Hello friends. If this post is inappropriate, please tell me how to fix it or feel free to remove it. I am here because sometimes The Algorithm presents me new information, but especially when it's about Judaism in the current global climate, I want to make sure I'm not being told something inaccurate or harmful.

  • When I was a kid, I thought Judaism was a religion
  • As I got older, I learnt people also treated it as an ethnicity, it was both
  • Now I am seeing some people (I am unsure of their intentions) say Judaism is not an ethnicity, it is a religion

For example, this guy: https://www.tiktok.com/@yuvalmann.s/video/7317661422694026529

Who is a Jew, from Israel, who is now an anti-Zionist. He says "a Jewish person from Morocco, a Jewish person from Ethiopia and a Jewish person from Germany or Hungary have absolutely nothing to do with each other but one thing, religion". And later explains that the idea of Judaism as an ethnicity itself was an idea of Zionists.

I'd be curious to hear what people here think about that take, whether it's accurate, if it's harmful/inaccurate, etc. Thanks very much!

  • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
    ·
    10 months ago

    tiktok is designed to make you dumber. i appreciate what this guy is trying to do (and I'm curious about the book he's apparently cribbing from), but a number of unquestioned premises and oversimplifications lead him to a confused conclusion.

    Nationality, race, and ethnicity are all constructed categories. Accepting them as completely ontologically distinct is a fallacy. It's true that no one is inherently a Jew, any more than one is inherently an American or inherently European. The notion that Jews were another people (that is, other than Christians) was obviously not invented by Israel, but central to the identity of Christianity. After all, if Jews and Christians aren't a separate thing, then Jesus didn't form a new covenant with God, establishing His church and dying to redeem humanity, but instead just founded a new sect of Judaism that happened to get popular within the empire. Fast forward through most of the history of Europe and of antisemitism and we find enlightenment-era Christian Europeans, in the process of conquering the world, developing new scientific taxonomies of human difference, thereby inventing the races that would be inscribed in relationships of enslavement, subjugation, and economic domination. If you want to pick a time when Jews became an ethnicity as well as a religion, this works okay. Zionism would follow a few centuries later, but remain a fringe movement until the middle of the 20th century, when its goal was not to racialize Judaism, but to reracialize it, form it into a new identity independent of both the multiplicity of Judaisms held and practiced by Jews around the world as well as the initial racial category theorized primarily by Christian antisemites.