In talking about anti-Semitism and Jewish experience, it would seemingly be handy to answer who actually is a Jew. Judaism is a religion, but Jewishness is much more than that – a culture at least, maybe an ethnicity. Whether the religion, culture or ethnic parts need to be present for a Jew to be a ‘real’ Jew is a matter that spans a considerable academic spectrum, with nuanced arguments on all sides appealing to religious, cultural and historical sources.

Disclaimer: I am not a scholar. There will be no facts and no answers. This is the rambling of someone who has a Jewish father, is sometimes called a Jew, and sometimes calls himself a Jew.

I’ve never been a religious person. I went to the synagogue for the same reasons most people go to church on Sundays – your grandparents aren’t gonna be around forever so you might as well do one thing to please them if you insist on not being a doctor or a lawyer. Despite being close to my local Jewish community, the first time I ever felt like a Jew was when a fellow eight-year-old in my school came up to me and told me that my parents suck. Asking him why, he explained matter-of-factly that my parents sucked because they killed Jesus. If I were to have this conversation now, I’d probably appeal to historical records which show that it was actually the Romans who were more concerned about Jesus as a revolutionary than his fellow Jews, and maybe more relevantly to the fact that my parents aren’t 2,000 years old. At the time, I just hit him in the face.

“It probably wasn’t much consolation to the Jews being taken away by Nazis that they weren’t really Jews”

Okay, maybe that’s not the best way to solve your problems, and maybe there’s more to being Jewish than being offended by the charge that your parents killed Jesus. Orthodox Jews maintain that someone who has a Jewish mother is a Jew, whereas many liberal Jewish scholars argue that being a Jew is merely a matter of religion. But my experience, not just with a single eight-year-old, but all the surprisingly normal, socially respectable adult anti-Semites who attacked me for the background of my parents, does point to one common characteristic that seems to transcend both these definitions. People who are not religious or don’t have Jewish mothers or don’t meet other stringent criteria are still treated as Jews. And taking a look at history or the present day, Jews aren’t treated too nicely. It probably wasn’t much consolation to the Jews being taken away by Nazis that they weren’t really Jews, since only their father was Jewish or they hadn’t really bought into this whole ‘God’ thing.

It should be quite obvious that race as the Nazis conceived it is piece of pseudoscience – there is no skull-shape or platonic form of a ‘Jewish nose’ which determines who is a Jew. But even though race isn’t real, it can have real consequences on individuals and their identities. The fact is that all Jews were persecuted in accordance with the Nuremberg laws, which targeted anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent or a Jewish spouse. This definition, while not in line with tradition, is still often used to define Jewishness.

This understandably makes some people uneasy. It might be seen as giving up our autonomy to define ourselves and giving it to those who historically oppose us. But persecution is undeniably a source of identity, whether it is based on anything real or not. It certainly is for me – I happen to like Woody Allen, challah and having a beard, too, but I don’t feel I have the freedom to suddenly become un-Jewish, even if I wanted to. Even if I threw away my copy of Annie Hall, just ate regular bread and shaved, there would still be some asshole wanting to burn down the place where my family worships.

Your conspiracy theory is anti-Semitic

There is of course much more to being Jewish than being called names. There are (I’d hope) plenty of Jews who never have to face this kind of persecution, and whose identities are built from different materials. I think it’s perfectly consistent that other people feel that other things make them Jews – religion, tradition, ethnicity, whatever. Anyone making a habit of telling other people they’re not Jewish, on top of being rude, is erasing that person’s meaningful experiences associated with their identity. For me, those experiences are largely ones of persecution – for others, they may be ones of religious clarity, culture or tradition.

I do appreciate the academic struggle of defining what really constitutes the nature of Jewishness. But an alternative and much simpler definition seems more attractive to me: if you feel like you’re a Jew, you probably are one.