Why The Heck Are We Jews So Innately Tribal?
For better or for worse, it’s who we are
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Why The Heck Are We Jews So Innately Tribal?
I’m a Jew through and through.
I’ve never done a DNA test but I don’t need to. I know it will say something along the lines of 96% Ashkenazi Jew and 4% Sephardic Jew.
100% Jew.
I don’t feel I need to question this. I look Jewish. My skin is olive. My hair curls. My nose takes on a meaning of its own.
I resemble both my mother’s family and my father’s family, both with remarkably Jewish traits. Throughout my family tree, Jews married Jews and had Jewish babies. A couple of my dad’s siblings veered from this — the first in the family line — as Jewish life became more immersed in British society. But my dad ended up in Israel as a young man, escaping the monotony of a dull job in London, met and married an Israeli Jew, and kept that bloodline 100% Jewish.
And yet, a whole part of my life is very non-Jewish. I’m a Jew who didn’t grow up in a location where other Jews lived. Until the age of eight and a half, I lived largely as an expat British kid, attending international schools or non-religious British schools. I remember devout English Christians, African Christians, Finnish Christians, German Christians, African tribal folk, and Indian Hindus. No Jews though. My final primary school back here in the UK was a Church of England school, with religious assemblies and religious education classes with the local vicar.
I didn’t attend those. I was (and still am) a Jew, and my mother, born and bred in the one Jewish state on this planet and by now living in her husband’s country of birth rather than her own, couldn’t bear to see her children being immersed into a religious English Christian society. And I don’t blame her.
So although we had no immediate Jewish community surrounding us, we still lived with some separation from non-Jewish English doctrine, which separated us from our community just a tiny little bit.
We weren’t, in any shape or form, what I would call religious. Observant of traditions, yes. Willing to join in and give things a go, for sure.
We may not have had a local Jewish community surrounding us but we did have family at a distance, for whom being Jewish was deeply ingrained into their way of life. We also attended the synagogue in Oxford from time to time but we knew no one else who attended. We were the visiting ones, surrounded by families who probably celebrated Purim together, lit Hanukkah candles together, and went to one another’s houses for Shabbat dinner every Friday evening.
As for us, I remember occasionally going to my uncle Derek’s house in Hertfordshire for Passover, spending several Passovers in Tel Aviv with my grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins, and a couple of times doing Passover at home, just with my immediate family. Boy, does the Haggadah take a long time to read when you have no cousins around to distract you!
We always celebrated Hanukkah; it felt like a special, secret version of Christmas that was uniquely for us and not for any of my friends. We would receive presents for not just one day but for eight days in a row, and usually, before Christmas itself had landed.
I also read the Torah as a child, as requested by my mother. Although she would never consider herself to be “religious”, as she well observed, the Torah is central to understanding the plight of the Jewish people, the deep connection to the land of Israel, and the interconnectedness of the bloodline that descended from Abraham.
But I repeat, neither I nor my immediate family consider ourselves religious.
I recently read an interesting thread on X in which people debated what Judaism is, and whether or not it is a “faith”. As with any discussion on social media, no one could agree, but it got me thinking hard.
The post’s topic was a claim that Judaism became a faith — or religion — purely due to pressure from Christianity and Islam to conform to the ideas of what a religion specifically is. But the claim was that Judaism was never originally based on a “religion” but purely on DNA and our tribal unity.
Today, that argument is strong. Because Jewish people everywhere are claiming their Jewishness, no matter their place of birth, their religious or secular backgrounds, their observance of Jewish or non-Jewish traditions, their notions of who or what “God” or HaShem is, or how much they care to stick with other Jews in their day-to-day lives.
They may consider themselves deeply observant of religious tradition and belief, or they may consider themselves to be atheists. But all are equally Jewish. Because, no matter how much we may or may not blend into white, black, brown or mixed cultures globally, our DNA remains unequivocally Jewish. It’s not, therefore, a religion but a culture, an ethnicity, or a tribe.
There is also much evidence that Jewish spirituality originally went far beyond the limits of religious doctrine. The Kabbalah — the received wisdom of the Jewish texts — is based on mysticism and earth magic. Modern-day witchcraft has overlapped into Jewish folklore that stems from the Kabbalah, and the psychedelics movement has a strong Jewish presence due to parallels with the many plant medicine traditions around the world.
In today’s world, being Jewish is so many more things than a religion that it’s impossible to pin it down.
No matter how you look at it, Jewishness is a tribal quality, and tribal unity is a value we all hold dear.
Some time ago, I was asked by an acquaintance why I became so tribal when it came to being Jewish.
The question was intentionally provocative but it nevertheless made me reflect on my passionate pushback and defense of the Jewish people. Why do I feel such a sense of tribalism?
It has taken me months to process my thoughts over this, despite a deep knowing in my gut. And here is the conclusion I have reached thus far:
We are a minority.
Even those who live in Jewish communities know that their community is isolated among the masses. In the State of Israel, where Jews are everywhere, there is the awareness that beyond Israel’s borders, Jews quickly disappear.
We’ve always been a minority. But the fact that Jews were continuously being slaughtered simply for being Jewish for hundreds of years, and then the holocaust happened, wiping out 54% of Jews in the world at the time, has kept our numbers low, at a mere 0.2% of the global population.
And this history is of vital importance to us. Awareness of the holocaust and the many decades of pogroms leading up to it has been baked into us all. I was born just 30 years following the end of WWII — barely any time in the grand scheme of things. Many holocaust movies were released in the first 20 or so years of my life — movies my generation of Jew was raised on. Our parents were never going to let any of their offspring forget. We cannot forget, and in this way, we pass it on to the next generation; though with less intensity, they too register horror that this happened to people just like us — Jews. We were only saved from living through such fear and torment by a few decades.
No matter how we look at it, we cannot turn off our awareness of being a historically oppressed minority in this world. We’re also, by nature, compassionate people who care about our fellow humans. We have a natural desire to seek justice and come to the defense of oppressed people. Think of all the successful Jewish doctors and lawyers — they are successful because it’s deeply ingrained to fight to the last for life and for justice.
So when we see Jews being attacked simply for being Jewish or hear vile antisemitic claims about Jews, not only does our compassionate nature kick in but our awareness that any attack on Jews is an indirect attack on us. It’s a double whammy. So we seek fellow Jews for comfort and to share humour amid the madness.
And then there’s the fact that we’re typically an argumentative bunch. (Any Jew will testify to that, and if you need further evidence, just come and spend an evening with my dad.) We cannot remain quiet in the face of injustice, no matter what, even if it doesn’t serve us or help anyone’s case to do so. And believe me, that Jewish trait has worked against us on many occasions!
So, what with our sense of sisterhood and brotherhood with our fellow Jews across the world, our innate defense of justice, our compassion, and our (sometimes disastrous) outspokenness, we cannot help but come together in times of crisis for the Jewish people.
Is it a trait I’m ashamed of? Not at all. Because this willingness to defend is not limited merely to my tribe of Jews. I will stand up for anyone I love, no matter their ethnicity or religious background. I will speak out for them, and open my arms wide to hold them when they need it.
I will speak out for the marginalised ones, whoever they are. My defense of humanity is not limited to Jews. But when it’s Jews who are being attacked for merely being Jewish, something else is stirred in me — something ancestral, that feels as if it comes from a cellular level, from generation upon generation of trauma.
Being born a Jew, brought up as a Jew, educated as a Jew, and celebrated as a Jew, even against a backdrop of a very non-Jewish world, has made me acutely aware that my Jewish DNA could, at any point, be turned against me. Likewise, it could happen to my parents, my sister, or my children. And I can’t fathom that thought.
It’s happened before and it can happen again. In some places, it is already happening.
The fact is, we can never forget. And that very fact is what binds us as a tribe. When we see elements of the past raise its ugly head, we cannot let it pass. That’s just the way it is. Our tribalism takes over.
Like our history, our tribalism has been baked into us, and there’s no escaping that fact.
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Thank you for this article. I feel comfort being amongst the tribe these days. No matter how close your friends it’s not the same.
Well said. My main gripe is that our Jewish tribalism makes us empathetic to others, especially if they are experiencing discrimination, etc. There is nothing wrong with that compassion for others, except Jews do not seem to learn that our concern for others is not often reciprocal. One of my other gripes is that the Jewish tribe has a propensity to embrace whatever political movement seems to offer government for the common good. Even when that movement (socialism, Marxism, etc.) proves to be something other than what it pretends to be, they are way too reluctant to give it up. It become almost a tradition. Even now, when left wing political movements threaten the very existence of our people, they still hang on to it. Please, wake up.