In the modern world, since Jewish emancipation, few topics have produced more anxiety, moral anguish, and family argument among Jews than marriage between Jews and non-Jews.* It was not always thus. In the Middle Ages, when Jews lived as a minority under nonliberal Christian and Muslim rule, the different religious communities defined the rules of marriage in mutually inconsistent ways, and the status hierarchy imposed by the majority had the last word. The Catholic Church then required anybody being married under its auspices to have been baptized as a Catholic, so for a Jew to marry a Catholic in church required baptism. When, in Merchant of Venice, Shylock’s daughter Jessica flees her father’s home to marry Lorenzo, it goes without saying that she will be baptized first, as indeed Shylock himself is (forcibly) baptized by the end of Shakespeare’s play.
Meanwhile, Jewish rabbinic law did not recognize the legal possibility of marriage between Jews and non-Jews unless the non-Jewish partner formally became a Jew. For a Jew to cause someone to leave Catholicism for Judaism was an act of heresy triable by church courts and punishable by the Christian government.1 Consequently, such defections were rare. Islamic law, in yet a third configuration, permitted Muslim men to marry Jewish and Christian women but not women who were polytheists, who would have to accept Islam; the same Islamic law prohibited Muslim women from marrying Christian or Jewish men. None of the systems recognized the possibility of civil marriage outside the jurisdiction of religion.
Things began to change with the emergence of a distinctively Protestant set of teachings about marriage. The Catholic Church had considered marriage to be a sacrament under its religious authority. Searching the Bible, some early Protestants concluded there was no scriptural sanction for this belief. They redefined marriage not as a sacrament but as a social institution. It could be performed by a minister in church, but it also took on a civil dimension, under the authority of the state.2 This made divorce a possibility for Protestantism, as it had not been and still is not for the Catholic Church. Puritans went further, as was their wont: they affirmatively assigned marriage to the state, allowing weddings to be performed by justices of the peace. These developments opened the door to the possibility of state-recognized civil marriage.3
Alongside the concept of civil marriage came another Protestant idea that was also secularized into classical liberalism: the idea of marriage as a free choice, a civil contract reflecting the will of both parties. Historically, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all nominally insisted that the act of marriage must be undertaken voluntarily, without coercion. In practice, however, medieval people of all backgrounds understood marriage to be shaped and often controlled by the couple’s families. Liberalism, with its emphasis on the moral centrality of voluntary choice, helped change that perspective. Then came Romanticism, which contributed the idea that a couple marrying should think of themselves as two souls in love, destined to join each other. Romantic love gradually came to be part of the modern Western ideology of marriage, both as a necessary impetus for entering marriage and as a reason for divorcing should that love fade away.
The potent combination of voluntaristic liberalism and Romantic destiny shapes most current Western understandings of marriage. Needless to say, contemporary mainstream Western beliefs about marriage therefore may clash with religious law, whether Catholic or Muslim—or Jewish. If the couple who falls in love and chooses to marry happens to belong to the same religious tradition, there need be no conflict. But, as humans have known as long as they have recognized the emotions of romantic love, that kind of love cannot be entirely cabined to people who share the same religious, racial, ethnic, or class background. In the contemporary world, where people are meant to choose freely and marry the partners they love, a religious tradition that rejects the possibility of their union under its own laws finds itself squarely opposed to broadly held values and beliefs. To deny people who love each other the right to marry defies both liberalism and Romanticism.
The historic success of the movement for marriage equality in the West stands as a powerful confirmation of this analysis. Much of the opposition to same-sex marriage came from religious communities who objected to the validation of gay people’s relationships and insisted on a definition of marriage restricted to one man and one woman. (That traditional marriage had, in many times and places, included the possibility of one man being married to several women was mostly ignored in the debate, although the issue of plural marriage is due for a comeback in the near future.†) Ultimately, the religious communities’ objections failed to win the day, in the U.S. Supreme Court, in most Western European countries, and in most liberal religious denominations. Civil marriage, liberalism, and Romanticism, all working together, overcame the power of religious tradition.
Different movements within Judaism have addressed the question of marriage between Jews and non-Jews, often called “intermarriage” or “interfaith marriage,” differently. For Traditionalist Jews, the topic is a nonstarter. Authoritative rabbinic law denies the validity of the marriage act between a Jewish and a non-Jewish partner.
The Talmud discusses whether the prohibition on a Jewish man marrying or having sex with a non-Jewish woman is biblical or rabbinic. Its main conclusion is that the rabbis prohibited such marital and sexual relations.4 Beyond this technical issue, at a cultural level, Traditionalists treat marriage to a non-Jew as an act of fundamental self-removal from their community. The communal taboo, in other words, goes beyond even the legal prohibition.
Progressive Jews have come to see marriage differently, although their path has been tortuous and their conclusions are relatively new ones, still subject to ambivalence and development. Reform rabbis from the beginning of the movement until the late twentieth century formally refused to sanction or officiate at marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Notwithstanding the movement’s teachings on universal love and its willingness to reject Jewish legal tradition when inconsistent with its theological beliefs, Reform Judaism nevertheless reflected centuries of Jewish taboo against marrying non-Jews. To an important degree, nineteenth-century Reform Judaism in Germany was conceived as a mechanism to keep the Jewish community from disappearing via baptism and marriage to non-Jews. Keeping the prohibition on exogamy intact therefore functioned as a key tool in maintaining the boundaries of the Jewish community, even (or especially) for the Reform movement.
In America, Progressive Jews have tried various options to handle the situation of non-Jews who married Jews and then sought to participate in institutional Progressive Jewish life. Classical rabbinic law considers a Jewish woman’s child to be a Jew, regardless of who the father is. In an effort to create a more egalitarian model, one that emphasized practice and choice rather than accidents of birth, both Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism experimented in the late 1960s with a new rule. According to this rule, the children of any Jewish–non-Jewish couple would be considered Jews if they were raised as Jews, regardless of whether the mother or father was the Jewish partner. Simultaneously, the children of any such couple would not be considered Jewish if they were not raised as Jews, even if the mother was the Jewish partner. The rule was, in other words, both more and less inclusive of who counted as a Jew than the classical rabbinic rule.5
The rule did not last, however. Toward the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Progressive Jewish attitudes became more fully inclusive. For one thing, practical reality demanded a new perspective. As more and more Progressive Jews married non-Jews, the institutional synagogues associated with Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism had to decide how to attract those Jews—and their spouses—into their communities. Telling such couples that their kids wouldn’t be Jewish unless they joined the community was a more coercive, less attractive approach than telling them that their kids were Jews no matter what and that they were welcome to belong. From the standpoint of continued vitality, the shift was also clearly necessary. If Progressive Judaism wanted to maintain its historical role of keeping as many Jews as possible affiliated with Jewish religion, it would be far better to be able to tell the grown children of mixed couples that they were Jewish no matter what than that they were only Jewish if they had been raised Jewish.
At the level of belief, what was required for Progressive Jews was to allow the religious-cultural sentiment against marriage with non-Jews to fade away in the face of the ideals of free choice and Romantic love. If that process sounds easy in theory, the reality was not so, even for many Progressive Jews. The Jewish historical experience of living as a besieged minority created deep and powerful cultural norms that hardened into what you might call cultural instincts: not instincts in the biological sense, but learned, conditioned responses that function as powerfully as instincts. Anthropologists call such culturally conditioned responses taboos. To get a sense of how powerful the taboo against marrying non-Jews has been, even for Progressive Jews, consider that it was, and even remains, easier for many Progressive Jews to embrace gay marriage (among Jews!) than straight marriage between Jews and non-Jews. Among Evolutionist Jews (about whom more in a moment), this hierarchy is actually becoming delineated openly: an increasing number of left-Evolutionists accept some form of gay partnership but insist that it be restricted to Jews.
As the broad cultural success of the gay marriage movement shows, however, it is possible for humans to overcome conditioned responses and taboos around marriage, individually as well as collectively. That is what is in the process of happening in Progressive Jewish circles with respect to marriage between Jews and non-Jews. It is still difficult to find a Progressive rabbi who will say sincerely that she is equally happy to officiate at a wedding between a Jew and a non-Jew as she is at a wedding between two Jews. Such is the power of tradition and instinct, even among open-minded Progressives. But that is changing, slowly, as Progressive Jewish congregations include more and more non-Jewish spouses. Some of those spouses eventually choose to become Jews formally. Others, however, participate in Jewish communal life for many years, effectively performing Jewishness, without feeling the need for any ceremonial marker of their belonging.
From the standpoint of Progressive Jewish thought, the only challenge left is to reframe the acceptance of marriage between Jews and non-Jews as affirmatively positive, rather than as a concession to social reality.6 Part of this process will interact with the long-standing Progressive Jewish commitment to Jewish continuity. An inclusive attitude can be justified by the bet that the children of such marriages will be more likely to consider themselves Jewish if the Jewish community thinks of their parents’ marriage as a good thing, not a bad one. This shift would entail changing the attitude of concession to reality as a kind of concession to reality.
More important, however, will be a deeper religious-philosophical exploration of the value of marriage as an interpersonal partnership. Given that Progressive Jews consider universalism and egalitarianism to be basic moral values, I would predict the ultimate success of such a reframing. In the end, contemporary Western thought understands marriage as an expression of freedom, equality, and the realization of selfhood. Progressive Judaism must inevitably embrace these moral and philosophical beliefs as true and find their origins in prophetic teachings of God’s love. Ultimately, Progressive Jews can and will disidentify with the strand of Jewish particularism that has historically resisted Jews marrying non-Jews. They will realize—they are already realizing—that the identity of their community can be preserved and even strengthened by declining to police its boundaries so aggressively.
Part of this process, for Progressive Jews, also involves recognizing that the medieval bright line between Jews and non-Jews does not necessarily reflect the realities of ancient Judaism, ancient Israel, or the modern age. The Hebrew Bible prohibits the Israelites from marrying the sons or daughters of the seven nations who lived in the land of Israel on their arrival,7 but does not otherwise provide a blanket condemnation of the practice. It states that “no Ammonite or Edomite may come into the assembly of God; even the tenth generation of them may not enter the assembly of God forever.”8 But this formulation, which Rabbi Joshua, whom we met earlier in the book, treated as obsolete already in Talmudic times,9 would seem to permit others not of those two nations to do so.
Moses marries Zipporah, the daughter of Jethro, “a priest of Midian.”10 She becomes a central figure in the Moses narrative.11 Moses also marries a “Cushite woman.”12 His sister Miriam speaks against him because of it. In response, God appears in a pillar of smoke and tells Miriam and Aaron, Moses’s brother, that Moses is his faithful servant to whom he speaks mouth-to-mouth. When the vision ends, Miriam has become “leprous, white as snow.” Moses prays to God for her recovery, which is granted after she spends seven days outside the Israelite camp in recognition of her disrespecting Moses’s marriage.13
Later on in the biblical narrative, King Solomon “loved many foreign women: the daughter of Pharaoh, Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonites, Hittites.” Some of his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, the book of Kings states, belonged to the peoples whom God had prohibited to the Israelites in marriage. To these women, the Bible reports, “Solomon cleaved in love.”14
These marriages are depicted as a stain on Solomon’s previously unspotted character. In his old age, the wives turned his heart after other gods, so that he followed Ashtoret, the goddess of the Sidonians, and Milkom, the god of the Ammonites. He built shrines to Chemosh, the Moabite god, and to Molekh, the Ammonite god, “on the mountain in front of Jerusalem.” As a consequence of these sins, says the book of Kings, God decided to take the kingdom of Israel away from Solomon’s line, leaving only the kingdom of Judah in the hands of his heirs, because of the merit of his father David. The passage is certainly a serious warning against the danger of marrying non-Jewish women and being drawn to their gods. Solomon’s acts are sinful and merit severe generational punishment. Yet they are simultaneously the acts of one of the greatest kings of the Bible and reflect biblical acknowledgment of the constant presence of non-Jewish worship and non-Jewish women in the Israelite milieu.
The book of Ezra, which depicts a community of “people of Israel” who return to the land of Israel after the Babylonian exile, also reflects a deep concern with marriage between Israelites who stayed behind and were never exiled and local peoples (Canaanite, Hittite, Perizite, Jebusite, Ammonite, Moabite, Egyptian, Emorite). Ezra, speaking in the first person, says that by these marriages, “the holy seed has been mixed with the peoples of the lands.” That reality causes him to tear his garments and pull the hair from his head and beard and sit stunned in fasting and prayer.15 Once again, the biblical text condemns marriage with non-Israelite peoples, even as it acknowledges the widespread reality of that phenomenon in the world the book of Ezra describes.
Early rabbinic literature of the post–Second Temple period also reflects the possibility of Jewish–non-Jewish marriage, condemning it without formally prohibiting it.16 The Talmud, a bit later in Jewish history, is where the technical rulings emerge that both ban marriage to a non-Jew and also classify the offspring of such unions.17 The strong implication of all these texts is that Jewish communities in late antiquity, like Israelite communities before them, occupied a reality where many Jews and non-Jews were married to each other, even as Jewish religious authorities sought to condemn the unions.
Skipping through the Middle Ages and the early modern period to the period after Jewish emancipation, the conditions of communal interaction around the marriage question once again immediately become complicated. In nineteenth-century Germany, for example, significant numbers of Jews were baptized and yet continued to identify and be identified as Jews, ethnically if not religiously. The consequence was that Jews could marry non-Jews while still insisting on being Jewish in some form. The family of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was religiously Christian and ethnically Jewish, his grandfather Hermann Wittgenstein having been baptized. According to a family story, one of Hermann’s daughters, Emilie, actually had to ask her older brother, Louis, whether the family was of Jewish origin. He answered with the French phrase pur-sang, which literally means “pure-blood” and also has the connotation of “beyond all doubt.”18 Whole families could become hybridized this way, or they might be partly religiously Jewish, partly religiously Christian, partly ethnically Jewish, and partly ethnically German by marriage and descent.
This complex situation has repeated itself in the United States. From the moment when substantial numbers of eastern European Jews emigrated to the United States, American Jews were concerned, not to say obsessed, with the issue of marriage to non-Jews. Abie’s Irish Rose (1922) was a play by Anne Nichols, raised a Baptist in Georgia. It ran on Broadway for a then-record-breaking 2,327 performances. The show featured a Jewish American who marries a Catholic Irish American over the objections of their two fathers. The wedding itself, played for comedy, is repeated multiple times by a priest and a rabbi, who recognize each other from their World War I service and treat each other collegially. In the play’s last act, the fathers reconcile with each other and their children.
Critics then and now consider the play ill-written and literarily unimportant. Its popularity reflected the optimistic ideology of the American melting pot, but also the emerging phenomenon of marriage between Jews and non-Jews, which intrigued as well as entertained the audience. In retrospect, the play can be seen as expressing a precursor of contemporary cultural values with respect to marriage. Marriage is depicted as inherently a free choice made by two people who love each other. Views to the contrary are treated as outdated, Old World thinking (this already a century ago). Different religious practices are seen as no bar to compatibility. Contemporary Progressive Jews now mostly agree.
This brings us to Evolutionist Jews, who have not to date really grappled with marriage between Jews and non-Jews but may have to in the near future. To the extent that Evolutionists accept the authority of rabbinic law, they must treat marriage between Jews and non-Jews as invalid from a legal perspective. That might have been the end of the matter were it not for current efforts within left-wing Evolutionism to accommodate gay partnerships. Those efforts, which are in part succeeding, will not be easily restricted to gay couples, but will raise fundamental questions for life partnership between Jews and non-Jews.
The current creative approach among Evolutionist Jewish thinkers around gay marriage has been to design new liturgical rituals and symbolic-but-formal partnership contracts. These enable gay couples to solemnize what is not technically a marriage in Jewish legal terms but is supposed to feel like one in the eyes of contemporary Western society. The Evolutionist thought leader Rabbi Steven Greenberg, whom I introduced in part I, was the first to draft a model partnership contract for gay couples to substitute for the traditional Jewish marriage contract.19 (His approach followed a suggestion first made for feminist Progressive reasons by the Reform rabbi Rachel Adler.) A growing number of left-Evolutionist rabbis now are prepared to perform partnership-marriage ceremonies built around such contracts.
Innovating in order to facilitate gay marriage within the framework of Jewish law comes from the recognition that gay people should have the same rights and opportunities within normative Judaism as straight people. To Evolutionist Jews, once a moral position is firmly established, the goal is to evolve Jewish law to correspond to it.
At present, the left-Evolutionist rabbis and thinkers who are evolving Jewish law to create opportunities for same-sex marriage do not see the situation of gay Jews as comparable to that of straight Jews who wish to marry non-Jews. Being gay is not a choice, they would almost certainly point out. Marrying a non-Jew is. For a gay person, the only marriage option available in good conscience is to a person of the same gender. A heterosexual Jew, by contrast, may in good conscience marry a Jew of the person’s preferred gender. Alternatively, the non-Jewish partner may choose to become Jewish.
This argument is logically sound. It does not, however, fully take account of the liberal-Romantic ideology according to which a couple who fall in love cannot in good conscience do other than marry each other and live together. It does not matter that the nature of their romantic attraction differs from sexual orientation. They are in love, they have chosen one another, and Jewish law, as traditionally interpreted, stands in the way of their union.
Consequently, it seems probable that Evolutionists will eventually be challenged—as Progressive Jews have been—with the arguable immorality of denying a loving couple the opportunity to be joined in a marriage that would be recognized and celebrated by their community. Unlike Progressives, left-Evolutionists will not be able to offer such couples the standard Jewish marriage ceremony. But they might well be able to offer them a partnership contract analogous to the contract adapted for gay unions. Jewish law recognizes the validity of business partnerships between Jews and non-Jews. The same spirit of legal creativity that devised the partnership contract for gay couples could be adopted for the marriage of a Jew and a non-Jew.
The barrier to the partnership contract for Jewish–non-Jewish couples would hence primarily be sociological, not Jewish-legal. Again, at present, the Evolutionist leadership is not open to such an approach. But that could change, especially if the membership in Evolutionist congregations comes to include more Jews who are partnered with non-Jews, and perhaps even their partners themselves. If this possibility shocks some readers, as it no doubt will, recall that the idea of rabbis ordained as Orthodox officiating at gay marriages seemed unthinkable thirty years ago.
CULTURAL JEWS AND MARRIAGE NORMS
If different streams of Judaism are struggling with the marriage question in different ways (or in the case of the Traditionalists, not at all), what about cultural Jews? Is there any good, justifiable reason for practitioners or exponents of bagels-and-lox Judaism to object to Jews and non-Jews marrying each other?
Let me stipulate at the outset that as an empirical matter, many cultural Jews do in fact object when their children announce an intention to marry someone who isn’t Jewish. Their arguments are sometimes an ill-expressed version of the taboo, served with a dollop of Jewish guilt: “How can you do this to us?” Sometimes they say that to preserve Jewish culture, Jews really ought to marry other Jews who share the same cultural background. Occasionally one will hear an argument presented as cultural but also to a certain degree religious: citing the Holocaust, the parents may say that marriage to a non-Jew gives Hitler a posthumous victory.‡ Jewish survival, some cultural Jews might argue, is therefore a moral imperative, not so much an extra divine commandment as a moral consequence of the Holocaust. And, they might conclude, for Jews to marry non-Jews is to undermine the survival of the Jewish people.
Even without Fackenheim’s dictum, cultural Jews may find themselves arguing for Jews to marry Jews as a matter of the maintenance of Jewish people, without whom there would (apparently) be no one to perpetuate genuine Jewish culture. This in turn raises important questions: Why, for cultural Jews, is it inherently valuable for the Jewish people to continue to exist? And if the answer is the preservation of Jewish culture, is it true that only Jews can keep Jewish culture alive?
For Jews who believe in God, no matter which version of theology they prefer, the preservation of the Jewish people surely has religious value. At a minimum, God’s biblical promise to choose the Israelites, and the covenant between God and Israel that embodies that choice, imply an obligation on the part of the Jews to worship God. God in turn promises to care for the Jewish people, punishing them where necessary, sending them into exile but not destroying them outright. In the theology of the three oaths, there is even a divine promise to the Israelites that their subjugation at the hands of the nations of the world would not be “over-much,” usually interpreted to mean “unbearable.” The Jewish commitment to self-preservation can thus be understood, in religious terms, as the fulfillment of the commitment by the people of Israel to continue to participate in the divine covenant.
But for Jews who don’t believe in God, the preservation of the Jewish people must be justified in some other, nontheistic terms. Classical Zionism offered an answer based on nationalist Romantic ideas of each people’s destiny. Genuine Romantic nationalists valued diversity, at the national level if not at the subnational level. (In fact, their most important predecessor, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), arguably invented the concept.20) They believed that each nation had a distinct unique national genius, and that each nation ought therefore to fulfill its destiny by expressing that genius as best it could. If a given nation failed to do so, that was a tragedy. The failure to self-express would represent a loss for the nation itself, since the whole point of being alive, according to Romanticism, is to self-actualize. But a single nation’s failure to self-actualize would also represent a loss for humanity, which would lose the value of that nation’s special genius.
It is still possible today to embrace the Romantic nationalist account of why the Jews as a people should continue to exist. Certainly, we continue to value cultural diversity in the broadest sense. When we hear of languages dying because too few people speak them (something that happens every year 21), we feel sadness and pain at the loss, even if we’ve never heard of the language before. There is a similarity between this sense of loss and the one we feel when we hear of a species going extinct (another event that occurs much too frequently). We experience, in Romantic terms, the tragedy of the reduction of the gorgeous mosaic of multivariate existence. In these terms, the loss of the Jewish people would be a tragedy because it would impoverish the world’s diversity. For Jews who think in Romantic nationalist terms, it would be a particularly great loss, because it would mean that the Jews could no longer attain their destiny of national self-realization.
The elements of this Romantic nationalist worldview that are harder to accept, especially for Jews who don’t believe in God, start with the idea that the Jewish people really has some inherent destiny. We are, historically, a long way from the type of nationalism that posits this sort of collective determinism. Israel has unquestionably turned out to be a nation. As I’ve argued, this development shows that the Jewish people has not turned out to be a nation, but something else. To argue—without God—that the Jewish people has a necessary destiny seems so mystical that it calls out for some theory of why. Romantic nationalism offered an answer, but without it the answer is much harder to glimpse.
Then there is the implicit assumption that if a people ceases to exist, its culture dies with it. That is not always true. Consider ancient Greece, which produced literature, philosophy, science, art, architecture, and more. Ancient Greek civilization had a good run among the ancient Greeks. And its ideas, values, and literature have lived on long after the Hellenes (the people, or maybe peoples) who created them ceased to exist as a distinctive group. First Alexander the Great (who was Macedonian) spread Greek civilization throughout his vast empire. Then Greek civilization transfused Roman civilization, which spread even farther afield. Some parts of ancient Greek civilization, especially philosophy, were incorporated into Islamic thought in the Middle Ages. Greek civilization was rediscovered in Europe via the Renaissance (alongside Roman civilization), not that it had ever been entirely forgotten. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britons and Americans came to identify with the Greeks and Romans, which is how the Lincoln Memorial (completed in 1920) and the U.S. Supreme Court building (completed in 1935) came to be surprisingly faithful versions of Greek temples.
It emerges that ancient Greek civilization has persisted without ancient Greeks. True, nineteenth-century Greek nationalists laid claim to ancient Greek heritage as part of their Romantic nationalist project. But as even their supporters (many of them Englishmen enamored of ancient Greece) noted, the connections between ancient Greeks and modern Greeks were attenuated.§ The point is that ancient Greek civilization would continue to matter today even if modern Greece had never emerged from the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
There can be little doubt that ancient Israelite civilization, as recorded in the Bible, would similarly continue to exist without the Jews. After all, the Bible and its associated narratives fundamentally shaped Christianity and Islam. Within Christianity, there is a recurrent phenomenon of groups of Christians coming to identify with ancient Israel. (Two famous examples are the Massachusetts Bay Puritans, who saw themselves as Israelites on a divine “errand into the wilderness,”22 and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which established a durable new Zion in Salt Lake City.23)
Christians in far-flung times and places have found themselves slipping into what orthodox Christian theology calls the “Judaizing” heresy. That is, they begin to believe that they must obey the commandments of the Hebrew Bible, from which orthodox Christianity considers them to have been liberated by Christ’s sacrifice. Such Christians sometimes go so far as to begin to think of themselves as Israelites or Jews, a phenomenon I mentioned in part II in connection with the Ethiopian Beta Israel. This generates a kind of reemergence of certain aspects of Jewish or Israelite identity, even without a role for other Jews in the process.
Admittedly, the influence of late antique and medieval Jewish civilization in a world without Jews would certainly be considerably less. The Mishnah and the Talmud and the midrash and the rest of the vast body of medieval and modern Jewish literature are far less accessible than the Bible. They are far, far less relevant to non-Jewish societies, past or present.
Yet recall that “cultural Jews” rarely advert to this literature either. For them, Jewish culture is usually defined to include ideas and values and attitudes shaped over the past two hundred years, since Jewish emancipation in Europe: critical thinking, argumentation, thirst for knowledge, and the arguably Jewish teachings of Marxism, Freudianism, and so forth. All these practices, ideas, and values would continue to exist without self-identified Jews to perpetuate them.
The upshot is that cultural Jews cannot easily justify the value of perpetuating the Jewish people just to preserve Jewish culture, at least not without God. Even granting Jewish culture its special role in contributing to global civilization, Jewish culture could go on without Jews. Bagels and lox are not themselves of inherent Jewish value. They acquired Jewish meaning because they were eaten by Jews. Like essentially all Jewish cuisine (except maybe matzah, the bread of affliction eaten on Passover), bagels and lox are transient manifestations of non-Jewish foodways that were adapted and adopted by Jews. Bagels ultimately derive from southern Germany, if linguistic etymology is any guide. And lox is such an old name for smoked or cured salmon that it is actually proto-Indo-European, still used in all the living Scandinavian languages as it is in Yiddish and (increasingly rarely) in English.
Perhaps a slightly different argument could be made by Reconstructionist Jews, those Progressives who do not (necessarily) believe in God but nevertheless adhere to Jewish practices and liturgy in the fulfillment of the ideal of “Judaism as a civilization.” For Reconstructionists, the value of Jewish practice lies ultimately in its cultural-spiritual meaning to them as Jews. They seek to perpetuate Jewish civilizational culture, understood in their distinctive terms, because they believe that doing so enhances their own lives, not because of the contribution Jewish civilization is supposed to make to the world at large.
So if Reconstructionist Jewish parents were to advise their child against marrying someone non-Jewish, a charitable reconstruction of their intention might run something like this: We in our lives have found meaning and purpose through engagement with the practices and rituals of Jewish religious culture, even if we don’t exactly believe in God. To make that kind of civilizational or cultural engagement work, it helps a lot to have two partners who both participate in and share that set of traditions and practices. We raised you this way. We believe that you, too, will continue to benefit from our kind of Reconstructionist engagement with Jewishness. We think that will be harder with a partner who does not identify as a Jew. So we are not saying that you must marry a Jew in order to perpetuate the Jewish people and achieve some greater good. We are, rather, saying that by marrying a Jew, you will enable yourself to continue in our footsteps. What’s more, we think that is all Jewishness has ever been: a series of people following in their parents’ footsteps.
To this sort of entreaty, the Jew who wants to marry a non-Jew could make one of several replies. She could say, “My partner is fully committed to joint participation in my culture and rituals, so there is nothing for you to worry about, Mom and Dad.” If that’s true, she deserves to win the argument. (Not that real-world arguments are won and lost in this way, but more on that in a moment.)
Or she could say to her Reconstructionist parents, “I acknowledge the challenge you are describing. I acknowledge the risk that if I marry someone who is not Jewish, it will be more difficult for me to achieve a meaningful, engaged experience of civilizational Judaism. I acknowledge it will be harder for me to pass on that set of experiences to my children. But these are risks I am prepared to take. I will do my best to pass on the version of the tradition that is meaningful to me.”
Then would come the kicker: “If I do not manage to create an environment in which my children feel the same kinds of connections to Jewish ritual practice as you and I do, it won’t be a tragedy. Jewish practice and culture are wonderful for anyone who, like me or like you, finds them meaningful. But if someone does not find them meaningful, that’s okay. It’s not like we as Reconstructionists believe that there is a God who will be angry or disappointed. There is just the Jewish people, doing some version of what it’s always done. If fewer of the Jewish people do so, that’s all right with me.”
At this point, it’s entirely possible that the parents might pull out the last card in their nominally rational argument: the “what if everybody else did it” card. “Surely you see,” they might say, “that if all Jews felt as you did, then there would be no Judaism left. And surely the passing away of Jewish civilization would be tragedy.”
To this the Jew who seeks to marry a non-Jew might reply, “Yes, that would be tragic. But fortunately, not all Jews do feel as I do. Many actually believe in God and perpetuate Jewishness for that reason. Since we don’t believe in God, and there isn’t much we can do about that, we should not bear the burden of communal preservation that others are prepared to carry.”
Alternatively, she might respond, “No, I don’t see what would be so tragic if civilizational Judaism ceased to exist. If I believed in God, I might think the end of Jewish civilization represented a violation of the divine will. But the very idea of Judaism as a civilization presumes that Judaism is a civilization like others. Civilizations rise and fall; it’s what they do. Reconstructionism is a humanist approach to religion. If there were, as a voluntary matter, no Jews, there would be no humans harmed by there not being any Jews.” From the standpoint of Reconstructionism, I do not think there is a powerful answer to be made to this argument. Without God, Jewishness is a civilizational or cultural construct that has inherent value for its participants and for the rest of the world. But it has no supervening need to exist beyond the humans who value it, and who will sustain the Jewish people in whatever way they decide is best.
TRIBALISM AND ITS CONTENTS
Anyone who has ever been anywhere near this kind of marriage argument between Jewish parents and their adult children knows that my stylized model is far from reality. In real life, both sides draw upon religious and rational arguments. But lurking in the near background is a particular affect, the affect I associate with group identity. The parents, in all of my examples, are invoking that group identity in trying to convince their children not to violate the group’s solidarity. The talk of God or the Law or Jewish civilization can ring hollow, even among Traditionalist Jews who literally believe in and fear a personal deity whose laws will be violated by their child’s marriage to a non-Jew.
What are we to make of the powerful impulses to group identity and solidarity that are felt by many Jews today, regardless of their other beliefs about religion or culture or civilization? From the standpoint of rationalism or cosmopolitan universalism, these impulses are unappealing or even morally wrong. They can be characterized as tribalism, a term that in Western society usually has negative connotations. Tribalism is the word we usually use when we are trying to conjure up the worst aspects of group solidarity. It’s the pejorative word we use when we are trying to describe patterns that led Hutus to kill Tutsis in Rwanda or Burmese Buddhists to kill Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. When we use it to describe Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews, you can be sure we are criticizing those attitudes as crude, premodern, and potentially dangerous. If non-Jews call Jews “tribal,” Jews’ hackles go up, and they wonder if they are being subjected to antisemitism.
It doesn’t take much thought to condemn the kind of tribalism that leads people to kill their neighbors for no reason except that they are different and hated. But is tribalism always so terrible? Is there something inherently harmful about group identification by a combination of birth and culture and myth and belief? In this context, I’m asking the question with respect to marriage between Jews and non-Jews. Yet the question has far greater implications because it goes directly to the fundamental question of Jewishness.
Here’s the problem. No matter how you define it, the Jewishness of the Jewish people entails some degree of differentiation from other peoples. To that extent, Jewish peoplehood necessarily has a whiff of tribalism associated with it. No matter how hard Progressive Jews have tried to make Judaism into a choice-based religion, it still isn’t the same as Christianity or Islam, which as an official matter base membership solely on an act of faith. The ethnic or communal or kinship aspects of Jewishness keep finding their way back into the picture. The very notion of Jews as a people—not a community of the faithful like the Islamic ummah or a mystical union of believers like the Catholic Church—implies that there is more than belief at stake, and less. The challenge, put bluntly, is: How can the Jewish people be distinguished from a Jewish tribe?
One possible approach is to find and embrace the good parts of tribalism. Not all kinship-based groups are bad. Families are kinship-based, in part. And while some families are terrible, others can be life-giving and life-affirming. We measure the worth of a family by how it does its job of being a family, not by disqualifying the whole category altogether. As I suggested earlier in part III, families are not entirely based on biological kinship, not ever. Neither are tribes. All families bring in members by marriage or other kinds of partnership and by associational acts like adoption. Same for tribes. Biological kinship always coexists with other forms of affiliation. If families aren’t always bad, perhaps tribes aren’t always bad either.
This much of the argument is not only defensible but plausible. We all know what it’s like to feel special bonds to our family. So it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to recognize that we can feel tribal bonds that are analogous, even if less intense or immediate. What is trickier is to embrace aspects of tribalism that are, in an important way, irrational.
Rooting for a sports team, especially a sports team you grew up with, is an example of harmless, irrational affective and emotional adherence that can confer meaning on one’s life. Since I’m a Bostonian, the examples come readily to my mind. I root for the Red Sox, the Celtics, the Bruins, and the Patriots just because I do, and because it’s a point of solidarity with the people around me. What’s more, Bostonians take our support for our teams into the diaspora. You can see lots of us rooting for the Red Sox in games played all over the country, especially in warm places. If the local team is new or doesn’t enjoy deep-seated and broad support, it’s not unheard of for Boston fans to be louder at away games than the home fans. When I lived in New York, which is only a couple hundred miles from Boston, there was a bar around the corner from me in the West Village that was in all respects a Boston sports bar. You went there to be with other Bostonians doing what we do when we watch our teams play: fretting and arguing and yelling and drinking and second-guessing, a strange but perhaps not unfamilial combination of love and rage mixed together.
A sociologist might say that rooting for a local sports team confers functional advantages on the fans who do it. That’s clearly correct in Boston. Very different Bostonians can create instant solidarity by discussing their teams without having to negotiate the potentially perilous territory of class or neighborhood. (Race is a different matter, especially given Boston’s shameful history and only slightly better present.) In Boston, people use sports talk as a social equalizer and to grease the wheels of communication, either because we were surrounded by that practice or else have consciously realized its benefits.
That professing allegiance to a sports team creates solidarity does not make that affiliation fully rational. It’s one thing to follow sports enough to be able to talk about it, like the weather. It’s another to feel—actually feel—joy when your team wins and sadness when it loses. And often enough, if you’re a Patriots fan, the experience of supporting the team has come into conflict with the moral values you hold in ordinary life. In the conflict, it’s hard not to support the team over what you would ordinarily consider to be right. I know I do. (I will say no more. This book is controversial enough already.24)
Allegiance to a sports team is a further instance of (relatively) harmless tribalism, based mostly on geography. Of course Jews who want their children to marry other Jews aren’t just acting like sports fans. They are reflecting a deeper sense of group solidarity, one felt, as it were, in the body. They want their children to belong to the same kinship group as they do in some way partly because they think of their children as part of their bodies (whether biological or adopted doesn’t matter, as any adoptive parent could tell you).
Tribalism has a lot to do with the body. Many tribes throughout the world and throughout history have used body modification as a primary marker of group identity. To have the tribal marker—a particular kind of scar or tattoo or piercing—is to inscribe tribal membership on and in the body. It is no coincidence that Western Enlightenment culture reacted negatively to such body modifications, which it identified with tribalism. Nor is it surprising that so-called neoprimitives today embrace body modification to express their resistance to hegemonic Western cultural norms that they experience as alienating.25
Body modification has been central to Jewish identity from its origins in the Israelite past to the present. The Bible introduces the obligation of male circumcision long before it depicts God giving the commandments to Moses. In the book of Genesis, God commands Abraham, the progenitor of the Israelites, to circumcise himself and his sons and his household. The circumcision, God explains, “shall be a sign of the covenant between you and me.” This is not a metaphor. Through circumcision, the covenant is literally inscribed in the flesh as a visible sign.¶ When Moses fails to circumcise his son, God himself seeks his death. Moses is saved only by the fast thought and action of his wife Zipporah, who circumcises their son with a flint knife and abates the danger.26
Christianity, of course, ultimately repudiated physical circumcision. It substituted the metaphorical circumcision of the heart (itself a motif found in the Hebrew Bible) as part of its movement toward universalizing Christian faith and superseding the bodily, carnal religion of Israel. The preservation of circumcision for Jews thus became distinctive in Europe (although not in the Muslim world). As the Jews preserved circumcision despite background pressures of Christianity, circumcision came to be the most obviously embodied element of “primitive” Jewish tribalism.27
A few early German Jewish reformers recognized the “barbarism” (we might say tribalism) of circumcision. They contemplated the possibility of abolishing it along with other aspects of Judaism that fell short of their ideal of moral-rational faith.28 Reform Judaism held back from an outright ban for complex reasons. Most basically, Reform leaders did not think that those who wished to remain Jews would be prepared to accept a ban on circumcision, even as Reformers eliminated Hebrew from the synagogue service and experimented with Sunday worship. Subsequently, every form of organized Judaism has maintained circumcision, and it has persisted even among the overwhelming majority of cultural Jews.
Today, some Jews once again are organizing against circumcision, taking prominent roles in anticircumcision coalitions seeking to effectuate local bans in the United States. (In Europe, the situation is very different. Jews and Muslims have come together to resist proposed circumcision bans in northern European countries.) In the spirit of liberalism, they reason that even if there were nothing inherently wrong with tribalist male circumcision, it would require the adult consent of the person being circumcised, and therefore must be banned for people under the age of eighteen. A further argument invokes medicine to claim that male circumcision is inherently harmful to male sexual health and functioning. This argument usually also entails cultural comparison. Its exponents maintain that male circumcision is a form of genital mutilation, comparable to female genital mutilation, which is banned in essentially all Western countries and many non-Western ones. This perspective is closer to being a rejection of tribalism, especially because female genital mutilation is characteristically (perhaps stereotypically) associated with actual tribal practices in Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia.
It is of course possible that attitudes toward male circumcision might change among Jews, reflecting a more universalist and cosmopolitan viewpoint. (The medical arguments against circumcision are much less likely to convince Jews, since they have been debated extensively for a thousand years.) For now, however, the inroads anticircumcision thinking has made seem to be short. This indicates, I think, that the great majority of Jews, including those who think of themselves as enlightened and liberal, are comfortable enough with the tribalism inherent in male circumcision.
They recognize, below the surface, that circumcision cannot really be justified on rational grounds. It is, in the end, a deeply ingrained group practice, one that is also doubtless bound up in the psychosexual phenomenology of fathers and sons. I know plenty of Jews who wince at the thought of circumcision, prefer not to attend circumcision rituals, or feel faint when they do. But mostly, these Jews choose to circumcise their sons, if they have them. Perhaps they cannot precisely say why. The real answer is that they do it because it has always been done, and because it is definitional for their conception of (male) Jewishness.
The persistence of circumcision is, then, surely one of the most powerful indicators of persistent tribalism in Jewish thought and practice. Can it shed light on the question of marriage between Jews and non-Jews? At one level, the answer is yes. Otherwise rational and cosmopolitan Jews who bridle at the thought of their children marrying non-Jews, even without what they would themselves consider a good argument for it, are demonstrating tribalism. This is the same tribalism that those same Jews probably demonstrated in having their sons circumcised. Culturally conditioned instinct is culturally conditioned instinct. Totem is totem. Taboo is taboo.
So a Jewish parent who, without being able to say quite why, embraces circumcision and rejects Jewish marriage to a non-Jew, may be a Jew who is comfortable with a degree of tribalism. That parent’s most honest answer to the child who proposes to marry a non-Jew would be, “I just don’t want you to. It’s against the traditions of the tribe. It’s taboo. It doesn’t feel right.”
Nothing is wrong with this answer. Things get a bit more complicated if the child’s response pits romantic love, voluntary choice, and the negative aspects of tribalism against the parents’ honest invocation of tribal feeling. What we are then left with is what might be called default tribalism: tribalism that remains in effect unless it is overwhelmed or overcome by some other set of powerfully held values. In the case of circumcision, neither the argument from voluntarism nor the argument from medical harm seems to have sufficient weight to convince the great majority of Jews to give up their tribal practice. In the case of marriage to non-Jews, however, the arguments on the other side seem to be more powerful, particularly for Jews who are not Traditionalists or Evolutionists. In the United States, the rate of Jewish marriage to non-Jews has continued to rise consistently, reaching around 50 percent. Israeli Jews nearly always marry other Jews, but some evidence suggests that if they leave Israel, their likelihood of doing so begins to conform to the norms that exist outside Israel.
Nevertheless, it remains improbable that marriages between Jews and non-Jews would eliminate or even substantially reduce the Jewish population worldwide, especially if Jewishness is defined by self-identification and not by Traditionalist Jewish law. For one thing, studies suggest that a substantial and continuously growing number of the children of Jews who marry non-Jews identify as Jews, more than in previous generations. For another, birth rates among Traditionalist Jews remain disproportionately high. Even if some number of the children of Jews cease to identify as Jews, Traditionalists will make up the slack.
The old adage remains true: the one thing that each generation of Jews has in common with every other is the complete confidence that it is the last.
US AND THEM
Not so far beneath the surface of the taboo against Jews marrying non-Jews lies buried the division that haunts the whole topic of Jewish peoplehood: the division between Us and Them. No group of any kind or of any size is free of this specter. Carl Schmitt, a repugnant, antisemitic genius (yes, they exist), asserted that all genuinely political actions and motives can be reduced to the distinction between friends and enemies.29 Schmitt, who joined the Nazi Party and served as Adolf Hitler’s constitutional lawyer (as long as Hitler needed a constitutional lawyer), understood perfectly that, according to Aristotle, humans can be defined as political animals. If to be human is to be political and to be political is to divide the world into ultimate friends and ultimate enemies, then humans are the animal of Us and Them. The thought is horrifying, like most of Schmitt’s. It is also just plausible enough to be possibly true.
Suppose Jewish peoplehood entails some division of the world into Us, people who count as Jews, and Them, people who don’t. What then? I’ve struggled with this question as long as I’ve been able to articulate it. On the one hand, it can’t always be morally wrong to divide the world up into Us and Them. All human beings and all human societies do it frequently. Essentially all people consider some such divisions to be appropriate, at least when they are the divisions that those people consider to be relevant and important.
Even empathy itself, that extraordinary virtue and important human faculty, can only exist if I have divided the world into myself and the other people for whom I have empathy. To have empathy for myself is, strictly speaking, a contradiction, or maybe a metaphor intended to teach us something. Ideally, I should care about myself just because I am myself, not because I’m so self-divided that first I must think of myself as someone else and only then feel care for that person.
On the other hand, there are conditions and circumstances in which it feels wrong—ethically and morally wrong—to divide the world into Us and Them. Love seems like one of those domains. Maybe it is even the most important such domain. To love another person most meaningfully, says Aristotle, is to love that person for what is best in the person’s character or soul.30 What makes you a member of an Us or a Them isn’t your truest soul, or not usually. Membership comes from who you were born to, or the community you choose, or perhaps what you believe. Those are all important elements of your selfhood and character. They aren’t, however, ultimately what makes you you. To use Aristotle’s terminology a last time, in most instances the things that make you part of an Us or a Them seem like accidental aspects of who you are, not your essence.
Love, in its highest form, should be about essence. Yes, as an ordinary human being, I may love someone partly for how the person looks or laughs or sings or thinks or how the person makes me feel. Ideally, however, if I love someone truly, it should be for reasons that transcend these accidental features of the person. I would love the person even if those accidental features changed, because I love the person’s soul.
If this is right, even partly, then there is something troubling about saying that I can only love someone if the person is part of my Us, not if the person is part of my Them. I meet someone. We speak. We connect. We go deep, eventually or quickly. We discover things in one another that arouse genuine love of one another’s souls. Could we, should we, then say, “Our connection cannot be complete, because we are not part of the same Us”?
In the premodern world, before liberalism or Romanticism, it may have been possible to answer this question by explaining that the truest, highest form of love had nothing to do with marriage. Aristotle was describing loving friendship between men, whom he believed (in the benighted sexist way of the ancient Athenians) were the only sex capable of this kind of true love. For him, marriage fulfilled other functions. In this Aristotle was not alone. Many, probably most civilizations throughout history have conceptualized marriage as fulfilling a range of purposes potentially different from the deepest and truest love between people: functions like household partnership, companionship, familial alliance, procreation, and child rearing. If marriage is seen from this perspective, it is not so strange to say that people should only be married to another if they belong to the same Us. People may love each other even if they don’t belong to the same Us, but love and marriage are not the same thing, and indeed are not inherently connected.
To be sure, for as long as we have records of literature, humans have fallen in love and wanted to marry each other, even when they belonged to a different Us. Shakespeare’s depiction of Romeo and Juliet’s forbidden love was powerful when written precisely because it was not only an invention of love but an artistic depiction of an utterly familiar situation. People fall in love with the wrong partners in the Bible and in ancient Greek epic and drama and in Hindu classics and pre-Islamic Arab poetry and beyond. The common lesson of all those literatures, however, is ordinarily that love and marital partnership cannot invariably go together. The distinction between Us and Them generally wins. That’s the tragedy. It’s devastating.
To us moderns or postmoderns or whatever it is that we are today, the picture feels and looks different. We believe firmly that it should be possible to choose one’s love as one’s partner. Things might not work out, we know. Contemporary Western society has divorce rates unimagined in the great majority of other societies that have existed throughout history, maybe precisely because we want love and marriage to go together forever. Yet we persist in believing that the confluence of voluntary choice and Romantic attachment ought to be followed. To deny people the opportunity to marry whom they choose and whom they love seems to us inhuman and cruel.
Never mind that there exists a tension, even a contradiction, between our liberal, voluntary idea about the freedom to choose a partner and the Romantic belief that you precisely cannot choose whom you love, because it just happens. We believe both of those things with equal certainty and confidence. We cannot do otherwise, or at least we do not choose to believe otherwise.**
Seen through the lens of our complex, partly contradictory beliefs about love and marriage, it does not feel ethically right to say that we will only marry people who count as our Us. This poses the most fundamental problem for the Jewish taboo against marrying a non-Jew. When our tribalism or our taboos do not contradict our most strongly held beliefs, we feel comfortable keeping them. When they do, we feel the taboos must go.
If there were a simple answer to this problem, I would give it. I fear there is not. It would be so wonderful to quote my grandmother: “It’s as easy to fall in love with a rich girl as a poor girl,” and transpose the adage (which, it turns out, isn’t Yiddish††) to say, “It’s as easy to fall in love with a Jewish girl (or guy) as a non-Jewish girl.” But of course, the subtext of the adage is surely that its text is quite wrong. If love were a voluntary choice, it would be true. Jews could restrict their loves (and maybe their acquaintanceships, just to be safe) to other Jews, and then no difficulties would arise. But once we treat love as, to a degree, beyond our control, then we need to acknowledge that we love whom we happen to love. And if we want to be able to choose to marry that person, then we might find ourselves in conflict with the taboo.
The issue is not one of willpower but of ethical values. A Jew can choose not to marry someone who is not Jewish, even if they are in love. The question is whether doing so would violate a core tenet of living well, namely giving that love a chance to manifest itself through an aspirationally lifetime partnership.
For those whose faith in God is clear, the challenge does not necessarily disappear. If God prohibits the union, it does not follow that it cannot go forward. Rather, the marriage can go forward only in outright rebellion against the divine decree or in shamefaced recognition of the sin against God’s law. Both stances are painful. And both are possible. Similarly, if God deems us all universally part of the same human race and rejects such differentiation, then the union is blessed, and yet some residual taboo may nevertheless weigh against it. For those whose faith is less resolute, the uncertainty will be more challenging still.
Perhaps the only advice I can give—not that you’ve asked for it—is that whatever course seems best to you, there is wisdom in empathizing with those who choose to live otherwise. In the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, the union of the loving couple is the central metaphor for the mystical union of the godhead; that is, such a union symbolizes the very purpose of existence itself. It is, in this mystical tradition, a transmutation of differences into oneness and wholeness. Its stakes are cosmic. It is not the fate of the Jewish people that rests on its accomplishment. It is the fate of the world as a whole.