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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).
So perhaps the question should not be “Are the Jews a race or religion?”, but rather “who is a Jew?” Under Jewish religious law (halakhah), a person is Jewish if they are born to a Jewish ...
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. Thus, there are those who may have been ethnically part of the original group who are no longer part of Judaism, and those of other ethnic groups who have converted into Judaism.
Judaism is a religion as well as a nation and culture. Approximately 14.7 million people worldwide identify as Jewish, with the vast majority living in either the United States or Israel. Jews come in all shapes, sizes, ethnicities, and nationalities. There are black Jews from Ethiopia, Chinese Jews from Shanghai and Indian Jews.
It’s not quite a religion, because one can be Jewish regardless of observance or specific belief. (Einstein, for example, was proudly Jewish but not religiously observant.) But it’s...
