“Are Jews an ethnic minority?” is not a difficult question. As far as British law is concerned, the answer is open-and-shut: we count as both an ethnic and a religious grouping for the purpose of equalities and employment law. From a purely mathematical perspective, the number of people entering some variation of “Jewish” under one of the five “high-level” ethnic categories (White, Black/Black British, Asian/Asian British, Mixed, and Other) is a minority within the United Kingdom.
When you zoom out beyond the narrow confines of “the United Kingdom in 2021” the question becomes easier still. Whether Benjamin Disraeli would feel today that he were an ethnic-minority Briton is unknowable: but we can say with copper-bottomed certainty that he and other ethnically-Jewish Britons faced what we would now recognise as workplace discrimination in addition to the open dissemination of racist tropes about Disraeli and his family by his political opponents.
Content from our partners
