It is really not a good sign to be starting a piece of writing on the question of “what is a Jew?” Generally, it is best when there’s less dwelling on this question, not more. And yet, that’s where we are, because there’s apparently a great deal of confusion on the basics of the subject, and the confusion seems to issue from ambiguity about words, especially the words nation, people, and country.
Here’s how we got here: People started saying preposterous things almost immediately after the New York Times reported that President Trump was about to issue an executive order bringing the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act protections “on the ground of race, color, or national origin” to Jews by way of classifying Jews as a nationality.
Bianna Golodryga, the “senior global affairs analyst” at CNN, managed to fire off the following on Twitter before making her way out of the country: “The defining label [of Jews as a nationality] is very… Soviet.” Social justice and science writer Erin Biba, reflecting on the same policy change, said the order is “a good way to start deporting Jews” from America. She recalled that “Hitler kicked off the Holocaust with the Nuremberg Laws that, among other things, declared German Jews weren’t of German nationality.” The other things here are actually sort of important, but anyway, Trump’s executive order is emphatically not declaring that Jews are not of “American nationality.” In this sense of nationality, there is no such thing.
I am not religious, I do not have so much as an Israeli stamp in my passport, and I am Jewish. This is not any kind of contradiction, because the noun “nation” we’re talking about here means people, not political or geographic entity. Jewish also happens to be a word for a religion, but lots of words have more than one meaning. If “Irism” were a religion, I would not be a member of the “Irish” religion, but I would still be part Irish, the ethnicity.
Our colloquial vocabulary surrounding all of this is further complicated by the fact that the now-50 semi-self-governing provinces of the United States of America are called “states.” Calling them that was a sop to people attached to a bunch of ideas about Delawarean and Virginian sovereignty and independence from the federal government that were a great deal more salient in the Revolutionary period than in our own.
When Romantic-era nationalism came about, it got termed that because it was the idea that a people should determine its own government and life, and “nation” is a word for people. All kinds of nations decided that they didn’t like being a population within countries that were large, multinational empires and that they wanted to separate off and form their own nation-states — countries populated largely by one people. We use “nation” sloppily to mean “sovereign country” or “state” now because following the rise of nationalism, the nation-state became the sort of default idea of a country in our heads. Why is the term “nation-state” not redundant? Because a state is a politically sovereign area, and a nation is a group of human beings with some shared, binding history, culture, language … whatever, so long as they understand themselves to be a people and/or are understood by others to comprise one.
Poles are a nation, and they wouldn’t stop being one if Poland stopped being an existing sovereign country (this thesis has been rather repeatedly and dramatically stress-tested). Greeks are a nation, Greece is a country. Armenians, like Jews, were in the 19th and early 20th centuries not a majority in any area, so the ethnic violence surrounding nationalism didn’t turn out very well for them during the period of the breakdown of the great empires. The Armenian people were nearly destroyed in a genocide during a world war and only after that was given the area that is now the sovereign country of Armenia with its capital in Yerevan. The idea was that having a nation-state is a matter of survival for a people.
In this sense, neither Jewry nor Israel is unique or special at all, except in being late to a party that most other nations occupying the former great Imperial Zone of Europe threw in the previous century. Only in 1948, after the same sort of thing happened to Jews that happened to Armenians, did they succeed in the nationalist project to get a state, Israel, for the previously existing people, Jews. That’s why the obsession with Israel and Palestine seems like a matter of Jew-hatred to people who understand this history and these words: It’s one piece of a historical process involving dozens of basically identical situations, and the Jewish one is what gets all the condemnatory United Nations resolutions and ranting by Noam Chomsky.
So, Trump’s executive order on Jews as a nation only affirms the idea of Jewish peoplehood that is, first, totally coherent within the ordinary framework of how we understand nations, and second, only doing about Jews what Title VI already does for other demographic categories. Suddenly a lot of people don’t like the constitutional implications of applying the Civil Rights Act the day it extends to Jews? Well, that seems odd. Debate the policy all you like, but this is not the Wannsee Conference, and everybody pretending it is has revealed that they do not understand the very elementary issues here and should read more and seethe less.
