The question of who is a Jew has become a knot of complexities. I once heard Benjamin Netanyahu say in jest at a lunch at The New York Times—I think he was Israel’s UN ambassador at the time—that the Cabinet had thrown up its hands over the issue: “We have decided to adopt Sartre’s definition instead—anyone whom anyone else thinks is a Jew, is a Jew,” he said. The crux of the issue is whether Jewishness is just a religious and cultural trait or whether it also has a biological basis. To undermine disastrous ideas about eugenics and racial purity, Jewish intellectuals from Franz Boas to Ashley Montagu have derided the idea of race. But just as they had succeeded in persuading social scientists to embrace the unlikely idea that race is a mere social construct, advances...

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