Posted By admin on February 27, 2023
Members of the Russian diaspora join global protests marking the first anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine Global Voices
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Posted By admin on February 25, 2023
On a Thursday in October, a Times reporter attending a district school board meeting watched as both men voted to spend about $5 million in federal stimulus money to replace the heating and cooling system at an early childhood education centerowned by the U.T.A.-affiliated company, which Mr. Kepecs and Mr. Polatsek co-founded. Both men still sit on its board, records show.
After The Times inquired about the board members ties to the education center, Mr. Kepecs and Mr. Polatsek publicly disclosed their roles at the nonprofit, acknowledging a potential conflict of interest and pledging to abstain from future votes related to leases or contracts with the organization. In January, they recused themselves from a new vote related to the heating and cooling repairs.
The district has also been generous with employee salaries and benefits. Among the workers on its payroll is Aron Polatsek, the board presidents son, who earns $178,000 a year as a teacher aide/E.M.T., records show. Mr. Petlin said the salary was justified because Aron Polatsek performs additional duties as a parent liaison and had worked at the district for more than 20 years.
The school system has also awarded a $4.6 million contract to a village bus company, Focus in Chinuch, managed by another son of Mr. Polatsek, Joel. That company, in turn, has donated about $300,000 a year to the U.T.A. over a recent four-year period to promote religious education, tax documents show.
Records show Mr. Polatsek abstained from the vote on the bus contract renewal in 2020. A representative of the bus company said Joel Polatsek worked as an operations manager at the firm and had no independent decision-making authority.
Mr. Petlin, the superintendent, said any questions about board members relatives were misguided.
Our leases and contracts are based upon our needs for space and for the services that we are mandated to provide, Mr. Petlin said. Hiring and promotions at the Kiryas Joel School District are based upon merit, not by someones last name.
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How Public Money Goes to Support a Hasidic Villages Private Schools ...
Posted By admin on February 25, 2023
Their former leader, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, emigrated from Eastern Europe after escaping a concentration camp and settled in Williamsburg. Satmar leaders believed that the United States represented a kingdom of grace, said David N. Myers, a history professor at UCLA and co-author of a book about Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic community in New Yorks Hudson Valley.
Leaders sought benefits housing and other subsidies and quickly realized that they needed to understand how to navigate the political system, concluding that that this was the American way and they needed to do so in order to preserve their communities, Mr. Myers said.
The Hasidic community began to carefully build relationships with elected officials, starting in the 1950s, when Rabbi Teitelbaum found common ground with Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr.
A pivotal moment came in 1991 when the Crown Heights riots shook the city.
The violence and chaos was almost unimaginable. Overnight, Brooklyn streets had turned into combat zones, pitting groups of Hasidic Jews against mostly Black men some holding longstanding grudges over what they saw as the Hasidic community receiving preferential treatment from the police and the city. Racial and antisemitic epithets filled the air alongside hurled rocks and bottles.
A police-led motorcade of the Lubavitcher grand rebbe had fatally struck a Black child, and in the melees that followed, a visiting Australian Hasidic scholar was stabbed to death. Hasidic leaders in Brooklyn pleaded with city officials for more police intervention and protection, but the help did not come until days later.
Two years later, those wounds were still raw enough to galvanize Hasidic voters who rallied around Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Republican mayoral candidate. Mr. Giuliani played on the widely held perception that his opponent, Mayor David N. Dinkins, had not acted quickly enough to quell the violence, which Mr. Giuliani characterized as a pogrom.
The community voted as a unified bloc, developing a political voice and muscle that it had not demonstrated before, recalled Dov Hikind, a longtime Democratic state assemblyman from the Orthodox community.
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How the Hasidic Jewish Community Became a Political Force in New York
Posted By admin on February 25, 2023
Religious and gay: When coming out means going up against your homophobic rabbi father Haaretz
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Religious and gay: When coming out means going up against your homophobic rabbi father - Haaretz
Posted By admin on February 25, 2023
The demographic profile of Jewish Americans is distinctive in several ways. Compared with the overall public, the Jewish population is older, has relatively high levels of educational attainment and is geographically concentrated in the Northeast.
Jewish adults ages 40 to 59 also have slightly fewer children, on average, compared with the general public. However, Orthodox Jews have much higher fertility rates and live in larger households than non-Orthodox Jews.
The remainder of this chapter provides further detail on the demographic characteristics (including fertility rates and household sizes) of Jewish Americans. It also looks at the self-described sexual orientation of U.S. Jews.
In the 2020 survey, Jewish adults ages 40 to 59 report having had an average of 1.9 children, the same as in the 2013 survey and slightly below the comparable figure for the general U.S. public, which is 2.3 children per adult in the same age cohort. While some adults in this age range may continue to bear children, this statistic is a rough measure of the completed fertility of this cohort.
However, to increase the reliability of comparisons across subgroups of Jews, this study also uses information from all adults in the survey. This includes young adults in their prime childbearing years (who may give birth to additional children in the future) as well as older adults (who may already have had all the children they intend to bear).
Based on reports from adults of all ages, the survey finds that, on average, Jews by religion have more children than Jews of no religion (1.7 vs. 1.0), and Jews with spouses who are also Jewish have more offspring than religiously intermarried Jews (2.3 vs. 1.5).
The survey also indicates that fertility among Orthodox Jews is at least twice as high as among non-Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jewish adults report having an average of 3.3 children, while non-Orthodox Jews have an average of 1.4 children. Orthodox Jews also are five years younger, on average, when they give birth to their first child (23.6 vs. 28.6 among non-Orthodox Jews).
Fertility differences between Jews and the general public are driven in part by the greater share of Jewish women who have never had children. Among women ages 40 to 59, Jews are twice as likely to have no children (20% vs. 10%).
The average U.S. Jew lives in a household of 2.7 people, including 2.1 adults and 0.6 children. Overall, the average size of Jewish households has not changed much since the 2013 survey.
Orthodox Jews tend to live in much larger households than Jews who identify with other branches or streams of American Judaism. The average Orthodox household in the survey contains 2.0 children, compared with 0.3 children per household among Conservative Jews and 0.5 children per household among Reform Jews.
As of 2020, about one-third of Jewish adults who live with at least one other adult (who could be, but is not necessarily, a spouse or partner) have children living in the household. It is much less common for Jews who are the sole adult in their household to have children living with them.
The survey finds that, on average, Jewish adults are older than the U.S. public as a whole. But a closer look reveals that this is true only for Jews by religion. Jews of no religion, on average, are younger than U.S. adults overall.
Among adults, the median age in the Jewish population is 49 slightly older than the median age of adults in the general public (46). Jews by religion (adult median age of 54) are similar in age to U.S. Protestants (53), and Jews of no religion (median age of 38) are similar in age to religiously unaffiliated people in the broader U.S. population (39).
Looked at another way, roughly half of Jewish adults are ages 50 and older (49%), compared with 45% of adults in the general public. Among Jews by religion, 56% are 50 and older, compared with just 32% of Jews of no religion.
Orthodox Jews (median age of 35 among adults) are substantially younger than Conservative Jews (62) and Reform Jews (53).
U.S. Jewish adults are, on the whole, a comparatively well-educated group. Nearly six-in-ten are college graduates, including 28% who have obtained a postgraduate degree. By comparison, among U.S. adults overall, about three-in-ten are college graduates, including 11% who have a postgraduate degree. Both Jews by religion and Jews of no religion have much higher levels of educational attainment, on average, than does the public overall.
About two-thirds of Reform Jews (64%) say they are college graduates, as do 57% of Jews with no denominational affiliation and 55% of Conservative Jews. Fewer Orthodox Jews (37%) report having college degrees.
The survey finds that 4% of U.S. Jews identify as gay or lesbian, and an additional 5% say they are bisexual. About nine-in-ten U.S. Jews (88%) say they are straight. Compared with Jews by religion, somewhat fewer Jews of no religion say they think of themselves as straight (81% vs. 91%). Instead, Jews of no religion are more likely than Jews by religion to say they are bisexual (10% vs. 3%).
Older Jews are more likely than younger Jews to say they are straight. Fully 96% of Jewish adults ages 65 and older say they are straight, as do 93% of those between the ages of 50 and 64. Fewer Jewish adults in their 30s and 40s (85%) and under 30 (75%) identify as straight.
The percentage of Jewish adults who identify as straight (88%) is similar to the share of the overall U.S. public that identifies that way (89%). And the share of Jewish adults under 30 who describe themselves as straight is on par with the share of U.S. adults under the age of 30 who say the same (78%).
This question asked about U.S. Jews sexual orientation; it did not measure transgender identity.
About four-in-ten Jewish adults (38%) live in the Northeast roughly double the share of U.S. adults overall who live in that census region (18%). A quarter of Jewish Americans reside in the West (25%), and a similar share live in the South (27%). Just one-in-ten Jewish adults live in the Midwest.
Compared with Jews by religion, Jews of no religion are somewhat more evenly distributed across the Northeast, South and West.
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Posted By admin on February 25, 2023
From dust to human: A new Hallmark rom-com puts a twist on the Jewish golem legend The Times of Israel
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Posted By admin on February 25, 2023
Continued here:
Posted By admin on February 25, 2023
The term Jew originated from the Roman "Judean" and denoted someone from the southern kingdom of Judah.[103] The shift of ethnonym from "Israelites" to "Jews" (inhabitant of Judah), although not contained in the Torah, is made explicit in the Book of Esther (4th century BCE),[104] a book in the Ketuvim, the third section of the Jewish Tanakh. In 587 BCE Nebuchadnezzar II, King of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, besieged Jerusalem, destroyed the First Temple and deported the most prominent citizens of Judah.[105]
According to the Book of Ezra, the Persian Cyrus the Great ended the Babylonian exile in 538 BCE,[106] the year after he captured Babylon.[107] The exile ended with the return under Zerubbabel the Prince (so-called because he was a descendant of the royal line of David) and Joshua the Priest (a descendant of the line of the former High Priests of the Temple) and their construction of the Second Temple in the period 521516 BCE.[106] The Cyrus Cylinder, an ancient tablet on which is written a declaration in the name of Cyrus referring to restoration of temples and repatriation of exiled peoples, has often been taken as corroboration of the authenticity of the biblical decrees attributed to Cyrus,[108] but other scholars point out that the cylinder's text is specific to Babylon and Mesopotamia and makes no mention of Judah or Jerusalem.[108] Professor Lester L. Grabbe asserted that the "alleged decree of Cyrus" regarding Judah, "cannot be considered authentic", but that there was a "general policy of allowing deportees to return and to re-establish cult sites". He also stated that archaeology suggests that the return was a "trickle" taking place over decades, rather than a single event.[109] By the 4th century BCE, the majority of Jews lived outside the land of Israel.[110]
As part of the Persian Empire, the former Kingdom of Judah became the province of Judah (Yehud Medinata)[111] with different borders, covering a smaller territory.[109] The population of the province was greatly reduced from that of the kingdom, archaeological surveys showing a population of around 30,000 people in the 5th to 4th centuries BCE.[97]:308 The region was under control of the Achaemenids until the fall of their empire in c. 333 BCE to Alexander the Great. Jews were also politically independent during the Hasmonean dynasty spanning from 110 to 63 BCE and to some degree under the Herodian dynasty from 37 BCE to 6 CE.[112]
Genetic studies on Jews show that most Jews worldwide bear a common genetic heritage which originates in the Middle East, and that they share certain genetic traits with other Gentile peoples of the Fertile Crescent.[113][114][115] The genetic composition of different Jewish groups shows that Jews share a common gene pool dating back four millennia, as a marker of their common ancestral origin.[116] Despite their long-term separation, Jewish communities maintained their unique commonalities, propensities, and sensibilities in culture, tradition, and language.[117]
After the destruction of the Second Temple, Judaism lost much of its sectarian nature.[118]:69
Without a Temple, Greek-speaking Jews no longer looked to Jerusalem in the way they had before. Judaism separated into a linguistically Greek and a Hebrew / Aramaic sphere.[119]:811 The theology and religious texts of each community were distinctively different.[119]:1113 Hellenized Judaism never developed yeshivas to study the Oral Law. Rabbinic Judaism (centered in the Land of Israel and Babylon) almost entirely ignores the Hellenized Diaspora in its writings.[119]:1314 Hellenized Judaism eventually disappeared as its practitioners assimilated into Greco-Roman culture, leaving a strong Rabbinic eastern Diaspora with large centers of learning in Babylon.[119]:1416
By the first century, the Jewish community in Babylonia, to which Jews were exiled after the Babylonian conquest as well as after the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, already held a speedily growing[120] population of an estimated one million Jews, which increased to an estimated two million[121] between the years 200 CE and 500 CE, both by natural growth and by immigration of more Jews from the Land of Israel, making up about one-sixth of the world Jewish population at that era.[121] The 13th-century author Bar Hebraeus gave a figure of 6,944,000 Jews in the Roman world; Salo Wittmayer Baron considered the figure convincing.[122] The figure of seven million within and one million outside the Roman world in the mid-first century became widely accepted, including by Louis Feldman.
However, contemporary scholars now accept that Bar Hebraeus based his figure on a census of total Roman citizens, the figure of 6,944,000 being recorded in Eusebius' Chronicon.[123][124] Louis Feldman, previously an active supporter of the figure, now states that he and Baron were mistaken.[125]:185 Feldman's views on active Jewish missionizing have also changed. While viewing classical Judaism as being receptive to converts, especially from the second century BCE through the first century CE, he points to a lack of either missionizing tracts or records of the names of rabbis who sought converts as evidence for the lack of active Jewish missionizing.[125]:20506 Feldman maintains that conversion to Judaism was common and the Jewish population was large both within the Land of Israel and in the Diaspora.[125]:183203,206 Other historians believe that conversion during the Roman era was limited in number and did not account for much of the Jewish population growth, due to various factors such as the illegality of male conversion to Judaism in the Roman world from the mid-second century. Another factor that made conversion difficult in the Roman world was the halakhic requirement of circumcision, a requirement that proselytizing Christianity quickly dropped. The Fiscus Judaicus, a tax imposed on Jews in 70 CE and relaxed to exclude Christians in 96 CE, also limited Judaism's appeal.[126]
Israel
+ 1,000,000
+ 100,000
+ 10,000
+ 1,000
Following the Roman conquest of Judea and the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, hundreds of thousands of Jews were taken as slaves to Rome, where they later immigrated to other European lands. The Jews who immigrated to Iberia and North Africa comprise the Sephardic Jews, while those who immigrated to the Rhineland and France comprise the Ashkenazi Jews. Additionally both before and after the Roman conquest of Judea many Jews lived in Persia and Babylon as well as other Middle eastern countries, these Jews comprise the Mizrachi Jews.[127] In Francia, Jews like Isaac Judaeus and Armentarius occupied prominent social and economic positions, as opposed to in Spain, where Jews were persecuted under Visigoth rule. In Babylon, from the 7th to 11th centuries the Pumbedita and Sura academies lead the Arab and to an extant the entire Jewish world. The deans and students of said academies defined the Geonic period in Jewish history.[128] Following this period were the Rishonim who lived from the 11th to 15th centuries, it was during this time that the Ashkenazi Jews began experiencing extreme persecution in France and especially the Rhineland, which resulted in mass immigration to Poland and Lithuania. Meanwhile, Sephardic Jews experienced a golden age under Muslim rule, however following the Reconquista and subsequent Alhambra decree in 1492, most of the Spanish Jewish population immigrated to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. However some Jews chose to remain and pretended to practice Catholicism. These Jews would form the members of Crypto-Judaism.[129]
The Jewish people and the religion of Judaism are strongly interrelated. Converts to Judaism typically have a status within the Jewish ethnos equal to those born into it.[130] However, several converts to Judaism, as well as ex-Jews, have claimed that converts are treated as second-class Jews by many born Jews.[131]Conversion is not encouraged by mainstream Judaism, and it is considered a difficult task. A significant portion of conversions are undertaken by children of mixed marriages, or would-be or current spouses of Jews.[132]
The Hebrew Bible, a religious interpretation of the traditions and early history of the Jews, established the first of the Abrahamic religions, which are now practiced by 54percent of the world. Judaism guides its adherents in both practice and belief, and has been called not only a religion, but also a "way of life,"[133] which has made drawing a clear distinction between Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish identity rather difficult. Throughout history, in eras and places as diverse as the ancient Hellenic world,[134] in Europe before and after The Age of Enlightenment (see Haskalah),[135] in Islamic Spain and Portugal,[136] in North Africa and the Middle East,[136] India,[137] China,[138] or the contemporary United States[139] and Israel,[140] cultural phenomena have developed that are in some sense characteristically Jewish without being at all specifically religious. Some factors in this come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews or specific communities of Jews with their surroundings, and still others from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community, as opposed to from the religion itself. This phenomenon has led to considerably different Jewish cultures unique to their own communities.[141]
Hebrew is the liturgical language of Judaism (termed lashon ha-kodesh, "the holy tongue"), the language in which most of the Hebrew scriptures (Tanakh) were composed, and the daily speech of the Jewish people for centuries. By the 5th century BCE, Aramaic, a closely related tongue, joined Hebrew as the spoken language in Judea.[142] By the 3rd century BCE, some Jews of the diaspora were speaking Greek.[143] Others, such as in the Jewish communities of Asoristan, known to Jews as Babylonia, were speaking Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages of the Babylonian Talmud. Dialects of these same languages were also used by the Jews of Syria Palaestina at that time.[citation needed]
For centuries, Jews worldwide have spoken the local or dominant languages of the regions they migrated to, often developing distinctive dialectal forms or branches that became independent languages. Yiddish is the Judaeo-German language developed by Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to Central Europe. Ladino is the Judaeo-Spanish language developed by Sephardic Jews who migrated to the Iberian peninsula. Due to many factors, including the impact of the Holocaust on European Jewry, the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries, and widespread emigration from other Jewish communities around the world, ancient and distinct Jewish languages of several communities, including Judaeo-Georgian, Judaeo-Arabic, Judaeo-Berber, Krymchak, Judaeo-Malayalam and many others, have largely fallen out of use.[2]
For over sixteen centuries Hebrew was used almost exclusively as a liturgical language, and as the language in which most books had been written on Judaism, with a few speaking only Hebrew on the Sabbath.[144] Hebrew was revived as a spoken language by Eliezer ben Yehuda, who arrived in Palestine in 1881. It had not been used as a mother tongue since Tannaic times.[142] Modern Hebrew is designated as the "State language" of Israel.[145]
Despite efforts to revive Hebrew as the national language of the Jewish people, knowledge of the language is not commonly possessed by Jews worldwide and English has emerged as the lingua franca of the Jewish diaspora.[146][147][148][149][150] Although many Jews once had sufficient knowledge of Hebrew to study the classic literature, and Jewish languages like Yiddish and Ladino were commonly used as recently as the early 20th century, most Jews lack such knowledge today and English has by and large superseded most Jewish vernaculars.The three most commonly spoken languages among Jews today are Hebrew, English, and Russian. Some Romance languages, particularly French and Spanish, are also widely used.[2] Yiddish has been spoken by more Jews in history than any other language,[151] but it is far less used today following the Holocaust and the adoption of Modern Hebrew by the Zionist movement and the State of Israel.In some places, the mother language of the Jewish community differs from that of the general population or the dominant group. For example, in Quebec, the Ashkenazic majority has adopted English, while the Sephardic minority uses French as its primary language.[152][153][154] Similarly, South African Jews adopted English rather than Afrikaans.[155] Due to both Czarist and Soviet policies,[156][157] Russian has superseded Yiddish as the language of Russian Jews, but these policies have also affected neighboring communities.[158] Today, Russian is the first language for many Jewish communities in a number of Post-Soviet states, such as Ukraine[159][160][161][162] and Uzbekistan,[163][bettersourceneeded] as well as for Ashkenazic Jews in Azerbaijan,[164][165] Georgia,[166] and Tajikistan.[167][168] Although communities in North Africa today are small and dwindling, Jews there had shifted from a multilingual group to a monolingual one (or nearly so), speaking French in Algeria,[169] Morocco,[164] and the city of Tunis,[170][171] while most North Africans continue to use Arabic or Berber as their mother tongue.[citation needed]
There is no single governing body for the Jewish community, nor a single authority with responsibility for religious doctrine.[172] Instead, a variety of secular and religious institutions at the local, national, and international levels lead various parts of the Jewish community on a variety of issues.[173] Today, many countries have a Chief Rabbi who serves as a representative of that country's Jewry. Although many Hassidic Jews follow a certain hereditary Hasidic dynasty, there is no one commonly accepted leader of all Hasidic Jews. Many Jews believe that the Messiah will act a unifying leader for Jews and the entire world.[174]
A number of modern scholars of nationalism support the existence of Jewish national identity in antiquity. One of them is David Goodblatt,[175] who generally believes in the existence of nationalism before the modern period. In his view, the Bible, the parabiblical literature and the Jewish national history provide the base for a Jewish collective identity. Although many of the ancient Jews were illiterate (as were their neighbors), their national narrative was reinforced through public readings, a common practice in the ancient eastern Mediterranean area. The Hebrew language also constructed and preserved national identity. Although it was not spoken by most of the Jews after the 5th century BCE, Goodblatt contends that:[176][177]
the mere presence of the language in spoken or written form could invoke the concept of a Jewish national identity. Even if one knew no Hebrew or was illiterate, one could recognize that a group of signs was in Hebrew script. It was the language of the Israelite ancestors, the national literature, and the national religion. As such it was inseparable from the national identity. Indeed its mere presence in visual or aural medium could invoke that identity.
It is believed that Jewish nationalist sentiment in antiquity was encouraged because under foreign rule (Persians, Greeks, Romans) Jews were able to claim that they were an ancient nation. This claim was based on the preservation and reverence of their scriptures, the Hebrew language, the Temple and priesthood, and other traditions of their ancestors.[178]
Within the world's Jewish population there are distinct ethnic divisions, most of which are primarily the result of geographic branching from an originating Israelite population, and subsequent independent evolutions. An array of Jewish communities was established by Jewish settlers in various places around the Old World, often at great distances from one another, resulting in effective and often long-term isolation. During the millennia of the Jewish diaspora the communities would develop under the influence of their local environments: political, cultural, natural, and populational. Today, manifestations of these differences among the Jews can be observed in Jewish cultural expressions of each community, including Jewish linguistic diversity, culinary preferences, liturgical practices, religious interpretations, as well as degrees and sources of genetic admixture.[179]
Jews are often identified as belonging to one of two major groups: the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim. Ashkenazim, or "Germanics" (Ashkenaz meaning "Germany" in Hebrew), are so named denoting their German Jewish cultural and geographical origins, while Sephardim, or "Hispanics" (Sefarad meaning "Spain/Hispania" or "Iberia" in Hebrew), are so named denoting their Spanish/Portuguese Jewish cultural and geographic origins. The more common term in Israel for many of those broadly called Sephardim, is Mizrahim (lit. "Easterners", Mizrach being "East" in Hebrew), that is, in reference to the diverse collection of Middle Eastern and North African Jews who are often, as a group, referred to collectively as Sephardim (together with Sephardim proper) for liturgical reasons, although Mizrahi Jewish groups and Sephardi Jews proper are ethnically distinct.[180]
Smaller groups include, but are not restricted to, Indian Jews such as the Bene Israel, Bnei Menashe, Cochin Jews, and Bene Ephraim; the Romaniotes of Greece; the Italian Jews ("Italkim" or "Ben Roma"); the Teimanim from Yemen; various African Jews, including most numerously the Beta Israel of Ethiopia; and Chinese Jews, most notably the Kaifeng Jews, as well as various other distinct but now almost extinct communities.[181]
The divisions between all these groups are approximate and their boundaries are not always clear. The Mizrahim for example, are a heterogeneous collection of North African, Central Asian, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern Jewish communities that are no closer related to each other than they are to any of the earlier mentioned Jewish groups. In modern usage, however, the Mizrahim are sometimes termed Sephardi due to similar styles of liturgy, despite independent development from Sephardim proper. Thus, among Mizrahim there are Egyptian Jews, Iraqi Jews, Lebanese Jews, Kurdish Jews, Moroccan Jews, Libyan Jews, Syrian Jews, Bukharian Jews, Mountain Jews, Georgian Jews, Iranian Jews, Afghan Jews, and various others. The Teimanim from Yemen are sometimes included, although their style of liturgy is unique and they differ in respect to the admixture found among them to that found in Mizrahim. In addition, there is a differentiation made between Sephardi migrants who established themselves in the Middle East and North Africa after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s and the pre-existing Jewish communities in those regions.[181]
Ashkenazi Jews represent the bulk of modern Jewry, with at least 70percent of Jews worldwide (and up to 90percent prior to World War II and the Holocaust). As a result of their emigration from Europe, Ashkenazim also represent the overwhelming majority of Jews in the New World continents, in countries such as the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and Brazil. In France, the immigration of Jews from Algeria (Sephardim) has led them to outnumber the Ashkenazim.[181] Only in Israel is the Jewish population representative of all groups, a melting pot independent of each group's proportion within the overall world Jewish population.[182]
Y DNA studies tend to imply a small number of founders in an old population whose members parted and followed different migration paths.[183] In most Jewish populations, these male line ancestors appear to have been mainly Middle Eastern. For example, Ashkenazi Jews share more common paternal lineages with other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than with non-Jewish populations in areas where Jews lived in Eastern Europe, Germany, and the French Rhine Valley. This is consistent with Jewish traditions in placing most Jewish paternal origins in the region of the Middle East.[184][185]
Conversely, the maternal lineages of Jewish populations, studied by looking at mitochondrial DNA, are generally more heterogeneous.[186] Scholars such as Harry Ostrer and Raphael Falk believe this indicates that many Jewish males found new mates from European and other communities in the places where they migrated in the diaspora after fleeing ancient Israel.[187] In contrast, Behar has found evidence that about 40percent of Ashkenazi Jews originate maternally from just four female founders, who were of Middle Eastern origin. The populations of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish communities "showed no evidence for a narrow founder effect."[186] Subsequent studies carried out by Feder et al. confirmed the large portion of non-local maternal origin among Ashkenazi Jews. Reflecting on their findings related to the maternal origin of Ashkenazi Jews, the authors conclude "Clearly, the differences between Jews and non-Jews are far larger than those observed among the Jewish communities. Hence, differences between the Jewish communities can be overlooked when non-Jews are included in the comparisons."[9][188][189] A study showed that 7% of Ashkenazi Jews have the haplogroup G2c, which is mainly found in Pashtuns and on lower scales all major Jewish groups, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese.[190][191]
Studies of autosomal DNA, which look at the entire DNA mixture, have become increasingly important as the technology develops. They show that Jewish populations have tended to form relatively closely related groups in independent communities, with most in a community sharing significant ancestry in common.[192] For Jewish populations of the diaspora, the genetic composition of Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi Jewish populations show a predominant amount of shared Middle Eastern ancestry. According to Behar, the most parsimonious explanation for this shared Middle Eastern ancestry is that it is "consistent with the historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelite residents of the Levant" and "the dispersion of the people of ancient Israel throughout the Old World".[193] North African, Italian and others of Iberian origin show variable frequencies of admixture with non-Jewish historical host populations among the maternal lines. In the case of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews (in particular Moroccan Jews), who are closely related, the source of non-Jewish admixture is mainly Southern European, while Mizrahi Jews show evidence of admixture with other Middle Eastern populations. Behar et al. have remarked on a close relationship between Ashkenazi Jews and modern Italians.[193][194] A 2001 study found that Jews were more closely related to groups of the Fertile Crescent (Kurds, Turks, and Armenians) than to their Arab neighbors, whose genetic signature was found in geographic patterns reflective of Islamic conquests.[184][195]
The studies also show that Sephardic Bnei Anusim (descendants of the "anusim" who were forced to convert to Catholicism), which comprise up to 19.8percent of the population of today's Iberia (Spain and Portugal) and at least 10percent of the population of Ibero-America (Hispanic America and Brazil), have Sephardic Jewish ancestry within the last few centuries. The Bene Israel and Cochin Jews of India, Beta Israel of Ethiopia, and a portion of the Lemba people of Southern Africa, despite more closely resembling the local populations of their native countries, have also been thought to have some more remote ancient Jewish ancestry.[196][193][197][189] Views on the Lemba have changed and genetic Y-DNA analyses in the 2000s have established a partially Middle-Eastern origin for a portion of the male Lemba population but have been unable to narrow this down further.[198][199]
Although historically, Jews have been found all over the world, in the decades since World War II and the establishment of Israel, they have increasingly concentrated in a small number of countries.[200][201] In 2013, the United States and Israel were collectively home to more than 80percent of the global Jewish population, each country having approximately 41percent of the world's Jews.[202]
According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics there were 13,421,000 Jews worldwide in 2009, roughly 0.19percent of the world's population at the time.[203]
According to the 2007 estimates of The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, the world's Jewish population is 13.2million.[204] Adherents.com cites figures ranging from 12 to 18million.[205] These statistics incorporate both practicing Jews affiliated with synagogues and the Jewish community, and approximately 4.5million unaffiliated and secular Jews.[citation needed]
According to Sergio Della Pergola, a demographer of the Jewish population, in 2015 there were about 6.3 million Jews in Israel, 5.7 million in the United States, and 2.3 million in the rest of the world.[206]
Israel, the Jewish nation-state, is the only country in which Jews make up a majority of the citizens.[207] Israel was established as an independent democratic and Jewish state on 14 May 1948.[208] Of the 120 members in its parliament, the Knesset,[209] as of 2016[update], 14 members of the Knesset are Arab citizens of Israel (not including the Druze), most representing Arab political parties. One of Israel's Supreme Court judges is also an Arab citizen of Israel.[210]
Between 1948 and 1958, the Jewish population rose from 800,000 to two million.[211] Currently, Jews account for 75.4percent of the Israeli population, or 6million people.[212][213] The early years of the State of Israel were marked by the mass immigration of Holocaust survivors in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Jews fleeing Arab lands.[214] Israel also has a large population of Ethiopian Jews, many of whom were airlifted to Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s.[215][bettersourceneeded] Between 1974 and 1979 nearly 227,258 immigrants arrived in Israel, about half being from the Soviet Union.[216] This period also saw an increase in immigration to Israel from Western Europe, Latin America, and North America.[217]
A trickle of immigrants from other communities has also arrived, including Indian Jews and others, as well as some descendants of Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors who had settled in countries such as the United States, Argentina, Australia, Chile, and South Africa. Some Jews have emigrated from Israel elsewhere, because of economic problems or disillusionment with political conditions and the continuing ArabIsraeli conflict. Jewish Israeli emigrants are known as yordim.[218]
The waves of immigration to the United States and elsewhere at the turn of the 19th century, the founding of Zionism and later events, including pogroms in Imperial Russia (mostly within the Pale of Settlement in present-day Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus and eastern Poland), the massacre of European Jewry during the Holocaust, and the founding of the state of Israel, with the subsequent Jewish exodus from Arab lands, all resulted in substantial shifts in the population centers of world Jewry by the end of the 20th century.[221]
More than half of the Jews live in the Diaspora (see Population table). Currently, the largest Jewish community outside Israel, and either the largest or second-largest Jewish community in the world, is located in the United States, with 5.2million to 6.4million Jews by various estimates. Elsewhere in the Americas, there are also large Jewish populations in Canada (315,000), Argentina (180,000300,000), and Brazil (196,000600,000), and smaller populations in Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, Colombia and several other countries (see History of the Jews in Latin America).[222] According to a 2010 Pew Research Center study, about 470,000 people of Jewish heritage live in Latin-America and the Caribbean.[223] Demographers disagree on whether the United States has a larger Jewish population than Israel, with many maintaining that Israel surpassed the United States in Jewish population during the 2000s, while others maintain that the United States still has the largest Jewish population in the world. Currently, a major national Jewish population survey is planned to ascertain whether or not Israel has overtaken the United States in Jewish population.[224]
Western Europe's largest Jewish community, and the third-largest Jewish community in the world, can be found in France, home to between 483,000 and 500,000 Jews, the majority of whom are immigrants or refugees from North African countries such as Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia (or their descendants).[225] The United Kingdom has a Jewish community of 292,000. In Eastern Europe, the exact figures are difficult to establish. The number of Jews in Russia varies widely according to whether a source uses census data (which requires a person to choose a single nationality among choices that include "Russian" and "Jewish") or eligibility for immigration to Israel (which requires that a person have one or more Jewish grandparents). According to the latter criteria, the heads of the Russian Jewish community assert that up to 1.5 million Russians are eligible for aliyah.[226][227] In Germany, the 102,000 Jews registered with the Jewish community are a slowly declining population,[228] despite the immigration of tens of thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union since the fall of the Berlin Wall.[229] Thousands of Israelis also live in Germany, either permanently or temporarily, for economic reasons.[230]
Prior to 1948, approximately 800,000 Jews were living in lands which now make up the Arab world (excluding Israel). Of these, just under two-thirds lived in the French-controlled Maghreb region, 15 to 20percent in the Kingdom of Iraq, approximately 10percent in the Kingdom of Egypt and approximately 7percent in the Kingdom of Yemen. A further 200,000 lived in Pahlavi Iran and the Republic of Turkey. Today, around 26,000 Jews live in Arab countries[231] and around 30,000 in Iran and Turkey. A small-scale exodus had begun in many countries in the early decades of the 20th century, although the only substantial aliyah came from Yemen and Syria.[232] The exodus from Arab and Muslim countries took place primarily from 1948. The first large-scale exoduses took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily in Iraq, Yemen and Libya, with up to 90percent of these communities leaving within a few years. The peak of the exodus from Egypt occurred in 1956. The exodus in the Maghreb countries peaked in the 1960s. Lebanon was the only Arab country to see a temporary increase in its Jewish population during this period, due to an influx of refugees from other Arab countries, although by the mid-1970s the Jewish community of Lebanon had also dwindled. In the aftermath of the exodus wave from Arab states, an additional migration of Iranian Jews peaked in the 1980s when around 80percent of Iranian Jews left the country.[citation needed]
Outside Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and the rest of Asia, there are significant Jewish populations in Australia (112,500) and South Africa (70,000).[31] There is also a 6,800-strong community in New Zealand.[233]
Since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, a proportion of Jews have assimilated into the wider non-Jewish society around them, by either choice or force, ceasing to practice Judaism and losing their Jewish identity.[234] Assimilation took place in all areas, and during all time periods,[234] with some Jewish communities, for example the Kaifeng Jews of China, disappearing entirely.[235] The advent of the Jewish Enlightenment of the 18th century (see Haskalah) and the subsequent emancipation of the Jewish populations of Europe and America in the 19th century, accelerated the situation, encouraging Jews to increasingly participate in, and become part of, secular society. The result has been a growing trend of assimilation, as Jews marry non-Jewish spouses and stop participating in the Jewish community.[236]
Rates of interreligious marriage vary widely: In the United States, it is just under 50percent,[237] in the United Kingdom, around 53percent; in France; around 30percent,[238] and in Australia and Mexico, as low as 10percent.[239] In the United States, only about a third of children from intermarriages affiliate with Jewish religious practice.[240] The result is that most countries in the Diaspora have steady or slightly declining religiously Jewish populations as Jews continue to assimilate into the countries in which they live.[citation needed]
The Jewish people and Judaism have experienced various persecutions throughout Jewish history. During Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages the Roman Empire (in its later phases known as the Byzantine Empire) repeatedly repressed the Jewish population, first by ejecting them from their homelands during the pagan Roman era and later by officially establishing them as second-class citizens during the Christian Roman era.[241][242]
According to James Carroll, "Jews accounted for 10% of the total population of the Roman Empire. By that ratio, if other factors had not intervened, there would be 200million Jews in the world today, instead of something like 13million."[243]
Later in medieval Western Europe, further persecutions of Jews by Christians occurred, notably during the Crusadeswhen Jews all over Germany were massacredand a series of expulsions from the Kingdom of England, Germany, France, and, in the largest expulsion of all, Spain and Portugal after the Reconquista (the Catholic Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula), where both unbaptized Sephardic Jews and the ruling Muslim Moors were expelled.[244][245]
In the Papal States, which existed until 1870, Jews were required to live only in specified neighborhoods called ghettos.[246]
Islam and Judaism have a complex relationship. Traditionally Jews and Christians living in Muslim lands, known as dhimmis, were allowed to practice their religions and administer their internal affairs, but they were subject to certain conditions.[247] They had to pay the jizya (a per capita tax imposed on free adult non-Muslim males) to the Islamic state.[247] Dhimmis had an inferior status under Islamic rule. They had several social and legal disabilities such as prohibitions against bearing arms or giving testimony in courts in cases involving Muslims.[248] Many of the disabilities were highly symbolic. The one described by Bernard Lewis as "most degrading"[249] was the requirement of distinctive clothing, not found in the Quran or hadith but invented in early medieval Baghdad; its enforcement was highly erratic.[249] On the other hand, Jews rarely faced martyrdom or exile, or forced compulsion to change their religion, and they were mostly free in their choice of residence and profession.[250]
Notable exceptions include the massacre of Jews and forcible conversion of some Jews by the rulers of the Almohad dynasty in Al-Andalus in the 12th century,[251] as well as in Islamic Persia,[252] and the forced confinement of Moroccan Jews to walled quarters known as mellahs beginning from the 15th century and especially in the early 19th century.[253] In modern times, it has become commonplace for standard antisemitic themes to be conflated with anti-Zionist publications and pronouncements of Islamic movements such as Hezbollah and Hamas, in the pronouncements of various agencies of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and even in the newspapers and other publications of Turkish Refah Partisi."[254][bettersourceneeded]
Throughout history, many rulers, empires and nations have oppressed their Jewish populations or sought to eliminate them entirely. Methods employed ranged from expulsion to outright genocide; within nations, often the threat of these extreme methods was sufficient to silence dissent. The history of antisemitism includes the First Crusade which resulted in the massacre of Jews;[244] the Spanish Inquisition (led by Toms de Torquemada) and the Portuguese Inquisition, with their persecution and autos-da-f against the New Christians and Marrano Jews;[255] the Bohdan Chmielnicki Cossack massacres in Ukraine;[256] the Pogroms backed by the Russian Tsars;[257] as well as expulsions from Spain, Portugal, England, France, Germany, and other countries in which the Jews had settled.[245] According to a 2008 study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, 19.8percent of the modern Iberian population has Sephardic Jewish ancestry,[258] indicating that the number of conversos may have been much higher than originally thought.[259][260]
The persecution reached a peak in Nazi Germany's Final Solution, which led to the Holocaust and the slaughter of approximately 6million Jews.[261] Of the world's 16million Jews in 1939, almost 40% were murdered in the Holocaust.[262] The Holocaustthe state-led systematic persecution and genocide of European Jews (and certain communities of North African Jews in European controlled North Africa) and other minority groups of Europe during World War II by Germany and its collaboratorsremains the most notable modern-day persecution of Jews.[263] The persecution and genocide were accomplished in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II.[264] Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labour until they died of exhaustion or disease.[265] Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in Eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings.[266] Jews and Roma were crammed into ghettos before being transported hundreds of kilometres by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were murdered in gas chambers.[267] Virtually every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal nation."[268]
Throughout Jewish history, Jews have repeatedly been directly or indirectly expelled from both their original homeland, the Land of Israel, and many of the areas in which they have settled. This experience as refugees has shaped Jewish identity and religious practice in many ways, and is thus a major element of Jewish history.[269] The patriarch Abraham is described as a migrant to the land of Canaan from Ur of the Chaldees[270] after an attempt on his life by King Nimrod.[271] His descendants, the Children of Israel, in the Biblical story (whose historicity is uncertain) undertook the Exodus (meaning "departure" or "exit" in Greek) from ancient Egypt, as recorded in the Book of Exodus.[272]
Centuries later, Assyrian policy was to deport and displace conquered peoples, and it is estimated some 4,500,000 among captive populations suffered this dislocation over three centuries of Assyrian rule.[273] With regard to Israel, Tiglath-Pileser III claims he deported 80% of the population of Lower Galilee, some 13,520 people.[274] Some 27,000 Israelites, 20 to 25% of the population of the Kingdom of Israel, were described as being deported by Sargon II, and were replaced by other deported populations and sent into permanent exile by Assyria, initially to the Upper Mesopotamian provinces of the Assyrian Empire.[275][276] Between 10,000 and 80,000 people from the Kingdom of Judah were similarly exiled by Babylonia,[273] but these people were then returned to Judea by Cyrus the Great of the Persian Achaemenid Empire.[277]
Many Jews were exiled again by the Roman Empire.[278] The 2,000 year dispersion of the Jewish diaspora beginning under the Roman Empire,[citation needed] as Jews were spread throughout the Roman world and, driven from land to land,[citation needed] settled wherever they could live freely enough to practice their religion. Over the course of the diaspora the center of Jewish life moved from Babylonia[279] to the Iberian Peninsula[280] to Poland[281] to the United States[282] and, as a result of Zionism, back to Israel.[283]
There were also many expulsions of Jews during the Middle Ages and Enlightenment in Europe, including: 1290, 16,000 Jews were expelled from England, see the (Statute of Jewry); in 1396, 100,000 from France; in 1421,thousands were expelled from Austria. Many of these Jews settled in East-Central Europe, especially Poland.[284] Following the Spanish Inquisition in 1492, the Spanish population of around 200,000 Sephardic Jews were expelled by the Spanish crown and Catholic church, followed by expulsions in 1493 in Sicily (37,000 Jews) and Portugal in 1496. The expelled Jews fled mainly to the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, and North Africa, others migrating to Southern Europe and the Middle East.[285]
During the 19th century, France's policies of equal citizenship regardless of religion led to the immigration of Jews (especially from Eastern and Central Europe).[286] This contributed to the arrival of millions of Jews in the New World. Over two million Eastern European Jews arrived in the United States from 1880 to 1925.[287]
In summary, the pogroms in Eastern Europe,[257] the rise of modern antisemitism,[288] the Holocaust,[289] as well as the rise of Arab nationalism,[290] all served to fuel the movements and migrations of huge segments of Jewry from land to land and continent to continent until they arrived back in large numbers at their original historical homeland in Israel.[283]
In the latest phase of migrations, the Islamic Revolution of Iran caused many Iranian Jews to flee Iran. Most found refuge in the US (particularly Los Angeles, California, and Long Island, New York) and Israel. Smaller communities of Persian Jews exist in Canada and Western Europe.[291] Similarly, when the Soviet Union collapsed, many of the Jews in the affected territory (who had been refuseniks) were suddenly allowed to leave. This produced a wave of migration to Israel in the early 1990s.[218]
Israel is the only country with a Jewish population that is consistently growing through natural population growth, although the Jewish populations of other countries, in Europe and North America, have recently increased through immigration. In the Diaspora, in almost every country the Jewish population in general is either declining or steady, but Orthodox and Haredi Jewish communities, whose members often shun birth control for religious reasons, have experienced rapid population growth.[292]
Orthodox and Conservative Judaism discourage proselytism to non-Jews, but many Jewish groups have tried to reach out to the assimilated Jewish communities of the Diaspora in order for them to reconnect to their Jewish roots. Additionally, while in principle Reform Judaism favors seeking new members for the faith, this position has not translated into active proselytism, instead taking the form of an effort to reach out to non-Jewish spouses of intermarried couples.[293]
There is also a trend of Orthodox movements reaching out to secular Jews in order to give them a stronger Jewish identity so there is less chance of intermarriage. As a result of the efforts by these and other Jewish groups over the past 25 years, there has been a trend (known as the Baal teshuva movement) for secular Jews to become more religiously observant, though the demographic implications of the trend are unknown.[294] Additionally, there is also a growing rate of conversion to Jews by Choice of gentiles who make the decision to head in the direction of becoming Jews.[295]
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Posted By admin on February 25, 2023
" " redirects here. For the 1930s catchphrase, see Who's Yehoodi?
"Who is a Jew?" (Hebrew: pronounced[mi(h)u je(h)udi]) is a basic question about Jewish identity and considerations of Jewish self-identification. The question pertains to ideas about Jewish personhood, which have cultural, ethnic, religious, political, genealogical, and personal dimensions. Orthodox Judaism and Conservative Judaism follow Jewish law (Halakha), deeming people to be Jewish if their mothers are Jewish or if they underwent a halakhic conversion. Reform Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism accept both matrilineal and patrilineal descent as well as conversion. Karaite Judaism predominantly follows patrilineal descent as well as conversion.
Jewish identity is also commonly defined through ethnicity. Opinion polls have suggested that the majority of Jews see being Jewish as predominantly a matter of ancestry and culture, rather than religion.[1][2]
The term "Jew" lends itself to several definitions beyond simply denoting one who practices Judaism. The historical Israelites and/or Hebrews, who promulgated Judaism, were not simply a homogeneous assemblage united by a common ideology, that being the Jewish religion; they constituted an ethnoreligious group from whom a majority of modern Jews directly descend,[3][4][5][6][7] and therefore an ethnic form of Jewish identity exists alongside the religious form of Jewish identity. As such, the concepts of Jewish ethnicity, nationhood, and religion are strongly interrelated,[8][9] however, through conversion, it is possible for one who has no historical connection to the historical Jewish population to become a Jew, in that sense.
In essence, the word "Jew" can be defined as a conglomerate of several different, albeit closely related, ideas:
The definition of who is a Jew varies according to whether it is being considered by Jews on the basis of religious law and tradition or self-identification, or by non-Jews for other reasons, sometimes for prejudicial purposes. Because Jewish identity can include characteristics of an ethnicity,[12] a religion,[13] or peoplehood, the definition depends on either traditional or newer interpretations of Jewish law and custom.[14]
Israel's Law of Return stipulates that a Jew is someone with a Jewish mother or someone who has converted to Judaism and is not a member of another religion.[15] The Israeli Chief Rabbinate requires documents proving the Jewishness of ones mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother when applying for marriage.[16] The Office of the Chief Rabbi (OCR) has underlined the basic principle that a child is not recognised by the OCR and other bodies as Jewish unless their mother is Jewish, or they underwent a conversion recognized by the body.[17]
According to the simplest definition used by most Jews for self-identification, a person is a Jew by birth or becomes one through religious conversion. However, there are differences in interpretations when it comes to non-Orthodox Jewish denominations in the application of this definition, including
According to the Mishnah, the first written source for halakha, the status of the offspring of mixed marriages was determined matrilineally.
According to historian Shaye J. D. Cohen, in the Bible, the status of the offspring of mixed marriages was determined patrilineally. He brings two likely explanations for the change in Mishnaic times: first, the Mishnah may have been applying the same logic to mixed marriages as it had applied to other mixtures (kilayim). Thus, a mixed marriage is forbidden as is the union of a horse and a donkey, and in both unions the offspring are judged matrilineally. Second, the Tannaim may have been influenced by Roman law, which dictated that when a parent could not contract a legal marriage, offspring would follow the mother.[18]
All Jewish religious movements agree that a person may be a Jew either by birth or through conversion. According to halakha, a Jew by birth must be born to a Jewish mother. Halakha states that the acceptance of the principles and practices of Judaism does not make a person a Jew. However, those born Jewish do not lose that status because they cease to be observant Jews, even if they adopt the practices of another religion.
Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, as movements which reject the concept of halakha, often accept a child as Jewish when only the father is Jewish, provided that the child chooses to identify as Jewish.[19] As conversion processes differ, those performed by more liberal denominations are not accepted by more orthodox denominations.[19]
According to halakha, to determine a person's Jewish status (Hebrew: yuhasin) one needs to consider the status of both parents. If both parents are Jewish, their child will also be considered Jewish, and the child takes the status of the father (e.g., as a kohen). If either parent is subject to a genealogical disability (e.g., is a mamzer) then the child is also subject to that disability. If one of the parents is not Jewish, the rule is that the child takes the status of the mother (Kiddushin 68b, Shulchan Aruch, EH 4:19).[20] The ruling is derived from various sources including Deuteronomy 7:15, Leviticus 24:10, Ezra 10:23.[20] Accordingly, if the mother is Jewish, so is her child, and if she is not Jewish, neither is her child considered Jewish. In Orthodox Judaism the child of a non-Jewish mother can be considered Jewish only by a process of conversion to Judaism.[21] The child is also freed from any disabilities and special status to which the father may have been subject (e.g., being a mamzer or kohen) under Jewish law.[22]
The Orthodox and Conservative branches of Judaism maintain that the halakhic rules (i.e. matrilineal descent) are valid and binding. Reform and Liberal Judaism do not accept the halakhic rules as binding, and most branches accept a child of one Jewish parent, whether father or mother, as Jewish if the parents raise the child as a Jew and foster a Jewish identity in the child, noting that "in the Bible the line always followed the father, including the cases of Joseph and Moses, who married into non-Israelite priestly families."[23] (However, according to the oral tradition of Orthodox Judaism, the spouses of both Joseph and Moses converted to Judaism prior to marrying them.)[non-primary source needed][citation needed] The Reform movement's standard states that "for those beyond childhood claiming Jewish identity, other public acts or declarations may be added or substituted after consultation with their rabbi".[24] Advocates of patrilineal descent point to Genesis 48:1520 and Deuteronomy 10:15.[25] This policy is commonly known as patrilineal descent, though "bilineal" would be more accurate.
In 1983, the Reform Central Conference of American Rabbis passed the Resolution on Patrilineal Descent, declaring that "the child of one Jewish parent is under the presumption of Jewish descent. This presumption of the status of the offspring of any mixed marriage is to be established through appropriate and timely public and formal acts of identification with the Jewish faith and people... Depending on circumstances, mitzvot leading toward a positive and exclusive Jewish identity will include entry into the covenant, acquisition of a Hebrew name, Torah study, Bar/Bat Mitzvah, and Kabbalat Torah (Confirmation). For those beyond childhood claiming Jewish identity, other public acts or declarations may be added or substituted after consultation with their rabbi."[26]
Rabbi Mark Washofsky summarizes the 1983 CCAR resolution and subsequent interpretations in Reform responsa literature as follows:
Waiving the need for formal conversion for anyone with at least one Jewish parent who has made affirmative acts of Jewish identity was a departure from the traditional position requiring formal conversion to Judaism for children without a Jewish mother.[28]
The CCAR's 1983 resolution has had a mixed reception in Reform Jewish communities outside the United States. Most notably, the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism has rejected patrilineal descent and requires formal conversion for anyone not born of a Jewish mother.[29]
Karaite Judaism believes that Jewish identity can only be transmitted by patrilineal descent, on the grounds that all descent in the Torah went according to the male line, basing this idea "on the fact that, in the Bible, tribes are given male names and that biblical characters are always referenced by their fathers' names.[30] However, a minority of modern Karaites believe that Jewish identity requires that both parents be Jewish, and not only the father.[31]
The divergence of views has become an issue because Orthodox and Conservative communities do not recognize a person as Jewish if only their father is Jewish.[19] For the person to be accepted as Jewish by an Orthodox or Conservative community (for example, on an occasion of their bar or bat mitzvah or marriage), they require a formal conversion (in accordance with halakhic standards). Orthodox Judaism has a predominant position in Israel. Although Orthodox and Conservative Judaism do not recognize Jewishness through patrilineal descent, "it should also be noted, however, that in the case of a child born to a Jewish father but to a non-Jewish mother, most Orthodox rabbis will relax the stringent demands normally made of would-be converts",[32] and the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement "agreed that 'sincere Jews by choice' should be warmly welcomed into the community".
All mainstream forms of Judaism today are open to sincere converts, with most subgroups having a specific process for accepting converts. Not all conversions are recognised by all varieties of Judaism.[33]
In Rabbinic Judaism, the laws of conversion are based on the classical sources of Jewish law, especially discussions in the Talmud, and the law as codified in the Shulkhan Arukh.[34] This corpus of traditional Jewish law (halakha) is regarded as authoritative by the Orthodox[35] and Conservative movements.[36] The traditional halakhic requirements for conversion are instruction in the commandments, circumcision (if male), and immersion in an acceptable body of water before valid witnesses, and acceptance of the commandments before a rabbinical court. If a male is already circumcised, a drop of blood is drawn from the penis.[37]
Orthodox authorities require that conversions be performed in accord with traditional Jewish law and recognise only those conversions in which a convert accepts and undertakes to observe Jewish law as interpreted by Orthodox rabbis. Because rabbis in the other movements do not require that converts make this commitment, Orthodox authorities do not generally accept as valid conversions performed outside the Orthodox community.[38]
Conservative authorities likewise require that conversions be conducted according to traditional Jewish law. Conducting a conversion absent the traditional requirements of immersion in a ritual bath and circumcision for males is a violation of a Standard of the Rabbinical Assembly and grounds for expulsion.[39] Conservative authorities generally recognize any conversion done in accord with the requirements of Jewish law, even if done outside the Conservative movement. Accordingly, Conservative rabbis may accept the validity of some conversions from other non-Orthodox movements.[40][41]
The Union for Reform Judaism states that "people considering conversion are expected to study Jewish theology, rituals, history, culture and customs, and to begin incorporating Jewish practices into their lives. The length and format of the course of study will vary from rabbi to rabbi and community to community, though most now require a course in basic Judaism and individual study with a rabbi, as well as attendance at services and participation in home practice and synagogue life."[42] Its Central Conference of American Rabbis recommends that three rabbis be present for the conversion ceremony.[43] The Rabbinical Court of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism requires an average of a year of study to become conversant in Jewish life and tradition. Following this, converts are required to immerse in a ritual bath, be circumcised if male, and accept the commandments before the rabbinical court.[44]
Although an infant conversion might be accepted in some circumstances (such as in the case of adopted children or children whose parents convert), children who convert would typically be asked if they want to remain Jewish after reaching religious adulthood which is 12 years of age for a girl and 13 for a boy, as required by Jewish law.[45][46]
Karaite Judaism does not accept the oral legal traditions of Rabbinic Judaism. It has different requirements for conversion and refrained from accepting any converts until recently.[30] Traditionally non-proselytizing, on August 1, 2007, the Karaites reportedly converted their first new members in 500 years. At a ceremony in their Northern California synagogue, ten adults and four minors swore fealty to Judaism after completing a year of study. This conversion came 15 years after the Karaite Council of Sages reversed its centuries-old ban on accepting converts.[47]
Syrian Jewish communities do not normally carry out conversions, particularly where the conversion is suspected of being for the sake of marriage. Nor do they accept such converts from other communities, or the children of mixed marriages or marriages involving such converts.[48]
In general, Orthodox Judaism considers individuals born of Jewish mothers to be Jewish, even if they convert to or are raised in another religion. Reform Judaism views Jews who convert to or are raised in another religion as non-Jews. For example "... anyone who claims that Jesus is their savior is no longer a Jew..." [Contemporary American Reform Responsa, #68].[49][50][51]
Historically, a Jew who has been declared to be a heretic (Hebrew: , romanized:min) or Christian (Hebrew: , romanized:notzri, meaning "Nazarene") may have had a cherem (similar to excommunication) placed on him or her; but the practice of communal and religious exclusion does not affect their status of Jewish birth.[52] Judaism also views as Jewish those who involuntarily convert from Judaism to another religion (Hebrew: anusim, , meaning "forced ones"), and their matrilineal descendants are likewise considered to be Jewish.
Judaism has a category for those who are Jewish but who do not practice or who do not accept the tenets of Judaism, whether or not they have converted to another religion. The traditional view regarding these individuals, known as Meshumadim (Hebrew: ), is that they are Jewish; however, there is much debate in the rabbinic literature regarding their status vis-a-vis the application of Jewish law and their participation in Jewish ritual,[52] but not to their status as Jews.
A Jew who leaves Judaism is free to return to the religion at any time. In general, no formal ceremony or declaration is required to return to Jewish practices. All movements of Judaism welcome the return to Judaism of those who have left, or been raised in another religion. When returning to Judaism, these individuals would be expected to abandon their previous practices and adopt Jewish customs.
The same rules in principle apply to the matrilineal descendants of such persons, though some rabbinical authorities may require stricter proof of Jewish descent than others. Whether such persons are required to undergo a full formal conversion depends on the community and their individual circumstances. For example, a male who has had a brit milah, who has a general understanding of Judaism, but who has been raised in a secular home might not be required to undergo ritual conversion. However, a male who has not had a brit milah, a male or female who has converted to or been brought up in another religion, or an individual raised in a completely secular home without any Jewish education, in most communities, may be required to undergo a full ritual conversion. For full participation in the community (for example, to marry with the participation of a rabbi), they may be required to display sincerity, such as a declaration of commitment to Judaism.[53]
Another example of the issues involved is the case of converts to Judaism who cease to practice Judaism (whether or not they still regard themselves as Jewish), do not accept or follow halakha, or now adhere to another religion. Technically, such a person remains Jewish, like all Jews, provided that the original conversion is valid. However, in some recent cases, Haredi rabbinical authorities, as well as the current Religious Zionist Israeli Chief Rabbinate, have taken the view that a given convert's lapse from Orthodox Jewish observance is evidence that he or she cannot, even at the time of the conversion, have had the full intention to observe the commandments and that the conversion must therefore have been invalid.
A valid Jewish court of sufficient stature has the ability to revoke a person's or a group's status as Jews. This was done for the lost Ten Tribes of Israel[54] and the Samaritans.[55]
According to the traditional Rabbinic view, which is maintained by all branches of Orthodox Judaism and Conservative Judaism, and some branches of Reform Judaism,[56] only halakha can define who is or is not a Jew when a question of Jewish identity, lineage, or parentage arises about any person seeking to define themselves or claim that they are Jewish.
As a result, mere belief in the principles of Judaism does not make one a Jew. Similarly, non-adherence by a Jew to the 613 Mitzvot, or even formal conversion to another religion, does not make one lose one's Jewish status. Thus, the immediate descendants of all female Jews (even apostates) are still considered to be Jews, as are those of all their female descendants. Even those descendants who are not aware they are Jews or practice a religion other than Judaism, are defined by this perspective as Jews, as long as they come from an unbroken female line of descent. As a corollary, the children of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother are not considered to be Jews by Halakha unless they formally convert according to Halakha, even if raised fully observant in the Mitzvot.[57][58]
Those not born to a Jewish mother may become accepted as Jews by the Orthodox and Conservative communities through a formal process of conversion to Judaism in order to become "righteous converts" (Gerei TzedekHebrew: ). In addition, Halakha requires that the new convert commit himself to the observance of its tenets; this is called Kabbalat Ol Mitzvot (Hebrew: ), "Acceptance of the Yoke of the Commandments". Kabbalat mitzvot (Hebrew: ) is used by Reform Judaism in accordance with reform responsa and Halakhah.[59][clarification needed]
Both Haredi Judaism and Modern Orthodox Judaism accept a similar set of rules regarding Jewish status based on classical rabbinic Judaism, including both matrilineal descent and requirements that conversions be performed by Orthodox rabbis and that converts promise to strictly observe elements of traditional Judaism such as Shabbat and Niddah. However, their application of these rules have been different, and the difference has been increasing in recent years. Modern Orthodox authorities have been more inclined to rule in favor of Jewish status and to accept non-Orthodox Jews' word in doubtful cases involving people claiming to be Jews, while Haredi authorities have in recent years tended to presume non-Jewish status and require more stringent rules and standards of evidence in order for Jewish status to be proven, and have tended to distrust the evidence of Jews who are not personally Orthodox. Haredi rabbis have tended to look at a convert's current personal observance and to regard deficiencies or lack of Orthodoxy in current observance as evidence that the convert never intended to validly convert. In addition, the contemporary situation is further complicated by the fact that some Haredi rabbis no longer regard some Modern Orthodox rabbis as reliable.[60][61][62]
Karaite Judaism relies on the Tanakh to indicate that Jewishness is passed down through the paternal line, not the maternal line as is maintained by Orthodox Judaism (though a minority holds that both parents need to be Jewish). Karaite Jews are eligible for Aliyah under the Law of Return. The eligibility of converts to Judaism through the Karaite movement to make Aliyah under the Law of Return has not yet been addressed in Israeli courts.[63]
Several verses in the Bible mentioning about laws of family inheritance depending on the paternal lineage of the tribe:[64]
So shall not the inheritance of the children of Israel remove from tribe to tribe: for every one of the children of Israel shall keep himself to the inheritance of the tribe of his fathers. And every daughter, that possesseth an inheritance in any tribe of the children of Israel, shall be wife unto one of the family of the tribe of her father, that the children of Israel may enjoy every man the inheritance of his fathers.
Reform Judaism recognizes a child as being Jewish if either parent is Jewish and the child is being raised Jewish. Voices within the Reform movement say that the law, which changed to matriarchal around 2,000 years ago (originally in the Torah the offspring was determined by patriarchal descent) and was based on the tragic circumstances the Jewish people were facing, was once helpful but is no longer relevant.
Modern Progressive Jewish denominations have a conversion process based on their principles. In the US, an official Reform resolution in 1893 abolished circumcision as a requirement for converts,[65] and Reform does not require converts to have tevilah, ritual immersion. A "prospective convert declares, orally and in writing, in the presence of a rabbi and no less than two lay leaders of the congregation and community, acceptance of the Jewish religion and the intention to live in accordance with its mitzvot".[66]
The controversy in determining "who is a Jew" concerns four basic issues:
One issue arises because North American Reform and UK Liberal movements have changed some of the halakhic requirements for Jewish identity in two ways:
Secondly, Orthodox Judaism asserts that non-Orthodox rabbis are not qualified to form a beit din.[62] This has led to non-Orthodox conversions generally being unaccepted in Orthodox communities. Since Orthodox Judaism maintains the traditional standards for conversion in which the commitment to observe halakha is required non-Orthodox conversions are generally not accepted in Orthodox communities because the non-Orthodox movements perform conversions in which the new convert does not undertake to observe halakha as understood by Orthodox Judaism.
A third controversy concerns persons (whether born Jews or converts to Judaism) who have converted to another religion. The traditional view is such persons remain Jewish.[67][68] Reform Judaism regards such people as apostates,[69][70] and states regarding Messianic Jews: "'Messianic Jews' claim that they are Jews, but we must asked [sic] ourselves whether we identify them as Jews. We can not do so as they consider Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah who has fulfilled the Messianic promises. In this way, they have clearly placed themselves within Christianity. They may be somewhat different from other Christians as they follow various Jewish rites and ceremonials, but that does not make them Jews."[71] Regardless, such people do not count as Jewish for the purposes of the Israeli citizenship laws.
A fourth controversy stems from the manner in which the Chief Rabbinate of Israel has been handling marriage and conversion decisions in recent years. Conversions and marriages within Israel are legally controlled by the Orthodox Israeli Chief Rabbinate; therefore, a person not proven to be a Jew to the Rabbinate's satisfaction is not legally permitted to marry a Jew in Israel today. Although the Rabbinate has always refused to accept non-Orthodox conversions, until recent years it was more willing to accept the Jewish parentage of applicants based on personal testimony, and the validity of conversions based on the testimony of Orthodox Rabbis. However, in recent years the rabbinate, whose rabbis historically had a more Modern Orthodox orientation, has increasingly been filled by the more stringent Haredi camp. It has increasingly been inclined to presume that applicants are not Jewish until proven otherwise, and require more stringent standards of proof than in the past. It has implemented a policy of refusing to accept the testimony of non-Orthodox Jews in matters of Jewish status, on grounds that such testimony is not reliable. It also has been increasingly skeptical of the reliability of Orthodox rabbis ordained by institutions not subject to its accreditation, particularly in matters of conversion. Accordingly, non-Orthodox Jews born to Jewish parents, and some Jews converted by Orthodox rabbis, have been increasingly unable to prove their Jewishness to the Rabbinate's satisfaction, because they are unable to find an Orthodox rabbi who is both acceptable to the Rabbinate, and familiar with and willing to vouch for the Jewishness of their maternal lineage or the validity of their conversion.[60][61][62]
There have been several attempts to convene representatives of the three major movements to formulate a practical solution to this issue. To date, these have failed, though all parties concede the importance of the issue is greater than any sense of rivalry among them.
Ethnic Jew is a term generally used to describe a person of Jewish parentage and background who does not necessarily actively practice Judaism, but still identifies with Judaism or other Jews culturally or fraternally, or both. The term ethnic Jew does not specifically exclude practicing Jews, but they are usually simply referred to as "Jews" without the qualifying adjective "ethnic".[a]
The term can refer to people of diverse beliefs and backgrounds because genealogy largely defines who is "Jewish". "Ethnic Jew" is sometimes used to distinguish non-practicing from practicing (religious) Jews. Other terms include non-observant Jew, non-religious Jew, non-practicing Jew, and secular Jew.
The term may also refer to Jews who do not practice the religion of Judaism. Typically, ethnic Jews are cognizant of their Jewish background and may feel strong cultural (even if not religious) ties to Jewish traditions and to the Jewish people or nation. Like people of any other ethnicity, non-religious ethnic Jews often assimilate into a surrounding non-Jewish culture, but, especially in areas where there is a strong local Jewish culture, they may remain largely part of that culture instead.
"Ethnic Jews" include atheists, agnostics, non-denominational deists, Jews with only casual connections to Jewish denominations or converts to other religions, such as Christianity, Buddhism, or Islam. Religious Jews of all denominations sometimes engage in outreach to non-religious Jews. In the case of some Hasidic denominations (e.g. Chabad-Lubavitch), this outreach extends to actively proselytizing more secular Jews.[72][73][74][75]
The 2013 Pew Research study of American Jews found that 62% thought that being Jewish was mainly a matter of ancestry and culture, while 15% thought that it was mainly a matter of religion. Of those who stated themselves to be Jews by religion, 55% thought that being Jewish was mainly a matter of ancestry and culture, while two-thirds thought that it was not necessary to believe in God to be Jewish.[76]
During the Middle Ages there was no need to ask the question "who is a Jew?", because the difference between the Jewish and the non-Jewish community was clear to both sides.[77][78] For example, a person born to a Jewish family was Jewish, marriages between Jews and non-Jews were not allowed, and the only way to leave the Jewish identity was through not only leaving the religion, but also cutting all ties to the Jewish community, including family and friends. To Medieval Jews the most essential difference between them and others was not about faith but about the peoplehood, to which their religious community was tied into, and they called themselves "Israel".[77]
As the emancipation for Jews in Europe became relevant,[77] the ideology of nationalism started rising[79] and in parts of the Western Europe religion became more clearly separated from ethnicity,[78] the question of what kind of a group the Jews were, religious, cultural, racial, national or something else, became discussed more. Due to emancipation, Jews were expected to assimilate into European nations. Religious difference was tolerated better than ethnic,[80] and Jews were now sometimes defined just as a religious group, e.g. Jews in Germany were defined as Germans who practice "Mosaic faith".[79][80] Jews themselves were usually not happy with this definition.[80] Yet, as seeking for equal civil rights and to prove that Jews can be a part of Western civilizations as well, some Central European Jews started highlighting their identity more as a religious group, with some rejecting ethnic definitions of Jewishness completely and some consciously getting rid of their "oriental" habits.[81] Many Jews however, especially in Eastern Europe, criticized Western Jews for losing their Jewishness.[82] Still, simultaneously, the concept of "Semitic race", which included the Jews, was coined. This also lead to pseudoscientific ideas of Jews being racially inferior to "Aryans".[83] Later the Holocaust caused some more Jews to avoid attaching ethnic or racial elements to being Jewish.[84][85] In the former Soviet Union, "Jewish" was a nationality by law, as with other nationalities such as Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians and others,[86] and Soviet Jews themselves had a strong sense of ethnic Jewishness ("Yiddishkeit") which would have separated them from surrounding ethnic groups.[87] There were certain restrictions on their civil liberties in the early years of the Soviet Union.[86]
The modern genealogical DNA test of ethnicity is a non-religious definition of 'who is a Jew?' as increasing numbers of persons discover their biological and cultural origins outside the traditional religious setting.[88] There has been controversy about the use of DNA tests in Israeli rabbinical courts as a test of Jewishness.[89][90]
In the United States and Europe, because of intermarriage, the population of "half-Jews" is beginning to rival that of Jews with two Jewish parents. Self-identified "half-Jews" consider the term a familial category, which reflects multiple heritages and possible Jewish cultural or spiritual practices.[91][92] Other similar terms that have been used include: "part-Jewish" and "partial-Jews". The term "Gershom", "Gershomi" or "Beta Gershom" has also been seldom used as an alternative to "half-Jewish" and "part-Jewish" in connection with descendants of intermarriage, Gershom being the biblical son of Moses and his Midianite wife Zipporah.[93] The term typically has no religious meaning, as terms like Jewish Christian do, but rather describes ethnic Jewry.
The Society for Humanistic Judaism defines a Jew as "someone who identifies with the history, culture and fate of the Jewish people". In their view it is, therefore, possible for a non-religious individual to adopt Judaism and join a Humanistic Jewish community, and for the Society for Humanistic Judaism to adopt the person wanting to be part of the Humanistic Jewish family.[94] As Israeli author Amos Oz puts it, "a Jew is anyone who chooses or is compelled to share a common fate with other Jews."[95] Oz summed up his position more succinctly in a monologue published in Tikkun, saying "Who is a Jew? Everyone who is mad enough to call himself or herself a Jew is a Jew."[96]. From a similar perspective it is possible for a person born and raised as a Jew to leave Judaism and no longer be a Jew: famous historical examples are Heinrich Heine, Benjamin Disraeli, Gustav Mahler, Georg Brandes.
Israeli constitutional documents have not defined "who is a Jew" although the decision whether someone is Jewish or not has important legal, social and financial ramifications. This lack of definition has given rise to legal controversy in Israel and there have been many court cases in Israel that have addressed the question.[97][98]
As of 2010[update], anyone who immigrated to Israel after 1990 and wishes to marry or divorce via the Jewish tradition within the state limits must go through a "Judaism test"[99] at an Orthodox Rabbinical court. In this test, a person would need to prove their claim to be Jewish to an investigator beyond a reasonable doubt. They would need to present original documentation of their matriline up to their great-grandmother (4 generations),[100] or in the case of Ethiopian Jews, 7 generations back.[101] In addition, they should provide government documents with nationality/religion shown as Jewish (e.g., birth/death certificates, marriage documents, etc.).
In the case of people whose original documents have been lost or never existed, it may take considerable effort to prove they are Jewish.[102]The court rulings are not final, and any clerk has the power to question them[103] even 20 years later, changing one's citizenship status to "on hold", and putting them in jeopardy of deportation.[104]
The two biggest communities affected by these documentation issues are:
Following the birth of the modern State of Israel in 1948, the Law of Return was enacted in 1950 to give any Jew the right to immigrate to Israel and become a citizen.[111] However, due to an inability on the lawmakers to agree, the Law did not define who was a Jew, relying instead on the issue to resolve itself over time. As a result, the Law relied in form on the traditional halakhic definition. But, the absence of a definition of who is a Jew, for the purpose of the Law, has resulted in the divergent views of the various streams of Judaism competing for recognition.
Besides the generally accepted halakhic definition of who is a Jew, in 1970, the Law extended the categories of person who are entitled to immigration and citizenship to the children and grandchildren of Jews, regardless of their present religious affiliation, and their spouses.[112] Also, converts to Judaism whose conversion was performed outside the State of Israel, regardless of who performed it, are entitled to immigration under the Law. Once again, issues arose as to whether a conversion performed outside Israel was valid. The variation of the definition in the Law and the definition used by various branches of Judaism has resulted in practical difficulties for many people.
It has been estimated that in the past twenty years about 200,000 non-Jews and even practicing Christians have entered Israel from the former Soviet Union on the basis of being a child or grandchild of a Jew or by being married to a Jew.[113]
However, there is an exception in the case of a person who has formally converted to another religion. This is derived from the Rufeisen Case in 1962,[97] in which the Supreme Court ruled that such a person, no matter what their halakhic position, is not entitled to immigration under the Law; they concluded that "no one can regard an apostate as belonging to the Jewish people".[114]
Current Israeli definitions specifically exclude Jews who have openly and knowingly converted to or were raised in a faith other than Judaism, including Messianic Judaism. This definition is not the same as that in traditional Jewish law; in some respects it is deliberately wider, so as to include those non-Jewish relatives of Jews who may have been perceived to be Jewish, and thus faced antisemitism.
The Law of Return does not, of itself, define the Jewish status of a person; it only deals with those who have a right to immigration to Israel.
In the early 1950s, the Israeli Chief Rabbinate originally objected to the immigration of Karaite Jews to Israel, and unsuccessfully tried to obstruct it. In 2007 Rabbi David Chayim Chelouche, the chief rabbi of Netanya, was quoted in the Jerusalem Post as saying: "A Karaite is a Jew. We accept them as Jews and every one of them who wishes to come back [to mainstream Judaism] we accept back. There was once a question about whether Karaites needed to undergo a token circumcision in order to switch to rabbinic Judaism, but the rabbinate agrees that today that is not necessary."[115]
In relation to marriage, divorce, and burial, which are under the jurisdiction of the Israeli Interior Ministry, the halakhic definition of who is a Jew is applied. When there is any doubt, the Israeli Chief Rabbinate generally determines the issue.
In terms of social relations, most secular Jews view their Jewish identity as a matter of culture, heritage, nationality, or ethnicity.[116] Ancestral aspects can be explained by the many Jews who view themselves as atheists and are defined by matrilineal descent or a Cohen (Kohen) or Levi, which is connected by ancestry.[117] The question of "who is a Jew" is a question that is under debate.[118] Issues related to ancestral or ethnic Jews are dealt with by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate.[119][120][121][122]
Orthodox halachic rules apply to converts who want to marry in Israel. Under these rules, a conversion to Judaism must strictly follow halachic standards to be recognised as valid. The rabbinate even scrutinizes Orthodox conversions, with some who have converted by orthodox authorities outside Israel not being permitted to marry in Israel.[122][123]
If one's ancestral line of Jewishness is in doubt, then a proper conversion would be required in order to be allowed to marry in the Orthodox community, or in Israel, where such rules govern all marriages.
The Jewish status of a person in Israel is considered a matter of "nationality".
In the registering of "nationality" on Israeli identity cards, which is administered by the Ministry of the Interior, a person had to meet the Halakhic definition to be registered as a "Jew". However, in a number of cases the Supreme Court of Israel has ordered the Ministry of Interior to register Reform and Conservative converts as Jews. The right of people who convert in the Diaspora under Reform or Conservative auspices to immigrate to Israel and claim citizenship as Jews is detailed in Israeli law.[124]
Until recently, Israeli identity cards had an indication of nationality, and the field was left empty for those who immigrated not solely on the basis of being Jewish (i.e. as a child, grandchild or spouse of a Jew only) to indicate that the person may not be a Jew. Many Israeli citizens who are not recognised by the Rabbinate as Jewish have been issued with Israeli identity cards that do not include their Hebrew calendar birth date.
In 2010 the Labour Court of South Africa addressed the question of who is a Jew for the purposes of the Employment Equity Act.[125] The question has also arisen in the United Kingdom, where religious schools are allowed to select all or a proportion of their intake based upon religion. A 2009 ruling, R(E) v Governing Body of JFS, determined that the definition of Jewish religion based upon descent constituted discrimination on ethnic grounds, and therefore contravened racial discrimination laws. Also in the UK, under the Sunday Trading Act 1994 "a person of the Jewish religion" who observes the Jewish Sabbath can open their shops on Sundays. The Act defines "person of the Jewish religion" as someone who holds a certificate that they are Jewish from a Rabbi, synagogue secretary or the representative body of British Jewry, the Board of Deputies.
There have been other attempts to determine Jewish identity beside the traditional Jewish approaches. These range from genetic population studies[b] to controversial evolutionary perspectives including those espoused by Kevin B. MacDonald and Yuri Slezkine. Historians, such as the late Kamal Salibi, have utilized etymology and geography to reconstruct the prehistoric origin of the Jewish people in the Arabian Peninsula.[126]
As with any other ethnic identity, Jewish identity is, to some degree, a matter of either claiming that identity or being perceived by others (both inside and outside the ethnic group) as belonging to that group, or both. Returning again to the example of Madeleine Albrightduring her Catholic childhood, her being in some sense Jewish was presumably irrelevant. It was only after she was nominated to be Secretary of State that she, and the public, discovered her Jewish ancestry.
Ido Abram states that there are five aspects to contemporary Jewish identity:
The relative importance of these factors may vary enormously from place to place. For example, a typical Dutch Jew might describe their Jewish identity simply as "I was born Jewish," while a Jew in Romania, where levels of antisemitism are higher, might say, "I consider any form of denying as a proof of cowardice."[129][clarification needed]
During the time of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, conversion to Roman Catholicism did not result in total termination of the person's Jewish status. Legally, the converts were no longer regarded as Jews and thus allowed to stay in the Iberian Peninsula. During the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, however, many Jews were forced to convert, but thereafter were regarded by many people, though not in a legal form, as New Christians, distinguishing them as separate from the Old Christians of non-Jewish lineage. Since legal, political, religious and social pressure pushed many people to untrue conversions (public behaviour as Christians while retaining some Jewish beliefs and practices privately, a kind of crypto-Judaism),[c] they were still treated with suspicion, a stigma sometimes carried for several generations by their identifiable descendants.The limpieza de sangre ("Cleanliness of blood") required public officials or candidates for membership of many organizations to prove that they did not have Jewish or Muslim ancestry.
Jean-Paul Sartre, who was not Jewish, suggested in Anti-Semite and Jew (1948) that Jewish identity "is neither national nor international, neither religious nor ethnic, nor political: it is a quasi-historical community." While Jews as individuals may be in danger from the antisemite who sees only "Jews" and not "people", Sartre argues that the Jewish experience of antisemitism preserveseven createsthe sense of Jewish community. In his most extreme statement of this view he wrote, "It is the anti-Semite who creates the Jew." Conversely, that sense of specific Jewish community may be threatened by the democrat who sees only "the person" and not "the Jew".
Hannah Arendt repeatedly asserted a principle of claiming Jewish identity in the face of antisemitism. "If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man, or whatever"; "A man attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or a Frenchman. The world can only conclude from this that he is simply not defending himself at all."
Wade Clark Roof (1976), a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, proposed that social sectors in modern life, in which traditional symbols and rituals are meaningful, provide an alternative approach for explaining the social basis of religion in a secular order, in doing so, he turned to the local community as a sphere in modern society that still persists "as a complex system of friendship and kinship networks, formal and informal associations, as well as symbolic attachments, very much rooted in family life and ongoing socialization processes".[130]
The question "who is a Jew?" is also sometimes of importance to non-Jews. Historically, it had exceptional significance when it was considered by anti-Jewish groups for the purpose of targeting Jews for persecution or discrimination. The definition can have an impact on whether a person may have a certain job, live in certain locations, receive a free education, live or continue to live in specific countries, be imprisoned, or executed.
The question was of critical importance during the rule of the Nazi party in Germany, which persecuted the Jews and defined them for the government's purposes by the Nuremberg Laws. In 2009, a United Kingdom court considered whether the question was a racial issue, in the case R(E) v Governing Body of JFS (2009).[131]
The Nazi regime instituted laws which discriminated against Jews, declared a race by the Nazis, and thus needed a working definition of who is a Jew as to its law-defined race system. These definitions almost completely categorised persons through the religions followed by each individual's ancestors, according to membership registries. Thus, personal faith or individual observance, as well as the religious definitions of Judaism as given by the Halacha, were mostly ignored.
In Germany itself, the Ahnenpass and the Nuremberg Laws classified people as being of the Jewish race if they were descended from three or four grandparents enrolled in Jewish congregations. A person with one or two grandparents enrolled in a Jewish congregation could be classified as Mischling,[132] a crossbreed, of "mixed blood", even if they were not a member of a Jewish congregation at the time the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. The Mischling Test was introduced in order to identify Europeans with Jewish blood, and these were classified as "Jews of the first or second degree". Only people with at least two grandparents of "German blood" could be German Reich citizens. Other Germans were dropped into a new second class group of citizens, the so-called "state subjects" (Staatsangehrige).[133]
If a person with grandparents of the same religious combination was enrolled as a member of a Jewish congregation in 1935, or later enrolled, they switched from the discriminatory class of Mischlinge into that of Geltungsjude, "Jew by legal validity" even if they did not meet the criterion of descent from three or four Jewish grandparents. In the eyes of the Nazi government, one could not become a non-Jew by seceding from one's Jewish congregation, becoming non-practicing, marrying outside the religion, or converting to Christianity. Thus any Mischling could move into the class of Geltungsjude by joining a Jewish congregation, but the Nuremberg Laws provided that the classification of any Geltungsjude would not change even she or he tried to evade harm by withdrawing from their Jewish congregation after 1935, considering such secessions as being of no effect. Similarly, after 1935, any Mischling with two Jewish grandparents (colloquially called a half-Jew) who married anybody classified as a Jew would drop into the Geltungsjude class. Mischlinge with one Jewish grandparent were usually forbidden from marrying anybody with any Jewish grandparents.
In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws forbade new marriages between people who were classified as Jews and people who belonged to other classifications.[d] Earlier contracted marriages between spouses of different classifications (so-called mixed marriages; Mischehe) provided the Jewish-classified spouse with uncertain protection from some discriminations and atrocities.
There were very few Karaites in Europe during the Nazi era; most of them lived in Turkey, Greece, and the Crimea. Karaites were not considered Jewish for the purpose of the Holocaust extermination policy;[134] according to SS Obergruppenfhrer Gottlob Berger, writing on November 24, 1944, discrimination against the Karaites had been prohibited due to their proximity to the Crimean Tatars, to whom Berger views the Karaites as being related. Nazis still retained hostility towards the Karaites, on grounds of their religion; and there were a number of small scale massacres of Karaites.
In German-occupied France, an ordinance defined a Jew as an individual who belonged to the Jewish religion or who had more than two Jewish grandparents.[135]
The Vichy rgime in southern France defined a Jew as an individual with three Jewish grandparents or two grandparents if his/her spouse was Jewish. Richard Weisberg points out that this was a potentially broader classification than the one used in Occupied France, for example, a Mischling could not be classified a Jew under the Nazi dictate, by her/his spouse's classification if the marriage was contracted before the imposition of anti-Semitic marriage laws there, but would be deemed one under the Vichy act if he/she had married a Jew, regardless when.[135]
There are various groups besides Jews which have claimed to be descended from the biblical Israelites. The question nowadays arises in relation to Israel's Law of Return, with various groups seeking to migrate there. Some claims have been accepted, some are under consideration, while others have been rejected by Israel's rabbinate.
Some sources say that the earliest Jews of Cochin, India, were those who settled in the Malabar Coast during the times of King Solomon of Israel, and after the Kingdom of Israel split into two. There is historical documentation of the Jews being in Cochin after the fall of the Second Temple, from around the first century CE. Later additions were smaller immigration of Sephardic Jews from Europe in the sixteenth century after the expulsion from Spain, and Baghdadi Jews, Arabic-speaking Jews who arrived in the late eighteenth century, at the beginning of the British colonial era.[136] Following the independence of India and the establishment of Israel, most Cochin Jews emigrated to Israel in the mid-1950s. Some have gone on to North America or Britain.
The Bene Israel in India claim to be descended from Jews who escaped persecution in Galilee in the 2nd century BCE. The Bene Israel resemble the non-Jewish Marathi people in appearance and customs, which indicates some intermarriage between Jews and Indians. The Bene Israel, however, maintained the practices of Jewish dietary laws, male circumcision and observation of the Sabbath as a day of rest. From the late eighteenth century, other Jewish communities instructed them in normative Judaism.
Initially, the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel said that the Bene Israel would have to undergo conversion in order to marry other Jews, as matrilineal descent could not be proven. In 1964 the Israeli Rabbinate declared that the Bene Israel are "full Jews in every respect".
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Posted By admin on February 25, 2023
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro took a swing at liarcongressman George Santos over his dubious longstanding claim that he has 'Jew-ish' heritage.
'What he should have said is, "On the inside, I feel Jewish,"' joked Shapiro, who is himself Jewish, in an interview on Piers Morgan Uncensored on Wednesday night. 'I feel so Jewish on the inside, what are you going to do, challenge my feelings?'
Just days ago, Morgan also interviewed Santos himself, who admitted that he 'got away' with lying on the campaign trail by wildly embellishing his resume and personal history.
However, the Long Island Republican stuck by his guns on the heritage claim, saying he had called himself 'Jew-ish' as a joke throughout his life due to purported Jewish ancestry on his mother's side.
'He's almost the apex predator of politicians at this point, he's reached the logical endpoint of where our politics is going,' remarked Shapiro, a writer and podcaster who founded the Daily Wire conservative news site.
'We have just reached a sort of post-truth era, not in that people don't pay attention to the truth, but I'm not even sure how many people care about the truth,' said Shapiro.
At various points, Santos has claimedhe is 'Jewish,' 'Jew-ish,' 'half Jewish' 'a proud American Jew' a 'Latino Jew' and a non-observant Jew, though genealogy searches reveal no family ties to Judaism, according to Jewish Insider.
During one interview, Santos said his family name on his mother's side was the historically Jewish name 'Zabrovsky.'
He claims that his grandfather was born in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union, and migrated to Belgium in 1940 or 41 when he met his grandmother.
Speaking to Fox Digital last year he said: 'We don't carry the Ukrainian last name, for a lot of people who are descendants of World War II refugees or survivors of the Holocaust, a lot of names or paperwork were changed in the name of survival.'
However reports indicate that there have been no successful efforts to find any Jewish or Ukrainian heritage at all in his family tree, according to the Forward.
Santos said in a separate interview in 2020 that he was raised by 'a white Caucasian mother, an immigrant from Belgium.
But Santos' mother, Fatima Devolder, was born in Brazil, according to her obituary in 2016.
Speaking to Morgan he said that his heritage was an argument that he would 'battle to his grave'.
He added: 'I have already ordered those DNA test kits, I've done four of them and I am so far waiting for the returns which I am very curious to share those with everybody.
'My grandparents fled from Belgium to Brazil, and faked a lot of documents. It has happened to other people, and they received apology letters. I will be the same story.'
However the congressman denied ever saying he was Jewish, telling Morgan that he was a Christian who was 'Jew-ish' a joke he claims he has made throughout his life.
He said: 'I never claimed to be Jewish. It was a party favor joke. I say that my grandparents are Jewish on my mothers' side, and I am Jew-ish.
'There were thousands of people in a room at the RJC in November who all laughed at that joke.'
However, he admitted previously that he had 'embellished' his resume during his successful 2022 House campaign - and his unsuccessful 2020 bid.
The Long Island Rep told Piers Morgan: 'I've been a terrible liar on those subjects and what I try to convey to the American people is I made mistakes of allowing the pressure of what I thought needed to be done.
'This wasn't about tricking anybody. It wasn't about tricking the people it was about getting accepted by the local party.'
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Ben Shapiro mocks George Santos over claim his heritage is Jew-ish
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