Recently, we received a question in our comments section in reference to an article about Messianic Judaism and how it differs from what is traditionally accepted as Jewish philosophy. In that article I made a brief mention of how the perception of Jews as a social group has changed, especially in America, over the past century. The commenter, B. Wolper, asks,
You say in your article that Jews were considered an ethnic group until around the mid-twentieth century. What changed that? Why are we not considered an ethnic group anymore?
I would like to thank B. Wolper for the question and will now clarify exactly what I meant when I suggested that Jews in modern day America are no longer considered a distinct ethnic group.
Ethnicity as a concept is at best fluid and at worst the product of arbitrary prejudice. It isn't a once-and-forever concrete idea. To claim that a particular group of people belong to a specific ethnicity is to claim that they are fundamentally different and thereby separate from other people. This has been used to identify people based on everything from physical features to cultural practices and it is rarely without some connotation of racism.
Jewish ethnicity is, itself, the product of the sudden introduction of Jewish people into cultures that had no Jews prior to the establishment of their own ethnic identity. Whereas Jews in ancient Canaan were not considered ethnically distinct from their pagan Canaanite neighbors (as evidenced by the fairly common practice of marriage between Jews and non-Jews in that time and place), Jews were considered a distinct ethnicity in Europe when they migrated to the region after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Empire. Jews were not considered Persian, Arab or even specifically Israelite, but where called ethnically different based on their religious and cultural customs.
Jews have also had a history of being insular in less welcoming cultures. The degree to which Jews have segregated themselves from their surrounding culture has always been in proportion to that culture's unwillingness to accept them as regular citizens. In extreme cases, such as the Jews of Eastern Europe under the Russian Czars, Jews lived in ghetto-like conditions that kept them separate from all non-Jews in their region.
Jewish culture in America has always been less segregated than these extremes in Europe prior to the mid 20th century. As with many other immigrant populations, such as the Irish, Italian and Polish populations of America, Jews certainly began as an isolated group but have become more integrated into regular society with each generation. It's true that Jews were considered ethnically distinct from all other American populations as recently as 50 years ago, though it's hard to see much more than a few superficial distinctions in modern culture. The "Jewish part of town" is an increasingly anachronistic concept, as is the corporation that refuses to hire Jews or the de facto prohibition (on both sides) of marriage between Jews and non-Jews. On most forms that ask respondents to list their ethnicity, "Jewish" is not an option, just as "Christian" or "Buddhist" is not.
This gets to the core of why Judaism never truly was and ever more today is not an ethnicity. There are Jews from a wide variety of backgrounds. To say that Jews are ethnically distinct from, say, Asians is to imply that no Asians can be Jewish, which we know isn't true. Judaism is a religion with roots in an ancient civilization and so it has some distinct customs, but Judaism is not an ethnicity.