Is Judaism a race, an ethnicity or a religion?

A people with a covenant

The Bible describes the Israelites as the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – a family that became a nation (am) and entered a covenant with God at Sinai. Jewish identity therefore has two sides that cannot be separated: belonging to a people and a shared faith and law. A Jew who is not religious is still Jewish; a non-Jew who adopts Jewish beliefs without converting is not.

Not a race

Conversion has been part of Judaism from the beginning. Ruth the Moabite told Naomi: “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16) – and she became the great-grandmother of King David. Jewish law says a convert is like a newborn child and is fully Jewish. Over the centuries Jewish communities formed in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Yemen, Ethiopia, India and beyond, and they look as diverse as the places they lived.

Ethnicity?

Many Jews do share ancestry, languages (Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic) and culture, so sociologists often speak of Jewish ethnicity. But ethnicity alone does not define who is Jewish in Jewish law – birth or conversion does.

Why it matters

Treating Jews as a “race” was the basis of modern racial antisemitism, which persecuted people no matter what they believed. Jewish tradition itself never defined Jewishness that way.