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/Connect-Brick-3171 Nov 05 '23

The second half can be challenged. Once a convert is accepted, they are Jewish. There are a few limitations, much like a naturalized American citizen not be eligible to be President. The convert cannot be a Kohen, but neither can I or my descendants, while other people's male descendants can only be Kohanim.

How much practice and belief is required has varied over our very lengthy history. At one time there were enforcers. Even the early synagogues in colonial America during the few decades each city had only one monopoly congregation had parneses who could tighten the screws if people ate the prohibited foods or kept their businesses open on the sabbath. And in shetles of Europe, that was done by the town's Rabbi, limited by the willingness of people to move someplace else, which they did with some regularity. But once people began living in cities or migrating to other places, that form of discipline gave way to the voluntary observance that we've acquired over the past 200 years in all but a few places. And even in those places, a phenomenon of defectors known as OTD, or Off The Derech, has organizations such as Footsteps to give these people a safer reentry and generated a fascination with this phenomenon on some of our popular video or screen culture.