Question

Hello to our master, Rabbi Michael Abraham, may he live long.
In your article about Jewish identity in our generation, at the end of the discussion you wonder what is so important about this whole debate at all, but you yourself answered it: who is this entity called the Jewish people that seeks ownership of the land over a thousand years of Muslim history.
1. In that article you brought a view of people who see a collection of Israeli actions as a criterion for Jewishness—serving in the IDF, reading Amos Oz, and so on. You challenged each of the criteria, but I, in my humility, think that supporters of this view mean that the person in question fulfills all the criteria, or at least most of them, and only such a person is called Jewish, not someone who has only one of them.
2. According to Rabbi Shach’s approach (which it seems you lean toward to some extent), the Jewish people are not a nation, ethnicity, and the like, but only a religion. If so, one must ask: should a religion be given a state? And furthermore, why should Judaism be preferable to Islam in terms of right to the land—because it was there first? Muslims too were in Spain before the Christians; what does that prove?
3. There is no doubt that the Jewish people are a unique phenomenon among the nations. The Jewish people wandered to Babylonia, the lands of Islam, the Balkans, Europe, India, the Caucasus, Ethiopia. As a result, they are very diverse and characterized by countless layers of identity that make them Arab, Moroccan, Yemeni, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, German, Turkish, and more. The only thing that characterizes them is their unique religion, from which—despite all the differences—similar customs and culture were derived. There is no escaping saying this: the Jewish people are both a nation and a religion, bound up together.
4. Even so, in recent times the Holocaust served as an unparalleled melting pot for that Jewish people, when the Nazis themselves were forced to decide who is a Jew. Does the Rabbi think the Holocaust affects this debate (even though of course Hitler is not the authority to decide the matter)?
5. In the end, I think the essence of Judaism is race, like any other people. The Jews are a race that preserved its ethnic genetic makeup. That same Jewish race is entitled to inherit its historic land. What can be done—genetic studies show that Jews have one common origin with a common religion, and they preserved their national identity in the Holocaust as I defined earlier. Genetics compensates for religion, and religion compensates for genetics. (Genetics, genetics—after all we are speaking of completely different people, except for their shared religion; on the other hand this is not just any religion like Christianity or Islam, but one belonging to a particular people with shared genetics.) If so, what about righteous converts of various kinds? I think every people can decide how foreigners may join them (mainly by accepting its national identity, as righteous converts do). And what about Jewish-Christians? I think that if their lineage is clear, they deserve a place in the land like the rest of the Jews. And what about the claims of Shlomo Sand and the like, according to whom the Jewish people are Khazar converts? It should be answered that even if a considerable part of European Jewry are Khazars, in the end they assimilated into the European Jewish communities and became part of them, and now they are Jews in every respect.
6. What does the Rabbi think of Gandhi’s article, “In India live two peoples, Hindus and Muslims,” and therefore they should be given two states? Was he right—that two religions within the same people and culture can turn into two peoples?