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ArishMell I take your theological point there, but as a person he was Jewish.
Let me split another hair here as well. If there was a historical Jesus, he was not Jewish. There were no Jews back then and none of the national borders that carve up the Middle East we know today.
Two thousand years ago, there was Palestine, the land of the Jesus story. And Jesus was an Israelite, one of the indigenous peoples living there. The Israelites, also known as Hebrews, practiced the religion of Yawehism in their temple at Jerusalem. The Roman persecuted the Israelites, crucified Jesus, and destroyed their temple just as the Babylonians destroyed it before them. The Roman persecution of the Israelites was protracted and went on for a couple of hundred years causing many Israelites to flee. Most of them went to Europe while those who stayed in Palestine settled among the other indigenous people who were mainly Arabs. The Israelites who fled practiced a form of Yawehism called Judaism based on Hebrew scripture and the Talmud, an "Oral Law," a massive compilation of rabbinic debates. Practitioners of Judaism became known as Jews. German Jews are called Askenazi Jews. Spanish Jews are called Shephardic Jews, and so on. This bring us to the question of the Promised Land, a zionist project.
Zionists are atheists and zionism is a European Jewish secular nationalist movement in the late 19th century rather than a religious one. The Promised Land was a compact between God and the Israelites whose religion was Yawehism. Israel is Palestinian territory colonized by the British and given to the zionists. Many Jews are not zionists. Zionism is a political ideology that has nothing to do with God and the Promised Land he gave to the descendants of Abraham of the Hebrew Bible.
