In search of Jewish identity.

The other day I was having a conversation with the Jewish intellectual,

and the question came opposite often does as to the nature of Jewish identity.

What are we? What makes us Jewish?

This has been one of the persisting debates about Jewish life ever since the 19th century.

Until then, people by and large knew who and what Jews were.

They were the heirs of an ancient nation who in the Sinai Desert long ago

made a covenant with God and with greater or lesser success tried to live by it ever since. They were God's people.

Needless to say, this upset others. The Greeks thought they were the superior race. They called

non-Greeks barbarians, a word intended to resemble the sound made by sheep. The Romans likewise thought themselves better than others.

Christians and Muslims both held in their different ways that they,

not the Jews, were the true chosen of God.

The result was centuries of persecution.

So when Jews were given the chance to become citizens of the newly secular nation states of Europe, they seized it with open arms.

In many cases they abandoned their faith and religious practice, but they were still regarded as Jews.

What, though, did this mean? It couldn't mean that there were a people dedicated to God since many of them no longer believed

in God or acted as if they did. So it came to mean a race. Benjamin Disraeli, converted

to Christianity by his father, as a young child, thought of his identity in those terms.

He once wrote, All is race. There is no other truth.

And said about himself in response to a taunt by the Irish politician Daniel O'Connell,

yes, I am a Jew. And when the ancestors of the right honorable gentlemen were brutal savages

in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.

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