JVL Introduction
Nira Yuval-Davis is an emeritus professor of sociology and honorary director of the University of East London’s Centre for Research on Migration Refugees and Belonging.
In this essay epecially written for Jewish Voice for Labour she looks at the vexed question as to “Who is a Jew” and particularly at the complicated issue of Jews and ethnicity.
Ethnicity is about identity: for ethnic collectivities what is important are the boundaries which separate people between ‘us’ and ‘them’ rather than the specific contents of these groupings. So our definition as “Jews” defines a difference but not at the expense of others.
It is only by embracing such a notion, she argues, that we can prevent our Jewishness being coopted by others and used to construct us as what we are not (e.g. as religious or as pro-Israel because we are “Jewish”).
Nira Yuval-Davis writes
The question of whether the Jews in the UK should be considered as belonging to a common ethnicity arose recently when Angela Rayner congratulated the newly elected leader of the Scottish Labour party Anas Sarwar as the first leader of a British political party who is a minority ethnic. When people objected, identifying leaders like Ed Miliband, Michael Howard and Disraeli as such previous leaders, as they are Jews, a BBC panel composed entirely of non-Jews discussed the issue and came to the conclusion that Jewishness constitutes a religious category rather than an ethnic one and therefore Rayner was right.
Indeed, the 2021 British census, like previous ones, does not recognise Jewishness as an ethnicity but only as a religion, forcing non-religious Jews – a significant part, if not the majority of British Jews – to choose between defining themselves as religious Jews or, if choosing to reply that they have no religion, to disappear as Jews from the census altogether. (Unless, like me, they fill in that they belong to the ethnic category of ‘other’ – at least this time it was not ‘Chinese and Other’ as in the previous census.)
Interestingly, when one looks at the ethnic categories used in the census, most of them are racial categorisations and above all, mark the categories in the population the state would like to keep under surveillance.[1] Even more interestingly, Jews are recognised in Britain as a racial minority who are protected from racial discrimination – notwithstanding the fact that post-WW2 UNESCO declared that there are no such thing as human races.[2] This is part of the fallacy discussed below that racism can be directed only against racial minorities. On the contrary: the process of racialisation can be directed against virtually any intergenerational grouping or collectivity.
It seems to me that there is a need to ‘go back to basics’: to ask what the relationship is between ethnicity, ‘race’, religion, nation and – as importantly – community. We need to avoid homogenisation, if not essentialisation, of these categories which can only lead to counterintuitive notions of self and others. It worries me that some of my friends from the Israeli and Jewish Left have fallen into these traps and as a result find it more and more difficult to self identify as Jews. As has been emphasised in the discussion about the emancipation of Jews under Napoleon,[3] the separation of religion and nationality is basically Christian (or we can say these days Euro- or Westo-centric) – the notion of ethnicity or ethnic community (or the similar notions in the Ottoman empire case the Millet system and in South Asia Communalism) is important because it is able to avoid these dichotomies and be elastically adaptive to local/temporal specificities.
When I left Israel almost fifty years ago I celebrated the fact the being Jewish in the diaspora meant having more options of self-definition as a Jews than those available in Israel when I grew up there. Only two versions of Jewishness were then available: either the Zionist one which defines Jewishness as being a part of what I came to understand to be a settler-colonial nation; or the orthodox religious one which included racist and sexist elements (as other more liberal and reform versions of Jewish religiousness were not acknowledged there). I actually grew so fascinated with this richness and variety of ways of being Jewish among those I met in the USA in the early 1970s that I wrote my doctorate on that very subject.[4] Different politics, ways of life, attitudes to spirituality and to mainstream Jewish religious and secular diasporic institutions and to Israel, as well as feeling or not being part of specific Jewish communities (which had different histories, traditions and countries of origin) – all varied among the people I interviewed or discussed the question of Jewishness with.
However, they all had one thing in common – they all told me they were Jewish, even when they didn’t know what it meant except for feeling an ‘other’. Also, many felt, like Isaac Deutscher in his classic ‘The Non-Jewish Jew’ essay,[5] that their notion of being Jewish was based on identification with a history of collective persecution. For a large number of mainstream Jews, Israel has come to mean an embodiment of their collective identity. For a growing number of others, especially in recent years, their Jewishness has come to mean protesting against Israeli occupation and violations of human rights which were supposedly carried out ‘in their name’ – as Jews.
While the Jewish case might be one of the most complex and heterogenous ones, contestations regarding who belongs and who does not are very common to a variety of national, racial and ethnic collectivities – whether the question is who is ‘Mizrachi’ in Israel or who is Black in the UK.
When I talk about ethnicity, or, rather, ethnic groupings or collectivities (not ‘community’ which I take to be a much tighter form of social organisation and using it can be misleading), I am following, like many other anthropologists and sociologists, the definition used in Fredrik Barth’s 1969 book.[6] This claims that for ethnic collectivities what is important are the boundaries which separate people between ‘us’ and ‘them’ rather than the specific contents of these groupings. As Benedict Anderson claimed regarding nations[7] all these collectivities constitute ‘imagined communities’ with varying degrees of solidarity and perceptions of commonality of origin and/or fate among the members. Ethnic collectivities, like national and racialised collectivities, include past and future as well as present generations. Also, like national collectivities, but unlike racialised ones, these boundaries are permeable. They usually share some common (but not homogenous) cultural resources which may include religion, language, folklore, cooking and some notion of collective memories. Unlike national collectivities, however, they do not have a political project of self-determination and unlike racialised collectivities their boundaries are used for ‘self’ and ‘other’ identification rather than for excluding/exploiting the ‘others’. In other words, the most important ethnic project relates to identity narratives – how people and/or others define who they are.
I agree with Shlomo Sand[8] about the heterogenous origins of Jews from different parts of the world, and this is true also for Jews living in Britain. While this definitely prevents them from being racially Jewish or religiously Jewish (as British laws define them) it does not prevent them from being ethnically Jewish.
When Ed Miliband was elected as the leader of the Labour party he was not described as a religious leader (unlike Tony Blair, for instance) or as coming from a religious home (Ralph Miliband would have turned in his grave) but as Jewish. Nor, once he started to criticise the Israeli occupation, did it prevent accusations being levelled against him personally, and against the Labour party under his leadership, of being antisemitic.
This is because these days, as important as is the religious heritage (which is used among the non-religious Jews as a cluster of cultural traditions rather than as a form of religion) even more so is the hegemony today of what Jamie Hakim calls ‘popular Zionism’.[9] This assumes Israel as the collective identity of all Jews – an assumption that has motivated many leftist Jews to refuse it and argue, as Jews, that what Israel is doing is not done ‘in our name’, thus reaffirming their Jewish identity in a non- (often anti-) Zionist way and most of the time also in a non-religious way. But in an ethnic way.
The debate as to ‘who is a Jew’ has caused major political crises throughout Israel’s history. However, in a very different way, this is a question which British Jews have to debate among themselves as well. Only the construction of the Jews as an ethnicity can free contemporary British Jews, especially secular non-Zionist one from being constructed into what they feel they are not, whether by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the British state or a BBC panel populated by non-Jews.
Endnotes
[1] Anthias, F. and Yuval-Davis, N., 2005, Racialized boundaries: Race, nation, gender, colour and class and the anti-racist struggle, Routledge
[2] UNESCO. 1952, The Race Concept; Results of an Inquiry., Paris: UNESCO
[3] Katz, J., 2013, The Term” Jewish Emancipation”: Its Origin and Historical Impact (pp. 1-26), Harvard University Press
[4] Yuval-Davis, N., 1983, New Jewish Movements in the USA 1967-1973, PhD Dissertation, the University of Sussex
[5] In Isaac Deutscher, 2017 (1st pub 1968), The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, edited by Tamara Deutscher, Verso
[6] Barth, F., 1998, Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of culture difference, Waveland Press
[7] Anderson, Benedict, 1983 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso
[8] Sand, S., 2009. The invention of the Jewish people, Verso
[9] Hakim J., Affect and Popular Zionism in the British Jewish community after 1967, European Journal of Cultural Studies. 2015;18(6):672-689
