Posted September 09, 2018
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Sad thread is sad.
Judaism can be described broadly as a shared culture (which is, basically, what ethnicity means), with, indeed, believers and atheists, but even atheists can belong to a religious tradition in the sense that I am an atheist belonging to a christian culture (that is, in a society organised by christian rites, christian calendars, and philosphical currents rooted in christianism). It has been racialized by antisemits (in particular nazis), it can be sometimes vaguely traced by genetic markers (in the sense that all partially in-breeding populations tend to statistically carry some markers around), but it is not a "race", and a person's judaic religion or culture cannot be inferred by the shape of their nose or whatever.
But identities (be it "jew" or "tutsi" or whatever) can also be administratively imposed by the outside, and that's what the nazi bureaucratic powers did a lot, designating people as "jewish" depending on their own pseudo-scientifical definition of the notion. So no, a designated "jew" could not opt-out. But the nazi administration could decide arbitrarily who would be or wouldn't be "a jew".
Post edited September 09, 2018 by Telika