The Law of Return & the Jewish Gold Standard
April 2001
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I was troubled. Why should it bother me, who've never especially attached to the Jewish identity, who always believed that the more the human race gets mixed the better? After giving it much thought, I realized that my uneasiness was rooted in Israel's history.
First, the historical facts. The Zionist enterprise was, to all intents and purposes, a colonialist enterprise, displacing the autochthonous population - i.e., the Palestinians - and settling Jews in their place. The Zionist leadership knew that this was the case, but pretended that the land was empty ('A land without a people for a people without a land,' was the fabulous slogan.) The settlers, of course, had to face the awkward realities on the ground, and when the opportunity came in 1948, carried out 'ethnic cleansing' on a large scale.
Thus far the facts. The question is, how do we live with them? One answer was given by the historian Isaac Deutscher, though he was not in the least pro-Zionist: 'It is difficult to blame a man jumping out of a burning house if he falls on somebody and breaks his leg.' This was said not long after the Jews of Europe were exterminated by the Nazis. And indeed, the moral justification of Zionism was that Jews, being a persecuted, homeless minority, needed a safe haven. It was the misfortune of the Palestinian Arabs that the place chosen for the purpose - for reasons of religious tradition combined with international circumstances - was their homeland. Conscientious Zionists understood this and hoped to minimize the harm to the local population. Some expressed it with the phrase, 'How to keep the wolf satisfied and the sheep whole.'
The Law of Return was passed five years after the end of World War II, and in view of the Holocaust, which was grounded in the Nazis' racist philosophy, it avoided defining Jewish identity. In practice, what it did was apply the Nazi definition in reverse: If a person who had one Jewish grandparent qualified as a Jew for the purpose of persecution, then such a person ought to be qualified as a Jew for the purpose of finding a safe haven in Israel. This was a vague formulation, but understandable and reasonable enough in its historical context. Some people proposed even more sweeping definitions; for example, Moshe Sharett proposed that for the purpose of the Law of Return, a Jew is a person who considers him/herself a Jew and is regarded as one by others.
In parenthesis, it might be noted that the Nazis adapted their race laws from the race laws of Virginia and other Southern states as codified after the Civil War to categorize people of African descent. These laws - whose origins went back to colonial times - laid down definitions of Mulatto ('half-black'), Quadroon ('a quarter-black'), Octoroon ('an eighth-part black'), and even a sixteenth-part black. In the 20th century the Third Reich took this model and applied it to Jews. A few years later, the Nationalist Party in South Africa adopted the model and restored its original function, i.e., to define Black and 'Coloured' people... We should, however, keep in mind that Judaism is not quite the same as a racial group, because while it is not possible for a white person to become black, it is possible for a gentile to convert to Judaism, even if the process is difficult and conditional. (On the other hand, one who is born a Jew cannot sever the relationship for good - such a person can always repent and be received back into the fold.)
But long before the Law of Return was promulgated there was a definition of Jewishness which no secular laws can touch. The people in charge of this definition are not lawmakers but rabbis - Orthodox rabbis. The fact is that the Jewishness of a person acknowledged by the Orthodox rabbinate will not be questioned by anyone else. On the other hand, recognition by Conservative or Reform rabbis, or some government body, may be rejected by the Orthodox rabbinate and will remain inconclusive. This is an awkward fact, but a fact nonetheless. It is not surprising, therefore, that Ben Gurion and his government left the Orthodox rabbinate in charge of all matters to do with Judaism in Israel. They had also, without a doubt, various political reasons for doing so - the Conservative and Reform communities were less pro-Zionist than the Orthodox and had made no inroads into Israeli society; and it obviously suited the then Labour government to form coalitions with the locally-strong religious group. But beyond these practicalities, there was also a sense that Orthodox Judaism represented, as it were, the 'gold standard' of Judaism, and if Israel was to be the State of the Jews, then it might as well have the Judaic 'gold standard' at its base.
This somewhat imperfect state of affairs persisted for nearly five decades. Now and then there were crises when the Law of Return and the Orthodox 'gold standard' conflicted, for example in the 1950s when the community known as Benai Israel arrived from India and the Orthodox rabbinate refused to recognize them as Jews. In the end some sort of solution was found and the issue forgotten. Most of the time there were no major crises - until recently.
What is happening now is that the masses of people wishing to emigrate from the former-USSR for economic reasons see one door open to them - Israel. And it turns out that it's enough to point to a single grandparent, or even a great-grandparent, who was a Jew, in order to obtain an immigrant visa to Israel and become a citizen upon arrival. This raises two major questions: a) Where does that leave the justification of the Zionist enterprise - i.e., a safe haven for persecuted Jews? Clearly what we have here is a tidal wave of economic migrants, not at all 'persecuted Jews' (if such still exist today). Was the Palestinian nation dispossessed so that its land could become a destination for economic migrants, Russians and others? In fact, the day is not far off when any human community suffering economic hardship would be able, with a little effort, to immigrate to Israel - except for the one human community which is languishing in refugee camps all around the Middle East, whose home this country was until 1948! And while delegates from Israel are busy bringing more and more economic migrants from the crumbling fragments of the Soviet Bloc, the government continues to expropriate lands from Palestinians both in Israel and the Occupied Territories, in order to settle on them non-Arab citizens, including the aforesaid migrants.
The second question is, what about the 'gold standard'? Secular Israelis - not to mention the immigrants, to whom the idea of the 'safe haven for persecuted Jews' is irrelevant - are free to dismiss the matter, or point to wider definitions of Jewishness; people who are chiefly concerned about increasing Israel's demographic mass vis-a-vis the Arab world can argue that time will take care of the problem and that the millions of Russians and others would eventually assimilate and become Israelis, and that the Israeli identity can now take over from the Jewish. But so long as Israel is defined as the State of the Jews, it will be impossible to evade the Orthodox 'gold standard', and the people who regard this as a vital issue will certainly not give it up. Moreover, we should remain with the paradox of turning Israel into an immigrant country, a miniature Australia or Canada, closed only to her autochthonous children.
I have no answer to these problems, no suggestion how they may be solved. I can only point them out and ask that we recognize them and try to be honest with ourselves, even if the government and other bodies running the Zionist enterprise pretend that there is no problem. (Though they too sometimes run headlong into it; even a free-thinker like Yair Tzaban, when he was Minister of Immigrant Absorption in the last Rabin government, consulted the Orthodox rabbinate about the Jewishness of various 'new immigrants'.) In the meantime, the Israeli public adopts stereotyped images, both positive and negative, of the new arrivals, and fails to understand that the problem is not the 'quality' of the immigration, but the nature of Israel and the future of this country.
END
The Zionist Paradox and its consequences
Some time ago I observed in conversation that many of the newcomers from Russia are obviously not Jews, and at once the question came: 'Why does it matter?'I was troubled. Why should it bother me, who've never especially attached to the Jewish identity, who always believed that the more the human race gets mixed the better? After giving it much thought, I realized that my uneasiness was rooted in Israel's history.
First, the historical facts. The Zionist enterprise was, to all intents and purposes, a colonialist enterprise, displacing the autochthonous population - i.e., the Palestinians - and settling Jews in their place. The Zionist leadership knew that this was the case, but pretended that the land was empty ('A land without a people for a people without a land,' was the fabulous slogan.) The settlers, of course, had to face the awkward realities on the ground, and when the opportunity came in 1948, carried out 'ethnic cleansing' on a large scale.
Thus far the facts. The question is, how do we live with them? One answer was given by the historian Isaac Deutscher, though he was not in the least pro-Zionist: 'It is difficult to blame a man jumping out of a burning house if he falls on somebody and breaks his leg.' This was said not long after the Jews of Europe were exterminated by the Nazis. And indeed, the moral justification of Zionism was that Jews, being a persecuted, homeless minority, needed a safe haven. It was the misfortune of the Palestinian Arabs that the place chosen for the purpose - for reasons of religious tradition combined with international circumstances - was their homeland. Conscientious Zionists understood this and hoped to minimize the harm to the local population. Some expressed it with the phrase, 'How to keep the wolf satisfied and the sheep whole.'
The Law of Return was passed five years after the end of World War II, and in view of the Holocaust, which was grounded in the Nazis' racist philosophy, it avoided defining Jewish identity. In practice, what it did was apply the Nazi definition in reverse: If a person who had one Jewish grandparent qualified as a Jew for the purpose of persecution, then such a person ought to be qualified as a Jew for the purpose of finding a safe haven in Israel. This was a vague formulation, but understandable and reasonable enough in its historical context. Some people proposed even more sweeping definitions; for example, Moshe Sharett proposed that for the purpose of the Law of Return, a Jew is a person who considers him/herself a Jew and is regarded as one by others.
In parenthesis, it might be noted that the Nazis adapted their race laws from the race laws of Virginia and other Southern states as codified after the Civil War to categorize people of African descent. These laws - whose origins went back to colonial times - laid down definitions of Mulatto ('half-black'), Quadroon ('a quarter-black'), Octoroon ('an eighth-part black'), and even a sixteenth-part black. In the 20th century the Third Reich took this model and applied it to Jews. A few years later, the Nationalist Party in South Africa adopted the model and restored its original function, i.e., to define Black and 'Coloured' people... We should, however, keep in mind that Judaism is not quite the same as a racial group, because while it is not possible for a white person to become black, it is possible for a gentile to convert to Judaism, even if the process is difficult and conditional. (On the other hand, one who is born a Jew cannot sever the relationship for good - such a person can always repent and be received back into the fold.)
But long before the Law of Return was promulgated there was a definition of Jewishness which no secular laws can touch. The people in charge of this definition are not lawmakers but rabbis - Orthodox rabbis. The fact is that the Jewishness of a person acknowledged by the Orthodox rabbinate will not be questioned by anyone else. On the other hand, recognition by Conservative or Reform rabbis, or some government body, may be rejected by the Orthodox rabbinate and will remain inconclusive. This is an awkward fact, but a fact nonetheless. It is not surprising, therefore, that Ben Gurion and his government left the Orthodox rabbinate in charge of all matters to do with Judaism in Israel. They had also, without a doubt, various political reasons for doing so - the Conservative and Reform communities were less pro-Zionist than the Orthodox and had made no inroads into Israeli society; and it obviously suited the then Labour government to form coalitions with the locally-strong religious group. But beyond these practicalities, there was also a sense that Orthodox Judaism represented, as it were, the 'gold standard' of Judaism, and if Israel was to be the State of the Jews, then it might as well have the Judaic 'gold standard' at its base.
This somewhat imperfect state of affairs persisted for nearly five decades. Now and then there were crises when the Law of Return and the Orthodox 'gold standard' conflicted, for example in the 1950s when the community known as Benai Israel arrived from India and the Orthodox rabbinate refused to recognize them as Jews. In the end some sort of solution was found and the issue forgotten. Most of the time there were no major crises - until recently.
What is happening now is that the masses of people wishing to emigrate from the former-USSR for economic reasons see one door open to them - Israel. And it turns out that it's enough to point to a single grandparent, or even a great-grandparent, who was a Jew, in order to obtain an immigrant visa to Israel and become a citizen upon arrival. This raises two major questions: a) Where does that leave the justification of the Zionist enterprise - i.e., a safe haven for persecuted Jews? Clearly what we have here is a tidal wave of economic migrants, not at all 'persecuted Jews' (if such still exist today). Was the Palestinian nation dispossessed so that its land could become a destination for economic migrants, Russians and others? In fact, the day is not far off when any human community suffering economic hardship would be able, with a little effort, to immigrate to Israel - except for the one human community which is languishing in refugee camps all around the Middle East, whose home this country was until 1948! And while delegates from Israel are busy bringing more and more economic migrants from the crumbling fragments of the Soviet Bloc, the government continues to expropriate lands from Palestinians both in Israel and the Occupied Territories, in order to settle on them non-Arab citizens, including the aforesaid migrants.
The second question is, what about the 'gold standard'? Secular Israelis - not to mention the immigrants, to whom the idea of the 'safe haven for persecuted Jews' is irrelevant - are free to dismiss the matter, or point to wider definitions of Jewishness; people who are chiefly concerned about increasing Israel's demographic mass vis-a-vis the Arab world can argue that time will take care of the problem and that the millions of Russians and others would eventually assimilate and become Israelis, and that the Israeli identity can now take over from the Jewish. But so long as Israel is defined as the State of the Jews, it will be impossible to evade the Orthodox 'gold standard', and the people who regard this as a vital issue will certainly not give it up. Moreover, we should remain with the paradox of turning Israel into an immigrant country, a miniature Australia or Canada, closed only to her autochthonous children.
I have no answer to these problems, no suggestion how they may be solved. I can only point them out and ask that we recognize them and try to be honest with ourselves, even if the government and other bodies running the Zionist enterprise pretend that there is no problem. (Though they too sometimes run headlong into it; even a free-thinker like Yair Tzaban, when he was Minister of Immigrant Absorption in the last Rabin government, consulted the Orthodox rabbinate about the Jewishness of various 'new immigrants'.) In the meantime, the Israeli public adopts stereotyped images, both positive and negative, of the new arrivals, and fails to understand that the problem is not the 'quality' of the immigration, but the nature of Israel and the future of this country.
END