A Rabbinical Perspective: Understanding Jewish Identity

To mark the anniversary of the passing of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, the Steinsaltz Center has prepared a new edition of the book "We, Jews...". This article publishes excerpts from its first chapter. The full text of the book can be found on a dedicated page and in the EAJC digital library.

The question of who has the right to be called a Jew continually sparks heated debates. The discussion is highly emotional because its resolution directly affects the interests and fates of many people, not to mention the far-reaching consequences of possible answers. However, despite the intensity of the passions, this question is subsidiary to the primary one: what defines an "unquestionable" Jew, what is the essence of Jewishness? After all, establishing the boundaries of any phenomenon depends on defining its essence.

The problem of defining Jewishness arose relatively recently. In the not-too-distant past, no such problem existed because the people of Israel were a sufficiently monolithic community, united by a single faith and system of commandments. Throughout almost all of our long history, the definition of Jews as a religious community was self-evident. In the words of the great philosopher and rabbi Saadia Gaon: "Our nation is a nation only by virtue of the Torah." In other words, Jewish identity is conditioned by Judaism, and it alone unites such diverse groups of Jews.

However, defining Jews as a religious community poses a problem: today, the majority of the Jewish people do not observe the normative code of commandments and do not accept the traditional worldview. This occurs either because members of a significant portion of Jewry belong to religious movements that, while defining themselves as Jewish, are undoubtedly not a consistent development of traditional Judaism, or, even more commonly, due to a departure (often already inherited) from the Jewish religion in any of its understandings. Yet, even those who severely criticize these people for inconsistent and selective observance of Jewish religious law, or for abandoning it altogether, unequivocally recognize that they are Jews (which, in fact, serves as the basis for condemnation). So what defines and unites such highly diverse people, between whom there is no active bond of a shared faith?

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All attempts to define belonging to the people of Israel using criteria typically applied for such purposes have proven unsuccessful. Clearly, Jews are not a race. The reverse is untrue even from a strictly historical perspective: over millennia, the people of Israel have absorbed many proselytes, descendants of other races and nations, making the idea of "purity of the Jewish race" fundamentally absurd. At one time, the Nazis exerted great effort trying to define racial criteria for Jewishness, but were completely unable to find them.

Just as Jews are not a race, they are also not a nation. The basic definition of a nation as a historically established, stable community of people united by territory, language, culture, and origin does not fit the people of Israel, neither in the past nor in the present.

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The impossibility of defining the Jewish people according to conventional criteria has led some politicians and ideologues to desperate attempts to devise new, vague definitions, such as a "historical community." Of course, such a community does indeed exist, but for the majority of modern Jews, the shared part of history is fifteen hundred to two thousand years old. Maintaining an active historical bond with such a distant past, if not reinforced by other, more tangible factors, is absurd.

An even vaguer, yet highly popular idea in certain ideological circles, is the "community of fate." In practice, this means that Jews are defined through the foreignness, hostility, or hatred of the peoples of the world. Proponents of this idea delegate the right to define Jewishness to anti-Semites of all stripes, which is not only morally questionable but also fails to answer the main question: what is this community that so many people isolate or hate? The fact that there are those who hate and despise Jews makes them persecuted, but does not create the phenomenon or define it. Signs like "No Jews or dogs allowed" may arouse a reader's sense of solidarity with an oppressed people, but they explain nothing.

To understand the essence of Jewishness, it is necessary to return to the original, basic definitions—those utilized by the Torah. It refers to the Jewish people as the "House of Israel" or the "House of Jacob." In other words, the people of Israel are understood as a family-clan community. It began as the lineage of the patriarch Abraham, grew and strengthened until it became a tribe, and then a nation. However, despite the growth in numbers and power, the understanding of the internal bonds between them remained familial.

The vast numbers, the creation of legal, state, and communal institutions, even the wanderings and life in the diaspora, changed nothing. Jews are those who belong to the "House of Israel." And everything they do in the religious, national, or any other sphere is derivative of this.

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All of this becomes understandable once we realize that the "House of Israel" is not a family in the biological sense of the word, but a community of people who do not necessarily share a common biological origin, but are united by a bond that can be likened to a family. This concept of Jewishness is expressed by a theological definition: the sages say that where the Scriptures refer to "your father"—it also implies the Almighty, and "your mother"—the Community of Israel. ("Knesset Yisrael" is a kabbalistic concept expressing the sum total of the entire Jewish people.) This statement explicitly treats a Jew as a child in a family, where the parents, however, are not Abraham and Sarah, but the Almighty and the Community of Israel. The relationship between them is metaphorically described in the Scriptures as that between a man and a woman, and their union is likened to a marriage. A continuation of this metaphor is the perception of Jews as children born of this union—the "children of Israel."

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For the very same reason that a person cannot leave a family, it is impossible to expel them from it. Neither a private individual nor any religious or public institution has the authority or the right to strip a Jew of their Jewishness. Even excommunication from the community ("cherem") is merely a method of punishment and separation; it does not nullify Jewishness and does not release one from duties.

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Every family—and in this sense, our nation is no exception—bears the seeds of discord. Kinship is a source of constant friction; intra-family clashes are far more common than conflicts with the outside world, because it is the very intimacy of the bond, breeding partiality and bias of opinion, along with the awareness of interdependence and the indissolubility of the relationship, that creates countless grounds for misunderstanding. Members of a family, even when estranged, cannot cease to be family, and therefore a dispute between them cannot be resolved by a business-like agreement often made by disagreeing parties: "let's part ways forever and stop bothering one another."

It is far easier for strangers to reach an agreement on disputed matters than it is for relatives. The latter can bicker continuously over any issue, yet cannot afford to allow a real rift to occur. Even with a complete severance of relations, there remains a sense of belonging and responsibility toward someone who, in spite of everything, is my kin, my brother. And whatever he does is ultimately connected to me. His behavior brings shame, provokes anger, or inspires pride precisely because this connection is indissoluble and obvious.

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Jewish history offers striking examples of behavior that cannot be explained without taking into account this deep, family-clan bond. When persecution and death became the lot of Jewish communities, people who lived completely detached from national life, who in no way emphasized their Jewish identity, when faced with a fateful choice, often condemned themselves to suffering and death so as not to break the bond with their people. The centuries-old martyrology of those who gave their lives for their Jewishness includes not only holy righteous individuals but also those to whom it was entirely alien, who despised it all their lives. The martyrdom for the sake of faith to which Jew Süss (Josef Ben Issachar Süsskind Oppenheimer (1698-1738), whose life was described in various studies and served as the plot for Leon Feuchtwanger's novel "Jew Süss" and the Nazi film of the same name) condemned himself is an example of such a strange type of traditional connection, where people who had always demonstrated their lack of interest in G-d and the people of Israel, compelled by an unknown force, returned to their people and proclaimed that, despite everything, they belonged to the Jewish family.

The understanding of Jewishness we have proposed may provoke rejection as it does not fit into conventional frameworks. However, once accepted, many details of the picture that otherwise remain unexplained fall into place. Our relationship with the Father, faith, and way of life are the institutionalized expression of family relations of a special kind, ancestral rituals, and codes of conduct, "the instruction of your father and the teaching of your mother" (Proverbs 1:8). What is mistakenly perceived by our contemporaries as national relations is in fact nothing other than the manifestation of family-clan traditions shaped over millennia. A family that has grown over thousands of years to the size of a nation has remained, in its essence, a family.

This accounts for the uniqueness of Jewishness. Family-clan relationships are the most ancient and primary social structure. This type of relationship is far more primitive than a nation or a religious community—which are more modern and refined forms of social cooperation. National, cultural, and religious bonds are expedient; they can be explained and justified. It is much harder to define the essence of family and clan bonds; they are less rational, and their expediency is vague and unobvious. Yet, it is precisely these bonds that sustain the existence of Jewishness. This primitive, irrational connection touches the most intimate and sensitive chords of the soul. There may be no rational explanation for it, but it possesses authenticity and eternity.