A goy writes: That question only sound provocative when a gentile asks it, I suppose. But being a curious person, who has read big chunks of the Koran and Bhagavad Gita and Tao Te Ching and Confucius and Plato and so on… I sometimes read about Judaism. I was thinking about ethnic-intermarriage, and I knew about the Jewish proscription against it, which I assumed was a rule mostly ignored by American Jews. But I googled something about it, and this entry on Chabad.org was the first one to show up.
Frankly, it seems unbelievably racist to me. Here’s my favorite section:
What, then, is a Jew?
After studying the matter for many years and having countless conversations with Jews of every degree of observance and belief, I think that the most convincing and coherent answer is that the distinguishing element of the Jew is the Neshamah (soul) that every Jew possesses. The soul of the Jew is different than the soul of the non-Jew. They have different characteristics, potentials and needs.
My goodness. Imagine a white person proclaiming–on a well-known mainstream public website, by the way–that the soul of a white person is different than the soul of non-whites. What do my fellow gentiles think of this? Do we give Judaism a pass on being flat-out racist? I mean, of course, I’m trolling a bit… and I get it: if Jews accepted intermarriage without hesitation, they would vanish as a people. But that’s true of any ethnic group, and it seems to me that if any of the rest of them avoided intermarriage–in 2016!–specifically out of an effort to maintain their ethnic in-group population, we would not hesitate to call that “racist.”
