Comment: Yes, but it was also not uncommon to refer to the “English race,” “German race,” “Italian race,” etc. as well as the broader “White race” in that era. With regard to the population genetic evidence, discussing Jews as a race ignores that there are subgroups among Jews that have different genetic histories. Considering some of the larger Jewish subgroups, the recent work of Shai Carmi and collaborators has shown that Ashkenazi Jews are predominantly a mixture of Middle Eastern and Southern European genetic components with a small amount of East European admixture. Yemeni Jews appear to be descended from local converts.
Sephardic Jews are not and were never restricted to North Africa. After the Iberian expulsions, some Sephardic Jews went to Italy and the Ottoman Empire as well as to North Africa. Indigenous Middle Eastern Jewish populations, in modern parlance sometimes referred to as Mizrahim instead of Sephardim, existed outside of North Africa as well, for example in Iran and Iraq.
The strongest evidence for distinct Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry comes from autosomal DNA studies that assay thousands of loci throughout the genome rather than uniparental marker haplotypes. However, it is also now clear that Ashkenazi Jews are the result of admixture (predominantly Middle Eastern and Southern European with a minor East European component). The admixture and subsequent inbreeding tend to cause Ashkenazi Jewish samples to form their own genetic cluster in the standard statistical analyses of the genetic data. The same effect is seen to some extent when other admixed groups like Uighurs are analyzed genetically. But even regions within the UK are genetically differentiable by autosomal DNA analysis.
