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Back to Question of the Week Back to Archives Q: Two readers have written recently requesting information about matrilineal and patrilineal descent in Judaism. |
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A: Before getting to the history, I want to challenge my readers to think about the fundamental question that is often overlooked in debates about this issue: Who cares?! In other words, our answers to the question of how (if?) one inherits Jewishness should be related to our answers to the questions of what it means to be considered officially a Jew. What's a Jew? What are the implications of being one or not being one? Finally, (and not unrelatedly), who gets to decide the answers to these questions? Now don't lose sight of those questions while you pick up a little background history on the issue. Originally, (at least through the period of the first Temple) all aspects of Jewish identity were inherited from the father. This was true of tribal status and remains true today for the only tribal identities that (some) Jews maintain: Kohen, Levi, and Yisra'el. The royal line of David, as well as the royal lines of the various dynasties of the northern kingdom of Israel, passed from Jewish father to Jewish son, regardless of the ethnicity of the mother. A very telling verse is Leviticus 24:10:
This verse obviously makes a distinction between the son of an Israelite woman and an actual Israelite. In the Torah, Israelite identity was inherited through the father. At some point, Jewish identity in cases of mixed parentage started to be inherited from the mother. It seems that this was the position of the prophet Ezra, at the time of the return of the Babylonian exiles. Chapters 9 and 10 of the book of Ezra describe how he convinced the returning Jews (=returning Jewish men) to send their foreign wives and their children back to Babylonia or wherever they came from. However, because there is still debate on the matter in the Talmud, it is clear that this didn't become universal practice for many centuries. There have been many explanations offered for the change in practice, but there is not currently any unanimity about the causes. Explanations include the adoption of the Roman custom of a certain period, halachic exegesis of Deuteronomy 4:7, the greater public certainty about maternity versus paternity and others. I personally am most convinced by the theory that the change originated in an exilic situation in which Jews and gentiles lived in more or less separate communities, where marriage between the communities was illicit, and where a non-Jewish woman would have no option but to return to her community and would take any children with her. The halachah that gave the mother's status to the child then simply encoded the social reality. With the American and French revolutions, and the developments that ensued throughout the world, that social reality began to change. A person's social identity was no longer that of a member of a group, such as the Jews, but that of individual citizen. And it became possible for two citizens of different ethnic and religious affiliations to be civilly married. The American Reform movement responded to these changes relatively early. The 1909 Rabbis' Manual of the Central Conference of American Rabbis stated that the child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother was to be considered Jewish without a formal conversion, provided that the child was actively raised as a Jew: that is, that the child was circumcised if male, went through religious school, was confirmed, etc. This position was reaffirmed several times over the course of this century. This change in practice was hardly noticed and was not a major issue of contention in the Jewish world for most of the century because the rate of intermarriage was still quite low. However, when in the late seventies, the Reconstructionist movement declared that it accepted the children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers as Jews, and when in 1983, the Reform movement reaffirmed its earlier acceptance of patrilineal descent (with an important twist that I will describe below), the matter was greeted with much furore and controversy. The change in attitudes was again the result of changes in the social situation. There were now large numbers of intermarriages, and the status of their children was a real issue (at least in terms of numbers; recall my challenge at the beginning of this answer) that impinged emotionally and ideologically on other areas of Jewish concern, including high rates of assimilation and questions of "continuity." So because of the sociological situation, the 1983 American Reform statement was greeted (even by Reform Jews) as if it were a declaration, rather than a reaffirmation of the principle of patrilineal descent. What really was new about that statement was that it required formal acts of Jewish identification of the children of all mixed marriages; the children of Jewish mothers and non-Jewish fathers were no longer to be considered automatically Jewish. That is what the 1983 statement was about de jure. What is the de facto practice? Most American Reform rabbis probably maintain the pre-1983 practice of automatically accepting the Jewish status of the child of a Jewish mother and requiring formal acts of identification of the children of a Jewish father. In the Canadian Reform rabbinate, which objected as a group to the adoption of the 1983 statement, all of the rabbis accept the child of a Jewish mother automatically as Jewish, and many require the rites of conversion for the children of a non-Jewish mother as the formal acts of identification. The Conservative and Orthodox denominations and many individual Reform and Reconstructionist Jews continue to oppose the principle of patrilineal descent. From the Conservative and Orthodox points of view, it is simply outside the bounds of Jewish law, the halachah, as they understand it. And given that fact, and a commitment to the unity of the Jewish people, many Jews who do not consider themselves bound by halachah also oppose practices that result in differing definitions of "who is a Jew" among different segments of the Jewish People. Okay, you've got some background. Now, if you know what the question is, you're ready to set about answering it for yourself. written by Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz |
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