Is Judaism a race or a religion?

A: On the one hand, the Jewish people are a nation in the same sense as the Greeks or the Italians or the Japanese. Jewish history goes back some 4,000 years to Abraham, who moved to the land of Canaan (what is now Israel) form Ur (usually believed to have been the ancient city of Ur in Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq.) Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. Isaac had two sons named Jacob and Esau. The Jewish people are ultimately the descendants of Jacob, also called Israel. Since these are actual people, there is such a thing as "Jewish blood" if by that you mean is there such a thing as being biologically Jewish. Nothing in the Bible suggests that there is anything particularly special about the biology, however. It is faith and tradition, rather than pedigree, that hold the people together.

The faith of Abraham in One God (at a time when almost the entire world believed in multiple gods) is the basis of the Jewish faith. About 400 years after Abraham the Torah was given to Moses (the Torah is the first five books of the Bible). The Torah contains the history of the Jewish people up to that time, as well as the rituals and code of conduct for what became known as the Jewish religion. The Torah makes provision for foreigners to become a part of Israel, so it is possible to be "Jewish" and have any sort of physical ancestry at all. In Bible times, religion and ethnicity were tightly linked. The Egyptians had their religion, the Assyrians had a different religion, as did the Philistines, the Greeks, the Hittites, etc. Because Christianity and later Islam (both of them monotheistic faiths derived from the ancient faith of Israel) supplanted almost all of the ancient ethnic religions of Europe and the Middle East, the Jewish people may stand out as unusual for having their own "ethnic" religion. Today, Judaism, unlike Christianity, is both an ethnicity and a religion. It is possible to be ethnically Jewish and reject the Jewish religion, but such a person is still considered Jewish. On the other hand, it is possible for someone who has no "Jewish blood" at all to become a convert to the Jewish religion. Such a person is also considered "Jewish" For centuries now, the rule has been that if at least the mother is Jewish, so are the children.

In the year 70 AD, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and drove the Jewish people out of the land. The exiled peoples formed communities in various parts of the world, and over the centuries were alternately accepted and rejected in various places. At one time there was a thriving community of Jews in Spain, but Spain expelled them in 1492. Many of the exiles fled to northern Africa, the Middle East or the Netherlands, since the Netherlands was very open and tolerant at that time. Jews with this ancestry are called Sephardim, from the Hebrew name for Spain. Another large Jewish community was scattered across central and eastern Europe. These are called Ashkenazi Jews, and millions of them were still in Europe in the middle of the 20th century. Most of the Jews who fled to America, Palestine and other countries just before, during and after World War II are of this extraction. Many of them spoke Yiddish, a variant of High German written with Hebrew letters.

The modern Zionist movement to create a New Jewish homeland, got its start in the 1800's, but the Holocaust of the 20th century made the need to form a Jewish state appear even more urgent not only to Jews but to many other nations of the world. As a result, the modern state of Israel was established in the land then called Palestine (from the name the Romans had given it after driving out the Jewish people). Jews from all over the world were granted immediate citizenship upon arrival, and Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews arrived from all over the world, creating the mosaic of faces to be found in Israel today.