There is much debate as to whether Jewish identity should be understood primarily as an ethnic or religious identity. Orthodox Jewish thinkers such as Elliot Dorf situate Jewish identity as primarily a religious identity. Because "the languages Jews have spoken, the foods they have eaten and the clothes they have worn have been determinedÉ.. by the particular places in which they found themselvesÉ.All of the usual factors in defining a peopleÉare skewed when it comes to the Jewish people." (Dorf 1999:263) Dorf argues that

"Even if many contemporary Jews identify themselves as such primarily through other elements of the Jewish civilization, it is to the Jewish religion that we must turn to understand the identity of the Jewish people."(1999:263).

This view is supported on the methodological grounds that contemporary thinking on Jewish identity in a post-enlightenment tradition is inadequate in its use of concepts such as the "individual" and the "nation-state". The particularity of the Jewish people can only be understood correctly through the theological matrix of GodÕs dealings with the people of Israel. Other building blocks of ethnic identity such as land, language and individual self-identity are secondary.

However, such an approach to Jewish identity based ultimately on religious thought brings a distorted perspective to the issue, seeing the problematic nature of Jewish identity as a result of the encounter between religion and modernity. It also leads to Dorff to make rash statements such as:

"Even though the contemporary Jewish community is much exercised over the question of who is a Jew, it has uniformly and authoritatively determined that groups like Jews for Jesus are decidedly not Jews." (1999:271)

Such statements reveal the agenda of those who would take a religious basis for their discussion of Jewish identity, and who seek to solve the problem of identity by a return to an assumed religious orthodoxy.

Rather than limit the discussion of the subject to this narrow perspective, it is better to try to understand. Jewish identity from an inter-disciplinary perspective.

"What makes the study of Jewish identity complex is that we are not dealing with a unilinear phenomenon, but one more akin to a multi-plexed phenomenon moving in a variety of historical as well as structural directions. To discuss the Jewish condition is to examine religiosity, nationality and culture all at once as well as one at a time. Indeed, to separate these elements of Judaism results in distortions and reductions that can, and sadly often does, lead to little light and much heat." (Horowitz 1998:3)

For the purposes of this paper I am using BarthÕs model of ethnic identity based on the two aspects of social group and cultural unit. This enables us to trace both the historical factors that have influenced the formation of Jewish identity, the contemporary demographic aspects of the social unit that makes up the Jewish people, and the cultural trends affecting Jewish identity today and tomorrow. So Jewish identity may be defined as the pattern of attributes characterising the Jewish people at the level of group, sub-group and individual. These attributes arise from the historical, religious and social experiences of the Jewish people.

This definition gives considerable variety and flexibility to what it means to have a "Jewish identity". Is it necessary to believe in God, live in Israel, keep Jewish customs? Not necessarily? Is there one defining requirement such as matrilineal descent to determine Jewishness? No! Can there be many different and possibly contradictory Jewish identities? Naturally. What did you expect? As Menachem Kellner, professor of Jewish thought at Haifa University has recently argued in his book "Must a Jew Believe Anything?"

The crucial question for today's Jewish world, is not whether Jews will have Jewish grandchildren, but how many different sorts of mutually exclusive Judaisms will those grandchildren face?