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Oct. 18, 2013
Identity issues arise again
Recent studies point to need to reconsider who’s a Jew.
BERNARD BECK
There have been three reports released in recent days regarding Jewish population. Two of them, the one by Pew Research Centre and that of Steinhardt Social Research Institute, are concerned with Jewish population numbers. The third, by the University of Huddersfield in England, concerns itself with the genetic history of Askenazi Jews. But, in fact, all three studies are about Jewish identity.
The Pew and Steinhardt studies have come up with vastly different numbers concerning the size of the U.S. Jewish population. The disparity is due to their differing definitions of who is a Jew.
This is not a new problem. Jewish identity has been an issue in the Jewish community at least since the beginning of the Common Era, and perhaps even before. At the start of the Common Era, Jews in Rome were proselytizing so successfully that the rabbis felt that they had to erect barriers to conversion for fear that the Jewish community would become too diluted. In essence, they revised the standards for Jewish identification and, as Judaism became more rabbinical, whole segments of the Jewish population who were not considered religious enough by the rabbis became disenfranchised and were left out in the cold.
In great part due to this exclusionary policy, the world Jewish population declined sharply over the next thousand years. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the world Jewish population dropped from about five million at the start of the Common Era to about one million by the end of the first millennium CE. It remained at about one million until the middle of the 18th century, when it skyrocketed to seven million in less than a hundred years.
Both the precipitous population decline and the remarkable population increase resulted from the different policies for defining Jewish identity. In the early years of the Common Era, before the rise of rabbinic Judaism, Jews were defined through self-description; for example, you could describe yourself as a Roman Jew or as a Greek Jew, there was no other requirement than that. You didn’t have to belong to a synagogue or observe holidays, or keep kosher, or any of the other criteria that are currently applied in population surveys. After the rabbis gained power, the nature of Judaism and Jewish identification changed. A Jew could no longer self-select: he had to be listed as a Jew by a rabbi. Thus, if a Jew was not affiliated with a rabbinic religious community, he was not counted as a Jew.
This situation continued for the next thousand years, until Napoleon granted Jews citizenship, and pioneers and visionaries like the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Chassidism, and Rabbi Abraham Geiger, the founder of the Reform movement, declared that it was not necessary for a person to be affiliated with a synagogue or even know how to pray to consider himself Jewish. (It should be remembered that the Vilna Gaon attempted to excommunicate the Baal Shem Tov and his followers because of this heretical idea.)
These great visionaries said that if you consider yourself Jewish, then you’re Jewish! As a result of this earth-shattering declaration, the world Jewish population soared, so that, by 1935, through the measure of self-identification, there were 15 million Jews in the world. (Hitler did not ask “how Jewish” his victims were.)
Today, we are facing a problem similar to that which confronted Jews in the first centuries of the Common Era. We have once again set up barriers to Jewish identification and we now have standards to determine if you are a “true Jew”: Was your mother Jewish? Did you have a bar/bat mitzvah? How often do you attend services? Do you belong to a Jewish community centre? Contribute to Jewish charities? Been to Israel? Speak and/or read Hebrew? Light Shabbat candles? And on and on.
These questions serve to narrow the field in a time when we should be widening our tent. We can no longer afford to be an exclusive and exclusionary club. We need to find new ways to welcome not only the disenchanted and disenfranchised Jews but also the intermarried and their non-Jewish partners.
In the same way that Jews of the 21st century are different from their first-century ancestors, so, too, must the definition of who is a Jew be different. Until we can settle on a definition, we will be unable to accurately measure the Jewish population.
Bernard Beck is the author of True Jew: Challenging the Stereotype ($22.95), which was published by Algora Publishing, algora.com.
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