Eclectic Anecdotes

An article from My Jewish Learning summarizes the confusion of Jewish identity:

Jews disagree about many things, and how to designate the Jews as a whole is one of them. 

Are Jews united by a shared religion? Yes, the Jewish community shares certain religious inclinations, including belief in one God, shared holidays (like Shabbat, Passover and Yom Kippur), and upholding the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud as central religious texts. But in practice, many Jews are secular, atheist and/or non-practicing and yet still identify as Jews and are accepted by the community as Jewish.

Are Jews a culture? Yes, broadly speaking, except that Jews whose families hail from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere often share little in the way of traditional foods, music, language and more.

Are Jews a nation? Yes, except that it has been several millennia since all Jews lived in a single country, if indeed they ever did. Even today, when there is a Jewish state, most Jews do not live there and many identify primarily with the nation in which they live. 

Some Jews prefer to use terms like “people” or “tribe” —  terms that encompass more of the diversity noted above, but also have less precise definitions. Such terms are generally more inclusive of the diversity inherent in the Jewish community, allowing for the possibility that one can become Jewish by either birth or conversion, that one can stop practicing Jewish religious rituals or disavow Jewish beliefs and still identify as Jewish, and that one can identify primarily as Indian or American and still be recognized as Jewish.[1]

What unites all of these people are beliefs, even if they cannot agree on what these beliefs are. In the foreword of Jewish Business Practices: Sketches from Contemporary Social Life, I wrote that “What makes a person a Jew is their rejection of Christ.”[2] I opted for this definition because it is Jewish beliefs that define Jewish identity, specifically beliefs that stem from a hatred of Christ.

Jew is a chosen identity, just as Christian and Muslim are chosen identities. Jews as an ethnic group presents an ambiguous definition. If somebody from a Jewish ethnic background becomes a Christian, are they still a Jew? According to Israel, they are not. Oswald Rufeisen was born as a Jew and later converted to Catholicism, yet always considered himself an ethnic Jew. But when he tried to receive Israeli citizenship as per the Law of Return, his request was denied. One of the justices of the Supreme Court of Israel declared, “no one can regard an apostate as belonging to the Jewish people.”[3] Yet today atheist Jews are granted Israeli citizenship.[4] Reform Jews, who make up the largest proportion of religious Jews in the U.S., believe that a Jew who converts to another religion “is regarded outside the boundaries of the Jewish community.”[5] Orthodox Jews, on the other hand, may maintain that apostate Jews retains some form of Jewish identity, yet be treated as if they are a gentile based on certain halakhic teachings.[6] This lack of consensus is why Jewish identity can never be formulated coherently in ethnic terms.

It is only Jewish beliefs that can be the source of Jewish identity. There are many markers identifying someone as Jewish. Jewish behavior may include: promoting abortion, practicing tikkun olam, lobbying the U.S. government for more funds for the Israeli military, and advocating for perverse sexual practices. It is when these practices are done with knowledge of Christ, this becomes behavior to spite Christ, and thus is Jewish behavior.

What all modern Jews have in common is a willful rejection of Christ, and thus can be considered alethophobists, for Jesus is the truth. The behavior is not merely alethophobia, but specifically Jewish because rejection of truth is more general than rejection of Christ; it is a specific hatred of Christ and His message that yields Jewish identity. People can be alethophobists without ever hearing of Christ, but one cannot be a Jew without knowing Jesus.

We can point to a number of figures who make this identity explicit. Al Goldstein, a man known to have contributed the mainstreaming of pornography in America, said of Jewish involvement in porn: “The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism.”[7]

Ben Shapiro, a militant Zionist, when asked about what he thinks of Jesus, said, “I think he was a Jew who tried to lead a revolt against the Romans and got killed for his trouble. Just like a lot of other Jews at that time who were crucified for trying to lead revolts against the Roman[s] and got killed for their trouble.”^[8]

Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, said,

To be a Satanist is, by association, already to be aligned with the universal devil Jew. The Jews have always had the Devil’s name. They just haven’t owned up to or taken pride in it, but rather have attempted to defend themselves against it. Instead of declaring that Jesus was a nut and a shit disturber and he got what he deserved and we’d do it all over again, they decided to infiltrate the Christian world and survive that way.[9]

These people are in contrast to those who may have a very loose conception of Jewish identity. The “Jew” who eats bagels, is circumcised, hosts dinner for neighbors, weeps at news of war, has mixed feelings about gefilte fish, works hard to support their family, yet has never really considered religion after their Bar Mitzvah cannot meet the definition of Jew. They are firmly in the camp of philosophers, the lovers of wisdom, their only barrier to accepting Christ being imperfect knowledge. They have no hatred of Christ, but they still seek to do good because “what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness.”[10]

[1] https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/are-jews-a-race/

[2] Georg Ratzinger, Jewish Business Practices: Sketches from Contemporary Social Life (2023), 2.

[3] https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4173&context=smulr

[4] https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/14/2/268

[5] https://www.jta.org/2014/10/06/united-states/10-questions-about-jewish-conversion-you-want-to-know-but-are-afraid-to-ask-1

[6] https://www.jpost.com/jewish-world/jewish-features/ask-the-rabbi-am-i-jewish-or-not

[7] https://www.fisheaters.com/jc-jones3.html

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-jGqDpe9vE

[9] Anton LaVey, Satan Speaks!, (Port Townsend: Feral House, 1998), 21.

[10] Romans 2:15.