Judaism: Religion or Ethnicity? Understanding Jewish Peoplehood

The Short Answer

Is Judaism a religion? Yes. Is it an ethnicity? Also yes. A culture? A civilization? A nationality? A people? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Judaism is all of these things and none of them perfectly. It is a category that resists categories — a reality that drives census-takers, sociologists, and people filling out diversity forms slightly mad.

The best single word for what Judaism is might be peoplehood — the concept that Jews are a people (in Hebrew, Am Yisrael, the People of Israel) bound together by shared history, destiny, law, culture, and covenant with God. This peoplehood includes the deeply religious and the completely secular. It includes people who pray three times a day and people who have not entered a synagogue in years. It includes converts who chose Judaism and people born into it who never gave it a second thought.

Understanding this is the key to understanding almost everything else about Judaism.

Why Western Categories Don’t Work

The problem begins with the categories themselves. In the post-Enlightenment Western world, religion and ethnicity are supposed to be separate things. Your religion is what you believe — you can change it. Your ethnicity is what you are — you cannot change it (or so the theory goes).

Judaism refuses to cooperate with this distinction.

If Judaism is “just” a religion, then why are there atheist Jews? Why can someone who has never set foot in a synagogue, never read the Torah, and never observed a single commandment still be unambiguously Jewish? Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and countless other secular Jews maintained strong Jewish identities with little or no religious practice.

If Judaism is “just” an ethnicity, then how do you explain conversion? People convert to Judaism every year — they study, undergo rituals, and emerge fully Jewish. The biblical Ruth, a Moabite convert, became an ancestor of King David. You cannot “convert” to being Irish or Japanese, but you can convert to being Jewish.

The answer is that Judaism predates these modern categories by thousands of years and simply does not fit them. It is a civilization — a word the 20th-century rabbi Mordecai Kaplan used to describe the totality of Jewish life: religion, culture, language, literature, ethics, history, law, art, food, music, humor, and a sense of shared destiny.

Matrilineal Descent and Conversion

Traditional Jewish law (halakha) defines who is a Jew through two paths:

Matrilineal descent: A person born to a Jewish mother is Jewish — regardless of the father’s identity, regardless of whether the person is raised Jewish, and regardless of personal belief. This is an ethnic/biological definition. A Jewish atheist born to a Jewish mother is as Jewish as the most devout rabbi.

Conversion: A person who undergoes a valid conversion — including study, commitment to observe the commandments, immersion in a mikveh (ritual bath), and (for men) circumcision — becomes fully Jewish. Converts are not “second-class” Jews. Jewish law forbids reminding a convert of their non-Jewish origins. This is a religious/volitional definition.

The coexistence of these two paths is precisely what makes Judaism uncategorizable. It is a people you can be born into (like an ethnicity) AND a community you can choose to join (like a religion).

Reform Judaism added a third path in 1983 by recognizing patrilineal descent — children of Jewish fathers (not just mothers) who are raised as Jews are considered Jewish. This remains controversial; Orthodox and Conservative authorities do not accept it.

Secular Jews: The Test Case

Perhaps nothing illustrates Jewish peoplehood better than the existence of secular Jews — people who identify strongly as Jewish while observing few or no religious practices.

The Pew Research Center’s 2020 survey of American Jews found that 27% of American Jews describe themselves as having no religion — they identify as Jewish on the basis of ancestry, culture, or ethnicity. These “Jews of no religion” celebrate Passover seders, eat Jewish foods, feel connected to Israel, tell Jewish jokes, and identify passionately as Jewish — without believing in God or following the commandments.

In Israel, the phenomenon is even more pronounced. The majority of Israeli Jews describe themselves as hiloni (secular). They serve in the army, speak Hebrew, celebrate Jewish holidays as national holidays, and consider themselves thoroughly Jewish — without being observant in any religious sense.

If Judaism were only a religion, these people would not be Jewish. But they are. Everyone agrees they are. This proves that Judaism is something more than — or at least different from — a religion in the Western sense.

DNA and the Genetics Question

Modern genetic studies have added a new dimension to the identity question. Research has shown that Jewish communities around the world — Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, and others — share significant genetic markers that trace back to ancient Middle Eastern populations.

This genetic evidence suggests that many (though not all) modern Jews descend from a common ancestral population — supporting the idea that Jewishness has an ethnic or biological dimension. However, Jewish identity has never been defined by DNA. Converts share no genetic markers with born Jews, yet they are fully Jewish. And some people with Jewish genetic ancestry may not be halachically Jewish (for example, those with a Jewish father but non-Jewish mother, in Orthodox reckoning).

The genetics confirm what Jews have always known: this is a people — a family, really — that has maintained a remarkable degree of continuity over thousands of years. But identity is ultimately defined by community, covenant, and commitment — not by chromosomes.

Am Yisrael: The People of Israel

The Hebrew phrase Am Yisrael (the People of Israel) captures what all the English categories miss. “Am” means “people” or “nation” — not in the modern political sense, but in the sense of a tribe, a family, a folk bound together by shared story and shared fate.

This is why Jews around the world feel connected to each other despite speaking different languages, living in different countries, and practicing (or not practicing) different levels of religious observance. It is why a secular Jew in Tel Aviv and an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn and a Reform Jew in London and a Sephardic Jew in Istanbul all recognize each other as family — even when they disagree about almost everything.

The famous Jewish saying Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh — “All of Israel is responsible for one another” — expresses this idea. It does not say “all religious Jews” or “all observant Jews.” It says all of Israel. The bond is broader than belief, deeper than practice, and older than any modern category.

Why It Matters

Understanding that Judaism is a peoplehood rather than simply a religion clarifies many things that otherwise seem confusing:

Why antisemitism targets secular Jews as much as religious ones. Why Jewish humor, food, and culture persist even without faith. Why Israel was founded as a homeland for a people, not as a theocracy. Why a Jew who converts to Christianity is still considered Jewish by many authorities (an apostate Jew, but a Jew nonetheless). Why Jewish identity can be passed from a completely secular mother to her children without a single prayer being uttered.

Judaism is not either/or. It is both/and. Religion and ethnicity. Faith and family. Belief and belonging. The sooner you stop trying to fit it into one category, the sooner you begin to understand it.