BrenBrenSMASH

If I look like this when I’m walking around:

I’m treated as white, and a professional cis-male white at that (this is my professional shot that I use for various business related photos).  I do this specifically because I am an independent contractor who depends on having a positive impression from my clients. 

But if I look like this:

Or even like this (from last October):

My curly hair sets off the racist “Jewdar” and I’ll have random people come up to me and ask if I’m Jewish–just based on my curly hair! 

So, first off, yes, you’re wrong.  Judaism is an ethno-religion, i.e. a religion with an ethnic component or an ethnicity with a religious component, depending on how you frame it.  Ethno-religions used to be the rule in human civilizations, where the tribe/culture/civilization that you were born into would define what god or gods you would worship as an adult.  Simplifying dramatically, that changed with the Romans, and then the early Christians took their model of converting local populaces and applied it to the Jewish religion, and started missionizing (this is a vast over-simplification).  In the two thousand years since, the majority of the ethno-religions have gone extinct. However, Judaism and the Jewish people have not.

According to our texts and cultural histories, and this is verified by genetic testing, all of the various Jewish groups are descended from a single source that originally lived in the Levantine region roughly 3000 years ago.  But, due to numerous conquerings and invasions, the Jewish tribe has been scattered across Europe, Africa and Asia, in what we call the Diaspora.  According to those genetic studies, typically the various local groups are at least 50% Levantine in their ancestry, with the remainder being mixed from the locals (due to intermarriage, adoption and the all-too-frequent rape of Jewish women).  As such, the local groups often share some phenotype traits with those locals.

In your case, you’re obviously most familiar, as are most people, with the Ashkenazi group, which is mostly sourced from Eastern and Northern Europe, and has paler skin than the other Jewish branches.  I myself am Ashkenazi, and you can see my general skin tone in the pictures above.  However, I possess multiple other phenotype features consistent with a Levantine ancestry, including, as I pointed out above, my very curly and thick hair. 

However, the Askenazi are only one of multiple Jewish groupings, and none of them appear to be white in the slightest.  We have Arab Jews (the Mizrahi), African Jews (the Beta Yisrael), Mediterranean/North African Jews (the Sephardi), Chinese Jews (the Kaifeng), the Greek Jews (the Romaniote),  multiple groups in India (including the Cochin), and others besides.  We all share the same genetic markers that indicate a common ancestry in the Levant 3000 years ago.

Part of the reason why we’ve maintained ourselves as distinct for so long, while practically no other tribe or culture from that time period has (I’ve said previously that “Jews were Jews when the French and Germans called themselves the Gauls and Celts”), is that we have a strong culture and society that has a sense of tradition, communal attachment, and education (although I have wondered what specific features of the Jewish memeplex have contributed to this longevity), as well as typically marrying within the faith–and therefore, within the ethnicity.

Now, the reason why I had to resist snarling is that anti-semites–Jew-hating bigots–have a popular pasttime in denying every point that I just wrote, and insisting that “Jews are white!” (conflating the Askenazi with all Jews) and other such lies.  One individual on this very website, curvesincolor, has literally spent a good chunk of this year screaming at the top of his lungs about how Jews are white.  A further reason that we find that lie to be offensive, beyond denial of our heritage, is that that line of thought/accusation is part of the reason for the oppression that the Jews face.  The Holocaust was simply the more significant expression of that oppression, which is often on racial grounds.  White supremacists, for example, whisper feverishly to themselves in paranoid fantasies about how Jews are coming to pollute their “pure” bloodlines, and dream lurid fantasies of wiping us out.  The sheer fact that Neo-Nazis, the KKK and other such white supremacist organizations all speak of “The Jew” as an existential threat that has to be dealt with in the firmest manner possible should give something of a strong hint as to our status as “white people”. 

And there’s been an upsurge in this hatred over the last few years, but it has never gone away, and people asking this very question in bad faith is perhaps the third or fourth most frequently asked question to this and other Jewish-run blogs.  Hence the suppressed snarl. 

alien: why are you doing that?

alien: wait you forgot to make that one vibrate!

Other human: *is eating a slice of the same pizza, but cold*

Alien: this liquid has negligible nutritional value and, furthermore, contains some molecules that I believe are poisonous to your species.