What is a Jew

[Franconicus]

[QUOTE=Don Corleone]The point of the thread is the amibiguity over whether "Jewishness" is an ethnicity, a culture or a religion. QUOTE]
Right! And the answer is, they are everything and they are none.
Traditionally the religion and the people are just one. The Jewish God and the people are tied together. You cannot leave the club or become new member. So in the beginning ethic and religion were one.
Later non Jewish converted to the religion or Jewish stopped believing in their God. Even though this is something that Jewish fundamentalists never accept this created new categories: ethnis jews and religious jews. And today you have also the seperation of Jews living in Israel and Jews outside. So it is also a difference here.
Nazis did not care too much about the details. They defined Jews as a race (and were inline with Jewish fundamentalists). So they even killed people who did not even know that they were 'Jews', they were just Christian Germans. Some of them were high decorated officers fighting for Germany in WW1.


Well, they did hate communists as well so I don't think they really based their views on any logic......
There is a kind of insane logic. Many of the communists in Germany were Jewish.

[Efrem]

Well I consider myself an Australian who happens to have a jewish mother. So it ain't a race, its a religion with several distinct ethnic groups with in it.

[Louis de la Ferte Ste Colombe]

Euhh?

What do you have to say to the many Jews who are not believers anymore? That they are not Jews even if they identify themselves so?

What's the point in picking one arbitrary definition over another? Those labels really matters?

What you point at is NOT a good definition of "Jew", it hints at the ambiguity of it... It's an ambiguity that Israel faces. Going for simplicity over ambiguity Pindar?

Louis,

[Pindar]

Euhh?

What do you have to say to the many Jews who are not believers anymore? That they are not Jews even if they identify themselves so?

I guess this is directed at me.


I would ask them why they identify themselves as Jewish.

What's the point in picking one arbitrary definition over another? Those labels really matters?

What you point at is NOT a good definition of "Jew", it hints at the ambiguity of it... It's an ambiguity that Israel faces. Going for simplicity over ambiguity Pindar?

Louis,

I don't think qualifying being a Jew as following Judaism is arbitrary.

It seems to me that the other possibles: Jew = race or Jew = culture cannot pass muster. An Ethiopian Jew and a Russian Jew are not the same race. Further, the culture of an Ethiopian Jew and a Russian Jew are not the same.