This gentile understands (?) that , a person is born a true Jew , ONLY if their MOTHER was DEFINITELY Jewish.
I was reading an article on Bobby Fischer -magnificent chessplayer and also , alas , a nasty racist.
His mother was Jewish yet he renounced any claim to being Jewish .
On this basis , would he always be considered Jewish ?
Or is being Jewish , technically , non-renounceable?
Thank you for your help.
In the eyes of Jewish law, being Jewish is, technically, non-renouncable.
In the eyes of Jewish law, being Jewish defines a certain set of mutual obligations between that person (every Jewish person, that is) and G-d. It cannot be renounced unilaterally.
A person always has the free will to decide not to fulfill those obligations, but it doesn’t make him (from the perspective of Jewish law) any less obligated.
Would he be counted in a minyan? Yes.
Would I invite him to my seder? No.
;j
I’m not so sure he’d be counted in a minyan… Check with a rav before doing so. See commentaries as they pertain to Moranos and they’re status. There’s an interesting story related Moranos that went to Tzfat in the times of the Ari…
I believe that a cohain who “converts out”, but returns actually loses his status as a cohain and is treated as a geir. I’d have to check back into this, and BTW I am not a rav, so don’t take my word for it. But this seems to imply that there really is a change in a person’s status, particularly as it might pertain to being counted in a minyan.
But it is true that once a person’s a Jew, there’s no getting out of it.
I believe that I learned this at one time as well. Of course, I don’t have any sefarim with me at work, but it would make some interesting learning for Shabbos.
**
This is, to the best of my knowledge, incorrect. A Kohen is a Kohen for life, and nothing he does can change that. He can cause his children to lose Kohanic status by marrying a woman he is not allowed to marry and having children with her. But he himself forever remains bound to the restrictions of the kehunah.
However, if he is currently worshipping another religion, or married to a woman to whom he should not be married to, he should not duchan.
IIRC, a person who “converts” to another religion cannot be counted for a minyan. They are also treated as non-Jews WRT to certain other laws as well (stam yainam comes to mind). But, in reality, they are still full-fledged Jews and do not need a formal conversion to return to the fold. All they need is a whole-hearted repentance.
Zev Steinhardt
This is almost a moot question. I don’t mean that as a disparagement, allow me to illustrate: My parents, and most of my family, are Jewish. I’m not. For obvious reasons, the opinion of I just mean on the matter is irrelevant to me. Would some consider me Jewish? They might (though they’d better not do so to my face); but why, just by definition, would I care? The orthodoxy of the religion is irrelevant to me and I don’t accept it as truthful, so why would their opinion on my status count?
I’m not trying to be confrontational here, I’m just stating the arguments back and forth. If you are an atheist (like me) or of a generally non-religious persuasion, you might consider Judaism - or any other religion, since I don’t know that there’s anything unique about Judaism in this respect - renounceable. The people ‘running the show’ might not care, but again, their opinion wouldn’t really carry any weight, would it?
I would also add that there probably isn’t a singular ‘Jewish opinion’ on the subject, as different groups (i.e. reform, orthodox, etc.) would doubtless look at the issue in various ways, with differing degrees of leniency and different interpretations.
I don’t understand why I can’t edit my own posts here. What I meant to say in that one bizarro sentence in my first post is “For obvious reasons, the opinion of orthodoxy on the matter is irrelevant to me.”
It may be irrelevant to you, but it’s relevant to us.
For example, I can treat my non-Jewish friend to a pork dinner at the resturaunt of his choice (of course, I can’t eat there…). However, I cannot treat my Jewish friend (regardless of whether or not he “renounces” his Jewishness).
I sometimes bring candy into my office for my co-workers to share. I only bring kosher candy, because there are other Jews in the office who are not religious who would eat the non-kosher candy I brought in. Since I don’t want to cause them to eat non-kosher food, I only bring kosher food. If I knew for certain that everyone else in the office wasn’t Jewish, I would probably buy non-kosher candy; so as to remove the tempation from myself to eat it. 
Zev Steinhardt
Right. Irrelevant may be the wrong word. What I was trying to say - to deal with the question, not to quash it - is that there’s a certain contradiction within the question. To people who have renounced Judaism, it’s renounceable. To others and/or formal institutions, it may not be - but that answer isn’t necessarily of concern to those doing the renouncing in the first place.
Agreed. And I believe the OP was asking WRT Jewish law, not WRT the self-renounced Jew; since, as you mentioned, it makes no difference to the self-renounced Jew (unless he wants to return to Judaism and wants to know whether or not he needs a formal conversion to return).
Zev Steinhardt
I too am not trying to be confrontational, but since you asked, I’ve gotta try to answer…
Consider the possiblity that “others and/or formal institutions” and “the people running the show” might include God and Heaven, if they truly are real. It’s not merely whether or not Jews and Jewish Organizations consider you to be Jewish or not. If it turns out that your professed atheism is in error, and that God considers you to be Jewish, His opinion would certainly carry some weight, whether you choose to concede His authority or not.
I have tried to keep this not only non-confrontational, but also within the GQ context. I’ve tried to avoid expressing my own opinions, and kept myself to examining possibilities about factors whose veracity cannot be determined objectively in this world, yet might nevertheless be true or not true, and whether those factors would be of concern to someone or not. If I have failed in these attempts, I apologize.
Marley and zev:
A similar thing has happened to me. I am non-practicing, and we have an orthodox guy here in the lab. He of course only brings in kosher food for us to eat, and he would never ask me to do a favor for him on Friday night or Saturday, when I am at lab and he is at shul.
This led to an interesting side point. He works closely with a tech who is very into geneaology. She is a Christian, but she mentioned that she had some maternal Jewish ancestors who had converted. Until he could be convinced that it was not a direct maternal line, he asked her not to do his work on Shabbos. Only after she found out that it was a maternal cousin or uncle did they resume working together.
My mother believed her maternal Grandparents were Jewish, and there was a family story that her maternal grandfather was asked to leave the local synagogue (permanently) for marrying the wrong woman after his first wife (my greatgrandmother) died.
My mother tried out a bunch of beliefs during her life, including New-Ageism, and the Plymouth Bretheren, but remained proud of her (believed) Jewish heritage.
So, if she was right am I Jewish? I claim I’m of Jewish blood when anyone I like says something anti-Semitic. If she was wrong, do I need to stop fronting people?
I always thought it was weird for people to impose higher religious standards on me than I impose on myself, or even than my grandparents impose on me. I understand it from an intellectual viewpoint; it’s just counter-intuitive somehow.
Example: one of my co-workers is Orthodox. She has invited me (and various non-Jewish co-workers) to their house on various occasions to observe minor holidays, which I though was very sweet. (Major holidays are spent with my own family, but we don’t do anything on, say, Sukkot.)
Once she invited me to her son’s Bar Mitzvah, at the synagogue where her husband is the rabbi. It’s too far away for me and my ankle hardware to walk from home, so I couldn’t go, because apparently she can’t be the reason for me driving or taking a bus on the Sabbath. She even offered to have me stay with a friend of hers in the neighborhood the night before, so I could walk in the morning, but I felt kind of weird staying with a complete stranger and politely refused. On the other hand, the couple of non-Jewish co-workers could drive, and that was just fine, but even though I lived on their way to the synagogue, it was unacceptable for them to pick me up.
So Orthodox observance levels which aren’t even mine kept me from participating in a religious event. Go figure.
Excellent questions. My guess, from the way you tell the story, is that the events of the story happened too long ago, and the people in those events are no longer with us, so it will be impossible to even know the full truth.
A co-worker of mine was in a similar situation. She was looking around at various religions and got very interested in Judaism. She asked her mother “What would you think if I became Jewish?” Her mother replied, “That’s a good question for Grandma.” On the next visit to her maternal grandmother (which happened to be [Twilight Zone music] on Yom Kippur day [/Twilight Zone music]), she asked again, to which the grandmother replied, “Well, you wouldn’t be the first Jew in the family. My mother was Jewish.” It was clear from the story that the grandmother’s parents had married and agreed to raise their kids in the father’s church.
(She then asked me to check with my ;j rabbi about her status. His response was to consider her fully Jewish in all respects, except that if she would ever marry, she should go through a conversion just to be absolutely sure.)
In any case, as regards
I’d hope you’d have a similar response whether you’re truly Jewish or not. People’s feeling’s abouit bigotry shouldn’t depend on whether or not they are the butt of any particular remark or not. Sorry if this veers off of GQ into GD.
Perhaps. Then again, I wouldn’t be much of an atheist if I thought there was any kind of a chance that was the case, now would I? 
** Keeve**, 'twas only about how I phrase my response to the unthinking commenters, not an “I won’t bother if I’m not the target group” comment (that is laughably far from my nature!).
Ain’t nothing going to sway a person who is set in their prejudice, but some people are just ignorant or unexposed. I’ve found that one of the best ways to get a person with an unthinking prejudice to evaluate it, is to have them see that someone they like is one of the group of people they put down. Note: It doesn’t work so well on those who already think I’m a toad!
But there was also an element to my question of whether “self-identification” was relevant . Here (Australia) one factor in whether or not you can be regarded as Aboriginal is whether you identify yourself as such. I have a niece and nephew-in-law who are siblings, thus with equal proportions of Aboriginalness. One regards themself as Aboriginal, and thus is, the other does not, and thus isn’t.
So, assume a person has been raised by Jewish parents, all adhere to Jewish traditions, and that person regards themself as Jewish. Then, in later life, they discover they are adopted. Do they continue to be Jewish? Were they ever Jewish?
Similar thing happened to a friend. Father was Jewish, mother not. They decided to raise him as Jewish, and converted him following the procedures of their Reform Rabbi. In his teens and later, he embraced Orthodox Judaism, and spent several years in yeshivas in both New York and Israel. At one point, when he was in Israel, the topic of conversion came up in class, and he remarked to himself, “That’s not how I did it!”
He hastily spoke with the dean of the yeshiva, who confirmed that despite many years of acting as a Jew, his conversion did not meet Orthodox standards, and he was actually not Jewish. They were able to arrange a conversion for him about three days later, having decided that the usual period of education, learning how to be a Jew, and investigations of sincerity, were quite superfluous in his case.