Why Jewish Identity Cannot Be Reduced to Religion

In debates surrounding Zionism and Jewish self-determination, one recurring claim is that Jews are not a people but merely adherents of a religion. The Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, in The Invention of the Jewish People (2009), argued that Jews do not constitute a continuous historical nation but are instead primarily a religious community later reframed as a people.¹ Variations of this claim appear frequently in contemporary political discourse: if Judaism is only a faith, then Jewish national claims appear anomalous.

This argument rests on a reduction that history does not sustain.

Judaism is a religion. Jewishness, however, has long functioned as something broader – an ethnoreligious civilisation: a people shaped by shared ancestry, collective memory, culture, language, and covenant.

Medieval Europe: A Corporate Lineage

In medieval Europe, Jews were not treated merely as theological dissenters. They were treated as a corporate body — a people within Christian polities.

In England, Jews were expelled in 1290. In Spain, they were expelled in 1492. In both cases, expulsion operated collectively rather than individually; baptism did not always remove suspicion. The Spanish doctrine of limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”) made ancestry, not belief, the decisive marker of inclusion. Even converts and their descendants could be regarded as permanently marked by Jewish lineage.²

The governing assumption was clear – Jewishness was understood as hereditary. Faith could change. Lineage could not.

Across medieval Christendom, Jews were segregated, collectively taxed, and legally classified as a distinct corporate community. This was peoplehood in practice, whether acknowledged as such or not.

Nazi Germany: Ancestry Codified

By the late nineteenth century, European antisemitism increasingly racialised Jewish identity. Wilhelm Marr popularised the term “Antisemitismus” to describe hostility toward Jews as a racial collective.

Under the Nazi Party, that racialisation became law through the Nuremberg Laws. Jewish status was determined by the number of Jewish grandparents. Religious belief was irrelevant. A baptised Christian of Jewish descent remained legally Jewish; a secular atheist with Jewish ancestry remained legally Jewish.

This classification governed deportation and extermination under the Holocaust.³

The Nazi regime did not persecute Jews as practitioners of Judaism. It persecuted them as members of a people defined by ancestry.

The Soviet Union: “Jew” as Nationality

The Soviet Union provides a strikingly different ideological context but a similar classificatory outcome. Soviet internal passports listed natsionalnost — nationality. Citizens could be Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian — or Jewish.

“Jew” was recorded as an ethnic nationality, not as a religion. This applied to secular and atheist Jews as well as to the observant. The designation carried social and professional consequences.⁴

Even in a self-consciously atheist state, Jewish identity was bureaucratically recognised as peoplehood.

The Arab World: Nationalism, War, and Collective Displacement

Between 1948 and the 1970s, approximately 850,000 Jews left or were expelled from countries including Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, and Morocco.⁵

The causes were complex: rising Arab nationalism, the Arab–Israeli conflict, property seizures, discriminatory legislation, and episodes of violence. It would be reductive to attribute every departure to a single cause.

Yet one structural feature recurs across cases – Jews were treated collectively. Citizenship was revoked on the basis of Jewish identity; assets were confiscated because their owners were Jews. Many were Arabic-speaking and culturally embedded, yet they were perceived, whether accurately or not, as collectively associated with the establishment of Israel.⁶

Once again, Jewishness functioned as nationality in practice.

Genetics: Continuity Without Essentialism

Modern population genetics provides additional, though carefully bounded, insight. Studies by Hammer et al., Behar et al., and Atzmon et al. demonstrate that major Jewish diaspora communities share substantial Middle Eastern ancestry and cluster genetically closer to one another than to surrounding host populations.⁷

These findings indicate long-term historical continuity and shared origins. They do not define Jewish identity, nor do they establish peoplehood in a political sense. Identity remains a social and historical category.

Genetic data in this field has, at times, been misread in both antisemitic and ultranationalist directions — either to racialise Jews reductively or to essentialise belonging biologically. Both moves are errors. Genetics can illuminate patterns of descent; it cannot determine the meaning of collective identity.

What the data show is continuity. What that continuity signifies is a matter of history and culture, not DNA alone.

International Law and the Concept of “Peoples”

International law recognises “peoples” as collective actors, including in the context of self-determination (UN Charter, Article 1; ICCPR, Article 1). Scholars such as Antonio Cassese and James Crawford identify recurring descriptive features of a people: shared history, cultural cohesion, self-identification, connection to territory, and recognition by others.⁸

On these descriptive criteria, Jewish peoplehood meets the relevant characteristics. Jews share a continuous historical narrative, a body of religious and civilisational law, a collective name (Am Yisrael), and a long-articulated attachment to a historic homeland. They have also been repeatedly classified by external powers as a distinct collective.

Whether and how self-determination applies in specific contemporary political contexts is a separate and contested question. But descriptively, Jewish peoplehood aligns with established frameworks in international legal scholarship.

Jewish Thought: A Civilisation, Not Just a Creed

Internal Jewish debate reinforces this picture.

Ahad Ha’am argued that Jewish continuity depended on cultural and national renewal beyond ritual observance. Hermann Cohen emphasised Judaism as a moral civilisation rooted in collective history. Most explicitly, Mordecai Kaplan described Judaism as a “civilisation” — encompassing religion, language, land, social structure, and shared destiny.

Kaplan’s formulation dissolves the false binary between religion and ethnicity. One may cease to observe ritual law and yet remain part of a civilisation sustained by memory, ancestry, and communal belonging. Jewishness, in this account, cannot be collapsed into theology alone.

Conclusion

Across medieval Europe, Jews were segregated as a lineage community. Under Nazi racial law, ancestry outweighed belief. In the Soviet Union, “Jew” was recorded as nationality rather than religion. Across parts of the Middle East and North Africa, Jews were displaced collectively.

Externally and internally, Jewish identity has functioned as more than faith.

Judaism is a religion. Jewishness is an ethnoreligious civilisation — a people sustained by ancestry, covenant, language, culture, law, and shared historical fate.

History does not permit the category to be reduced any further.

References

1. Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009).
   
2. Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (New York: Random House, 1995); Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
   
3. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols. (New York: HarperCollins, 1997–2007).
   
4. Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
   
5. Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991).
   
6. Avi Shlaim and others have discussed these perceptions in the context of Arab nationalism; see Abbas Shiblak, The Lure of Zion: The Case of the Iraqi Jews (London: Al Saqi Books, 1986).
   
7. Michael F. Hammer et al., “Jewish and Middle Eastern Non-Jewish Populations Share a Common Pool of Y-Chromosome Haplotypes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97, no. 12 (2000): 6769–74; Doron M. Behar et al., “The Genome-Wide Structure of the Jewish People,” Nature 466 (2010): 238–42; Gil Atzmon et al., “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era,” American Journal of Human Genetics 86, no. 6 (2010): 850–59.
   
8. Antonio Cassese, Self-Determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); James Crawford, The Creation of States in International Law, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).