There is a note of tragic foreboding in the twelfth chapter of the first Book of Kings. This is where “Israel rebelled against the house of David” and the Kingdom of Israel, united under Saul, David, and Solomon, is split asunder as Jeroboam, a head man of the tribe of Ephraim, leads the ten tribes of the North against the southern kingdom of Judah. It’s a complicated situation; Rehoboam, the Judahite king, is weak and incompetent but, from the perspective of the authors, he is Solomon’s son and God’s legitimate anointed king of the House of David. Even if you don’t know how this is all going to end, it’s hard not to sense that it will end badly.
… And it does. The two kingdoms of Israel, Judah and Samaria, remained at war or, at best, an uneasy peace for the next 180 years, until the northern kingdom was swept away by Sargon’s Assyrian army in 720 BCE. The ten northern tribes of Israel were, according to legend, deported and dispersed – lost. Only the Kingdom of Judah, whose people were the Yehudi, remained. And then only for another 135 years.
Whether one believes in the historicity of the biblical account, and there are many good reasons to doubt much of it, one of the principal lessons that Jews (the descendants of the Yehudi) have drawn from the story over the millennia is that a rupture in Am Yisroel (the people of Israel) can only lead to catastrophe and hardship for all of us. And, as I have been reading reports about how the State of Israel’s new extreme-right-wing government is planning to greatly restrict the Law of Return, I cannot shake the ancestral memory of Jeroboam’s Rebellion and the sundering of Biblical Israel from my thoughts.
Since 1950, every person with a Jewish grandparent has had the right to move to the State of Israel (“make Aliyah”) and become an Israeli citizen. The rationale in 1950 was that, since the new state was to be a refuge for Jews facing the kind of horror that had just occurred in Europe, anyone who fell into the Nazi Nuremberg Law racial categories of Jude or Mischling would be welcomed in the State of Israel – no questions asked. It didn’t matter what you believed, where you came from, whether you were circumcised or whether you ever went to shul, if you were the kind of person the Nazis would send to the crematoria, you would be safe in the State of Israel. The Knesset passed the law unanimously.
The Law of return always made a certain amount of sense, and was the strongest ethical case for the very existence of the State of Israel. Yet now, hardliners like Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionism Party and one of the powerbrokers in the new Israeli government, are passionately advocating for the Right of Return (as it is known in Zionist circles) to be restricted only to Jews who are Jewish according to Halakha (religious law), as interpreted by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.
That means that only Jews with Jewish mothers, who were Brit Milah by an Orthodox mohel, or “new Jews” who converted in the Orthodox tradition, will have the Right of Return. Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist Jews, secular Jews, and new Jews converted by their rabbis will not be, by Israeli legal standards, Jews. The Israeli right is, in effect, denying the Jewishness of much more than half of the Diaspora Jewish community.
Including me.
Don’t get me wrong: I have no pressing desire to make Aliyah. I am a proud Goles (diaspora) Jew committed to doykayt (hereness) and Yiddishkayt (Ashkenazi Jewish culture). While I regard Israeli Jews as members of my extended mishpukheh (family) and wish them the best as fellow members of Am Yisroel (though I wish they’d get their shit together and stop being such shmuks to the Palestinians), the State of Israel is not my country; I don’t feel any particular connection to it as either a homeland or an obligation. Yet, the right-wing extremists who now control the Israeli government are preparing to arrogate the right to determine who is, and who is not Jewish, and I regard this as not only profoundly insulting, but an existential threat to my people.
Jewish life and culture can be extraordinarily complicated; it isn’t for nothing that we joke about “two Jews, three opinions.” And one of these complexities is that neither the Torah, nor the other books of the Tanakh specify how one converts to Judaism (let alone how to get married, whether to have a B’nei Mitzvah ceremony, or that chicken is fleysh), or how to be a Jew apart from circumcision and abstaining from treyf. The only thing that we are certain of about in-group/out-group boundaries going back to the proto-Jewish, Israelitish bronze age is that neither we nor our ancestors ate pork (pig bones have almost never been found in Israelite archeological sites despite our immediate neighbors’ fondness for pork), and that we have always trimmed the foreskin from our sons’ shmekls. In fact, one of the oldest and most common Jewish terms for non-Jews is “the uncircumcised.”
Ruth, the Moabite heroine of the biblical Book of Ruth, who is often celebrated as a paragon of the frumish convert (she marries the Israelite Boaz and is an ancestor of King David) was not circumcised, of course, but she probably did keep kosher. On the other hand, she probably did not actually become a Jew, either, since it is pretty clear that only men were really considered members of the kehillah (community) until long after 70 CE. (That was the year that the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem during the First Jewish Rebellion, and it represents one of the most traumatic watershed moments in our long history as a people.)
Indeed, the actual means of conversion to Judaism, particularly the requirement of matrilineal descent, are Halakhic: they were established in Mishnaic and Talmudic literature mostly after 70 CE, when we had to find a way to keep our community alive after the Romans cut the heart out of our religious observances and decapitated the priesthood. In fact, apart from circumcision and kashrut, the current Orthodox requirements for conversion to and membership in the community are of fairly recent origin. Bear in mind, of course, that we have been around for a long time and, by Jewish standards, the middle-ages are comparatively “recent.”
The Idumeans were forcibly converted to Judaism in the second century BCE (we did stupid things like that back then), long before the codification of Halakha, and I am pretty sure that the Judean warlord John Hyrcanus did not enquire into their mothers’ backgrounds. In fact, as much as 20 percent of the population of the Eastern Roman Empire before 70 CE was Jewish, with a significant population of uncircumcised “God Fearers” (φοβούμενοι τὸν Θεόν) besides. (These were sort of unofficial Jews who gave up souvlaki and ham, but didn’t want anyone to hurt their shmekls, but were still regarded as part of Am Yisroel.) It is highly unlikely that this vast population of Jews were all descended from Jewish mothers, or were converted according to Halakhic standards that – and I cannot stress this enough – did not yet exist.
That bears thinking about. What it means is that Jewish traditions and practices, including the very question of who belongs and who doesn’t, have been historically fluid and changeable. They have evolved in different ways, in different places, to address different kinds of social and cultural contexts. It is worth noting that very few of the Jewish, Converso, or Marrano refugees from Sefarad were Halakhically Jewish by the standards demanded by Orthodox authorities and their extremist proxies in the State of Israel, and the implications of that are perhaps earth-shattering.
As Mordecai Kaplan observed in Judaism as a Civilization, we are not some primordial religious culture forever set, unchanging, in the amber of the bronze age Levant. We have adapted, interpreted, and reinterpreted our laws, practices, indeed our beliefs to meet the changing realities and exigencies of our long, so often troubled history. As much as he was committed to “Tradition,” Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman recognized that traditions have to change while still being traditions. Even the Orthodox Union, the federation of rabbis that serves as the gatekeeper and guardian of American Jewish Orthodoxy, made a point of declaring that we must understand the Tanakh itself as reflecting the values and ideas of the times in which it was written.
So, what we are seeing in the State of Israel today is not the defense of immutable Jewish values and practices at all, but the institutionalization of maximalist Zionist ideology, whose whole point has always been Diaspora Negation (שלילת הגלות). That is: the idea that the State of Israel can only justifiably exist as a negation of the very possibility of Diaspora Jewish life. It regards the question of the legitimacy of the existence of the “Jewish State” in terms of the notion that one simply cannot be a Jew outside of it, once it has been established. Consequently, no one outside of Medines Yisroel is a member of Am Yisroel, unless they make Aliyah, or will make Aliyah, or are only temporarily resident in the Goles serving as an agent of the State of Israel.
In this thinking, the State of Israel has arrogated the right to determine the contours of all Jewish life, and indeed we see this in the colonization of all Diaspora Jewish institutions with the goal of establishing a kind of “Third Temple Judaism” that faces directly to Jerusalem, and where extremist Zionists like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir are its kohanim (priests). Now, they have taken this a step further by institutionalizing the ethnonationalist idea that one can only be a Jew in relation to – and preferably resident in and a subject to – the State of Israel, and thus only on its terms.
The maximalist Zionists who now control the Israeli government are, in effect, intentionally precipitating a rupture between the two houses of Am Yisroel. They are is cutting all of us in the Diaspora loose, showing us the door and telling us that we are no longer Jews at all. Should they succeed, and I believe that they might, it will be a catastrophe for our people on the order of the dissolution of the united Kingdom of Israel 2743 years ago… And we know how that ended.
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Image: Jeroboam sacrificing to his idol by Claes Corneliszoon Moeyaert, 1641 (with edits)