a! re part of an ethnic/racial group that is fairly homogenous, speaks a semitic language (usually), and are definitely traceable in origin to a particular territory, albeit a large one. Whether they are muslims or not is an entirely different question. Not so with Jewishness: it would strike most people as absurd to describe someone as a Christian Jew or as Muslim Jew, etc., but why? They will readily concede that there are agnostic or atheist Jews.
I know of no other identity that is so ambiguous in its construction as Jewishness is, and yet there is remarkably little problematising of it. A Jew can be a black adherent of the Judaic religion or a white atheist. Hmmm... I do know of at least one ideological strategy that attempts to resolve the matter. According to a certain strand of traditional Jewish thought, a person who converts to Judaism is miraculously converted also into a descendant of Abraham and in one fell swoop becomes both a member of a religious community and a member of a 'race'.
The nazis apparently thought that someone who had one Jewish grandparent (whatever that means) was a Jew and therefore eligible for the concentration camp and extermination. As someone who had a 'Jewish' grandparent (not religiously so I believe), I obviously have some small stake in this matter.
Incidentally I also believe that the nazis were enthusiastic zionists: the idea of a Jewish homeland was seen as part of the final solution, and I understand that some leading nazis actually visited Palestine to check out the possibilities. An irony is that many Arabs bought into the nazi ideology regarding Jews, with this difference, that presumably they would have wanted the homeland to be somewhere else than in their midst.
Tahir