepted by that group without actually being included in descent);
- a group of people roughly equivalent to a sub-species (although this use has been shown to have no biological foundation and should be set aside);
and - a group of people with approximately similar physical characteristics in which those characteristics may be often used to determine conditions (such as status) within a society.
Jews (and Irish or Finns or any number of other groups) are identified in the first definition while blacks and whites (among others) fall into the third definition.
Race is an obsolete concept adhered to those to ignorant to know otherwise (fools) or by those who need to hate (racists).
Race may not exist but racism and racialism don’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon. That is the main thing keeping the idea of ‘race’ alive.
For instance, ‘black’ people in America are historically defined by hypodescent - the idea that a product of two ‘races’ belongs to the socially inferior or ‘target’ race. As a result the majority of American blacks are of mixed ancestry, and a fair number of ‘African Americans’ are people of essentially ‘Caucasian’ ancestry who are defined as ‘black’ by hypodescent. Only in recent years have we seen people (Tiger Woods) who have challenged that.
In Europe, from the times of Ferdinand and Isabel to In Nazi Germany, similar efforts were made to define “Jewishness” along racial lines. But the ridiculousness of their thinking is betrayed by the fact that they often had to use methods such as the yellow star insignia to identify Jews, as most were in reality indistinguishable from many “Aryans” in Europe.
I think the idea of “Races” as distinct, coherent, more or less unchanging, and mutually exclusive grouping of humans has largely been abandoned - as ** tomndebb ** said. Now I think anthropologists who study this subject largely focus on units which they call “populations” which overlap, vary widely, are subject to constant change, and eventually blend with other populations to form new ‘populations’ over time.
We can see examples of this among the Mestizos of Latin America- who as a ‘race’ didn’t exist until after 1492, or the ‘Hapas’ (white/Polynesian or Asian) people of Hawaii who date from the last 2 centuries - both groups are essentially new populations which are rooted in and overlap with older populations such as “Caucasian”, “American”, “Polynesian” or so on, but do not fit into the old system of ‘race’ very well. Jews and American blacks are essentially two populations of people that have been defined as ‘races’ by many over the years.