The distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish whites has been contextually important when discussing the history of discrimination in college admissions. The original move towards subjective ranking of applicants was in part a way to limit the number of Jewish applicants: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-d...

There's lots of sneaky ways they tried to limit Jewish access to higher eduction in Russia. Jewish Problems, for example: https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

>What about other religions? Why include religion at all?

The Supreme Court has ruled that in fact Jewish people are a race...at least for purposes of Civil Rights/anti-discrimination laws.

I was under the impression that Jews commonly don't think of themselves as being white whereas the rest of the 'white' groups did. Maybe I'm wrong? Jewishness is a more closely knit identity which Jews are lucky enough to have, whereas even whiteness is an ever expanding identity leaving many white people with nothing but 'American'.

> I was under the impression that Jews commonly don't think of themselves as being white whereas the rest of the 'white' groups did.

In the Anglosphere, Jews have pretty much always been considered "white". For example, both the Confederacy and Apartheid South Africa, two regimes obsessed with racial classification, never even considered that Jews might not be white.

The conception of Jews as a separate race, has historically been an Eastern European idea. Even in 1930s Germany, the Nazi party's base of popularity was always firmly rooted in the most Eastern federal regions.

Jews were kicked out of numerous Western European countries throughout the Middle Ages and early modern era. I hardly think Eastern Europe has a monopoly on anti-Semitism.

Sure, but in a world dominated by the Christian church, isn't it possible that the discrimination was based more on religion than on race?

I don't remember where (help me, please!) but I read an account by a medieval European monk visiting monasteries and Christian communities in Africa. He described their religious practices, traditions, culture architecture and food in great detail, but mentioned their (certainly much darker) skin tones only in passing.

"Race" (boiled down to skin melanin contents) as a distinguishing point between groups of people is not a permanent fixture in human history. It is especially overwhelmed by religion, language and culture/tribal nationality in terms of its use as a dividing point between "us" and "them".

Depends on the place I suppose. In Portugal it was primarily because of religion (many time out of fear that they had secretly kept their Jewish religion, rather than actually converting to christianity).

It doesn't really make sense to talk about the expulsions in the 1500s as being motivated by race, given that there was no meaningful difference in race between the Jewish and Christian populations in the area, and they had widely intermingled.

While I have read plenty of accounts of riots and expulsions that either explicitly or implicitly state their reasons as being motivated by fears of new Christians still Secretly practicing Judaism, I haven't seen a single account naming race or some ethnic distinction as the cause.

First, I'm not discussing anti-Semitism in general. This is a discussion specifically focused on the idea of when and where Jews were considered a separate race. It's still quite possible for a group to be discriminated, and even persecuted, without them being classified as a separate race. Just ask the Irish.

Second, Oliver Cromwell readmitted the Jews to England, nearly 500 years ago. The Dutch readmitted Jews over 500 years ago. The Swedes 300 years ago. Over 200 years ago Napoleon's Western European armies emancipated Jews, primarily from Eastern Europe's absolute monarchies.

In contrast, Jews were never granted equal legal status in Russia until 1917. Pogroms were regular occurrences in Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania until the 1920s. The Romanian Iron Guard persecuted Jews with such brutality, that even the Nazis told them to dial it back. Contrast with Denmark, where the local populace refused to let the SS deport even a single Danish Jew.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity of Jewish history would tell you that while anti-semitism in the modern period isn't unheard of in Western Europe, its orders of magnitude worse in Eastern Europe.

>For example, both the Confederacy and Apartheid South Africa, two regimes obsessed with racial classification, never even considered that Jews might not be white.

Not true about South Africa:

"Shortly after the Union of South Africa received dominion status in 1910, the new Boer rulers proposed to re-classify the Jews as "coloured" because they originally came from the Middle East, and hence were not really European. The Jews of South Africa fought tooth and nail to retain their privileged status as "Whites""

https://www.quora.com/Were-Jews-during-South-African-aparthe...

Do you have a citation for that other than Quora?

No. It's something I heard growing up in SA, and I thought there'd be lots of sources about it online, but that was all I could find. It's possible that it's a myth - happy to hear from someone who knows more.

It's definitely possible. But I'd be skeptical that the sentiment was widespread.

Right around the same time the Oppenheimers were becoming the wealthiest and one of the most powerful families in South Africa. Despite being ethnically Jewish, I've never once heard of them facing any discrimination from the apartheid regime or the broader SA public.

It is the price that "white" identity demands. It is a subtractive identity, ie it abhors identity complication.

You basically have to strip every complicating element of your true identity safe for the absolutely benign forms (ie "Kiss me, I am Irish" tea shirts).

If you pay attention at least in American you can observe intriguing examples of this tension with white identity playing out. For instance being LGBTQ and white presents a problem for many. In fact there are examples now of white gay men who claim to hate "identity politics", what they really hate is that LGBTQ identity jeopardizes their "white" identity and they recognize this, so it is easy to pretend there are no other "blemishes" to their "white" identity....It is a fascinating phenomenon if you pay close attention :)

> In fact there are examples now of white gay men who claim to hate "identity politics", what they really hate is that LGBTQ identity jeopardizes their "white" identity and they recognize this

Speaking for myself, mmm.....no.

Good for you:) Unfortunately not so for these guys:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/magazine/gay-conservative...

As others have said, it’s not about religion it’s about ethnicity. If you really wanted to skew things, look at Ashkenazi Jews versus everyone else. You’ll find the former group extremely over-represented among Nobel laureates, Fields medalists, Turing award winners, and world chess champions. In light of all these achievements, I think it makes sense to distinguish Jews from non-Jewish whites at Harvard, where the achievements are paralleled there as well.

I think it's because Jews are also an ethnic group

That is correct, at least in regards to how the statistics were gathered:

"To ensure that we did not overlook religiously unengaged Jews, we asked students for their religion and whether they considered themselves Jewish aside from religion; then, we asked about their parents’ religious identities. Students who considered themselves Jewish in any way were counted in our estimates." -- https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat...

"Jewishness in the United States is considered an ethnic identity as well as a religious one." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Religion

I apologize if this sounds blunt, it's not imprudent to see more sinister reasons given history, but my thought would be you're seeing them break out Jewish because from the religion as cultural group perspective, the cultural import of education is anomalous.

I genuinely am not trying to break out the praeteritio, and say I'm not calling it a 'positive' stereotype, but at a certain level you can't have such a cultural focus on education, and then be gobsmacked when it has statistical significance in things like school admissions.

Like, if I told you that Utah had the lowest per capita alcohol consumption in the US, it's not liable to blow anyone's mind.

Heck, one of the reasons Harvard came up with its holistic admissions process in the first place was targeted at Jewish kids applying. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/9/19/admissions-laws...

Also just a lazy google, I'd hazard to guess you're right about catholic representation being higher than expected. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/09...

Aren't Jews a race and a religion? Plenty of non religious Jews out there.

I think this sort of addresses your comment: https://www.jewishgeneticdiseases.org/

What is a race exactly for humans?

A culturally and context dependent grouping of people based on ancestry and geographic origin.

"There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label"

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...

A race is a "folk science" version of an ethnicity (it's defined culturally instead of scientifically). An ethnicity is a genetically similar group of people that often come from the same geographic origin.

Ethnicity has nothing to do with genetics. Dictionary definition says "a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition"; Wikipedia has this starting paragraph:

"An ethnic group or ethnicity is a category of people who identify with each other, usually on the basis of a presumed common genealogy or ancestry or on similarities such as common language or dialect, history, society, culture or nation. Ethnicity is often used synonymously with the term nation, particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism, and is separate from but related to the concept of races."

>usually on the basis of a presumed common genealogy

From Wikipedia. You're right that I didn't list every factor.

"Presumed" is the key point. e.g. Ethiopian Jews have no genetic relationship with other Israeli Jewish subgroups, people in Eastern Germany have just as much in common genetically with Poles as with Western Germans, etc. And when these things are brought up, many ethnic nationalists will shrug their shoulders and say "so what".

Oh come now.

Judaism as an identity class has a lot more to it than mere religious affiliation.

I have to suspect that if the representation were 0.5x, rather than 5x, then its consideration would strike you as more natural.

Agreed, I know at least a dozen atheist Jews who are Jewish ethnically (Sephardic / Ashkenazi) / culturally, but not religiously.

I mean grouping Jews together based on a religious affiliation is just weird -- Reform would look at you really funny if you start talking to them about how Hasids and Orthodox view the world. It is as if Christianity was compressed into Amish, Anabaptists and Catholics and someone said "they are the same people"

It is ultimately a response to the fact that Jews were treated as the same people by policies designed to exclude them. There were no such policies for various Christian groups.

Practically for much of this history in this part of the world, "Jewish" has been used interchangeably with Ashkenazi. Jewish is not an ethnicity, but Ashkenazi is, and most of the Jewish people at a place like Harvard (or applied-but-denied) have been Ashkenazi. Note this paragraph is descriptive, not normative: this conflating of Jewish and Ashkenazi is a way by which other Jews (many of which face even more racial discrimination) get erased from discourse.

> Jewish is not an ethnicity, but Ashkenazi is

This is, to put it mildly, an opinion rather than an established fact. Ethnicity is a social construct, and many Jewish societies do construct an ethnicity that crosses the intra-Jewish Ashkenazi/Sephardi/Persian/etc. lines.

The biggest example of this is of course Israel, but you also see this in other mixed-background Jewish communities like e.g. Los Angeles or France, where a single umbrella Jewish ethnic identity is overlaid on top of those more specific ones.

When I'm in the United States, about half the time, I pray with a Chabad Minyan. About half the people there are not Ashkenazi, despite Chabad's Ashkenazi origins. We have Persians, Yeminites, Ethiopians, Syrians, etc, and people whose families have lived in greater Israel area for generations.

If you don't mind my asking, where in the US is this Chabad minyan?

Silicon Valley

Your point is taken. But, I think there's consensus that the term "Jewish" doesn't unambiguously refer to an ethnicity, because one common definition is that Jewish refers to a religion. Orthodox Judiasm confers full "Jewishness" on Orthodox converts, and most ethnicity definitions have to double-check with one's birth / blood relatives.

There is a belief that many of the "Jewish" ethnic groups form one nation (Zionism tends to hold this) and I suppose there are people who extend that to a broader definition of "ethnicity."

"Ethnicity" is more similar to tribal identities - there are usually ways of entering the group, which can be well- or ill-defined. See for example the traditional initiation ceremonies of many Native American tribes for non-members, or the recently-constructed avenues for Soviet-era Russian immigrants and their descendants to join the Baltic ethnicities. In the reverse direction, Halpulaar'en consider those who have shifted to speaking Wolof to have left the ethnic group. (Note, though, that they are usually not then considered by the Wolof to have entered their ethnic group, creating a serious social problem.)

To continue the example of Zionist ideology, even secular Zionists consider converts to be Jews, and many consider converts to non-Jewish religions to have exited the tribe. Non-Jewish immigrants and their descendants who speak Hebrew as a native language may or may not be considered members depending on the person.

> There were no such policies for various Christian groups.

Say what? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism#United_States

Are Chinese Jews, Jews?

Well this is the most replies I have ever gotten on HN. I strongly regret discussion my feelings on my own religion on here.

If people don't think that breaking "whites" down into Jewish/Non-Jewish and nothing else is strange then I don't think we can discuss this topic rationally.

Depending on context, Jewish can be either ethnicity or religion (or both). I believe in this context, ethnicity is more important (and it’s also a proxy for higher IQ of Askenazi Jews).

A lot of the responses here are talking about ethnicity or Jewish identity, but I think when it comes down to it, Jews are considered white mainly when other white people want to consider them as such.

I would bet that your average Ashkenazi Jew (it is worth noting there are multiple different Jewish ethnic groups) has more genetic commonality with an average person of Ukrainian descent than that Ukrainian person has with someone of Irish descent. So why are the Ukrainian and Irish person both white while the Jewish person isn't?

And also let's point out that there is no distinction for any other group of Middle Eastern people. They instead have to choose between being Asian, African, or European.

Arabs, Armenians, North Africans, and Persians are all considered white in the US.

Not according to many people on the Left. Congresswoman Tlaib, for example, identifies herself as a "Woman of Color" (https://thehill.com/homenews/house/429550-tlaib-people-hear-...).

My maternal grandparents were born in Gaza City, and Syria respectively. Grandmother was expelled Gaza in 1929, and the Syrian grandfather was expelled from Syria in 1927. Both families had been there for many generations, if not since Temple times.

When I'm in the United States, even though I am very dark, I am never considered a "Person of Color" solely because of my religion. Other people from the same places _are_ "Persons of Color" if their religion differs.

I'm darker than Ms. Tlaib if you want to get your colorimiters out.

It's 12:54 AM in Tel Aviv now, where I am. (I spend about half my time here and half in Silicon Valley).

However in the United States it's still Rosh Hashanah. I think it's a little unfair to have a discussion about Jews and affirmative action in the United States at a time when observant Jews will not be on-line.

Shanah Tovah.

I have never seen a coherent definition of POC. It seems to be based entirely on political expediency.

And all the central asians who have turk geneology? Are they white as well?

According to who? If you're referring to the census designations, Jews are considered white too which just goes to further underlines my point.

The government and thus US law.

Again, this further underlines how strange it is the Jews are separated out above when they are considered white according to things like the census. The numbers from the top comment would look a lot less scary to the average white person if Jews were lumped into that group.

Because when it comes to academics they (in particular Ashkenazi) have an advantage. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence) - so it does not have directly to do with religion, it's just that their persecution in the middle ages (because of their religion) seems to have lead to a slightly higher capability with regard to abstract thinking (the drawback here being a higher vulnerability to hereditary diseases).

That's because Americans fixate on Ashkenazi.

The US Jewish population is 90-95% Ashkenazim. It's unfortunate that Americans sometimes forget about the minority of Sephardim and Mizrahim, but for the most part the assumption that Jewish American == Ashkenazi holds true.

'White' is commonly thought of as a euphemism for European, they are surely referring to the Jewish race and not Judaism as a religion.

As an atheist Jewish person, I don't agree with your definition of "Jewish".

Neither did the Nazis, btw.

How about Christians, Jews, or... miscellaneous