Can Judaism be treated as ethnicity? 
The problem: a friend of mine from USA told me that a friend of his is
half Russian and half Jewish. Is this possible? Can somebody be half
Russian and half Catholic, for example?
I know that Judaism is based on whether your mother is Jewish, which
may point that it's right to look at Judaism as ethnicity. However,
it's also an option (not an easy one, but still..) to convert.

Dear Yuval Niv, 

Basically and originally, Judaism is a religion. Therefore, as you
said yourself, either a person is Jewish or not, one cannot be "half
Jewish" (though one could have Jewish ancestry and convert to another
religion).

The problem, however, is that in today's world, ethnicity is not
simply "membership in a particular racial, national, or cultural group
and observance of that group's customs, beliefs, and language." (The
New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D.
Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright ? 2002 by
Houghton Mifflin Company.).

Ethnicity is also a matter of identity: 
- If someone identifies himself/herself as Jewish; 
- If someone identifies others as "Jewish". 

In the case of the Jews, the construction of a separate identity was
first and foremost influenced by the exclusion by the erst of the
society and the identification of the Jew as the "Other".
Antisemitism, the hatered against Jews, has been developed after
societies have already undergone a process of secularisation: those
who wanted to exclude the Jews still claimed that there is something
"different" about the Jews - they have a different ethnicity.

Surprisingly or not, many Jews also believed that the most important
feature as a Jew is the identification as one, constructing a national
movement based on the principle that the "Otherness" of the Jews is a
national one, and that they deserve a homeland, just like any other
nation.

In that aspect, the Jews are a very special case: their identity is
based, first and foremost on religion, but some of them claim to have
also distinctive ethnic and national identity; on the other hand,
antisemites have also identified Jews as an "Other", deserving
discrimination, persecution, and hate. That means, that at least some
non-Jews have come to view "Jewishness" not only as a religion, but
also as an ethnicity: either because they were conviced by the Jewish
claim of difference, or by the antisemite one.

In the United States, the answer for your question is even more
complex. The term "ethnic" in the United States allotes to many
things, usually to some cultural ancestry or connection. This could
apply to that "half Jew/Russian" guy.

Here's a little more to read: 
Judaism: Race, Religion, or Ethnicity? 
<http://www.beingjewish.com/identity/race.html> 
"Every so often I get this question. Usually, I am asked simply
whether Judaism is an ethnicity or a race. [...] What I cannot
understand is: who cares?"

Ethnicity Online - Jews
<http://www.ethnicityonline.net/judaism.htm> 
"Jews consider themselves a nation rather than a religious community;
they are a hugely diverse group that shares some aspects of religious
observance and have shared historical roots. They have a great sense
of community ? indeed, the Jewish nation is more like an extended
family with its close connections and shared sense of discipline."

Soc.Culture.Jewish Newsgroups
<http://www.shamash.org/lists/scj-faq/HTML/faq/13-10.html> 
"If Judaism an ethnicity? In short, not any more. Although Judaism
arose out of a single ethnicity in the Middle East, there have always
been conversions into and out of the religion. Thus, there are those
who may have been ethnically part of the original group who are no
longer part of Judaism, and those of other ethnic groups who have
converted into Judaism."

I hope this answers your question. If you need any clarifications on
this answer, please let me know before you rate it. You might be also
interested in the following answer :
Opinions
<http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=475734>

---

Request for Answer Clarification by yuvalniv-ga on 25 Feb 2005 13:54 PST

Wow! Very impressive. I wasn't expecting this great response...

Your answer and Roger's comment really helped me to think about this
issue further,  and to understand that there is definitely no easy
answer here.
However, looking at the history and the evolution of the Jewish people
just confuses it more... as you mentioned the origin of Judaism came
from A Place (the kingdom of Judah) and their laws became their
Religion.

Therefore, I went back to simply look at the definitions (which is
accepted  world-wide):
"A Jew is any person whose mother was a Jew or person who has gone
through the formal process of conversion to Judaism".

As you can see a person can be totally secular but still can be
considered Jewish.  At the other end,  a person can be Jewish without
any family roots to Judaism.

Thus, here is my takeaway:
Judaism is Religion or Ethnicity or both. 
And therefore a person can say he is half Jewish simply because his
father is by definition Jewish (while is mother isn't).

So now the reminding question is:
How can one prove that his mother is Jewish... :)

Thank you very much,
Yuval.


P.S. here is another helpful link:
http://www.jewfaq.org/judaism.htm

---

Clarification of Answer by politicalguru-ga on 26 Feb 2005 00:25 PST

well, easy...

if her mother was Jewish

Best, #
PG

Very nice answer, Politicalguru! It's no easy question, and your
answer is good and thorough. Just a few things to add to it...

1) Really, the most accurate term to describe to 'what Judaism is' is
the Hebrew 'am, usually translated as 'people' or 'nation' -- so in
the Old Testament (and in Jewish religious-talk to this day), the Jews
are called 'Am Yisroel, meaning the nation Israel, the people [of]
Israel, or something like that. The closest Hebrew term there is to
'religion' is probably 'dat,' which is more literally translated as
'law,' though it's a somewhat larger concept. So 'the Jewish religion'
could be thought of as 'the laws of the people/nation Israel.' More or
less. This is all contensted, of course.
Certainly, it's entirely possible to *join* the nation of Israel (by
conversion, etc.) and so, though it might have been once the case that
there was a single ethnic identity for Jews, it hasn't been the case
for centuries and centuries. (The last comment Poliitcalguru quotes
puts this well.)  Just as immigrants to America are 'real' Americans,
converts into the Jewish nation are 'real' Jews. If you think of
ethnicity as some kind of blood purity, it has nothing to do with the
notion of 'Am Yisroel.

2) As to your friend, though: During the Soviet era, the government of
the USSR indicated the offical 'nationality' of each of its citizens
on official records and documents (like passports). Whereas some
passports said 'Russian' or 'Ukrainian' or 'Latvian' or the like, the
passports of Jews said 'Jewish.' The Soviet government was officially
atheistic and didn't have much patience for religion, but it
recognized the Jews as a distinct national/ethnic/cultural/etc. group.
I have a number of friends who emigrated from the USSR once the
borders opened under Perestroika, and I've seen these passports.
Traditionally, Russian Jews weren't particularly religiously
observant, but they still saw themselves as a distinct ethnic group,
not the least because of the persecution they suffered from the
various pogroms and other antisemetic incidents that populate Russian
history.
(I'm not sure if this labeling is a practice the post-Soviet Russian
government continues.)
So the idea of a 'half Russian, half Jewish' person actually makes a
lot of sense to me -- one parent was Russian, and one was Jewish. In
that sense, yes, Judaism can be *treated* as an ethnicity, certainly.
Whether or not it *is* one is a harder question, as Politicalguru
pointed out.

There are plenty of websites available on this: you might want to take a look at
http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/beyond-the-pale/index.html
for a good online exhibition about the history and politics of Russian Jewry.

Hope this is helpful,
Roger

I am a Rabbi and I thought I should weigh in on this one. 
The real question comes down to how do you define Judaism.  Is it a
culture (ie a social construct) or is it something integral. 
Classically Judaism has viewed the Jewish soul as special.  We were
chosen by G-d and that creates a special relationship.  That
relationship is the foundation of the soul.

This does not deny the great need for the non-Jewish world.  There are
different relationships with G-d.  Those that are chosen for a special
job, and others who were not.  This does not mean that there isn't
another job for them, but they have not been chosen as the one to have
that relationship.

Classical Judaism has always claimed that you must either join the
"family" of Jews (via convertion) or you must de-facto be a member of
the family (IE your mother was).

I hope I have been helpful.

MR_ME

The answer and the comments already given are very good. I would like
to add just a bit. In present-day American society, there is indeed
much uncertainty about whether ethnicity is properly part of Jewish
identity (i.e., "Judaism is a religion, anyone can choose to join it;
therefore why do people often treat it as an ethnicity?"). But the
answer to that question lies in the history. In many times and places
during the last 10 or 20 centuries, it was viewed as BOTH
simultaneously, and this question would have seemed ridiculous
emically (i.e., through the eyes of those cultures), because being
Jewish defined both your religion AND ethnicity, and intermarriage was
anathema and rare. Segregation over so many centuries enforced the
idea of marry-only-within-your-ethnicity to the point that the ethnic
distinction became self-fulfilling. The ?blood relation? is evidenced
by the fact that in the present-day epidemiology of diseases, certain
inherited disorders have higher incidence among Ashkenazic Jews than
among the larger population. Now, the relation of emic "us-vs.-them"
segregation to etic genetic inheritance is an ugly can of worms that
is scientifically useless and indeed is found useful only by sophist
bigots. Nevertheless, we all must understand that Jewish ethnicity has
been, and still very much is, an emic "reality." Today there are
plenty of Jews around the world who identify themselves ethnically as
Jewish but do not subscribe to the Jewish religion at all. So I just
wanted to point out that we all must understand that there are many
people in the world who would not understand the question, because in
their minds, Jewish ethnicity is very "real." That said, I wish we
humans would all just intermarry from now on and forget about it all!