In the five books of Moses—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy—there are no “Jews.” The first part of the Hebrew Bible refers only to the Children of Israel, divided into twelve tribes, more or less. In the Prophets, we hear about the kingdom of Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem, in contrast to the kingdom of Israel.1 It is not until the Babylonian exile and the disappearance of the so-called lost tribes that the word yehudim, derived from the Hebrew name for members of the tribe of Judah, starts to refer to a larger collective. The book of Nehemiah refers to the people who return from exile to the land of Israel as yehudim. The book of Esther, generally considered one of the latest contributions to the Hebrew Bible, consistently refers to the community designated for annihilation by Haman and saved by Esther’s intervention as yehudim. They are described there as a “people,” an entity that, the book specifies, has its own writing and language.*
In the Second Temple period, related words were used in both Greek and Aramaic (Iudaeon and yehudai).2 The rabbis, though, preferred the term “Israel” to the term yehudi, which occurs infrequently in the Mishnah and Talmud. For that matter, medieval rabbis preferred the word “Israel” as a formal designator of who belongs to the community. To this day, Traditionalists writing in rabbinic, legal Hebrew use that term rather than the word “Jews,” which American Traditionalists typically use only in English or in the familiar, affectionate Yiddish form, Yidn.
Meanwhile, in modern Israel, yehudi means “Jew” in everyday speech and is also a legal term of art. Israel’s Law of Return grants every yehudi the right to immigrate to Israel and become a citizen. It then defines the term as “a person who was born of a Jewish mother, or has converted to Judaism and is not a member of another religion.” This legal rule in turn requires further elaboration of what counts as a Jewish mother and what counts as a “conversion” to “Judaism” (not to mention what counts as membership in another religion). To make matters more complicated still, until 2005, the word yehudi was used on the Israeli identity card to designate Jewish nationality (le’om, which can also be translated as “ethnicity”), in contrast to “Arab” or “Druze” or “Circassian.” The category was dropped not to be more inclusive but because Traditionalist cabinet members did not want the word yehudi to designate people who were not Jewish under Traditionalist interpretations of Jewish law. (Many of these were immigrants from the former Soviet Union who had been brought to Israel as ethnic Jews but did not count as Jews to the Traditionalists because their mothers were not Jewish.)
It emerges that the word “Jew,” often a non-Jewish designation for Jewish people, has been adopted by Jews over time and put to their own purposes. Even the notion that there is a religion of “Judaism” was, it turns out, introduced by Christians in the fourth century in order to create a category in contrast to Christianity.3 In rabbinic Hebrew, whether in the Middle Ages or today, one never speaks of “Judaism” as an abstraction. One speaks of the Torah, the Law. Yahadut is a modern Israeli Hebrew coinage originally intended to translate the English word “Judaism” or its German synonym, Judaismus.
So what, then, are the Jews? Who is a Jew? And why does it matter? The answers to these questions are bound up in a complex web of beliefs, ideals, values, and institutions. There can be no single, objective solution, because to use the term “Jew” is to take a stand on what the word ought to mean, not only on what it does mean as a matter of description. “Jew” is what philosophers call an essentially contested concept: a concept whose meaning cannot be ascertained by empirical observation alone because the people who use it are taking a values-based stand on what it means to them.
In this part of the book, I want to explore the vexed question of Jewish peoplehood, recognizing up front that your answer to the question of what the Jewish people is will depend to a great degree on what you think the Jewish people should be, and for what purpose. God will enter the picture, as will the state of Israel, so the themes of parts I and II of the book will remain highly relevant. Yet I want to go further than we have gone so far, asking not only about the meanings of Jewishness deployed by Jews themselves but by admirers and detractors of the Jews who do not themselves identify as Jewish. I also will consider what contributions Jews as a group are now making or might make to world culture and civilization and what if anything makes those distinctive and valuable.
Ultimately, I hope to uncover some possible answers to forward-looking questions: Would anything be so terrible about a world where there were fewer Jews, or none, provided of course that happened by choice, rather than by coercion or murder? Would it be any sadder than the disappearances of other peoples or ethnicities or languages, which detract from the great diversity of human identity and experience but simultaneously make way for the new forms of identity we are always inventing? In short, I am asking the general question of what are the Jews mostly to provide answers to a highly specific, personal question: Why be a Jew?
PEOPLE AS FAMILY
How, then, should we think about, name, or describe the Jewish collective? The Hebrew Bible does not help much. Not only does it say little about the Jews, as opposed to the Israelites; it also uses the terms ‘am, usually translated “people,” and goy, usually translated “nation,” almost interchangeably.4 Indeed, in ordinary English, a people and a nation are more or less the same thing. The word “nation,” however, may conjure up for some readers the theory of nationalism, according to which nations have special qualities that entitle them to a nation-state of their own.
Consequently, the most neutral way to describe the Jews, the one I have opted for in the subtitle of the book, is as a people. The limitation of the word “people,” unfortunately, is that it isn’t very specific. Consider that a “people” is often defined broadly as something like “a community of people of shared nationality or race.” Defining Jewish peoplehood in terms of nationhood is either banal, if the words mean the same, or else misleading, since it omits a whole necessary argument about the distinctive aspects of nationhood.
As for defining the Jewish people as a race, one difficulty is that Jews have not thought of themselves as a distinct race since World War II.† Another is that Jews belong to multiple ethnicities and races, however you define those contested terms. It is not clear that Ashkenazi Jews of European origin and Mizrahi Jews whose origins lie in Islamic countries belong to the same ethnic group, whether measured by genetics or culture (especially before the two converged in modern Israel). Even apart from this question, the racial and ethnic diversity of Jews in Israel is rapidly increasing as a result of immigration and conversion. The same is true in the United States as a result of marriage, procreation, and adoption. When you add in other groups of people all over the world, especially in Africa, who identify as Jews or Israelites, the diversity of the Jewish people becomes greater still.5
To define Jewish peoplehood with more specificity, without using nationality or race, I want to identify the quality of Jewish peoplehood that expresses itself in fellow feeling, mutual concern, and mutual responsibility. A Talmudic aphorism captures these emotional-ethical-affective ties: “All Israelites are mutual guarantors of one another” (kol yisra’el ‘arevim zeh ba-zeh).6
This kind of peoplehood I want to describe will not be exclusively religious or theological. In practice, as we will see, almost no Jews, even Traditionalists, rely entirely on the formal Jewish legal-religious definition of who is a Jew when they experience sentiments of fellow feeling. The peoplehood will also not be exclusively cultural, because plenty of Jews share almost no overlapping culture with each other.
The Jewish peoplehood that I seek to describe most closely resembles a large, extended family. It can include aspects of religion, ethnicity, kinship, and culture, but it goes beyond all of these. It is based on the meaning of the word “family” that is most true to life and inclusive.
The kind of family I have in mind is not fixed or defined by blood ties alone, or even necessarily at all. It is defined by a whole range of different human connections people recognize as creating family. Members of this kind of family can be related by unchosen birth or by chosen relations like marriage, divorce, adoption, fostering, living together, mutual commitment, and connection. Families can bring themselves into existence by love, emotional support, holiday and other gatherings, and by much, much more. They may live together or thousands of miles apart. They may not all know each other, or even know of each other’s existence.
If this definition at first sounds too broad, ask yourself: How would you define your own family? Think of all the people you consider family. It’s not just biological parents and grandparents and siblings and cousins and in-laws. It may include none of those people, or all of them. It may include those people and their partners, as well as their exes. It can include stepsiblings and half-siblings and adopted siblings, stepparents and adoptive and foster parents, and all their family, however they define the term. In the United States, we don’t even have simple names for some of these relations. What do I call my ex-wife’s husband’s kids? What about his mother, who, by the way, acts like a loving bonus grandmother to my kids?
Beyond these kinship ties, chosen and unchosen and semi-chosen, there are many more kinds of family ties. Consider the queer and trans families organized into “houses” in Paris Is Burning (1990), the classic documentary of the New York City ball scene. These are families in the deepest sense of the word. They are chosen and also, in a sense, feel like they were destined or fated. Indeed, intentional families are ubiquitous around the world, not restricted to people who experience exclusion from families of origin. Extended clan networks are often intentional in this way. So are religious orders of monks and nuns (whose members, not by coincidence, often call one another Brother, Sister, Father, Mother, and so forth). So are communes. Anthropologists used to refer to relations like these as “fictive” kinship ties, in contrast to supposedly “real” blood ties. That distinction, thankfully, no longer obtains. All family relations are both real and also products of our faculty for symbol making.
The Jewish people is like an extended family in this sense. You can be born into it. You can be adopted into it. You can join it in a variety of ways. You can have a close or an ambivalent relationship with it. You can also decide to leave it. It might still be your family of origin, and it might still claim you. But you can, if you choose, disclaim it.
This family conception is a definition of the Jewish people that meets our needs, spiritual and intellectual and practical. It can accommodate fellow feeling as well as division. It acknowledges that it is appropriate for Jews to experience special pain at the death and suffering of fellow Jews, as at the time of the Hamas attacks on Israel, and special pleasure when Jews do something good. It recognizes the familial nature of Jewishness while remembering that families are not defined by genetics alone but by connections that exist in our minds rather than only in our bodies.
At the same time, because of its size, the Jewish people is also more than a family. The scale of a family is different from the scale of a clan or a tribe or a people. If you are a Jew who meets another Jew you did not know previously, you can’t be expected to think of that person as family right off the bat, because the degree of intimacy associated with the word “family” has not yet been earned. You may have a lot in common with the person or essentially nothing. You might share biological connections or not. You might share cultural commitments or not. You might share religious beliefs or not. At bottom, all you have in common is that you both think of yourselves as Jews, possibly not even according to the same definition.
Definitions and boundaries of Jewish peoplehood are tricky and sometimes contentious, as I will explore in a moment. For now, let me ask you to complete this thought experiment by asking whether you can name the outer edge of what still counts as your own family. Notice there is no fixed, agreed-on definition of the boundary. It isn’t a quantum of genes. Go back far enough, and we’re all related genetically. It also isn’t only people we know or can name.7
Notably, too, family members themselves may not all agree on who is in the family and who is not. If you think closely about it, essentially all our families are like this. Could you list every member of your family? And would that list exactly match everyone else’s list? Almost certainly not. The boundaries of families are porous.
Jewish peoplehood is a lot like this inclusive, complex, contested conception of the family. The peoplehood of family cannot be defined without asking how individuals perceive and define themselves. But neither can peoplehood-as-family be defined entirely by self-perception. Considering oneself to be a Jew, a member of the family, is not automatically going to make one a member of the Jewish people in the eyes of all others. Is a bar-mitzvahed, temple-attending Reform Jew, whose father is Jewish and whose mother is not, a Jew? It depends on whom you ask. A messianic Jew, born of two Jewish parents, who accepts Yeshua as his Lord and Savior? Depends again. A member of the Lemba, a Bantu-speaking people in southern Africa who identify as Jews and have some apparent genetic links to ancient Israelites?8 The House of Israel, a Ghanaian, Akan-speaking group of Sefwis, who don’t have a documented genetic relation to other Jews?9 More disagreement.
Over even relatively short periods of time, the boundaries of the Jewish family-people can change, even in the minds of the most unwavering Traditionalists. Consider the Beta Israel, the official name of the community of Ethiopian Jews, once known pejoratively as Falasha. Today, almost all of them live in Israel after being airlifted there from the late 1970s through the 1990s.
When European Jews encountered the Beta Israel in the early twentieth century, many were skeptical of considering the Ethiopians to be Jewish in any sense. Over the next hundred years, academic scholars, from anthropologists to historians to geneticists, have mostly denied any ancient connection between the Beta Israel and other Jewish communities. They concluded, after research, that the Beta Israel’s self-identification as Jews derived from their Christian Ethiopian ancestors, who in the late Middle Ages embraced the Israelites of the Bible as their model and took on observance of biblical law. (This is a recurring phenomenon in Christianity known to historians of religion as the Judaizing heresy.) Many, perhaps most, important Traditionalist rabbis agreed, noting that the Beta Israel had no knowledge of Hebrew or of rabbinic law.
Yet eventually, the Beta Israel came to be considered Jews by essentially the entire Jewish world. In 1973, Rav Ovadiah Yosef (1920–2013), a hugely influential religious and political figure who was then Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel, ruled that the Beta Israel were Jews who must be rescued and returned to Zion. A rabbinic compromise, hard-won but ultimately effective, called for a modified conversion upon their arrival to Israel. The Knesset enacted special legislation declaring the Beta Israel to be Jews for purposes of the Law of Return. As a result of this embrace, Jews became a multiracial family to a greater degree than they had previously been since the invention of racial classifications.
The point is not to depict the boundaries of Jewish peoplehood as easily or costlessly malleable. Ethiopian Jews continue to experience discrimination in Israel. Some Jews, even today, still quietly question their Jewishness. Beta Israel’s unique religious practices have been, to a meaningful degree, marginalized or even destroyed, a cost of “embracing” rabbinic Judaism.
Nevertheless, the point of this example—and the other, more contested ones—is to show that an adequate definition of the Jewish people as family cannot be exhaustive or permanent. Even after we have a workable definition of the Jewish people, there will be debates about who is in and who is out, just as there can be in families. Those debates will in turn be recognizable as part of the structure of Jewish peoplehood, the way they have always been, and the way all groups of humans contest and police the boundaries of their identities.
MY (CRAZY) JEWISH FAMILY
To think of the Jewish people as an oversized family is to invite a series of warm associations with Jewishness. Families love and nurture each other, or are supposed to. Families care what happens to other family members. Above all, families contribute to the way we make sense of our condition as humans. They give us our first models for attachment, compassion, and connection.
But as everyone with any kind of a family knows, all these wonderful aspects of family come with some, shall we say, complexity. For each uplifting feature of family life there can be a corresponding destructive one. Families give us models for favoritism, punishment, unfairness, and even abuse.
As it happens, the book of Genesis is very interested in these pairings of familial good and familial bad. Sarah wants Abraham to have a child and encourages him to father one with her handmaid, Hagar. Then, after Sarah has a child of her own, she encourages Abraham to banish Hagar and her son, Ishmael. Abraham, torn, nevertheless follows her guidance, creating a historic rift between the descendants of Ishmael and of Sarah’s son, Isaac. The loving desire to perpetuate the family becomes the cause of its rupture.
Isaac in turn favors Esau, the older of his twins, over Jacob, the younger. His wife Rebecca favors Jacob. The competition between the brothers, fueled by the parents, leads to Jacob’s “purchase” of the birthright and his subsequent theft of the blessing Isaac intended for Esau. Jacob has to flee Esau’s wrath, and the family is divided permanently. Parental love leads to sibling rivalry and alienation.
In Jacob’s own family, things get worse still. Jacob intends to marry Rachel and ends up tricked into marrying her older sister Leah first. He favors Rachel’s son Joseph, in recompense for which his other sons sell Joseph into slavery. When famine forces the brothers to Egypt for sustenance, Joseph, unrecognized by his half-brothers, gets his revenge on them and on his father by demanding that his younger full brother, Benjamin, Jacob’s beloved last child, be sent to him in Egypt. In this instance, parental love creates near-murderous rage and intergenerational trauma.
These engrossing, dynamically rich tales of the patriarchs and matriarchs are archetypes. They are archetypes of families. They are archetypes meant to explain the origins of the peoplehood of the Israelites, later the Jews. Hence, the stories are themselves archetypes of the Jews as family. In other words, I didn’t invent the idea that the Jewish people is like a family. The Bible did.
Acknowledging the pain of the families depicted in the Bible, any account of the Jewish people as a family must similarly acknowledge the multitude of ways a family can inflict pain. Disagreements among Jews can be particularly sharp and devastating because they are, or are felt to be, disputes within family. Those disputes can take on the shapes of sibling rivalry, of resentment of one’s parents, or of frustration with one’s children. There can be, and often is, a sense that a public dispute among Jews amounts to airing the family’s dirty laundry.
To understand further the degree of emotion associated with Jewish conflict, consider that families are where we form our first intense emotional bonds. Family dynamics can often become our most powerful models for other relationships in our lives, whether those are erotic, professional, or based in friendship. Those models can manifest with a vengeance in the course of Jewish conflict. Jewish authority figures may find themselves being treated as instantiations of the father, who might invite respect but also rebellion and rejection. Or the archetype of the Jewish mother may be brought into play, with all the many positive and negative associations she calls up.
This conflictual association between Jewishness and family can operate on several different dimensions simultaneously, all of which cross-cut each other. Consider the modern literary exemplar of Jewish familial conflict: a Philip Roth novel. (It could be almost any Philip Roth novel, but let’s call it Portnoy’s Complaint.) The characters are mainly Jews. They make up a Jewish family. They undergo conflict in the novel. A public readership, much of it made up of Jews, criticizes the author for writing unflatteringly about Jews, thereby adding a second layer of conflict. (Never mind that the Bible’s stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs are already public depictions of dysfunctional, conflicting Jewish families.)
In a third layer of conflict, the critics and the author find themselves occupying displaced familial positions, partly because they are Jewish, partly because they are all children born of parents. In yet a fourth layer, the Jews in question begin to argue vociferously about whether the novel has anything to say about the Jews as a people: Does the fictional familial story stand for specifically Jewish types? And of course the novel itself is openly about psychoanalysis and family dynamics and Jewish families and the Jews and Jewish criticism of Jewish families and … you get the picture.
Are the Jewish people as a family any more dysfunctional than any other group of people who might be compared to a family? The question is closely related to whether individual Jewish families are crazier than any other kinds of families. In both cases, I think the objective answer is no. All humans can be crazy in culturally specific ways, and Jews are no exception.‡ Yet it would be hard to find a Jew, myself included, who doesn’t secretly sometimes feel that Jewish families are crazier than other families and that the Jews as a people are the craziest family of all.
Why do we feel that way, knowing as we do that there is in fact no fundamental difference between families when it comes to certain kinds of crazy, except maybe how that crazy is expressed? It’s because when it comes to family, it’s so hard to get outside of your own subject position and look at things from an external point of view. When you’re talking to your father or your mother, it’s hard not to think of yourself as a son or a daughter. It’s challenging to talk to your siblings without thinking of yourself as a sibling. It’s almost impossible to talk to your children without thinking of yourself as a parent.
If the Jews are a family, it’s going to be hard to speak to them or about them without falling into some familial role or other. Consider the Passover seder, the classic Jewish family get-together and site of loving, contentious struggle. The seder is all about family. Mere attendance puts you into a familial role, since the stated purpose of the ritual is to tell the story of the Exodus to one’s children, as the Bible instructs. The Haggadah, the Passover script that literally means the “telling” of the story, includes the famous parable about the four sons: one wise, one evil, one quiet, and one who does not know how to ask. It’s included in every Haggadah you will ever see, no matter how updated or shortened or deconstructed. I defy anyone, of any faith background or none, to attend a seder and not wonder which son you are, deep down inside. Once you are taking part in the ritual, you will relate to the Jews—in particular to those present—as a family.
The upshot is that when I propose that you think of the Jewish people as a family of Jews, I am asking you to embrace both the love and the crazy, the joyful support and the enraged dysfunction. Part of what makes the Jews the Jews is that there is something familial about Jewish peoplehood. That is, part of what makes the Jews a people is that they relate to each other as family. That can be good and it can be bad. As Rabbi Jay Michaelson, the champion of nondual Judaism, would surely put it: both are true.
WHY NOT A NATION?
So the Jews are a people-family, or so I have been arguing. Why not say, instead or in addition, that the Jews are a nation? And while we’re at it, wouldn’t it be better for the Jews if they were a nation? According to classical Zionism, after all, it wasn’t enough just to be a people. The Jews absolutely were and needed to be acknowledged as a nation, an entity deserving and destined for statehood. But today, Jews as a whole are not a nation. To tell the story of how that came to be, we have to go back in time, all the way back to the biblical account of the Israelites’ early constitutional history, found in the book of Samuel.
In the Bible story, Samuel, the prophet-judge-leader who gives the book its name, is aging. The children of Israel are concerned that there is no good succession plan in place for when he dies. They approach Samuel and point out that he is getting old and that his sons are not judging the people justly as he long did. Then they demand that he appoint a king over them, “to judge us, like all the nations.”10
Until this point in the biblical narrative, the Israelites never had a king. Since the death of Joshua, Moses’s successor, the Israelites were governed (loosely governed, to be exact) by a series of prophets and judges identified in the book of, you guessed it, Judges. The effects of that weak and intermittent form of government were mixed, according to the biblical narrator, who often comments that “in those days there was no king in Israel, each man did what was right in his own eyes.” But between Moses and Samuel, according to the Bible, God never commanded the Israelites to choose a king, nor did he anoint one for them.
Samuel strongly objects to the people’s request. In good prophetic fashion, he goes and consults God. God ruefully tells him that by demanding a monarch, the children of Israel “have not rejected you, rather they have rejected me from reigning over them.”11 Samuel then warns the people that the king will take their sons as soldiers and their daughters as perfumers, cooks, and bakers; the king will also seize their fields, vineyards, and olive trees for his courtiers. One day, he promises them, they will cry out to God, who will ignore their cries against the king they demanded. The people refuse to heed Samuel’s dire warning. They insist again on a king, “that we also may be like all the nations.”12
I want to emphasize how this passage captures, in literary form, the idea that the Israelites want to be a nation like any other. Those words, and the idea they stood for, affected secular Jewish national thought from the nineteenth century onward.13 The Bible’s ambivalence about that aspiration also resonates: God relents and instructs Samuel to appoint a king. In the biblical narrative, this represents the moment when the Israelites cease to be ruled by God and become subjects of a standard ancient Near Eastern monarchic constitution, yet never quite manage to be a nation like all the others.
As I explained earlier, Zionism was an answer to the so-called Jewish question of what should happen to the Jews once they were formally emancipated and had the capacity to become citizens of European nation-states. Marxists mostly thought that the Jews, conceived as a social class, should cease to have a separate existence, like the bourgeoisie of whom they were an emblem. Liberals mostly thought the Jews should self-define as members of a religion, rather than as a people or even ethnicity, retaining (if they chose) a Progressive version of their faith while becoming full and equal citizens. Some Jewish socialists opted for secular Jewish cultural identity in alliance with other oppressed peoples.
All these responses to the Jewish question somehow wanted Jews to become like other peoples—even the Marxist response, which thought that all distinct nations should eventually cease to exist, not only the Jews. What made Zionism distinctive was that even as it identified the Jews as a nation, it described them as a nation missing the most significant constituent element of nationhood, namely a homeland. Its program therefore called for the Jews to become a nation like any other by acquiring and settling a homeland.
By so doing, Zionism argued, the Jews would lose the distinctive, shameful features of their exilic, diasporic experience. They would lose their idiosyncratic bourgeois economic status by becoming farmers. They would lose the religion that had differentiated them in a way that had all but assured their subordination to Christians and their sense of their own uniqueness. In psychoanalytic terms, they would lose the neurosis derived from the traumatic experience of never fitting into the framework of European nations. Yiddish, the language of that traumatic experience, would be replaced by Hebrew, a language the Zionists imagined as untouched by the weakness of the Diaspora. Zionists even called for the remaking of the Jewish body, which (in terms uncomfortably reminiscent of antisemitism) they sometimes imagined as weak and diseased. The so-called new Jew, like the communist “new man,” would be strong, healthy, secure, and self-confident. Above all, he (the pronoun is not an accident) would defend himself by force of arms, not by stratagems or by seeking favor with a royal court.
In all these respects, Zionism imagined that the state of Israel that would eventually emerge would be like any other nation-state. Tel Aviv, built from the ground up as a Jewish city, would be a normal, modern European city of its time, as its Bauhaus architecture was intended to suggest. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, is supposed to have remarked that Israel would be a state like any other when it had its own Jewish prostitutes and thieves conducting their business in Hebrew.14 Whether the line is apocryphal or not, it perfectly captures the ideology of normalcy to which Zionism from the start aspired.
Seen from this perspective, Zionism functioned as a deflationary answer to the question, Who are the Jewish people? Needless to say, the classical Zionists didn’t see it that way. In a Europe where Jews were conceived as less than a genuine nation, to be a nation like all the others was a promotion in status. In that environment, to be special in any way was to be marginalized and oppressed. In a strand of Christian theology that was dominant at the time (some Christians believe it still), the Jews were chosen by God to survive and to suffer in recognition of the sin of rejecting and murdering Christ. That kind of chosenness was no gift. Accordingly, Zionism wanted Jews not to be chosen, but to be normal, exactly like any other group of people who counted as a nation.
What made this conception deflationary was that if the Jews were a nation like all others, they had no special claim to being distinctive or different or more deserving than any other people. As a form of secularism, Zionism had to deny that what made the Jews special was any unique relationship with God. The Bible told the children of Israel that they had not been chosen because they were more numerous than the other nations of the earth or more righteous, but simply because God loved their forefathers.15 Zionism rejected, in principle, any special love between the nonexistent God and his people. If the classics of Jewish tradition depicted the Jews as chosen, then so did the classical literature of many other national groups emphasize their unique place in history. The Italian nationalists had ancient Rome. French nationalists had “our ancestors, the Gauls.” German nationalists had the free tribes of Germania described by the Roman historian Tacitus. The Jews had ancient Israel, no better and no worse, but their own.
Nationalism derived from Romanticism, a complex of ideas that maintained, among many other things, that each individual nation, like each individual human, possessed a specific, individual genius. Seen from that perspective, the deflation of the Jews from being chosen by God did not deny them the possibility of being unique. The Jews could be unique in their own way, like the Italians, French, or Germans, all of whom had their own specific national “genius” according to Romantic nationalism. Nevertheless, for classical Zionists, it was highly desirable that the Jews not be different from other nations in the fundamental sense of being uniquely downtrodden. One might go so far as to say that classical Zionists needed to be secularists, indeed atheists, because they believed that the Jews’ religious claim to be uniquely chosen by God was the source of their troubles: it led to the Jews being despised by others and simultaneously fed the Jews’ defeatism. If God did not exist, then the Jews could not be chosen, for good or ill.
The effect of the Zionist idea that the Jews should be a nation “like all other nations” can be seen today in the frequent complaint of Israelis and Jewish supporters of Israel that the state of Israel is held to a double or higher standard of morality when compared to other nation-states, especially those of the Middle East. Although it might sound otherwise on the surface, this complaint is not merely an attempt to deflect criticism of Israel’s liberalism or democracy. It also reflects the frustrated confusion that comes with recognizing that in fact Israel is not a nation like other nations, or at least is not treated as such by most of its critics and not a few of its supporters. The reason that Israel is on the minds of so many people around the world who have no concrete national-interest reason to care about it has everything to do with Israel’s uniqueness, with the ways it is precisely not treated as a nation like all other nations. Put bluntly, the Zionists’ aspiration for the Jews to be a nation like other nations failed, if measured by the way the rest of the world thinks about Israel.
THE HOLOCAUST AND THE FAILURE OF NORMALCY
Against the odds, Zionism succeeded in creating a Jewish nation-state. How, then, did today’s Jews turn out not to be a nation? Put slightly differently, how did the Jews as a whole manage not to become a normal nation, despite the normalizing aims of Jewish nationalism? Our story continues with the context in which the United Nations ultimately proposed the establishment of a state of Israel alongside a state of Palestine in 1947: the aftermath of the Holocaust. In that specific postwar situation, the destruction of European Jewry by Nazi Germany became one of the arguments to justify the creation of a Jewish state. Hitler had attempted to “solve” the Jewish question by murder. That reality, even if incompletely digested by the United Nations in 1947, was clear enough to lead to the conclusion that something must be done for the Jews at the national level.
The effect of the invocation of the Holocaust as a justification for creating the state of Israel was to change the older Zionist argument for a Jewish state into something new and different. No longer was it a regular argument for national self-determination. The Jews had been uniquely selected for genocide, went the new argument. It followed that they should be uniquely compensated with a nation-state of their own, notwithstanding their relatively recent return to their historic land and the presence in it of another people, the Palestinians. However strong (or weak) the case for a state of Israel might have been before World War II, the Holocaust made it overwhelming.
Through the ideology and reality of the Holocaust, the justification for Israel’s existence got bound up in the history of Jewish uniqueness. After all, Nazi antisemitism drew upon historic Christian antisemitism alongside its various other sources, such as scientific racism, antisemitic anticommunism, antisemitic anticapitalism, and so forth. One need not believe that the Holocaust was the direct continuation of some immutable historical Christian antisemitism to see that the legacy of Christian antisemitism was one source of the Nazi vision. And, crucially, Christian antisemitism was inextricably intermingled with the idea that the Jews were chosen by God, only to be displaced by God and uniquely punished by God and miraculously preserved by God for their sins in murdering and rejecting Christ.
The invention of the idea of genocide by the international lawyer Raphael Lemkin during the war, and its subsequent incorporation into an international treaty, tended to underscore the idea of the Holocaust as a unique crime that had been perpetrated against the Jews. True, Lemkin himself was quick to cite the Armenian genocide as a precursor, and he did not insist that only the Jews had suffered genocide.16 Yet the very invention of a new kind of crime, with the Holocaust as its legal-conceptual model, emphasized the distinctiveness of the Holocaust. The temporal juxtaposition of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (adopted December 9, 1948) with the establishment of Israel (May 5, 1948) made the association clearer still. By implication, the Jews had suffered a unique crime against humanity and were entitled to unique compensation from humanity, represented by the United Nations.
What I am saying is that from the moment that the establishment of the state of Israel came to be associated with the Holocaust, it became essentially impossible for the nations of the world that had acquiesced in Israel’s creation to consider it a nation-state like any other. Israel certainly became a nation-state. But it did not become an ordinary nation-state, the kind that would be universally recognized as the national homeland of all the members of the corresponding nation. It became a specific, arguably unique type of morally compensatory nation-state, its origin bound up in the debt that Europe felt it owed the Jews after the Holocaust.
It is worth noting that the Holocaust, coupled with the emergence of Israel as something other than a normal nation-state for all Jews, created further consequences for how Israel is perceived worldwide. If Israel was created (or rather, allowed by the UN to be established) as a response to the immorality of the Holocaust, then Israel had to become, by necessity, an emblem of global morality. This implied, rightly or wrongly, that Israel would be held to a moral standard that would necessarily be distinctive.17 If Israel was created to be a light unto the nations, then when it failed to live up to that ideal, its failure would inevitably be more conspicuous than the failures of other states.
Israel’s emergence in the immediate post-Holocaust context also helps explain why western Europeans continue to hold Israel to the political and moral standards of a western European nation, notwithstanding that those standards developed only in the post–World War II era and that Israel is in the Middle East. The same western Europeans do not hold Arab or Muslim states to western European moral-political standards, either because of implicit racism against them or because of a more defensible political relativism. When Israelis complain that western Europeans expect them to behave just as liberally and democratically as Sweden, they are correct. For western Europeans, the analogue to Israel is precisely western European democracy because, in their view, Israel was established as a democracy for western European Jews as a solution to the European problem of antisemitism.
A further, related consequence of the western European view of Israel is that as the European left came to condemn European colonialism and imperialism in the 1960s and 1970s, Israel’s quasi-colonial creation (as viewed from Europe) itself became a basis for condemnation. From the standpoint of the European left, colonialism now represented a shameful stage in their own national histories that had been left behind. (Never mind that this leaving-behind occurred only as a result of the weakening of the European powers through two world wars and the rise of colonial independence movements.) But unlike the colonies once held outside Europe by even relatively minor western European powers, Israel could not be fully decolonized once the European Jewish population had come to treat it as its homeland, because those Jews had no other country. From this postwar, European left perspective, Israel became an anomaly almost as soon as it was created. It could then be subject to anticolonial criticism that was, in a sense, displaced from anticolonial criticism of their own western European governments that had become passé once the colonies had been shed.
The upshot is that because of the circumstances of its creation, Israel did not become a normal nation-state like any other nation-state. That is, Israel did not achieve global legitimacy as the (normal) nation-state of the (normal) Jewish nation. Instead it became a special case, an instantiation of morally inflected recompense to a people terribly wronged by the Holocaust.
Israel did, however, become a nation-state. But it did not become the nation-state of the Jews as a whole. To the contrary: as we shall now see, Israel’s national development shows that whatever may have been true seventy-five years ago, the Jews cannot today be defined as a nation.
THE NATION OF ISRAEL
The crucial fact for understanding Israel’s development as a nation-state is that not all the world’s Jews emigrated to Israel. To be sure, a significant number did. By choice or coercion, a great many European Jewish refugees who had survived the Holocaust made their way to Israel. So did nearly all the Jews living in Arab countries, who were effectively transferred by governments hostile to Israel in a process that Israel itself treated as proof of the new state’s utility as a refuge for Jews subject to antisemitism. But the American Jewish community, by far the largest in the world once the Nazis had killed some two-thirds of the Jews in Europe, stayed put. So did most British Jews, as well as those elsewhere in the Commonwealth, from Canada to Australia to South Africa. So did most Jews living in Latin America. So did the Jews still living in eastern Europe. They had escaped or survived the Holocaust through the protection of the Soviet Union; now they discovered, as the Iron Curtain descended, that they were not permitted to leave the Soviet bloc even if they wanted to move to Israel.
According to the original Zionist picture, all these Jews outside Israel were still members of the Jewish nation. Once Israel came into being, the state defined Jews living outside the country as potential citizens of the national state. They were offered expedited citizenship under a Law of Return that recognized their special status as members of the Jewish nation and was designed to entice them to Israel as much as to protect them from persecution elsewhere.
Yet over time, as Israel grew into a functioning nation-state, it developed its own culture, its own language, and, ultimately, its own sense of contained selfhood. Jews outside Israel who had no intention of moving there did not partake of these. They did not speak modern Israeli Hebrew, a newly evolving national language different from rabbinic or biblical Hebrew. They did not know much about Israeli culture. So long as they stayed in their own countries, they did not take up Israeli citizenship. They were not, in fact, Israelis.
As a result, it gradually became harder and harder to sustain the Zionist-nationalist idea that all Jews everywhere in the world are members of a single nation. Israel’s flourishing over seventy-five years created a new national identity: the national identity of the Israeli. That identity, in turn, undercut the notion that the Jews today, including those non-Israeli Jews who live outside the country, are all members of a single nation.
Jewish Israelis today consider themselves Jews, either ethnically or religiously or both. But as Israelis, they acknowledge themselves to be nationally different from Jews living in the United States or Europe or wherever. Their nation is no longer a nation of all the Jews in the world. Their nation is the nation-state of Israel. A Jew can be an Israeli just like a Jew can be an American or a subject of the British Crown or a citizen of the French Republic. Israel is a nation with its own language, culture, and social norms—and of course non-Jewish citizens, themselves Israelis who share its culture to differing degrees. Israelis do not share the national status of being Israeli with Jews anywhere else in the world, except expatriate Israelis.
In other words, if Israel is a nation, and not all Jews belong to it, then the Jews today are not a nation, not even to today’s Zionist Israelis. The emergence of an Israeli nationality proves it.
WHO IS A JEW? THE ANATOMY OF A DEBATE
So Israeli national identity does not include all Jews. Yet Israel nevertheless still has something to do with how Jews try to determine who is a member of the Jewish people-family. The government of Israel, as we are about to see, takes stands on who is a Jew in a number of different ways. Jews outside Israel care about what Israel has to say on the matter, even (especially!) when they don’t agree with what Israeli institutions think the answer is. The reason Israel’s actions and opinions matter for the question of who is a Jew has everything to do with ongoing arguments about Jewish peoplehood and with the afterlife of the Zionist idea of the Jewish nation. To form our own views of the controversy, we need to understand the Israeli debate, past and present, and ask if Israel should continue to fill the role it currently plays.
In the definition of Jewish peoplehood that I’m proposing, no single authority gets or should get the last word on who counts as a Jew. And yet for the last fifty-plus years, a variety of institutional actors have been fighting over exactly the question of who gets to decide—and the main venue for the fight has been the state of Israel. The contours of the debate have become so familiar to the actors who care most about it that the very expression “Who is a Jew?” has come to be used as a shorthand for this recurring struggle. Technically, the parties are fighting over what definition of Jew will be used in Israel and under Israeli law. At a deeper level, however, the debate implicates Jewish identity everywhere, and all the participants understand that.
Let me sketch the existing debate in its Israeli context—without losing sight of the fact that it is, to me, the wrong debate, not the debate we need to have. The state of Israel today deploys the legal definition of Jewishness primarily in two ways: first, in the Law of Return; and second, in family law, which in Israel (following norms created by Ottoman law and continued under the British mandate) varies based on a person’s religion.
When the Law of Return was initially conceived by secular Zionists, it was intended to serve the nationalist Zionist goal of ingathering the exiles of the Jewish nation. So when the Law of Return specified a fast track to Israeli citizenship for Jews, the original idea was to include people who belonged to the Jewish nation. Zionists had not settled on a more precise definition because their nationalism did not require them to do so. Consequently, the original Law of Return, enacted in 1950, said only that “every yehudi has the right to come to this country as an oleh [literally, ‘one who goes up,’ meaning an immigrant on the citizenship fast-track].”18
The casual nationalist-Zionist definition worked fine except in certain highly unusual edge cases, which in turn shed light on what the Zionists had in mind. The most famous is that of Oswald Rufeisen (1922–1998), better known as Brother Daniel. Rufeisen was born to a Jewish family in Poland. Growing up there, he belonged to the Religious Zionist youth movement, Bnei Akiva. When the Germans invaded Poland, he showed extraordinary courage. Posing as a non-Jewish Pole, Rufeisen acted as a translator at a local police station in the town of Mir, then under German occupation. (The town was also the original home of the Mir Yeshiva, now in Jerusalem, that I mentioned in part II.) Rufeisen used the job to warn local Jews of impending deportations. Some two hundred Jews were able to take advantage of his warnings to escape into the forests and join the anti-German partisans there.
When Rufeisen’s true identity was discovered by the German authorities, he was hidden and given shelter in a monastery near the police station. While there, Rufeisen experienced a spiritual awakening, underwent baptism, and became a Catholic. He joined the partisans in the forests and after the war was ordained as a priest and became a brother of the Carmelite order.19 He then sought to emigrate to Israel, where he planned to join the Carmelite monastery of Stella Maris in Haifa. It took until 1959 for the Polish government to allow him to emigrate, which it did only on the condition that he renounce his Polish citizenship.
On arrival in Israel, the now stateless Brother Daniel sought to become a citizen of Israel under the Law of Return. He had a brother who had done exactly that after surviving the war and immigrating to Israel. Yet the Israeli government denied Brother Daniel’s request, reasoning that a Catholic—in particular, a Catholic priest—could not be considered a Jew from a “national” point of view. Brother Daniel took his case all the way to Israel’s high court, which ultimately upheld the government’s position.20 Brother Daniel was eventually able to become a citizen through the ordinary naturalization process available to non-Jews, rather than the expedited process available under the Law of Return. He lived out his days in Stella Maris.
In retrospect, it might seem strange that the inclusive, nationalist, secular Zionist conception of the Jew led to the exclusion of Brother Daniel, who had so evidently acted in solidarity with his fellow Jews in resisting Nazi German efforts to destroy them and who considered himself part of the Jewish nation. The Traditionalist Jewish position, which was acknowledged and discussed by the justices in their opinions, was that as a matter of Jewish law, Brother Daniel was a Jew. According to medieval Jewish legal authorities, a Jew cannot lose the status of being Jewish by joining another faith: “An Israelite, though he has sinned, is an Israelite.”21 In this instance, the secular Zionist definition of who is a Jew was more restrictive than that of Traditionalist Jewish law.
The secular Zionist reason to reject Brother Daniel’s insistence that he was a Jew lay in the nationalist notion that to be a member of the Jewish nation, one must not actively dissociate oneself from that nation. According to this view, the one way that Jews throughout the history of the Diaspora had been able to disidentify with other Jews was by conversion to Christianity or Islam. Conversion was therefore tantamount to national treason. Secular Zionism was in principle atheist, yet the secular Zionists treated conversion to Christianity not as a religious act but as a national one. That Brother Daniel considered his religious conversion to be perfectly consistent with his national identification as a Jew was confusing and confounding to this version of secular nationalist Zionism.
At the same time, the secular Zionist unwillingness to treat Brother Daniel as a Jew also reflected secular Zionism’s failure to get beyond Jewish intuitions—or, if you like, prejudices—about the line between Jews and non-Jews. Even those secular Zionist nationalists who had not formally theorized an answer to the question of who is a Jew found themselves instinctively unable to accept the idea that a Christian was also a Jew. One can see the same intuition at work today in the response of many Jews, whether secular or religious, to Jews for Jesus, a group founded in 1970 that is also loosely affiliated with movements who refer to themselves as messianic Jews. Many Jews refuse to think of Jewish-born Christian believers as Jews, notwithstanding that Jewish legal tradition would acknowledge them to be Jews, albeit Jews whose beliefs are wrong and heretical. The intuition is based on a powerful binary of the Christian and the Jew, coupled with a desire to insist that the two categories do not and cannot overlap.
From the standpoint of secular nationalist Zionism, collective intuitions about who is a Jew might be perfectly legitimate bases for answering the question. After all, nationalism does not necessarily posit that there is any objective definition of who belongs to the nation. So it’s possible for the definition to be ascertained by the views of the members of the nation themselves, even if this way of proceeding runs into the logical problem of needing to know who the members are so that their opinions can be taken into account.
Furthermore, to secular Zionists, there is no inherent need to limit the Law of Return to people who are considered Jews under Traditionalist Jewish law, which after all does not define nationhood but religious status. In 1970, the Law of Return was amended so it would extend to “a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew.” This formulation included people whom Traditionalists would not consider Jewish: the non-Jewish spouses of Jews as well as children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers. At the same time, the amended law excluded “a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his/her religion,” reaffirming the rejection of Brother Daniel and repeating the nationalist opposition to including people within the Jewish nation who converted to other religions.22
In contrast, Traditionalist Jews would not regard a survey of Jews’ intuitions as relevant. They believe in an authoritative God who formally conferred the authority to interpret his law on the rabbis. For them, the question of who is a Jew is a matter of Jewish law. They want the state of Israel’s definition of who is a Jew to match the Jewish law definition, because to them, Jewish law is the ultimate source of authority, higher than the law enacted by the state. In the context of the Law of Return, Traditionalist concerns arise in connection with the definition of yehudi added in 1970: “a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism.” For purposes of becoming fast-track citizens of Israel, the law includes anyone converted to Judaism by Progressive rabbis. Traditionalists would prefer the definition of conversion under the Law of Return be restricted to conversion according to halakhah, as they understand the term.23
The Traditionalists can live with the definition of who is a Jew under the current Law of Return only insofar as they do not believe that expedited citizenship in the state of Israel is a religious matter at all. That is, their religious beliefs do not extend to the category of Israeli citizenship. Where they have been able to draw the line—and have so far successfully sustained their position by effective politics—is in the realm of the law of marriage.
In Israel, Jews can only be married and divorced under the authority of the Chief Rabbinate of the country, which applies Jewish law as it interprets it. The Chief Rabbinate is a complicated, important institution that deserves a discussion of its own in making sense of how Traditionalist Jewish authorities interact with the state of Israel. Suffice it to say for our purposes that the Rabbinate tries to straddle Religious Zionism and Traditionalism, without formally committing itself to either. In any case, the Rabbinate defines the legal status of being Jewish to include birth to a Jewish mother or conversion to Judaism according to halakhah. And according to halakhah, Jews may only marry other Jews.§
From this set of legal definitions it follows that a person who is a citizen of Israel and considers himself or herself Jewish but is not considered so according to classical Jewish law cannot, within Israel, marry a person defined as a Jew. There is no civil marriage in Israel, so anyone getting married outside the confines of a state-recognized religious denomination must travel out of the country, marry abroad, and register the marriage on return to Israel. The issue arises most with respect to people whose families came to Israel from the countries of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s and 2000s. Many Jews were married to non-Jews who accompanied them to Israel under the expanded 1970 version of the Law of Return. In consequence, many of their children—those born to non-Jewish mothers—are not considered Jews by the Rabbinate. The only way they could marry Jews within Israel would be to undergo formal conversions recognized by the Rabbinate, namely, Traditionalist or Religious Zionist conversions.
Needless to say, Progressive rabbis outside Israel bitterly resent the Rabbinate’s monopoly over who may marry as a Jew in Israel, which tends to invalidate not only Progressive conversions but also, at a symbolic level, all Jewish marriages conducted under the auspices of Progressive rabbis. Adding insult to injury, Traditionalists, especially in Israel, typically refuse to recognize Progressive rabbinic ordination as valid. Many Traditionalists will not even use the Hebrew word rav to refer to Progressive rabbis, lest they confer legitimacy on that ordination. Since the majority of American Jews associate themselves with the Reform and Conservative strands of Progressive Judaism, this denial of their rabbis has an occasional chilling effect on relations between the American Jewish community and Israel.
The simplest way to address the difficulties associated with the Rabbinate’s monopoly over Jewish marriage in Israel would be, of course, for the state of Israel to recognize civil marriages or civil unions, which would not have to depend upon the authority of the Rabbinate. But Traditionalists have successfully resisted that possibility. Their argument for preserving the status quo is that civil union in Israel would create confusion between legal marriage and religious marriage. Some Jews who married other Jews civilly might also be religiously married. If so, they would have to be religiously divorced or would retain the status of being married to one another. If they obtained civil divorces and remarried, the result would be that they might be married to one person under religious law and another under civil law. This in turn, warn the Traditionalists, would lead to the Jewish legal problem of bastardy, a legal status that is in practice nearly obsolete but that still exists on the books. In Traditionalist law, being a bastard comes with a permanent prohibition on marrying another Jew unless he or she is also born a bastard.
Never mind that in the United States and elsewhere, where civil marriage exists as an option for Jews, the rabbis have been able to sort out this problem and avoid creating a class of unmarriageable Jewish legal bastards. Never mind that in practice, Israel does recognize civil marriage, provided it takes place outside Israel, in another country. The Rabbinate’s hold on marriage is a central reality of Israeli political life. It has proven extremely difficult to break, regardless of its unpopularity among secular Israelis, because the Traditionalist community cares about it so much that its leaders have made its preservation a condition of their joining various governments as coalition partners. In political terms, the Rabbinate’s control over marriage, coupled with its control over who counts as a Jew for those purposes, is a side effect of Israel’s parliamentary political system.
The effect, I think, of describing the state of the “Who is a Jew?” debate as it currently exists is to suggest just how unproductive it is and how much it is actually a debate about control over political institutions in Israel. Consider this paradox: The more time Jews outside Israel spend worrying about whom the state of Israel counts as a Jew, the more they are investing in the secular Zionist narrative that Jews are a nation based in Israel. Yet Israel’s persistence as a nation shows that the Jews are not a nation.
To make matters more paradoxical still, American Jews’ strongest objection to Israel’s definition of who is a Jew rests with the fact of Traditionalist religious power and control over the issue within Israel. In other words, the historic success of secular Zionism in making Israel seem central to the question of who is a Jew is being undermined by the failure of secular Zionism to defeat Traditionalist religious control. When it comes to defining who is a Jew, secular Zionism first succeeded—by making Israel into the arbiter—and then failed, by losing control of the definition to Traditionalists. Progressive Jews are suffering from the defeat of secular Zionism at the hands of Traditionalism on the who is a Jew question only because they are so committed to the initial success of Zionism in making Jewish identity into a question that the state of Israel is somehow in a position to define. It seems that the only route for Progressive Jews to care less about whom the state of Israel defines as a Jew would be for them to care less about the state of Israel.
NOT WHO IS A JEW—WHO ARE THE JEWISH PEOPLE?
Let me end my discussion of this aspect of Jewish peoplehood by noticing that no one is exactly certain who the Jewish people are—not even the Traditionalists, who are sure of the Jewish legal definition, but not of much beyond that. On the one hand, Traditionalist discourse sometimes treats Jews who are not religious as though they were barely Jews at all. The basic idea here is that to be a Jew is to embrace and acknowledge God’s authority, and to Traditionalists, anyone who does not accept the binding force of Traditionalist Jewish law is not properly accepting the yoke of heaven.¶ This attitude exists notwithstanding the Jewish juridical norm that treats everyone born a Jew as a Jew, no matter the person’s current beliefs or practices.
On the other hand, some Traditionalists have been struggling with the possibility of a broader conception of Jewishness, one that goes beyond the Jewish legal definition. They rely on a category called zera‘yisra’el, literally, the seed of Israel. This category encompasses anybody who has Jewish ancestors, even if they are not in the matrilineal line that confers formal Jewish legal status. One iconoclastic contemporary Traditionalist rabbi and politician, Haim Amsalem, has written several volumes on the subject.24 He argues that people of Jewish origin whose mothers are not Jewish are, in some spiritual sense, part of the greater Jewish people. They therefore ought to be brought into the fold of normative Judaism by conversion. In particular, Amsalem argues for lenient conversion standards to be applied to such potential Jews over and against the stricter standards that prevail among most Traditionalist authorities.
Amsalem was born in 1959 to Moroccan Jewish parents who had moved to Oran, in what was then French Algeria. The family emigrated to Israel when he was a child. He seems to have come to his views mostly through a moral-political intuition. It is not uncommon for Israelis who are technically non-Jews to be conscripted into the IDF, where some inevitably die in the line of duty. Under Traditionalist Jewish law, Jews and non-Jews cannot be buried together in the same burial plot. Some symbolic division must exist between the graves of Jews and non-Jews. The result would be that in some cases, soldiers who died fighting for the state of Israel and who identified as Jews could not be buried in Jewish cemeteries alongside their fellow soldiers. Amsalem, under the influence of a form of Traditionalist identification with the state of Israel’s military undertakings, found this situation outrageous. That in turn led him to support conversions of soldiers performed by Religious Zionist rabbis affiliated with the IDF, conversions dismissed by many Traditionalists as inadequately rigorous and therefore illegitimate.
From this beginning, Amsalem found himself exploring the notion of the seed of Israel. It led him to an interest in discovering lost tribes of Israel, itself a kind of generationally recurring hobby of a small number of Jews. More important, however, it led Amsalem to the view that becoming formally Jewish should be encouraged and made accessible to all people of Jewish descent.
To be clear, Amsalem is an outlier in contemporary Traditionalist Jewish thought, even a radical outlier. The historical and legal sources he cites, however, are telling. They show that even in the Middle Ages, organized Jewish communities were struggling with questions of belonging. Those included not only conversions to and from Christianity and Islam but also the status of Jewish communities that rejected the authority of rabbinic law, such as the Karaites, who first coalesced in the late eighth or early ninth century in Baghdad and existed uninterruptedly thereafter. (A handful still live today in Israel and Ukraine.) Karaites coexisted alongside rabbinic Jews for much of this long history, sometimes marrying them and sometimes moving back and forth between the two communities. This coexistence demanded a degree of openness and tolerance, even as rabbinic Jewish authorities polemicized against Karaism.
In parallel, today’s Traditionalists also must deal with the reality of Jewish communities that do not adhere to the Traditionalist definition of Jewishness. Rejectionism is one available course of action, particularly in Israel, where the political power of the Traditionalists allows it. But there is also the ideological option of expanding notions of Jewishness in the face of the sociological reality of people in Israel, the United States, and beyond who consider themselves Jews and live as Jews but do not qualify as Jews under Traditionalist definitions. The category “seed of Israel” represents one ideological option available even to Traditionalists. It shows that even the Traditionalist definition of who is a Jew may be able to take on board broader conceptions of Jewish familial peoplehood.
If this flexibility is possible for Traditionalists, at least under some conditions, the same also must be true for Progressive and Evolutionist Jews—and to a greater degree. It should certainly extend to Godless Jews who identify their Jewishness with ethnicity or culture. Jews can understand Jewish peoplehood broadly without fighting over definitional lines, provided the stakes of their understanding do not drive them to winner-take-all arguments about religious or legal authority.