levite

Technically, Hal, you're right: Judaism is not a race. Biologically, a race is as merleniau defined it. and there are no subspecies of human. Semantically, we in the U.S. use the word "race" to refer to characteristics defined by someone's physical appearance, primarily skin color. Neither applies to Jews.

However, Judaism is more than a religion. It is an ethnoreligious culture, meaning that it is a religion, an ethnicity, and a culture, all inextricably fused and intertwined. There have been a number of attempts during modern Jewish history to separate one element of Judaism from another, and all have more or less failed notably.

We call Jews an ethnic group in part because they often share characteristic genetic markers, such as in the case of kohanim (the priestly tribe), nearly 90% of whom share similar markers in Y-chromosomal haplogroup J1 (markers only shared by about 80% of non-kohen Jews, and very few non-Jews at all), or in the case of Ashkenazi Jews, of whom well over 60% are genetically more prone to develop Tay-Sachs disease than other people. In part, we call Jews an ethnic group because they are traditionally endogamous, and all Jews have always agreed that membership in the Jewish people is transmissible by birth. Although it might blur the line with culture, some have also said that the sharing of a common language and a common religion can also be defining characteristics of an ethnic group.

Perhaps the most important cultural aspect of Judaism is that, generally speaking, we say that cultures establish their own membership rules. And although in the case of Judaism, this blurs the boundaries between culture and religion, it is quite clear that from the First Century CE to the Twentieth Century, more or less all Jews agreed that having a Jewish mother meant that the child of that mother was Jewish. Today, the Reform movement of Judaism says that having either parent be Jewish is enough to call the child of those parents Jewish, although this is not accepted by the other movements of Judaism, as there is no traditional basis for such a statement. But even in the case of Reform Judaism, they do not dispute the idea that Judaism is an identity transmissible by birth. Moreover, Jews have always agreed-- at least from the First Century onward-- that once a Jew, always a Jew: whether by birth or by conversion, a Jew is considered Jewish forever by Jewish law and Jewish tradition, regardless of the person's behavior or claims of identity. Even if they reject Jewish beliefs, and go through the rituals of converting to another religion, Judaism still calls such people Jewish-- just non-practicing or non-identifying or (from the religious perspective) sinning Jews. In the past, it is true, such individuals were commonly put in herem, a status not unlike excommunication, or shunning, but such a status is inherently temporary, requiring only the individual's public recantation of his or her former ways (and some also say a trip to the mikveh, or ritual bath) to rejoin normative Jewish society.

I believe when you cite the phenomenon of Judaism being incorrectly called a "race," and originate it with some Frenchman a hundred years ago, you might be confusing two issues: the nature of Judaism as an ethnoreligious culture-- a phenomenon noted frequently long before a hundred years ago-- and the development of anti-Semitic racialist theories by racist scientists of the late Nineteenth Century-- these are the same people who brought us the concepts of craniometry, phrenology, and eugenics for controlled racial hygiene. These latter, it is true, mislabeled the Jews a "race," for the purposes of further anti-Semitism, but their canards ought not to be mistaken for the genesis of the legitimate phenomenon of Judaism as an ethnoreligious culture.

Discussions of Jews and Jewish cultural and religious phenomena are extant in literature as far back as Roman times, including mentions in Suetonius, Socrates of Constantinople, and Procopius, as well as later in commentaries on the Theodosian Code. A number of ancient and medieval writers, especially among the Church Fathers, made comments concerning the Jews, their society and culture, and the difficulty of getting Jews to convert to Christianity, since in doing so they gave up not only their religion but their entire sociocultural experience (my phrasing, not theirs).

Needless to say, Jewish literature is itself very clear on the subject. There are, as Xazy already pointed out, oblique references to ethnic and cultural integrity in the Torah. Certainly, Rabbinic literature (the materials composed during and around the authoring of the Talmud, in the first five centuries of the Common Era) makes frequent mention of Judaism as a "people," and discusses at length the factors and qualities of Jewish identity. Indeed, the term "the Jewish People" has become common parlance over the past 2,000 years-- a terminology not applied to adherents of other Western religions, and for clear reasons.

The idea of Judaism as an ethnoreligious culture is not entirely unique. Many Native American nations would qualify for such a definition, and some of the Hindu religions are inextricably interlinked with membership in certain tribes or clans, from certain areas. A number of sub-Saharan African religions are also peculiar to specific tribal groups from a specific locale. Among the Western religions, it is true that Judaism is the strictest definition of an ethnoreligious culture, but many scholars have proposed that Islam may also be an ethnoreligious culture, since it is also passed on by birth, and shares several other key characteristics with Judaism; although if it is an ethnoreligious culture, its social boundaries are much more permeable than those of Judaism.

As a fellow Jew, I'm sorry to hear that your Jewish identity displeases you, Hal. But by the definitions of the Jewish people, which are commonly held and respected by non-Jews also, you're a Jew, whether you're atheist or not. And hell, being an atheist certainly hasn't stopped lots of Jews from embracing certain aspects of their Jewish identity: most of the founding Zionists who began the State of Israel were atheists, who were none the less proud of their Jewish identities. Regardless, the point is, according to all the traditional definitions of the Jewish people, you are a Jew. What you do with your life is, of course, your own business: nobody will come around and try to force you to interact with Jewish society, or try to make you practice Jewish religion, or to take any pride in your Jewish identity at all.

But it's important that you make a distinction between the issue of Jewish identity as a whole and how that is constructed by the Jewish people and understood by the rest of the world in history, and your own feelings about your identity and your choice to reject it. The latter is entirely your business, and no one should ever say otherwise. The former is something that affects all of the rest of us; and there is enough controversy in the Jewish community right now with identity, given the shenanigans of the Reform movement, and the crisis of assimilation in modern society, that more vituperation-- to say nothing of misinformation-- is deeply counterproductive for the rest of us.

I really hope you don't take offense at this: I like your posts very much, and you seem like an awesome person. And I don't want to be the guy who gets in your face over religion and cultural identity, I really don't. But, as someone who is a professional student of Judaism, I feel like it's really important for me to say these things.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)