After 15 people forwarded me the NYTimes link to the article, "Who's A Jew?..." last week, I began working on this OpEd piece... Finally submitted it to the NYTimes on Monday, but they passed... poo on them. Was thinking of submitting it to Salon or Slate... but instead I'm submitting it to the blogosphere... so here it is:
Is Judaism inherently racist?
And is anti-racism inherently anti-Judaic?
For most people, race and religion probably seem like separate matters. But an ongoing legal case in Britain suggests that this is a false dichotomy. State-funded religious schools in Britain may base their admissions policies on students’ faith, but not on their race. However, one of the most salient distinctions between Judaism and Christianity rests upon their distinct understandings of the relationships between faith and race. Christianity is built upon the idea that faith in Christ negates racial and national distinctions; by contrast, Judaism is built upon the identification with Jewish ancestors, particularly those described in the story of Exodus. Anti-racist movements have often invoked Christian notions of universal brotherhood to argue for the rights of all humans, regardless of their ethnic or racial ancestors. While Christian understandings of the irrelevance of race have become the norm in most secular Western societies, the question of who’s a Jew complicates this norm.
Last year, administrators of a London Jewish school rejected a student (“M”) who they regarded as not Jewish. M’s mother had converted to Judaism under the supervision of a liberal rabbi, but according to the Office of the Chief Rabbi (OCR), such a conversion was not valid. And since M had not himself converted, the Chief Rabbi did not regard him as Jewish. The school uses the Chief Rabbi’s criteria to prioritize Jewish students’ admission, so M was not at the top of the list. M’s family sued, and in June 2009, the court ruled that the school’s rejection of the student was in contravention of the laws against racial discrimination. The school has since appealed and the parties are currently awaiting a decision.
So far, the case has focused on whether the school used race or religion as its admissions-criteria. While Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks insists that the decision was a matter of “pure theology,” the court maintains that the school’s decision was based on racial grounds. Neither is correct. The case cannot be solved by deciding which criterion was used because it is not the criteria themselves that are problematic. Rather, the question is whether such criteria were used to withhold power and resources to individuals of a particular community, specifically one that has had less power and resources than others, both historically and presently. Though exclusion and discrimination may be unethical, the criteria themselves are not to blame.
Judaism and Christianity are generally categorized as religions, but their definitions of communal membership have been radically opposed to one another from the very beginning. Collected at the same time as the New Testament, the Talmudic texts became the foundational documents of Judaism, establishing both an interpretive approach to the Hebrew Bible and a distinct understanding of the relationship between Biblical characters and contemporary Jews. The Rabbis of the Talmud declared that anyone with a Jewish mother is him- or herself Jewish, regardless of belief, practice or affiliation. Yet the Rabbis also welcomed converts who, by converting, become bar or bas Avraham, thereby claiming a Jewish genealogy.
Meanwhile, in the New Testament, Saint Paul proclaims, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then are you Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” In other words, regardless of ancestry, nationality, class or gender, anyone and everyone can and should join the universal brotherhood of Christ by proclaiming their faith in Him. Where Jewish authorities might disagree about what sorts of evidence are necessary to determine one’s genealogy, Christian authorities disagree about which authority--eg. the Church or the individual--has the power define one’s faith. Neither is a simple matter. And neither definition of community is more egalitarian than the other.
The irony is that while Christianity insists upon a definition of community that disregards ancestry, gender and class, it has no place for individuals who refuse to embrace Christ as their god and thereby reject Christian universalism. It is no surprise, then, that Christians have often criticised Jews for their insularity, exclusivism, and more recently, racism. With the emergence of secular societies, Christian universalism was re-invented as secular rationalism and universal humanism. Though Jews have often been vociferous spokespeople for secularism, they continue to use genealogy to define themselves (and their ancestors) as Jews.
American conversations about race have tended to focus on overcoming racism based on physical differences. But overcoming racism is not the same as overcoming race. In America and elsewhere, concepts of race have never been limited to the perception of physical differences: In the eras both of Jim Crow and of Affirmative Action, for example, a person could be legally regarded as X (black, Jewish, Asian-American, Native American etc.) if she had an X parent or grandparent, or even a great-grandparent. To this day, our perceptions of who’s who are often shaped by what we know, assume or discover about a person’s ancestors. Such knowledge is not (only) used to pass judgment, but more importantly to understand the ineradicable traces of history with which we all live. Thus, it is undeniable that a white person lives with the accumulated effects of white domination of the past, while a black person--even our 44th president--lives with the effects of the history of American racism.
Since the Holocaust, Jews and non-Jews alike have shied away from acknowledging the inherently racial self-definition of Jewishness because of its obvious associations with racist anti-semitism. Not surprisingly, it is this definition of Jewishness that has been most criticised by universalists-- whether Christian or secular--for at least fifteen centuries. It is also this definition that compels Jewish parents to send their children to Jewish schools, despite the fact that the parents may know next to nothing about Jewish tradition. Ironically, then, Judaism has survived both despite of and because of the racial definition of Jewishness.
The British case demonstrates a tension that is rampant amongst liberal and secular Jews. M’s case depends on the argument that by using the parents’ (in particular, the mother’s) identities to distinguish between Jewish and non-Jewish students, the school, and by extension Judaism, commits the crime of racial discrimination. If Jewish institutions are to avoid further legal actions, then, they will need to act more like Christian institutions that follow Paul’s dictum that since faith determines membership in the religious community, ancestry--whether Jewish or otherwise-- is irrelevant. Rather than hoping to radically transform modern Judaism, it seems more likely that M’s family (and others like it) implicitly accept the notion that to be Jewish is to have Jewish ancestors: This is demonstrated by the fact that the mother converted (rather than simply insisting that she was Jewish by dint of faith).
It is high time that Jews and non-Jews alike begin to confront the inherently racial definitions of Jewishness that directly contradict Christian definitions of community. This is not to say that Judaism is inherently racist, or that anti-racism is inherently anti-Judaic. But when secular courts rule that any judgments made on the basis of one’s genealogy or ancestral origins is by nature racist, they dangerously suggest that to do away with racism, we must also do away with one of the core elements of Judaism, if not Judaism itself.
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