Popular demands for transparency in our institutions and the availability of technological means to achieve it have made it hard to keep secrets. This has affected the conduct not only of government and business but also of religion.
Haim Amsalem.
Until modern times, the boundaries of Jewish identity were cut and dried. If you were born to a Jewish mother, or if you were a convert according to Jewish religious law (halakhah), you were Jewish. If not, you weren't.
In 1974, a strange letter from northeastern India landed on the desk of Israel's then Prime Minister Golda Meir. It was sent by a group of Indians claiming to be descendants of the biblical tribe of Menashe.
New immigrants, 1999
Late last week, narrowly averting a looming crisis within world Jewry, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured a postponement, possibly indefinite, of prospective Knesset legislation making the Chief Rabbinate the arbiter of conversion in the Jewish state and thus of who may be eligible for citizenship under Israel's foundational Law of Return. The measure has stirred impassioned debate in and between Israel and the Diaspora, much of it a depressing if also revealing exercise in talking past each other.
Debates over conversion to Judaism show no sign of abating, least of all in Israel. Last week, the legal adviser to the country's chief rabbinate declared that all conversions may retroactively be annulled at any time. In the ensuing firestorm of criticism, even some on the religious Right chimed in, especially those reflecting a historically more lenient Sephardi approach.
A great deal of institutional politics is involved here, including between the ultra-Orthodox in Israel and the Modern Orthodox in the United States; some of this came to light in the recent disgrace and resignation of an ultra-Orthodox foe of the moderates. But there is also genuine—if frequently no less bitter—conflict over principle. For the Orthodox in general, a key question is the place of the traditional requirement that a convert assume the often rigorous demands of Jewish law in their entirety. Is that requirement still necessary, and if so, what is its proper scope?
Is Jewishness a matter of belief, of belonging, of nationality, of religious practice, or of something else? The question, rendered ever more urgent by the quandaries of contemporary Jewish identity, is relevant not only in the Israeli context but (as a recent court case in Britain illustrates) to Diaspora Jews as well. It is perhaps relevant most all to that sizable number of individuals who actively seek to assume the burdens as well as the rewards of this fractious identity, each of whom has a story to tell.
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