It’s complicated. 

Judaism is a religion. But “The Jews” has multiple meanings. Besides referring to the practitioners of that religion, it also refers to a race of people, and also to the culture associated with those people. 

It’s a religion, it’s a race, it’s a nationality, it’s a culture. It’s all those those, or some of those things, or one of those things, depending on who you’re referring to. A lot of it is admittedly subjective and personal. But these kinds of things always are. 

I mean, come on. We all know what it means to “look Jewish” just as surely as we know what it means to “look Irish” or “look Japanese.”

An Irish Catholic who converts to Judaism obviously hasn’t become ethnically Jewish. But likewise, a Jewish girl from Hempstead Long Island whose grandparents left the Shtetl in Eastern Europe to come to America will ALWAYS be Jewish even if she converts to Catholicism. She couldn’t stop being Jewish any more than a black man could stop being black. 

The Nazis didn’t care about religion. They rounded up people who didn’t even know they had Jewish ancestry by going through genealogical records. They were wiping out a race, not a religion.  

We’re mostly talking about ashkenazi Jews, btw. European.