Apologies to all. Rather than a dash of antagonism, it was a dash of laziness. I started formulating a reply, but then got caught up on religious Jewish law in the context of the essentially secular law system in Israel, and began to edit, and then bailed.
Laziness colliding with OCD, perhaps? (I wonder what that would feel like - I suffer from both, but never both at once.)
Since Jewishness is so often secular and cultural, today’s society probably could have fun with a Jewishness Quotient, or JQ. Put together a test covering Jewish expressions, inflections, and foodstuffs; questions about traditionally Jewish occupations and preoccupations; cultural talismans from movies, tv, and pop culture; and jokes Jews tell about one another. A section could be multiple-choice, with bonus points for a very Jewish answer and deductions for a non-Jewish answer. The JQ is calculated with 100 as average. 140 and up makes you a macher; 60 or below and you’re a putz.
And my atheist friend is compelled by what higher power to accept Jewish Law proclamation?
None, but the op was not asking what your friend accepts but what Jewish law accepts. Do you comprehend the difference? What your friend accepts is completely off-topic for the op. Functional identity, personal identity, identity as perceived by others in society independent of how you think of yourself … each can be interesting subjects but not the question of the op’s GQ.
Just seems rude identifying someone as something they want no parts of. But I prolly carry a shoulder chip against religion, so there’s that.
Would you feel the same way if the question was “what are the criteria for being considered Apache by the Apache nation?” Would you find it rude to hear that a person born of Apache parents is considered an Apache by the tribe even if they say they are not?
I guess not, and I see what you mean. But in the situation I am familiar with, the affected individual has had god piled into the mix.
“You are an Apache” is one thing, “Because you maternal grandmother was Apache, the great spirit blah, blah, blah” is another thing.
As Jewish isn’t a race but a religion you may as well ask how many generations must pass before you’re no longer a Christian. You’re not a Jew if you stop practicing Judaism. That follows of necessity from the fact that Jewish is not a racial designation. It’s really as simple as that.
It’s just not that simple.
There’s a missing piece to the question, without which it is meaningless:
How many generations AFTER ________ before someone ceases to be considered Jewish?
where the blank represents some event in the person’s ancestry that starts the clock ticking. I guess what the OP has in mind is something like “the ancestor ceases to be a practising Jew” or “the ancestor is no longer aware of her Jewishness”.
It’s as simple or as complicated as people want it to be. In the case of Israel, of course, it becomes complicated because of the rules for citizenry. But I repeat, if Jews are not a race then the only identifying marks are customs and religion, just as with Christianity. I, for instance. am descended from a long line of Christians yet I don’t identify myself as such because I’m an atheist. Similarly if someone is descended from a long line of Judaists and becomes an atheist what is there left to mark him as a Jew other than his descent, and as I say my descent doesn’t make me a Christian. Why should his make him a Jew unless you’re saying that Jews are a race?
Think of “Jews” the same way you think of “Irish.” It’s not a race. But it’s a very real “belong to” group nonetheless; call it an “ethnicity” if you will, or a “culture,” or even a “nationality.”
It’s complicated further by the fact that there is also a religion called Judaism, which roughly coincides (but is not identical!) to the group of people who are ethnically/culturally/nationally Jewish, and you now have a mess on your hands.
Am I Jewish, religion wise? Hell to the no. I’m as atheistic as can be. Am I a Jew? Hell ***yes ***-- my genetics, my culture, my nationality are all related to the fact that I’m Jewish.
I once asked an Israeli how I know I’m Jewish. He answered that mother was. Well how did she know? Well, her mother was. Yes, but suppose you go all the way back. How do I prove it. He got angry.
The genetic truth is that very likely most Ashkenazy Jews are not not Jewish under current Jewish law/interpretation. The reason is that studies of DNA evidence shows that most Ashkenazy have European mitochondrial DNA while most of the men have middle eastern genes on the Y chromosome. For the record, you inherit all your mitochondrial DNA from you mother (there are rare exceptions, of course, nothing in genetics seems to be without exceptions) and males inherit their Y chromosome exclusively from their fathers (females don’t have Y chromosomes, again with rare exceptions, but then they would even more rarely reproduce). The leading hypothesis is that migrant men married local women and raised their children as Jews. Since it seems unlikely that anyone worried in those bygone days about formal conversion it seems likely that none of those children were Jewish under current interpretations. There’s real irony for you.
Anyway, my impression is that even if your mother was Jewish, if you actively participate in another religion, you cease being Jewish. And fuck Hitler.
I don’t see any irony there. There was a time in history where there weren’t any Jews by any interpretation. There was a later time when this particular rule was formalized. What happened before those times isn’t relevant.
Hari Seldon raises an interesting point. Any idea when this matrilinial decent was formalised? I wonder if this was done to prevent marriages outside the fold so to speak. If you go by paternal decent then a man can marry out and no problem. If you limit it to the maternal line, then you have a situation where a man is forced to marry within if he wishes his children to be considered “of the people”.
[QUOTE=Noone Special]
Am I Jewish, religion wise? Hell to the no. I’m as atheistic as can be. Am I a Jew? Hell yes – my genetics, my culture, my nationality are all related to the fact that I’m Jewish.
[/QUOTE]
With respect that is not limited to just Judaism. Many persons are muslim, hindu, buddhist, Anglican, Catholic only as far as culture is concerned, not as to religious belief. Richard Dawkins is a non believer. He is also a cultural christian.
But only because they didn’t bother with formal conversions, if the mothers did practice Judaism (which would be indicated by their rising the children in it), then saying they “didn’t convert” is akin to saying “since the Civil Registry of Marriages hadn’t been invented, they weren’t married.” Yes they were, they just didn’t have the kind of paperwork that has come to be expected under a completely different set of circumstances.
This has already been explained. Prior to DNA testing, there was no certainty who the father was. Prior to in vitro fertilization, you were certain who the mother was. It’s a simple matter of practicality.
No, I think the events Hari Seldon refers to post-date the establishment of the rule of matrilineal descent in Judaism. There’s an interesting article in Commentary that describes some findings discussed in a couple of recent books:
This indicates that the rule about matrilineal descent establishing Jewish identity did exist at the time of those migrations, but since it wasn’t possible to observe it formally, it was tacitly ignored.
Sure. It could also be that many of those women formally converted to Judaism so they became Jewish and had Jewish kids. My ex-wife converted and had we had kids, their genetics would have shown that they were half Swedish.
Some of them may well have done. But the excerpt in the article I linked to goes on to point out that once the new Jewish communities became established enough to have the sort of ritual infrastructure that would support formal conversion procedures, they would tend to resist intermarriage more strongly, with or without conversion:
Even if (some of) the original un-converted non-Jewish women never fully adopted Judaism themselves, and never gave up their own non-Jewish traditions of worship, the patriarchal structure of the society would mean that the communities’ religious identity would still be identified with that of the men. And as generations went by and communities solidified, they’d re-establish the halakhic orthodoxy that their parent communities in distant lands had followed.
So yeah, it seems not unlikely that there are many Ashkenazi Jews today who are descended from believing and/or practicing Christian, Muslim or pagan women back in the long-ago. But they don’t thereby become non-Jewish, because their ancestral communities identified as Jewish and accepted those women as Jewish. Modern genetic nitpicking does not override that social and historical identity.