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Jews who are atheists or Jews who follow other religions may have a Jewish identity. While the absolute majority of people with this identity are of Jewish ethnicity, people of a mixed Jewish and non-Jewish background or gentiles of Jewish ancestry may still have a sense of Jewish self-identity.
The vast majority of modern ethnic Jews (who make up the vast majority of modern religious Jews) share the bulk of their ancestry with populations from these regions and not with their (former) non-Jewish neighbors.
Jews are an ethnoreligious group, meaning that they are both an ethnicity (a group identified by common group identity and, usually, language and ancestry) and a religion (a group with the same beliefs about the supernatural).
In other words, without explicitly saying so, the Jews, as historian Naomi W. Cohen put it, “were now claiming rights as an ethnic group,” not just as a religion.
What are Jews? Members of a religious group? A race or an ethnicity? A nation? Some mixture of them all, or something else entirely?
Is Judaism an ethnicity? In short, not any more. Although Judaism arose out of a single ethnicity in the Middle East, there have always been conversions into and out of the religion.
On the one hand, being Jewish is a matter of religion – the traditional, matrilineal definition of Jewish identity is founded on halakha (Jewish religious law). On the other hand, being Jewish also may be a matter of ancestry, ethnicity and cultural background.
