Nathan Newman nathan at newman.org
----- Original Message ----- From: "Tahir Wood" <twood at uwc.ac.za> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Friday, May 17, 2002 8:39 AM Subject: But what IS a Jew?
The term "Jew" is an interesting one, and so is the "semitism" in the term "anti-semitism". I don't think that a Jew is one who adheres to the religion of Judaism. Probably the best one could say in that regard is that members of his or her family once were adherents of that faith. Which would explain why someone could refer to Karl Marx as a Jew. But it clearly does not refer to a race or ethnic group either. Jews come in all colours as far as I know, although it seems to me an interesting point that a great number of people who are Jewish, including many in Israel, are 'white' and originate from Eastern Europe. What then is their connection to the Middle East and that particular piece of disputed territory? Are all Jews actually semites then in any meaningful sense? Jews are also not an ethnic group as far as I can see - they speak many different languages, share the cultures of the countries they live in, etc. Now Arabs are semites, as I understand it, in two senses. They 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