Some questions never die. One of them is, “Who’s a Jew? What’s a Jew?” Related to that is, “Are the Jews a race?” The question has been revived by Whoopi Goldberg, controversially.
I have a memory. It’s 1986, and I’m watching C-SPAN, as one did. Reagan has nominated Associate Justice William Rehnquist to be chief justice. But Rehnquist has a problem: He owns a property with a “restrictive covenant,” barring the sale of the property to “any member of the Hebrew race.”
At this moment, I learned what a “restrictive covenant” was.
In the Senate hearings, Howard Metzenbaum is grilling Rehnquist. He reads the restrictive covenant and remarks, “No such thing as a Hebrew race. It’s a Hebrew religion.” Yes. And no? Consider that Israel is one of the least religious nations on earth. Always has been, since its refounding in 1948. But it is a Jewish state, no doubt.
Toward the end of her career, Gertrude Himmelfarb published a sparkling, learned little volume: The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, from Cromwell to Churchill. I wrote a three-part series on it, in 2012. Let me quote from the final part:
In reading Himmelfarb’s book, you see the word “race” a lot: “the Jewish race,” “the race of Englishmen,” and so on. In her epilogue, the author writes, “That word is anathema today.” Yet in former times, “it was meant as a tribute, denoting a people with an ancient lineage, a spiritual blood-line, as it were.”
From there, I give my hoary — now hoarier — memory of Metzenbaum and Rehnquist. I then write that all this is “too big a subject for a breezy lil’ column” like mine. Yes. And it is definitely too big for a breezy lil’ blogpost. But I can say this, for sure: Everything about race is controversial, including the word itself.