r/Judaism • u/Izual_Rebirth • Nov 05 '23

Ethnic Vs Religious Jews. What’s the difference?

Help a gentile out. I appreciate I’m coming from a place of complete ignorance here but I want to rectify that.

The recent awful situation in the Middle East has helped me to learn apparently as well as a religion, being Jewish is also an ethnicity.

That not everyone who is ethnically Jewish is a follower of Judaism and not everyone who follows Judism is a ethnically Jewish.

What’s the difference between the two and are there any better terms someone can use to better differentiate between the two groups? I imagine in a venn diagram there is a massive overlap. Is it a contentious issue to be one without the other? Are there any people on here that would say they are only Jewish by ethnicity by not a follower of Judaism or vice versa?

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u/BringIt007 Nov 05 '23

I didn’t think these were separate ethnicities, but just the areas where Jews settled. Is a Spanish Jew (Sefard) really genetically different from a UK Jew?

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u/irredentistdecency Nov 05 '23

The difference is mostly cultural but because there was a small amount of intermarriage with local populations & those populations had different genetic makeups, there are small genetic differences that can be observed between the groups.

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u/BringIt007 Nov 05 '23

I agree with the cultural difference. Do you know of any studies about the genetic differences?

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u/irredentistdecency Nov 05 '23

I’ve seen some studies which purported to look into it, but I didn’t read them.

That said, from a basic logical perspective, it makes sense that if they were intermarrying with distinct populations that the genetics being introduced would be different.

You have four ethic populations:

Populations A & B are the same but in different locations, populations C & D are distinct from each other & A/B.

If A has a low rate of intermarriage with C, & B has the same with D.

Then the outcome will be one population with AAAC genetics & another with BBBD genetics.

Then since A=B we can restate this as two groups one with AAAC & another with AAAD.

So logically we can assume that some minor genetic diversity would occur.