Easily missed in this story about emigration from Israel is that most of the 68,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union who have since left Israel were individuals not registered as Jews. This means that they were not Jewish according to Jewish law, which requires Jewish matrilineal descent. Israeli authorities will not register an individual as a Jew unless the Orthodox rabbinate OKs it based on the rabbinate’s understanding of Jewish law.
The emigration of so many “non-Jewish” immigrants is not surprising. Many of these individuals have Jewish ancestors, often on the father’s side (which was considered more relevant in Soviet society), and consider themselves to be Jews. Yet, for example, they cannot get married to a Jew in Israel because the Orthodox rabbinate controls marriage, nor can they get buried in a Jewish cemetery.
Formal conversion would be an option, but from everything I’ve read, the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel has intentionally made it very difficult for individuals who seek to do so to formally convert. I attribute this to (1) traditional Jewish reluctance to seek or encourage converts; (2) ethnocentrism, which is very prevalent among the ultra-Orthodox (and, to a lesser extent, Israelis more generally), though completely against Jewish law and tradition; and (3) a belief that most “Russian” converts will vote for non-Orthodox parties, reducing Orthodox political strength. I think the last explanation is the strongest, because the Orthodox establishment has been noticeably lax about approving the (dubious in a variety of ways) Jewish bona fides of Ethiopian immigrants who are much more likely to sympathize with the Orthodox view of matters such as separation of religion and state.
It would be easy enough of the rabbinate to be lenient with potential “Russian” converts. After all, the “Russian” immigrants will all be fulfilling the great mitzvah (commandment) of living in the land of Israel, they have thrown in their lot with the Jewish people, and, simply by virtue of living in Israel, they will be more observant of Jewish law than most Jews in the rest of the world, eating mainly or solely kosher food, observing Jewish holidays, not working on Shabbat, etc.
Besides, the whole matrilineal descent standard is (and here I’m going to offend some of our observant Jewish readers) a crock that should be abolished. While the Orthodox like to pretend that all of Jewish law was given to Moses at Sinai, it’s obvious that matrilineal descent is a relatively recent innovation, as a quick reading of the Bible makes it clear that the norm in biblical times amongst the children of Israel was a patrilineal descent standard. Why the change occurred is not 100% clear, but is likely a result of the traumas of exile, when many Jewish women were raped, and a patrilineal descent rule would have been a disaster. To the extent the “we always know who the mother is” rule could still carry weight, modern DNA testing allows us to know who the father is, too. There is no reason to keep the matrilineal descent rule except that it’s existed for almost 2,000 years; given that the patrilineal descent rule existed for almost as long, why not just call it a tossup and allow either matrilineal or patrilineal descent, combined with a demonstrated practical link to the Jewish people, to determine Jewishness? (The Reform and Reconstructionist movements in the U.S. have already done this; the Conservative movement hasn’t, for fear of losing its “halachic” (Jewish law) bona fides. But if the Conservatives can’t bring themselves to abolish a rule as tenuous and dumb as matrilineal descent, than the movement is basically useless as a modern, liberal halachic movement anyway).
UPDATE: This is the kind of email that drives me crazy: “laws like this
about whose mother’s, mother’s, mother was a real jew and israel still wonders why europe compares israel to south african apartheid sounds so very much like half-coloured, quarter-coloured, one-eighth coloured
rhetoric to me.” Response: (1) While the ethnocentrism noted above is a legitimate problem, and Jewish identity can be heriditary (but can also be based on religious conversion), it is not a racial, or even narrowly ethnic, concept; Jews come from all racial groups, and anyone can become a Jew. Judaism is, however, a religion of tribal origin, and thus, especially in its Orthodox manifestations, not in line with modern liberal sensibilities. It hardly follows that Israeli rules based on religious tradition are “racist,” though, as obvious from my post above, they should hardly be immune from criticism. (2) Relatedly, in Jewish religious tradition, and in Israeli law, there is no such thing as a “half-Jew”, “quarter-Jew,” etc., because the concept is not a racial one. One is either considered to be a Jew for religious purposes, or one is not. Because Judaism is not a universalistic religion, and only imposes its obligations on “Members of the Tribe,” there needs to be a way to distinguish members from non-members, a concept foreign to Christians and Moslems (edit: Islam has the worst of both worlds from a liberal perspective: “tribal” patrilineal descent and an imperialistic belief that all people should be Moslems). This makes Judaism less liberal in one sense, but more liberal in another–with the exception of the much reviled late-Hasmonean period, its leaders during periods of independence were immune to the concept of wars of conquest for purposes of forcing the heathens to follow the One True Faith. As for Israel, it needs some way to distinguish Jews form non-Jews, to be able to serve its (secular) purpose as a place of haven and refuge for the world’s Jews, without being overwhelmed by millions of Third World immigrants (and, indeed, the citizenship laws, based on this secular purpose, are far more liberal in this regard than the religion-based rules of who gets to be registered as a Jew). The problem with Israel’s rules regarding who is a Jew for internal purposes is not that they are racist, but that they allow the entrenched Orthodox minority to dictate the resolution of the issue to everyone else, and that Orthodox political power means that the issue matters for who gets to marry, etc.; (3) I think Germany reformed its laws very recently, but until it did so, a person of German “racial” origin whose ancestors had not lived in Germany for generations and who spoke no German was entitled to German citizenship, while grandchldren of Turks residing in Germany for decades were not (and I believe the former half of the above is still true). And Germany had no religious tradition to fall back on, nor a 2,000 year old history of persecution of Germans requiring a safe haven (though there was post-WWII persecution). In Ireland, I believe, grandchildren (or is it great-grandchildren?) of Irish emigrants are automatically entitled to claim Irish citizenship, with even less cause for such rules than have the Germans. Would my correspondent please point me to all the articles comparing Germany and Ireland to South Africa because of their “racist” immigration and naturalization policies? Only Israel comes in for such criticism regarding its immigration and naturalization policies, and the reason, my dear correspondent, is that you and others have absorbed European anti-Semitic traditions.
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