Reply #65: Within the last 150 years, Jews and Judaism have taken on a tripartite [View All]

[rockymountaindem]

character. The first is the religion. The religion is a set of practices and observances *and* a belief in God. Anybody can become a Jew, but because we do not proselytize, the percentage of converts in the total Jewish population has usually be very low. This means that Jews, who have usually married other Jews, eventually formed their own gene pool.

This gave rise to Jews as an ethnicity, a distinct group with hereditary characteristics and a common gene pool that, for the most part, was closed to outsiders. Nobody really took note of this until about 150 years ago, at which point hatred of Jews moved away from religious grounds and into ethinc ones. This caused us all to think of ourselves as a nation or ethnicity, because it didn't matter if you practiced Judaism the religion, other people (and eventually our own community) would always classify you as a "Jew".

This also gave rise to Jewish culture, and to modern "secular Jews". These are people who are of Jewish ethnic ancestry, and who identify themselves as "Jews" but who don't practice the religion or partake in other community rituals. Yet, being a "Jew" defines part of who they are in some way, much like someone would say "I'm a German" even if their family immigrated to the US in 1880 and they'd never even visited Germany, yet they show up at the Chicago Oktoberfest with all the other German-Americans and talk about being "German".

That's the highly abridged explanation of how one can be Jewish without practicing Judaism. They're kind of different yet the same (if that's not complicated ;) )

Within the religion itself, nowhere is it mandated that we believe in God, simply that we "have no gods before God". Having no belief in God is not specifically forbidden, as Judaism is a religion of acts and not faith.