{"id":9087,"date":"2009-11-08T18:38:30","date_gmt":"2009-11-09T01:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9087"},"modified":"2009-11-08T18:38:30","modified_gmt":"2009-11-09T01:38:30","slug":"who-is-a-jew-court-ruling-in-britain-raises-question-from-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9087","title":{"rendered":"Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question – from The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court in England is set to rule by the end of this year on a case involving a question that has vexed Jewish communities throughout the world for centuries: Who is a Jew? The case began because a 12-year-old boy whose father was born Jewish and whose mother converted to Judaism was denied admission to an Orthodox Jewish high school on the grounds that, because his mother was converted not in an Orthodox synagogue, but in what the Times<\/em> article refers to as a “progressive synagogue” (which I assume corresponds to something like Reform here in the States), she is not really Jewish; and so, therefore, neither is he. The boy’s family decided to sue the school for discrimination and lost. The Court of Appeal, however, reversed that decision on grounds that question one of the foundational tenets of Jewish identity: that, short of conversion, the only way one can be Jewish is to have been born to a Jewish mother.<\/p>\n

In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism \u2014 whether one\u2019s mother is Jewish \u2014 was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was \u201cbenign or malignant, theological or supremacist,\u201d the court wrote, \u201cmakes it no less and no more unlawful.\u201d<\/p>\n

The case rested on whether the school\u2019s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M\u2019s [which is how the boy is referred to in court documents] mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act,\u201d the court said. It added that while it was fair that Jewish schools should give preference to Jewish children, the admissions criteria must depend not on family ties, but \u201con faith, however defined.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same reasoning would apply to a Christian school that \u201crefused to admit a child on the ground that, albeit practicing Christians, the child\u2019s family were of Jewish origin,\u201d the court said. (via Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question – NYTimes.com<\/a>.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is Jewish<\/em> a religious or an ethnic identity? I was always taught it is both. Antisemites, on the other hand, have almost always argued otherwise. For the Nazis, Jewish<\/em> was racial; go back further, and you find the Catholic Church treating Jewish<\/em> as if it were a biological characteristic. Jewish men, for example, were understood to menstruate; Jews in general were believed incapable of perceiving the world accurately, of telling the truth in any language other than Hebrew, even of learning any language other than Hebrew–all because of the inherent deficiencies they suffered from as Jews. Even Jews who converted to Catholicism could not fully be trusted to have become sincere Christians, people at the time believed, because \u201conce a Jew always a Jew,\u201d and all it took to send a Jewish convert to be burned at the stake, or otherwise tortured and put to death, was for someone to imply that he or she was still, secretly, Jewish<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That Jews should trace their Jewishness back through their mothers, according to the rabbis, is commanded in the Torah. Here are the relevant verses from Deuteronomy 7:<\/p>\n

1. When the Lord the God shall bring thee into the land wither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before thee, the Hittite, and the Girgashite, and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; 2. and when the Lord thy God shall deliver them up before thee, and thous shalt smite them; (then) thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them; 3. neither shalt thou make marriages with them: thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take for thy son. 4. For he will turn away thy son from following Me, that they may serve other gods;<\/em> so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and He will destroy thee quickly. (Emphasis mine.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The commentator Rashi<\/a> explains the passage I have italicized as follows. (I am quoting here and above from The Pentateuch and Rashi’s Commentary<\/em>: A Linear Translation into English,<\/em> published in 1950 by S. S. & R. Publishing, Brooklyn, NY.)<\/p>\n

For he will turn away thy son from following Me: <\/strong>[Rashi is here paraphrasing the passage from the Torah:] The son of a heathen, if he will marry your daughter, will turn away your son, which your daughter will bear him, from following Me. So [here begins Rashi’s commentary], we learn that your daughter’s son that is born of a heathen is considered your son; but the son of your son that is born of a heathen woman is not considered your son, but her son, for it is not stated regarding his [the heathen’s] daughter: “Thou shalt not take…for she<\/em> will turn away thy son from following Me.” (Emphasis mine)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, a son born to your (Jewish) son and a non-Jewish woman does not count as a member of your family, i.e., that child is not considered Jewish, and so it is not necessary to state the possibility that she will turn the child away from her or his Jewish heritage. One spiritual\/mystical explanation that is given for this line of thinking is as follows:<\/p>\n

Jewishness is not in our DNA. It is in our soul. The reason it is passed down through the maternal line is not just because it is easier to identify who your mother is. It is because the soul identity is more directly shaped by the mother than the father.<\/p>\n

From a purely physical perspective, a child is more directly connected to their mother. The father’s contribution to the production of a child is instantaneous and remote. The mother, on the other hand, gives her very self to the child . The child is conceived inside the mother, develops inside the mother, is sustained and nourished by the mother, and is born from the mother.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that a father and child are not intimately attached. Of course they are. But as deep and essential as the bond between father and child may be, the child’s actual body was never a part of her father’s body. But she was a part of her mother. Every child begins as an extension of their mother’s body.<\/p>\n

This is a simple fact. It doesn’t mean she will be closer to her mother, or more similar to her mother, or follow her mother’s ways. We are not discussing the emotional bond between parent and child, but rather the natural physical bond. There is a more direct physical link between mother and child, because a child starts off as a part of her mother.<\/p>\n

The body and its workings are a mirror image of the workings of the soul. The physical world is a parallel of the spiritual world. And so, the direct physical link between mother and child is a reflection of a soul link between them. While the father’s soul contributes<\/em> to the identity of the child’s soul, it is the mother’s soul that actually defines<\/em> it. If the mother has a Jewish soul, the child does too.<\/p>\n

If the mother is not Jewish but the father is, his Jewish soul will not be extended to the child. There may be a spark of Jewishness there, but if it was not gestated in a Jewish mother, the child will have to go through conversion for their Jewishness to be activated.<\/p>\n

Jewishness is passed down by the mother because being Jewish is a spiritual identity, it defines our very being. And our very being we get from our mother, both in body and in soul. (Via Chabad<\/a>.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This explanation essentializes Jewish<\/em> in a way that would have been very familiar to the medieval Church, I think, and I imagine the Nazis as well, to the degree that any of them accepted the notion of a soul, would have endorsed it as well. I think anyone who believes in the necessity of keeping church and state separate, however, would be rightly troubled if a secular court were to accept such an explanation for why the actions of the Orthodox High School in England refused admission to M. (I should be clear that I have not read the court documents and so I don’t know if this explanation even entered into the school’s argument.) More to the point, if you read the passage from Deuteronomy without the mystical explanation, it’s hard to see matrilineal descent as anything other than a question of ethnicity.<\/p>\n

The more I think about the questions raised by this case, the dizzier I get. I don’t know British law; I don’t know the Race Relations Act; I don’t what the legal standing of M’s family’s suit would be here in the States. Indeed, I think the idea of a court ruling on what I have always thought of as a religious question is kind of scary. If the courts can rule on this, then what other questions that have traditionally been handled within religious communities by the followers of the faith in question might the courts and then the government suddenly have jurisdiction over? What happens then to our separation of Church and State. Then there is the part of me that says the legal question is almost beside the point. The larger question is who gets to define the criteria by which someone is considered Jewish by other Jews? If we follow the reasoning of the Orthodox, aren’t we (and I mean here the Jews) saying that it’s okay for us to discriminate within our own community in a way that we would never accept were the discrimination racial, say, or ethnic and taking place outside the community?<\/p>\n

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court in England is set to rule by the end of this year on a case involving a question that has vexed Jewish communities throughout the world for centuries: Who is a Jew? The case began because a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jews-and-judaism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9087\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}