When it comes to Covid-19, we’re ‘ethnic’
V HAS YOUR pen ever hovered over “Other” when filling out a form measuring ethnicity, while you wondered why Jews are not treated as an ethnic minority by British officialdom?
This question might be more important than you realise. The number of British Jews who have died from Covid-19 during this pandemic is three to four times what you might expect given the size of our community. At the same time, deaths in some other ethnic communities are also disproportionately high.
There are many possible reasons why this might be the case and both these trends should be examined together. However it is unlikely that they will be, because policy making, political campaigning and academic study regarding ethnic minorities ignore Jews so frequently that this omission barely gets noticed.
British anti-racism legislation does recognise Jews as a racial or ethnic group, a principle established by the 1976 Race Relations Act. But somewhere along the way, this has become the exception rather than the norm.
Yet over 33,000 of us went to the trouble of writing “Jewish” in the “Other” box on the 2011 census, even though “Jewish” was only offered as an option under religion. For a lot of Jews, especially those of a secular or atheistic outlook, Jewish identity is rooted more in culture, history and family ties — in other words, the building blocks of ethnic identity — than in belief in God or religious practice.
In the past our communal leaders preferred to avoid the “ethnic” label, worrying that it might hinder Jewish integration into the mainstream. But in modern Britain, ethnic diversity is widely celebrated and BAME communities are an important part of public life.
The question of whether Jewish identity is a matter of religion, ethnicity, nationality or some strange hybrid of all three will keep sociologists occupied for decades. This is a religion that happily accommodates atheists; an ethnicity in which you can be black or white; and a nationality over half of which has been living in a diaspora for as long as family records can be traced.
Sometimes it’s hard enough for Jews to work out who we are and where we fit in, so it’s no surprise that others try to place Jews into their own pre-conceived boxes. Professor Didi Herman, in her fascinating book An Unfortunate Coincidence, argued persuasively that English law has tended to treat Judaism as directly analogous to Christianity because judges assumed all religious groups must follow the same definitional rules.
These misconceptions even played an indirect role in the spread of antisemitism in the Labour Party, due to a view in certain parts of the radical left that Jews are white and privileged, and consequently can’t suffer “proper” racism.
The pandemic makes this discrepancy potentially a matter of life and death. A great deal of statistical analysis and political thought is going into working out why Covid-19 affects different ethnic groups in the way that it does, but Office for National Statistics data on deaths by ethnicity do not even include Jews and it is unclear whether Public Health England’s research into the problem will consider Jews either. It is vital that they do.