Nothing to do with maintaning “genetic purity”. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew- regardless of the color of their skin, the type of hair or facial feautures they have etc. The idea is that two Jews who marry and reproduce will raise Jewish children and the population of Jews will go up or at least stay stable. The risk of Jews marrying gentiles is that their children will not be raised as Jews and there will be fewer Jews in the world. My great aunt Esther married Danny (a fine man and the life of any party). Danny was Roman Catholic. Their children were Roman Catholics.
Back To The OP
After two bad marriages, my sister called me up and said “I’m done with men. From now on, I’m dating girls.” I said “Okay. But, only date Jewish girls.”. Now, she’s in a relationship with a wonderful woman- who is a shikseh.
Re Sitting Shiva
Technically, this violates Jewish law. The Talmud says that you must always keep at least a small opening in your life through which you might reconcile. In practice, I’m sure it still happens.
Re Who Should Shun
It was my understanding that any Jew was supposed to shun somebody who married outside the faith. From a standpoint of Jewish law, they’ve committed a pretty large crime.
BTW
I’m not planning on shunning my sister- at least not over the shikseh. After two awful husbands, she really hit the jackpot.
ETA
I’ve known atheists with more knowledge of the Talmud, Yiddish and Jewish American culture than I have. Under Jewish law, if you come out of a Jewish mother then you’re a Jew. I’ve even met an atheist rabbi. As we’ve said before in many threads, a Jew is required to DO certain things and to NOT DO certain things. Nowhere is a Jew commanded to BELIEVE anything.
That just reminded my of a contemporaneous MAD magazine cartoon. Highly paraphrased, I’m sure, it’s a 40 year old + memory.
A young women tells her parents she is dating a black guy. They sort of flip out and try to forbid it. She retorts “When that girl in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner brought home Sidney Portier, you said you didn’t mind.
And the father replies “If you bring home Sidney Portier, I won’t mind.
And, just an anecdote- my business partner is Israeli. As is his family. And the are all very Jewish. One of this brothers, however married a Christian woman. And one year, the entire extended family celebrated Christmas for her. My friend was extremely puzzled by , as he put it, “that whole hanging your socks on the fireplace thing”.
But they all had a really good time. I thought it was kind of cool.
Nava, I really don’t think you understand. It wasn’t a matter of participation in religious ceremony - the person marrying-out was shunned - a funeral was held, after which the person was not to be spoken to, not acknowledged if passed in the street, not spoken of…
I hate to rely over-much on Fiddler on the Roof because, after all, it is a sanitized, Broadway musical look at life in an Eastern European shtetl in the late 19th/early 20th Century but that is, in fact, where my family’s father came from - a small, mostly Jewish village in Eastern Europe (the location apparently stayed in place while the Russia/Poland border vibrated back and forth across it over the years). The treatment of the third daughter, Chava, after she marries her gentile husband is very much what I’m talking about here.
Here is a quote from a Syrian rabbi in 2017 from here. The quote is from quite a way down the article if you want to look for it yourself. I have added some emphasis.
As I mentioned, the observance of the shunning custom in my father’s family was varied, but there were indeed people who never spoke to or acknowledged my parents or us children after that. This isn’t a matter of “oh, you can’t attend a religious ceremony”, it was a complete rejection and ostracization of the people involved. As I noted, in a large city this may not be such a big deal but certainly back when people lived in segregated villages it was.
Nope. Who was Jewish and who wasn’t in the mixed couple didn’t matter.
My Jewish grandparents came over earlier than that - between 1890 and 1900.
I’m not judging them - I’m just curious about the details of the custom.
If your mother was a Jew then according to the Jews you are also a Jew. Which may or may not mean anything to you, personally, and you might never practice the religion or customs and maybe don’t give a fig about the whole group, but you’re still ethnically Jewish. It’s not something you personally get to define, other people define it for you - if it’s not the Jews consulting their rule books it’s something like the Nuremberg Laws.
Has nothing to do with genetic purity. It’s about tribal identity. Those who join the tribe - that is, those who convert - become full members of the tribe. If a gentile woman, before she marries a Jewish man, completes a conversion to Judaism then she is Jewish and any of her children born after that are just as Jewish as anyone else (children from prior relationships are not).
(Most) Jews do recognize that people converting from outside their faith/ethnicity is a good thing as it prevents inbreeding. They don’t go looking for converts, but those who are sincere about changing their status are welcomed.
Then there are folks like me who point out that if you didn’t make a point of treating the children of interfaith marriages as lepers/pariahs/non-persons (which is not to say YOU do, or YOUR community did, just a general statement) you might get more of them staying within the Jewish fold. As an example, of the four children of my parents two of us as adults spent time within Jewish communities so hey, that’s two out of four you might have kept. But when you grow up with your closest relatives pushing you away saying “you aren’t one of us, go sit over there with those people” then no, you’re not going to get a lot of folks interested in your camp. Tell kids you don’t belong here often enough and they might well start to believe it. And that’s the folks willing to talk to the kids at all. Becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
(Just to clarify - it was never quite that bad for us growing up. But that might also be in part because at a certain point my parents moved hundreds of miles away from the relatives. It think it was in part to get away from the bullshit and arguing but I was very young and not aware of some of this until much later.)
If you want to get along with your neighbors then inevitably some of the kids are going to cross lines their parents didn’t and marry those weird people over on the next street or whatever (that is, more or less, what happened with my parents - a group of Christians and Jews wanted better relations with the neighbors and - oh, surprise! - there were a few kids who started dating across religious/ethnic lines). You can either react with horror, or accept that this sort of thing is going to happen and keep the lines open with the kids. Maybe, if they have a positive experience of your culture, they’ll be interested in joining/staying with the tribe? (Whichever tribe that is - I grasp that mom’s family was not happy about any of this, either, but they didn’t feel a religious/cultural obligation to shun her.)
Eh, as already noted, since a woman who converts is just as much a Jew as a woman born Jewish that actually proves nothing.
In the late eighteenth century one of my ancestors married a Jewish woman from eastern Europe and was beheaded. This was in what is now Germany. Twenty something years ago I married a Jewish woman of eastern European descent, and I’m still here. Nobody on either side objected; both my Southern Baptist parents and my wife’s secular Jewish parents were fine with it, as was my wife’s observant (Reform) grandma.
In college I had a Jewish roommate who had three older brothers. Now, her parents were always very nice to me, but they were the kind of people who not only had two sets of dishes, they had two dishwashers. One of her older brothers married outside the faith, and in fact his wife converted, but nonetheless he was dead to them and they sat shiva.
Then a couple of years later another brother killed himself. Faced with the fact of actual rather than symbolic death, the parents let the first brother and his wife back into the family. “After all, she converted. She’s one of us now.”
My roommate went all crazy in college. She dated Catholics. She dated heathens. She dated an Arab! She did not introduce these guys to her parents but she thought they’d be okay with it after their previous experience. At least, sometimes she thought that, other times she said, “My mother will plotz!” But then her parents hired a matchmaker to find her a proper Jewish fellow. This marriage did not work out very well, but it happened. She left him for an itinerant Cajun truck driver, and I lost touch with her after that so I don’t know how her parents felt about that. Her mother probably plotzed.
I think what Nava is saying is that from the perspective of the shunners, they aren’t shunning the person. Rather, the way they see it is that the person being shunned has abandoned the group/family by marrying out of the group. There’s always more than one perspective , even if people outside the situation tend to agree with one more than the other.
Hell, remember when it was a lot stricter? Catholics and Protestants didn’t marry one another. My mother’s friend from Ireland told her about the time she caught her (Catholic) mother-in-law trying to baptize her eldest in the kitchen sink! I can’t imagine what would’ve happened if she had been Jewish!
So, like what happened to Protestantism in the US?
The low birthrate of non-Orthodox Jews and the high birth rate of ultra/orthodox Jews isn’t going to be a problem in the US but it may become so in Israel when you have a third of the voting population that wants to make Eretz Israel great again.
That sounds like a pretty neurotic family all around.
I agree with that. And AFAIK that reality has become more accepted even in a US society where it’s more and more common for it to be called ‘problematic’ to acknowledge various obvious realities.
But I remember when I was a kid in Queens in an area where the great majority were either Irish, Italian or Jewish (along with some other miscellaneous white ethnics and a few random WASP’s; there were African American kids at school but not living in the neighborhood), the polite rule was to call Judaism a religion and nothing else.
But that doesn’t mean it was true. And it’s gotten obviously less true as a greater % of Jews (like other religions if not all to the same degree) have become non-observant. Being non-observant, even totally so, is clearly a separate decision from deciding not to acknowledge oneself as a Jew. Which doesn’t mean the Jewish nation is 100% uniform worldwide: close friends of ours are non-observant Israeli immigrants to the US, earlier generations of whose families fled Poland. There’s a certain separation they feel from mutual friends who are Jewish multi-generation Americans, observant or not, but still no question from all their perspectives that they are Jews, and we are not. Same would go for pointing to recent immigrants to Israel or elsewhere who have a particular ethnic ‘imprint’ from Russia, Africa, etc. That doesn’t contradict the general point.
British politician Edwina Currie ‘married out’ in 1972, and her Orthodox family disowned her. The experience informed her novel, *She’s Leaving Home. *
Rand of course was vehemently atheistic. She had two friends, a middle-aged woman and her adult daughter, who used to come over every Sunday and chat with Rand. One Sunday, the subject turned to Hitler. The older woman said, “I know Hitler did some pretty bad things. But the one good thing he did was exterminate all those Jews.” Rand suddenly stood up, hands on hips, and said, “You apparently don’t know this, but I’m Jewish!” Rand’s husband quietly escorted the women out to their car, never to be seen again.
I can personally attest that in 2019, for an American, (baptized and raised in the LDS “Mormon” faith, but haven’t practised in 30+ years) marrying a Polish Catholic woman in Krakow (in a Catholic church ceremony) entailed miles of incredibly complex red tape that included the Polish government, the American government, the Catholic church and the Mormons, all working individually to make things as confusing, expensive and difficult as possible.
(apparently there are many others in similar situations here in Poland and other Catholic European countries, in particular Belgium for some reason, who choose to elope to Denmark, which is kind of the Las Vegas of Europe when it comes to “quickie” weddings with little paperwork that are sill legally valid in all EU countries, the USA and most other nations)
Yes, kinda crazy for 2019… I have a friend in Israel, and she was telling me its so difficult, one would have to renounce their religion, or the other would have to convert, for LEGAL reasons. She also said when those went through all that, they’d be shunned by family, etc.
Which reminds me when my cousin’s daughter married a Mexican-American… No one cared about that, but some didn’t come because he was already married once, and had two kids (Catholics)… I never ever go to weddings, even when I was that young, but I went in a form of human solidarity.
Or they go to Cyprus for the wedding, which apparently is very common for both Israelis and Lebanese who want to marry someone of another or no religion.
Cyprus was also recommended to us as an option for quick weddings without a lot of nonsense regulations designed to make things more difficult and expensive that they ought to be.
In case anyone cares, we were finally married 3 weeks aso here in the heart of Old Town Krakow in front of our family & friends (from 6 different countries, all told) in the stunningly beautiful Kolegiata sw’ Anny (St. Anne’s church) which apparently dates back to the 14th Century, and is where my wife’s parents were married 49 years ago, and where my wife was baptized as an infant, so sometimes there are happy endings afterall.