What are Jews a religion or a race?
With great respect to KNC and D Aravah, it is disingenuous to say that Jews are not ethnically distinct. While it is true that there are converts to the religion of Judaism, Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews each define a subset of the human gene pool which is distinct from other Eastern and Western Europeans respectively, from other Fertile Crescent populations and from each other. Genetic markers such as Tay Sachs accrue uniquely to the Ashkenazi population in the same way that sickle-cell trait is unique to sub-Saharan African populations. And, to be blunt, both Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews are phenotypically distinct enough to be recognizable relative to the rest of the European gene pool. My wife “looks Jewish” in the same way that I “look Irish”. It’s not a bad thing (actually I think it’s a very good thing, she happens to be gorgeous), but many Jews seem loathe to acknowledge their ethnic uniqueness.
