What’s a Jew?

On Friday, the Israeli Knesset postponed action for six months on a controversial bill to revise the procedures for officially determining who is and who is not a “Jew,” which guarantees at least six more months of bickering about them. The question is one of supreme legal importance, because Israel is a state whose raison d’ être is to favor “Jews,” which implicitly means disfavoring “non-Jews” – so you really need to know which is which.

Israeli law singles out Jews for special treatment in myriad ways, such as marriage. Jews can legally marry in Israel, as can Christians and Muslims. But since Israel does not recognize the concept of civil marriage, persons who think of themselves as Jews, but are not officially Jews under the law, cannot get married in Israel, period. (Nor can humanists who affiliate with no religion – but who’d want them to procreate anyway?) They have to travel to another country, typically Cyprus, marry there, and then return – a foreign marriage will be recognized by Israel under international law.

This is not an isolated problem, especially for hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have emigrated from Russia. They think of themselves as Jews, they follow Jewish religious rules, they fight in the Israeli army, but for reasons discussed below they don’t technically qualify as Jews. Non-Jews also have trouble getting buried in Israel – even those who are killed while fighting in the Israeli army. Then there is the question of money, doled out by the Israeli welfare state far more generously to “Jews” than to non-Jews, even though the law is refreshingly evenhanded when it comes to taxes: non-Jews pay just as much as Jews do.

Faced with these difficulties, a lot of Jewish non-Jews want to follow the procedures for “converting” to Judaism. But there are many different flavors of Judaism – Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, etc. – and that’s where the controversy arises. The Orthodox want to control the process, which is pretty much what the bill provides – at least so say the more liberal elements, especially the American Jews whose financial support keeps the Israeli state afloat, who can easily picture themselves being relegated to non-Jew legal status.

The need to distinguish legally between Jews and non-Jews predates the State of Israel by many centuries. The Vatican, for example, enforced a number of laws against Jews in the Italian territories it controlled. Jews were herded into an overcrowded, walled neighborhood called a “ghetto,” to avoid contaminating Christians. Jews were not allowed to marry Christians, or to employ Christian servants. As late as the 19^th century, Jews were forced to endure a Christian sermon every Saturday, typically focusing on their stupidity in remaining Jews. For the most part, the problem of defining who was subject to these rules was based on beliefs and actions rather than heredity. If you attended Jewish services and followed Jewish dietary laws, you were a Jew, until such time as you woke up and followed the Church procedures for converting to Catholicism.

Officially, conversion of Jews was the ultimate aim. But important segments of the Church did not get that memo. For example, in 1547, the archbishop of Toledo issued a law banning any Christians who were descended from Jews from the various forms of assistance that the archdiocese provided. In 1555, this law was ratified by Pope Paul IV and came to serve as a model for the Church throughout Spain. The Jesuits, the most powerful of the Catholic clerical orders, refused admission to anyone of Jewish ancestry within the preceding five generations. This rule remained in force until 1946.

Roman Catholics were not alone in the need to define whom to persecute. In Orthodox Russia, a massive legal code restricted Jews from hundreds of normal activities, from voting to owning corporate stock. There does not seem to have been great complexity in determining what a Jew was, though. If a Jew got baptized and started attending Christian services, the legal disabilities generally disappeared. That was the point, for example, in opening up the military draft; the Czar cynically noted that “the chief benefit to be derived from the drafting of Jews is the certainty that it will move them most effectively to change their religion.” Realizing that the Czar wouldn’t listen, the rabbis of Starokonstantinov addressed a bitter written complaint against the draft law directly to God; to assure the message’s delivery, they planted it on a corpse.

The Russian laws were so complicated, and their enforcement was so slipshod, that the system became utterly corrupted. It didn’t take many rubles to persuade the local officials that you weren’t really a Jew, even though you sort of acted like one, if you were affluent enough and went through the motions of getting baptized. The 19^th century anti-Semites of neighboring Germany were disgusted at the Russian inefficiency, and determined not to let Jews off the hook with a quickie baptism. As one popular jingle put it, “Never mind to whom he prays. The rotten mess is in the race.” [It rhymes better in German.] The problem was, they couldn’t agree among themselves on a good definition of “Jew”; according to Raul Hilberg, the most eminent historian of the Holocaust, definitional disputes prevented the introduction of anti-Jewish legislation in the German Reichstag.

The Nazis ran for office on a simple platform of doing something about the Jews; once elected, they confronted the same thorny problem. Their first attempts misfired, because they spoke of favoring “Aryans” and disfavoring “non-Aryans.” The Foreign Office, which was busily trying to make friends with the Japanese, reported that they did not appreciate being treated like Jews, so it was back to the drawing board.

The complicated result focused primarily on a person’s grandparents, explicitly following the Jesuit precedent. If you had at least three Jewish grandparents, you were a Jew, regardless of your current religious practices. If you had only one Jewish grandparent, you were called a “Crossbreed” of the first degree, subjecting you to some but not all of the anti-Jewish laws. The knife’s-edge case was the person with two Jewish grandparents. If he did not practice the Jewish religion and was not married to a full Jew on September 15, 1935, he was a Crossbreed of the second degree, subject to restrictions in-between those of Crossbreeds of the first degree and full Jews. Otherwise, he was a Jew.

Though this definition seems clear, it still caused a lot of problems. How do you know what your grandparents were, unless you look at their grandparents, etc. back to Abraham? This was usually solvable by looking at birth records, which indicated religious status at a time when there wasn’t a strong reason to lie. But this wasn’t perfect either, especially when the father was, um, unknown. Germany’s “Family Research Office” came up with an ingenious solution to part of this problem: a presumption that any child born to an unwed Jewish mother before 1918 had a Jewish father, but any such child born after 1918 had a Christian father. Why? Because they said that in the good old days before 1918 Jews and Germans did not mix, but in the bad days of the Weimar Republic Jews were intent on disintegrating the vitality of the German race.

Today’s law in Israel follows the German precedent of concentrating on grandparents (more precisely, grandmothers, since Jewish law is skeptical of claims about paternity). This is why so many Russian immigrants are treated as non-Jews, because so many Russian Jews found it convenient for the official records to indicate that they were not really Jews. What a tangled web we weave … Then there was the case of Oswald Rufeisen, born in Poland of unquestionably Jewish origins, who personally saved hundreds of fellow Jews from the Holocaust. Grandmothers notwithstanding, when he sought Israeli citizenship, both the Chief Rabbinate and the Israeli Supreme Court classified him as a non-Jew, because he had converted to Catholic religious beliefs.

Many Jews are offended – and rightly so – by glib slogans like “Israel is as bad as the Nazis.” So to be perfectly blunt, nothing that the State of Israel has ever done is even remotely in the same league as the crimes of Nazi Germany. However, that still leaves a lot of room for mischief. Here in America, the land of litigation, we have somehow managed to struggle through a couple of hundred years without legally defining the term “Jew” at all, a feat made possible by our lack of laws (at least in the last century or so) discriminating either for or against Jews. Depending on how you define “Jew” (there’s that question again), it appears that quite a few more “Jews” (broadly defined) choose to live in America than in Israel. Fancy that!

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Luis Granados is a Washington, DC attorney and a student of the scandals of religious history. His weekly God Experts blog relates a current headline or anniversary to a curious episode from the past. Someday, he will publish a book called Damned Good Company, a collection of stories of humanist heroes through the ages who bucked the prevailing God experts.

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