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Who is a Jew?

Since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE the world has puzzled over the criteria of what makes a person a Jew. Are Jews an extended family; a clan; a nation; a people; a religion; a race; or can anyone choose to identify himself as a Jew? Is there a distinction between Jews and Judaism?  Does the belief system of the Jewish faith belong only to the Jewish people?  The trees that provided the paper dedicated to those inquiries might well be enough to repopulate the oxygen-generating forests of the world.  On those subjects, we are informed by the Old Testament and the gleanings of history that:

• For 2000 years, ending with the First Century CE, the identity of the Jew was not really in issue. Patrilineal Jewish identity had been more than adequately described in the Torah granted to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai in 1280 BCE and transcribed in the Written Torah brought to the Second Temple by Ezra the Scribe in the fifth century BCE.
• Isaac, and ultimately Jacob, followed in the patrilineal line from Abraham.
• Jacob’s patrilineal line was the formula for the Twelve tribes of Israel, which, coincidentally, did not include his daughter Dinah.
• God’s design of the Jewish people and his gift of the land of Israel followed directly along patrilineal lines.
• Upon the death of the biblical father, his entire estate went to his sons according to Numbers 27 (8-11). “If a man dies, and have no son, then you shall cause his inheritance to pass to his daughter”.
• All biblical identification (naming of Jews) was done patronymically, e.g., Joshua ben (the son of) Nun. It is a formula used today when calling a Jew to the Torah.
• The religious personnel of both holy temples were selected patrilineally, i.e., kohanim (priests) and Levites were identified through the lineage of their fathers, a circumstance which exists even to this day, as an honorarium and in the event of the future construction of a Third Temple.

The Written Torah, by its own text, alleges that the Ten Commandments was written by the ‘finger of God”, Deuteronomy 9 (10). Some believe that the remainder of the Torah had similar authorship, or that it was written by Moses. However, modern authorities suggest that it was the work of four early historians who attempted to assemble and correlate Judaism’s historic events and laws.  Whether by the finger of God, or the efforts of historians devoted to transcribing the word of the Creator, it is a distinction without a difference.  Its text was, and is, accepted by Jews as the history of the Jewish people, the description of Judaism’s sacred design and origin, and the essence of the solemn relationship between the Jewish nation and its God.

Chosen People or Designed People?

Frequent suggestions are made claiming that the Jews are God’s Chosen People.  Nothing could be further from the truth. God did not choose an existing people.  Abram was 70 years old when God first selected and spoke to him.  God chose an older gentleman with a barren wife, Sarah. She was childless until she was 90 years of age, when God arranged for her to have a child.  God did not select or choose a people. He designed one, out of the rootstock of Abram and Sarah, as His agents to fulfill a desired mission.  That mission appeared obvious in Genesis 9 (11), where God covenanted with Noah, his sons and all living creatures (His own creations) that He will never again, through anger, destroy the rest of the human and animal life.   God promised that the appearance of a rainbow in the sky will be a constant reminder to all that He will be mindful of his commitment to abate his total destructive anger. Thus, in the very next chapter, God selects Abram and his wife Sarah as the source of a designed people with a mission. That mission, we discover later, was to disseminate God’s commandments and law to all, through precept and example, and to demonstrate how to live a moral life that would avoid the wickedness that provoked God’s anger, i.e., Tikkun Olam.

The design of God’s agent people appears more than 7 times in the pages of Genesis and Deuteronomy.  It describes a people who are the recipient of a continuum of “Zera”, the Hebrew word for semenal fluid, which fluid originates with Abraham, proceeds through Isaac and Jacob, and continues along patrilineal lines through their male descendents in perpetuity. In the Second Century CE, the Tannaim of the Talmud crudely abandoned that design and substituted matrilineal-ism in its stead. Women do not produce Zera, semen. Was this an outright rejection, by Rabbinical Judaism, of God’s designed people in the written Torah? Did it it say to God: Don’t tell us how Jews are created. We, the rabbis, prefer our own formula. Was it merely coincidental that the 2000 years of “Galut” (The Diaspora of Jewish landless wanderings) started at or about that time?

Why does the “Zera” of the patriarchs initiate the golden thread which weaves the fabric of the Jewish people?  The answer is quite simple.  It is because God, in the Old Testament, repeatedly prescribed it and presumptively designed it to fit within His blueprints of human genetics.

Consider: 

1. In Genesis 12(7), God appears to Abraham (then Abram) and in God’s reference to the land of Canaan tells him, “Unto thy Zera (semen) will I give this land.”
2. In Genesis 17(6-8), God tells Abraham that he will make him exceedingly fruitful and that he will sire kings.  God promises that he will give to Abraham and to Abraham’s Zera (semen) all of the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession. 
3. In Genesis 17(10-12), God reminds Abraham of the earlier covenant negotiated between God, Abraham and the Zera (semen) of Abraham and requires that a token of that covenant be represented by the circumcision of every male child. 
4. In Genesis 26(2-4), God confirms to Isaac the covenant with Isaac’s father Abraham.  God promises to make Isaac’s Zera (semen) multiply as the stars of the heaven and in Isaac’s Zera (semen) will all the nations of the earth be blessed. 
5. In Genesis 28(14), God tells Jacob that his Zera (semen) shall be as the dust of the earth.
6. In Genesis 48(4), Jacob, on his death bed, recalls to Joseph God’s promise that he will give the land of Canaan to Jacob’s Zera (semen) for an everlasting possession.
7. In Deuteronomy 34(4-5), God allows Moses, prior to his death, to look at the land to which he has brought the Jewish people and reminds Moses that he has given this land to the Zera (semen) of the Patriarchs.
8. In all of the foregoing biblical references, the Hebrew word Zera is used in a possessive form. Even today, it is translated as Semen (See The Complete English-Hebrew Dictionary (Ruben Alcalay), page 3290). In English translations of Torah text, the word seed is used in lieu of semen, presumptively because it is a bit less evocative. Obvious, although worth mentioning, is the fact that Semen is a fluid that is not produced in the female body.

In multiple Torah references in which God describes the concept of his designed people there are three essential requirements:

1. The People must be lineal descendants of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
2. Their line of descent must derive from the “Zera” (semen) of the patriarchs and their lineal male descendants.
3. Male descendants of the patriarchs must be circumcised on the eighth day following their birth. It is a mandate directed to the very instrument that delivers the semen, which is the thread of Jewish continuum.

Science Illuminates God’s Selection of Semen

Why male semen and not the female ovary? To answer that question, we must first look at what is unique about semen.  It took until 1903 and the brilliant scientist Nettie M. Stevens of Bryn Mawr College to answer that question.  She determined that in the human procreation process the male possesses two types of chromosomes, X and Y. The human female has two copies of the X chromosome.

In the human mating process, the male delivers to the female either an X or a Y chromosome. If a Y is delivered, it initiates a process for the birth of a male child, but the Y chromosome passes unaltered directly to that male child without combining with the X chromosome of the female.  If an X chromosome is delivered by the male in the mating process, that chromosome joins with the X chromosome of the female and the elements of both become the origin of the female child.  Thus, God’s designed Zera process, the patrilineal process in the Torah, allows the Jewish people the continuum of the uniqueness of the patriarchs without being altered by each mating encounter.  If God wanted an agent people, unaltered by the generations of change, this was certainly an effective way to do it. Who had more familiarity with the human reproductive process than the designer himself? The method is totally genetic and does not depend upon how one is reared or upon matrilineal origin. It is as true today as it was during the era of the Patriarchs.

Jews and Judaism Are Not One and the Same

It is important to note that during the biblical times there was no such thing as Judaism. Judaism, as a religion, did not start with the birth of Abraham in 2040 BCE. There were only the Jewish people and their tribal God Jehovah.  During the Second Temple period, 490 BCE to 70 CE, the sages discussed the universality of the Jewish God and his law.  It was one of the issues in conflict between the Sadducee priests, who rejected that notion, and the Pharisee priests, who argued in its favor. It was also an issue between Hillel and Shammai.  Not until Paul, the disciple of Jesus, brought the Tanakh (The Torah, the Prophets, and the Scribes) to an alien non-Jewish population did Judaism appear to have its own independent identity.  In fact, Jews existed for 2000 years before there was a refined notion of Judaism as a separate faith or religion. 

Through honest belief, cogent argument, or brute force, one could be persuaded to the religion of Judaism, its precepts and practices. But a person, not born a Jew could never be so altered as to be genetically converted into a Jew. Clearly, patrilineality, as some have suggested, is not a cabal designed by Jewish men in order to assert masculine domination over the Jewish faith. The rules of procreation, of necessity, preceded Adam and Eve.

A Fractional Jew Does Not Exist

How do Jews of today know whether they are really Jews, or are the result of a consensual union with a Gentile, a rape in a pogrom or by a marauding conqueror?  Even to this day, we rely on our identity, as told by our parents.  That source continues in full force and effect until we learn otherwise, by evidence or science.

It is ironic that some are told, as a result of DNA inquiry, that they are part Jewish, and are provided a fraction to designate the relevant percentage.  Such data, although it appears to be scientific in origin, is without appreciation of the biblical definition of who and what is a Jew.  There are no fractional Jews.  A child born of a Jewish father and a Gentile mother is as Jewish as a child born of a Jewish father and a Jewish mother.  Lamentably, a child born of a Jewish mother and a Gentile father is not Jewish, indeed not Jewish at all.  That father was unable to provide to the union the Zera of the patriarchs necessary to birth a Jewish child.  If the daughter of such a union mates with a Jewish man and has a child, that resultant child is Jewish.

Affirming the notion that Jews and Judaism are separate, but related is the fact that many Jews today claim to be agnostics or atheists.  Yet, they identify themselves as Jews and are vigorous in the pursuit of Jewish community goals, including Zionism.  They are viewed by other Jews, and Gentiles alike, as Jews.

A Gentile can look to Jewish law as an authentic social structure and a viable way of serving one God.  Nothing would prevent him from adopting the Jewish religion and law to his lifestyle.  The Torah does not speak of conversion, and none is required of him.  If he lives amongst Jews he is considered a Ger, Sojourner, with rights and privileges which are totally protected by the Torah. “And if a Ger sojourn with thee in your land, you shall not do him wrong.  The Ger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were Gerim (sojourners) in the land of Egypt.” Leviticus 19 (33f).  However welcome is the practice of Jewish law and customs by a non-Jewish practitioner, it does not provide that individual with genetic Jewish identity.

An Old Clarity and a New Freedom 

Throughout history, Jewish communities have been selected by Gentiles who, for one reason or another, have chosen to reside in those communities.

Judaism has been enriched by their presence, as in the case of Onkelos, nephew of the Roman Emperor, Hadrian.  He translated the entire Torah into Aramaic, the lingua franca of the era.

While there are still persons who come to Judaism out of religious or moral persuasion, today the vast majority select the Jewish community because of a relationship with a Jew.  All persons enter the Jewish community as a Biblically Protected Class of Sojourners (“Gerim”) entitled to the love, respect, honor and protection of the rest of the Jewish community.

The Torah requires no formal ceremony to achieve the status of the Sojourner.  A conversion ceremony, if desired, would formalize that person’s relationship with Judaism but would not make him or her a Jew.  In a unique and very practical sense, should the relationship that brought them to the community cease, they have the freedom to leave Judaism or to remain, as they choose. Jews, who are born Jews from the instant of conception, can select other religions, or even atheism, but they never stop being Jews.

During Biblical Times Marriages by Jewish Males with Non-Jewish Females were Not Infrequent and Did Not Breed Gentile Children

Historically, according to Torah, if your father were a Jew, you were accepted as a Jew, whether or not your mother was Jewish.  Four of Jacob’s sons, Dan, Naphtali, Gad and Asher, were issue of Bilah and Zilpah, the Egyptian handmaidens of Jacob’s wives, Leah and Rachel.  They were not only Jews, but they represented the originators of four of the tribes of Israel.  Joseph, one of Jacob’s sons, was married to an Egyptian woman by the name of Asenath.  She bore him two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh.  Inasmuch as Joseph became part of the Egyptian hierarchy, his sons took his tribal place and were identified as half tribes in Israel even though their mother was not a Jewess.

Moses was married to Zipporah, the daughter of a Midianite priest and to a Nubian woman by the name of Tharbis.  Neither of his wives were Jews.  Assuredly history does not proclaim that their issue was Gentile.  King David and King Solomon had hundreds of wives and concubines, many from alliances with neighboring tribes.  No one has suggested that their children were Gentile.  King David’s great grandmother was Ruth, a Moabite whose children were fathered by Boaz, a Jew.  Is there anyone who would suggest that King David was not Jewish?

A single universal fact made all of these children Jews: their fathers were Jews.  Most often, during biblical times, a non-Jewish mother simply took residence with her husband in the Jewish community, was accepted, and her progeny became Jewish by virtue of their Jewish father.

The Rise of Rabbinical Judaism, Matrilineal-ism and a Second Torah

With the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Judaism was in for a significant sea change.  No longer could Jews bring sacrifices of food animals at the temple in the manner in which they had traditionally served their God.  They felt obliged, by the mandate of the Torah, to congregate and read the law (Torah).  In lieu of the sacrifices formerly used, they were left with communications to their God in the form of verbal prayer.  The Pharisees, who perforce of temple destruction were unemployed, became the authority at such meetings and eventually identified themselves as Rabbis.  With their assistance, the verbal prayers became prepared and stylized.  With this evolution came the development of Rabbinical Judaism.

While the obvious prescription for such congregations was to function within the reasonable interpretation of the Written Torah, the Pharisee/Rabbis found that difficult to do.  The Torah itself had no provision for amendment. By its terms, in Deuteronomy 4 (2), the Written Torah rejected any additions or subtractions to its text.

Rabbinical Judaism found it impossible to be limited to the one world of the Written Torah, and created a totally new additional world called “Leolam Habah”.  In that world, it created the notion of life, after death, so that those who were zealous in following the rabbinical “Halacha” could find the reward, which they felt that they richly deserved.  They created the Talmud, which was principally composed of three sources: (1)The Mishna, a code which sought to preserve and codify the opinions of the Second Temple’s sages; (2) The Midrash, a more earthy collection of thoughts, stories, and opinions relating to Jewish history and (3) the Gamora, which contained later reflections and opinions of multiple rabbis on the laws of the Mishna.  

While much of the Talmud expressed conflicting religious opinions, it was not without some well-reasoned insights into Jewish law.  Institutional Jewish groups outside of rabbinical Judaism, such as the Karites, the Samaritans, and others would occasionally look to the Talmud, but never held themselves in any way bound to it.  Their orientation was to the Written Torah, or in the case of the Samaritans an earlier version of that Torah. 

A real problem developed regarding Rabbinical Judaism, when the Rabbis became so enamored with their own creation that they dubbed the Talmud the “Torah Shel Bial Pe,” the Oral Torah and claimed that it originated from Mount Sinai 1750 years earlier and held it to be of equal dignity with the Written Torah.

As noted, the Written Torah rejected any additions or subtractions to its text, but the Talmud could barely restrain itself in expanding simple text to the point of abject distortion.  The Written Torah’s prohibition against “seething a kid in the milk of its mother,” Exodus 34 (25), was construed by the Talmud in such a manner as to disregard the familial relationship of the two animals and their single species of origin.  The Talmud ended up prohibiting consuming milk from a cow with the meat of a lamb, or even a chicken that gives no milk. On the other hand, it allows the consumption of a chicken together with its eggs.

The Talmud enacted a plethora of religious restrictions and over-the-top interpretations of biblical provisions, which constituted a religious confinement, even within the gates of the ghettos in which they were obliged to live.  The related “Shulchan Oruch” instructs the observant Jew as to which shoe to put on first in the morning and which hand to be used for personal cleanliness.  Expansions and add-on rules such as these are clearly in violation of Deuteronomy 4 (2) of the written Torah. Two Torahs that have two distinct sets of laws imply the existence of a circumstance that no Jew can endure, i.e., two different deities.

Matrilineal-ism – Judaism’s Poison Pill

Of all of the departures by Rabbinical Judaism from the Written Torah, the abandonment of patrilineal-ism in favor of matrilineal-ism is by far the worst. Even today, 1800 years after the Talmud’s disastrous switch, acknowledged Torah scholars such as Shaye J. D. Cohen, Littaur Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard University, in his landmark work entitled “The Beginnings Of Jewishness” examined all possible rationales for the substitution of matrilineal-ism for patrilineal-ism and concluded:

“The matrilineal principle has had enormous social consequences for modern Jews, and it is easy to believe that the rabbis in antiquity must have been compelled by some societal needs to institute it. But there is little evidence to support this belief. Intermarriage was not a severe problem in rabbinic society, and even if it was, the logical response would have been the institution of a bilateral system, requiring both a Jewish father and a Jewish mother for an offspring to be reckoned Jewish by birth. Perhaps elsewhere the rabbis were legislators, listening attentively to the demands of their constituency. In their statement of the matrilineal principle, however, the rabbis were philosophers, and like most philosophers, they did not always live in the real world.”

Matrilineal-ism is a Tragic Blow to Judaism.  If Left Unchecked, it Can be the End of 4000 Years of Jewish Primacy.                                                

The Land of Israel:  God did not give the land of Israel to the Hebrew patriarchs.  He sent them there to sojourn for a period, but promised the land to their “Zeracha”, the lineal line, through the continuum of their male semen.  Nowhere in God’s pledge of the land does it reference the word children, daughters, descendants or other language that would include anyone other than the seminal lineage described.  By doing that, in a patriarchal environment, He was assured that the lineage of the people would retain the character of the patriarchs as He designed it.

Since the change to matrilineal-ism in the Second Century CE, we are indeed a different people. Under matrilineal-ism, the male line of semen no longer creates a continuum of Jews. That is especially true in the current era of 58% rate of intermarriage. Since we have altered the formula of who is a Jew from that provided in the Torah, it has changed the composition of the Jewish people. Are we, matrilineal descendants, still legally entitled to the land of Israel? Can we switch beneficiaries on God?

Conversion:  The written Torah invites non-Jews to sojourn in the Jewish community, it protects them, and assures a quality of life like Jews. However, it does not authorize genetic conversion of the Gentiles to Jews, even if that were possible.  It is hard to believe that the Tannaim of the Talmud’s Mishna fully perceived the deleterious effect of the rejection of the Written Torah’s patrilineal-ism in favor of matrilineal-ism.

Did they wake up one day and realize that transition to matrilineal-ism was determining that four full tribes and two half- tribes of Israel were non-Jewish in origin?  Did they understand that they were rendering the children of Jacob with the concubines, and the children of Joseph, Moses, and of the many foreign wives and concubines of King David and King Solomon as non-Jews, a result that would not have occurred under patrilineal-ism.

Somewhere along the line, the early authors of the Talmud must have perceived the need for corrective action, if matrilineal-ism were to survive. Anxious minds apparently came up with the notion of Rabbinical conversion.  Previously, conversion had not been necessary, as those Gentiles morally persuaded to the Jewish laws, precepts and practices could enter the Jewish community as a respected “Gerim”.  But, a formal ceremony of conversion could serve as a celebratory event for that transition.

It is doubtful that the Rabbinical schools of that era, and of now, provide courses on how to change the human genetics.  What Rabbis can’t do, in order to ameliorate the folly of matrilineal Judaism, is to genetically change a Gentile into a Jew.  The genetic heritage established at conception, even today, is immutable.  While a rabbi can provide the education necessary to introduce a Gentile wife into a normative Jewish lifestyle, the rabbi is unable to bestow upon the issue of the Gentile wife the Zera of Judaic continuity, unless, of course, it is provided by a Jewish husband. If a Gentile wife is converted and subsequently divorces her Jewish husband, does she breed Jewish children in the union with a new Gentile husband?

Boomerang Rabbinical Adventurism

There are approximately fourteen million Jews in the world today. Ashkenazi Jews comprise more than 80% of world Jewry. The remaining Jews are represented by the Sephardic Jewish Community (Jews from the Iberian Peninsular Jewish lineage) and Mizrahim (Middle Eastern Jews).

While all Jews are genetically related to each other, there are differences. Sephardic Jews have perceptively darker hair and skin coloring and there are significant differences in the diseases that impact Ashkenazis, but not the other Jewish populations. These differences were uniquely studied by David Goldstein PhD. from the Center for Genetic Anthropology at the University College in London; Doron Behar and Professor Karl Skorecki of the Technion medical faculty at the Rambam Medical Center in Israel; and Prof. Martin Richard of the Archaeogenetics Research Group of the University of Huddersfield in England.

Their findings demonstrated that the male lineage of Ashkenazi Jews, based on Y chromosome studies, traced back to the Middle East. However, the female mitochondrial origins are most closely related to southern and western European lineages.

Their findings suggest that when Jewish men migrated into Europe, most likely following defeat at the hands of the Romans, they procreated with European women. Doron Behar was able to determine that 40% of current Ashkenazi population is descendent from just four indigenous, non-Jewish women.

If one follows the rabbinical policy of matrilineal-ism, multiple millions of Ashkenazi Jews, are not Jews at all. On the other hand, if one follows the prescription of patrilineal-ism provided in the Torah, there is no problem at all, i.e., since the fathers were Jews, the children of those unions were also Jews.

Jewish Denominations Disagree as to What is a Valid Conversion

Further complicating the issue of Jewish identity, is the lack of any uniform standard for conversion, which is essential even for the erroneous matrilineal identification of a Jew. Orthodox Judaism which has primacy in Israel and elsewhere, recognizes only conversion done by certain of its rabbis.  The various Rabbinical Jewish denominations have different standards for conversion which often are not given full faith and credit by the other denominations. The ascendancy of matrilineal-ism, its ineffectiveness, and its multiple complications make the determination of who is a Jew as clear and precise as a Jackson Pollock painting. 

The clear and present danger of such confusion, and the need for immediate remedial action, result in the loss of both personal and functional Jewish identity. God’s design of the people and its responsibility for Tikkun Olam simply will stop become another item of fungibility in the mass of humanity that inhabits the earth.

Matrilineal-ism has been in effect in Rabbinical Judaism for over 1800 years. What makes its removal now so critical?  In a world in which Jews married other Jews, a world without significant intermarriage, the deleterious effect of matrilineal-ism did not become apparent. In the diaspora Jewish communities of Europe and the Middle East, intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles seldom occurred, it was an anathema. Marriage to a Jew could even constitute a punishable offense to Gentiles. The liberalism of the Twentieth Century, after Hitler, changed all of that. Matrilineal-ism was like an unexploded World War II bomb that burrowed itself the ground, only later to spontaneously explode in the next Century. The Jewish explosion of matrilineal-ism took place when more than 50% of all American Jews began to marry Gentile spouses. Good wine improves with age. Bad ideas do not.

The Plight of Jewish Children

The Torah of our forefathers, the Written Torah, still survives in its original scroll form in the ark of every Jewish synagogue in the world.  Under that Torah, children born of a Jewish father are Jews.  Today, tens of thousands of Jewish children born to Jewish fathers and Gentile mothers are denied their Jewish heritage, cast out from the bosom of Judaism and told that they can convert to Judaism, like any other Gentile.  Often, in Jewish institutions of learning, they are denied a Jewish education because their mother is not Jewish.  It is a tragedy for the children, their parents, Judaism and the Torah.

Reform Judaism, after its ranks swelled by intermarriage, felt compelled to add to its matrilineal-ism a modified version of patrilineal-ism.  Essentially, it provided that children born of Jewish fathers and Gentile mothers could claim Jewish identity if the children were reared in a Jewish home.  While that constituted a mini-step in the right direction, it failed to leave the wrong direction. How a person has absolutely nothing to do with whether is a Jew.  Jewish identity is established at the instant of conception. Fairness and equality are inbred in the Jewish spirit.  Jews are often at the forefront of the battle against disparity, prejudice and unfairness.  Yet, there are circumstances, which by their very nature, are not adaptable to parity.  Not all numbers are divisible by 2 resulting in, whole integers. We cannot change a male fetus into a female fetus simply because we have four other boys. Not all countries have equal distribution of gold and other valuable minerals, and not all sexes can produce semen which is the golden thread of Jewish identity.

Conclusion

The origin of the Jewish people is disclosed in the Written Torah. It starts with God’s selection of Abram and his barren wife, Sarah. The Torah describes how God intervenes to grant Sarah, at 90 years of age, a male child, Isaac. Isaac fathers Jacob, and the patrilineal succession of the patriarchs is complete. No other historical documents confirm or deny that succession. Without the Written Torah, the Jewish people, do not exist.

On seven different occasions, the Written Torah prescribes the manner in which the patriarchs will grow into a great and populous nation. That procedure occurs through the continuous thread of patriarchal semen from father to son through each generation. The scientific insights to that process were disclosed in 1903 by Nettie Stevens of Bryn Mawr College. She revealed how the Y chromosome passes directly through the mother to the male child. The father’s X chromosome, which signals the birth of a female child joins with the mother’s X chromosome to create that child. It is a simple elegant formula for the unaltered continuity of a designed people.

That natural design was used by default to identify the origin of Jews from the beginning until the rise of Rabbinical Judaism shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The Tannaim, early authors of the Talmud’s Mishna, for some reason, which even escapes the scholars of today, abandoned the Torah’s natural process of patrilineal-ism. They substituted the mother, whose body can provide no semen as the source of the Jewish child. It is the functional equivalent of trying to open the lock on your front door with a pillow. It simply can’t work. The disastrous effects of the Rabbinical alteration of the written Torah by the substitution of matrilineal-ism include:

1. The loss of the patriarchal continuum in the creation and identification of a Jewish child.
2. The erosion of the legal biblical entitlement to the land of Israel because of the alteration of the designee beneficiary.
3. The corruption of the Jewish genetic pool by the legalization of unauthorized semenal lines.
4. The creation of a class of “fractional Jews”.
5. The attempt to ameliorate the deleterious effect of matrilineal-ism by offering multiple confusing standards for conversion, which by its very nature is genetically incapable of resolving the issue.
6. By denying Jewish children, born of the Zera of Jewish fathers, their birthright and their identity as Jews thus submitting them to be absorbed by other cultures, and other gods.
7. By creating matrilineal-ism, a false and fraudulent rule of Jewish origin, millions of Ashkenazi Jews, whose origin traces back to four Gentile mothers, are, in fact, disenfranchised as Jews.

Like global warming, it has taken a long time for the real dangers of matrilineal-ism to affect the Jewish community and to come into focus. As with global warming, if you fail to address the challenge, the creeping muddy waters of Jewish identity will cover a 4000-year-old people and its God-prescribed mission.

The Origin

In 1280 BCE, both Judaism and Judeo-Christianity had their genesis at Mount Sinai with God’s delivery of the law to Moses. The written Torah, which incorporates the law given at Sinai, does not actually appear until around 500 BCE when it is presumed to have been brought by Ezra to the Second Temple.

While the Torah suggests that it was written by the finger of God (Exodus 3 (18) and Deuteronomy 9 (10)), the most current analysis is that it was drafted by four separate authors who laboriously and faithfully assembled and transcribed notes and recollections into the final document. In any event, the Torah was accepted by the Hebrew people as the sacred and immutable source of their origin and commitment to their God.

The Second Temple:  516 BCE to 70 CE

The Second Temple Period was an extremely important epoch in the history and character of the Jewish people. It was favored with the Torah, a written set of laws, under which the Jewish people could establish a new beginning. It was the Renaissance of Jewish nationhood following the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel (in 722 BCE) and the Babylonian destruction of the first Temple in Judah (in 586 BCE).

In its earliest stage, it functioned largely as a theocracy under the laws of the Torah construed by a coterie of sages and scholars (known as the Persons of the Large Assembly or Anshe Kenesseth Hagadol), administratively enforced by the Sanhedrin and religiously operated by the temple priests, Kohanim.

The priests of the temple were divided into two different, competing philosophical groups regarding the laws of the Torah. The Sadducees were an elite upper-class element who believed in strict adherence to the laws of the Torah. They followed the Torah’s rules of patrilineal descent, rejected conversion and all changes that were not within the reasonable interpretation of the express language of the Torah. On the other hand, the Pharisees (who came from the middle and working classes) were more open to a broad construction of the Torah, which on occasion meandered into changing aspects of that treasured instrument.

In 332 BCE, the Middle East neighborhood changed. Alexander the Great entered with his vast forces and took control of the area. The new state of Israel, as well as many other local nation-states accommodated the Greeks rather than confront them militarily. In addition to troops, the Greeks brought Greek philosophy, which some members of the Jewish community, including the Sadducees, found interesting and compelling.

However, Alexander’s life was short and the lands under his dominion were divided among his generals. Syria and Israel fell under the dominion of

Antiochus of the Seleucid Empire.  In 167 BC, the Maccabees (Hasmoneans), under the command of Judah Maccabee, led a successful revolt against Antiochus after he sought to interfere with Jewish temple worship.

Once again it appeared that Israel was restored to its own faith and independence. However, the cure might have been worse than the illness. The Hasmonean dynasty, descendants of the Maccabee family, concluded that to the victor went the spoils. They were self-interested and not only sought the political leadership of Israel, but also the high priesthood of the temple. 

Hasmoneon King Alexander Janneaus appointed Shimon Ben Shetach (his brother-in-law) as head of the Sanhedrin.  In that capacity, Ben Shetach politically eliminated all Sadducees from the temple and replaced them with Pharisees. This political maneuver changed the direction of the Jewish religion by eliminating the party dedicated to strict compliance with the written Torah. Ultimately, in 67 BCE, Janneaus’s two sons, Aristobulus II and Hyrcanus II, fought over succession. Hyrcanus invited the Romans, who were in the neighborhood, to assist in his struggle for succession. That act resulted in Rome’s ultimate domination of Israel and the destruction of the Temple and Israel’s Commonwealth.

The First Century CE:  The Beginning of Judeo-Christianity and of Rabbinical Judaism

If Jews are anguished upon hearing the name “Jesus”, it may well be because that very name was heard uttered during the Crusades when Jewish communities in Europe were slaughtered by bands of militants en route to free the “Holy Land” from the Saracens. Or, because in Jesus’s name, approximately 35,000 persons were condemned to be burned at the stake in Spain, Portugal, and the New World when it was suspected they still had an affinity for Judaism, their original faith. Or, because it was in dedication to that name that rode on the horses of the Cossacks as they ruthlessly murdered men, women, and children in the “shtetls” of East Europe. Or, because it was the name which, except in rare instances, was silent in the defense of 6 million innocent Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.

Yet, Jesus is a Hebrew name, as is the name of his cousin, John the Baptist, and the Hebrew names of all twelve of his disciples: Simon (called Peter) Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, James, Thaddeus, Simon (the Zealot) and Judas Iscariot. These men were all Jews, born and raised and educated in a Jewish land under the providence of the Second Temple. In fact, John the Baptist was a preacher who viewed himself as a Jewish prophet with a mission to cleanse his fellow Jews of their transgressions. He devised to do so in a manner familiar to most Orthodox Jews who visit a mikvah. His death was procured by Herod Antipas, the Roman provincial ruler, after Herod violated the Torah’s 10 Commandments by stealing the wife of his half-brother, Philip.

Jesus was one of a number of charismatic persons to offer himself to the Jewish people as an avenue to return to God, Torah, and peace. His disciples viewed his calling as the answer to the prediction of a Messiah, found in Isaiah 2. The Judaic Messiah, however, is not a deity but a king or anointed one with a mission to bring peace to the world. In fact, Isaiah 45 (1) identifies the Persian Cyrus as a Messiah because he helped to sponsor the return of the Jewish people to Israel and rebuild the Second Temple.

The sermons that Jesus preached were largely reminiscent of the classical Jewish training of the day. The reported miracles, which included healing the sick, turning water into wine, restoring a young girl to life and walking on water, had to be spectacular events to the disciples and all who observed them.

The Beginning of the End of the Jesus Ministry

Jesus’s misfortunes generated from a number of circumstances, some of which arose from injudicious conduct. To enter the temple and cause a ruckus by overturning the tables of the money-changers was a bit theatric and unwise.

Money-changers were essential on the temple campus. Many Jews came from far away and with foreign currency to purchase animals for sacrifice at the Temple. Without money-changers, these people could not accomplish the purpose of their long journey, which was purchasing an animal for sacrifice. Even today, international airports accommodate foreign travelers by providing money-changers.

Jesus’s real problem with both the Pharisees and the Romans was that he did not reject those who dubbed him Jesus, King of Israel “Melech Yisroel”. Kings of Israel had to originate from the line of King David (Jesse) and selected and anointed by the temple priests (Kohanim). To say the least, Jesus was unable to show his definitive lineage and had not ingratiated himself with the Pharisees. More importantly, the Romans, the foreign landlords of the State of Israel, could not tolerate someone competing with their authority.

Given the circumstances, what were Jesus and his disciples doing in Jerusalem where he might be in jeopardy? The answer is quite simple. It was Passover, one of the three annual foot holidays (Shelosh Regalim), when all Jews in Israel were encouraged to walk to the temple in Jerusalem and give animal sacrifices in the temple.   

Were Jesus, his four younger brothers (James, Judas, Joseph and Simon), his disciples and followers a danger to the Jewish state during his lifetime or upon his death? Hardly! Judeo-Christianity was an accepted sect of Jewish affiliation for decades after Jesus’s death (circa 36 CE).

Paul Brings Judeo-Christianity to the Gentile Masses

Saul of Tarsus, also known as Paul, was a contemporary of Jesus, although he never met Jesus nor heard him preach. Paul was a Pharisee and started adult life enforcing Judaic law. He was born in Tarsus, presently a part of Turkey and then under the dominion of the Roman Empire.

In midlife, Paul reported an epiphany that drove him to support Jesus and to bring the story of Jesus’s life, together with his form of Judaism, to the Gentile world. He overcame the main obstacle of converting Gentiles to Judaism by abandoning the Torah requirements of direct lineage from the patriarchs and the necessity of male circumcision. In essence, Paul’s program offered the God of Israel, with Jesus as his representative, to the world at large. For almost 200 years, Christianity grew moderately as a Gentile form of Judaism until the Roman Emperor Constantine declared it the official religion of the Roman Empire.

How then did Jesus, whose life started as a preacher and a prophet, become a Christian deity? Torah usages of the day provide some insight. Jews were accustomed to avoiding God’s name, instead using terms of respectful reference, like, God our Father, (See Deuteronomy 32 (6)) and Deuteronomy 14 (1). Also, in prayers like Aveenu Malknu, God is referred to as our Father. That reference is, of course, not to a single individual but to all creation

How did Jesus become a Christian deity?

Whether by inadvertence, misinterpretation or design, the term Father, as often used by Jesus, was construed by the early Christians to mean God created his own son Jesus by affecting the pregnancy of Mary (see New Testament: John 5 (30), 14 (6-11), (26), Matthew 11 (27)). From this notion, it is reasonable to conclude that the church probably developed the idea of a Virgin Birth, given the absence of John, Mary’s husband, from the equation. It was then not a quantum leap for the church to conclude that the son of the deity is, in fact, a new generation deity.

Transdeification (a word created by this author) is the effective transfer of all or part of the power and authority from a deity to another entity, generally human. The Ten Commandments of the written Torah, as well as a number of other provisions of that document, provide that there is only one true God. Indeed, the Torah insists upon that idea and declares that God is a jealous God and a vengeful one, a message that no one should take lightly. The idea that God is “one” is the credo of all Jews when they recite the universal Jewish prayer in every service that begins with “Shema Yisroel. ” A deity who is the son of God is a deity nevertheless and creates a circumstance repugnant to the written Torah and monotheism. This understanding has not escaped the awareness of the Christian community which attempts to cloud it in the inscrutable notion of the Trinity.

What is indeed strange and wondrous is that most of the two billion Christians who consider Jesus a divinity nevertheless retain, as the largest part of their Bible, the Old Testament, which includes the written Torah, the Prophets, the Scribes and its absolute insistence on monotheism.    

Rabbinical Judaism a.k.a. Rabbinism

The written Torah described how Jews should communicate with their God. First and foremost, an individual must follow the civilized rules of conduct which the written Torah prescribes, and thus avoid the ire of God.

Early on, by making a Temple sacrifice, one could request forgiveness for sinful conduct, ask God for a desired outcome, express gratitude for a joyful event or simply acknowledge love, respect or fear of God.

Today, some view temple sacrifices (korbans) performed by their Jewish ancestors with embarrassment and consider it unworthy of a civilized society.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Sacrifices in the temple involved food animals only, grain, meal, wine, and incense. Animals were not sacrificed merely to procure their death, as in the case of Santería. These animals which, even in the absence of Temple sacrifice, would have graced private tables and would not have been permitted to die of old age.  Temple sacrifices served both a devotional and practical purpose.

• It was a way of tithing in a community given to agriculture and husbandry, a community without sophisticated paper currency. Many of the animals and birds were uniquely similar to those we find wrapped in plastic at our local supermarket.
• It was a way in which the donor could, by giving, accompany his message to God with more than simply lip service.
• The holy Temple was operated by the priests (Kohanim) and the administrative personnel (Levites), all of whom were from the tribe of Levi. The tribe of Levi did not get a portion of the land of Canaan distributed among the other tribes of Israel. Instead, they were responsible for the temple and they and their families received the major part of all of the animals and food delivered as sacrifices at the temple.
• Thus, the temple and its services represented an orderly, civilized and well-designed system.

The End of the Second Temple: The Exit of the Kohanim (Priests) and   the Beginning of Rabbinical Judaism

On April 14, 70 CE, three days before the beginning of Passover, the Romans laid siege on the city of Jerusalem. The siege ended on August 30 of that year with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple.

The end of the Second Temple dramatically changed the way in which the Jewish people interacted with their God. Mourning for the loss of their Temple and their Capital by fasting on Tisha B’Av was appropriate. However, it did not provide for the needs of a people who were related genetically and connected through their commitment to their one God.

Jews began to assemble communally to read and learn the law, as was required by the Written Torah in Deuteronomy. But, that was not enough. Individuals had a need to tell their God about their anxieties, express their love, but most of all request God’s help on behalf of their families and their people. These communal sessions were generally under the auspices of the Pharisees, remnants of the temple personnel. Personal prayers became pre-prepared communal prayers. The Pharisees eventually became the Rabbinate and the communal assembly became the synagogue of Rabbinical Judaism.

The evolution was a normal and essential one. However, the early Rabbinate, like their predecessors, the Pharisees, did not constrain themselves to the interpretation of the written Torah. Under the guise of interpretation, they distanced themselves from the written Torah and began to change and amplify it. In today’s parlance, that is called “judicial legislation”.

With each Rabbinical stage, starting with the Sages of the late Second Temple, including the Midrash, the Mishnah, and the Gemorrah, the Rabbinical views, as recorded in the Talmud, departed from the Written Torah. While there may be some conceptual differences in the composition of the Talmud and the Oral Torah, they are essentially the same document and will be used herein interchangeably.

From the Word of God to the Word of Man

Under Rabbinical authority, Judaism began a gradual transition from Torah to Talmud. Persons learned in Jewish law became known as Talmudim. Schools of learning for Jewish children were called “Talmud Torah” with the word Talmud preceding the word Torah. This transition caused a major problem for the early Rabbinate. How could Rabbinical law (Halacha) promulgated by the Rabbis, who were not prophets and had no direct communication with God, take precedence over the express language of the written Torah?

Neither brilliance nor imagination was absent in the solution. The solution was not so simple because God’s voice was not heard either directly or indirectly since the end of the period of the Hebrew prophets. The last of such prophets was Malachi, who preached in the middle of the fifth century BCE about the time of Ezra. Rabbinical Judaism’s quandary was how to show God’s authority to amend the written Torah with an instrument authored by Rabbis and completed over a thousand years later.

God did not speak to the Rabbis and thus authorize changes to the written Torah. What the Rabbis did was to go back to Mount Sinai (1280 BCE) and maintain that God gave two Torahs, one that was written and one that was oral. Their rationale was that God felt that His written Torah was so incomprehensible that special instructions were necessary to understand its meaning. The implausibility of such a proposal is glaring. It suggests that God was unable or unwilling to speak in plain language and that he would provide a code to the Rabbis, which would not appear until over a thousand years later. The credibility of that proposition is more than a little wanting, as no mention of the “Oral Torah” appears in the written Torah, which expressly rejects any changes, additions or subtractions.

The Rabbis expressed multiple, varied and conflicting opinions in the Mishnah and especially in the Gemorrah. How could the Rabbis maintain that those opinions clarified God’s express word in the written Torah and justify elevating the Talmud to an Oral Torah of equal dignity? The most spectacular aspect of the Rabbinical proposal is how it got, some 1200 years later, from Mount Sinai to the minds of the early Rabbinical authors of the Talmud, who claim no direct communication with God.

The Written Torah and The Oral Torah:  Two Torahs, Two Judaisms, Two Gods?

The Written and Oral Torahs are so distinct, in spiritually significant ways, that it suggests that there are two different Judaisms, from two different sources.

The written Torah is immutable. How do we know? It says so in Deuteronomy 4 (2): “You shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish ought from it, that you may keep the commandments of the Lord, your God which I command you.” The written Torah is not like a Wikipedia, amendable by the reader.

Early Opposition to the Rabbinate’s Modification of the Written Torah

The Karite movement surfaced in Baghdad in the Seventh Century CE, in response to the Rabbinate’s deviation from the written Torah. It arose to challenge what was viewed as a number of erroneous interpretations and unauthorized additions contained in the Talmud. The Karites did not reject the Talmud, but neither did they feel bound by it.

The Karites insisted that the interpretation of the written Torah should be limited to conclusions that can honestly and reasonably be derived from its clear language, without amendment or addition.

The Golden Age of Karism occurred between the tenth and eleventh centuries CE. At one time the number of Jews affiliated with Karism was as much as 40% of world Jewry. Early in the 10^th century, the head of a Babylonian Rabbinical Academy, the Saadia Gaon, took upon himself the confrontation between the Rabbinical and the Karite views, a battle that ended up permanently severing the two Jewish communities. After that struggle Karaism, in a weakened position, continued in Iraq, Egypt, Persia, Lithuania, and Poland. Currently, it is estimated that there are approximately 40,000 Karites living in Israel, with smaller communities in Turkey, Europe and the United States.

Rabbinism’s Deviation From and Addition to the Written Torah and its Transdeification from God to Itself. 

Rabbinism’s Alteration of Jewish Identity

The written Torah tells us that a Jew is a person who is a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob through a Jewish male (patrilineal). It further requires that, in order to be considered Jewish, a male child must be circumcised.

1. In Genesis 12(7), God appears to Abraham (then Abram) and in referring to the land of Canaan tells him: “Unto thy seed will I give this land.”
2. In Genesis 17(6-8), God tells Abraham that he will make him exceedingly fruitful and that he will sire Kings.  God promises that he will give to Abraham and to Abraham’s seed all of the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession.
3. In Genesis 17 (10-12), God reminds Abraham of the earlier covenant negotiated between God, Abraham and the seed of Abraham and requires that a token of that covenant be represented by the circumcision of every male child.
4. In Genesis 26 (2-4), God confirms to Isaac the covenant with Isaac’s father, Abraham. God promises to make Isaac’s seed multiply as the stars of the heaven and in Isaac’s seed will all the nations of the earth be blessed.
5. In Genesis 28 (14), God tells Jacob that his seed shall be as the dust of the earth.
6. In Deuteronomy 34 (4-5), God allows Moses, prior to his death, to look at the land to which he has brought the Jewish people and reminds Moses that he has given this land to the seed of the patriarchs.
7. In all biblical references in which the word seed is used, the Bible employs the word “Zera” which, even today, is translated as Semen.

In 200 CE, the Tannaim (of the Mishnah and the Talmud) completely changed the origin of the Jew from those born of a Jewish male (patrilineal) to those born of a Jewish female (matrilineal). Thus, Jewish males could no longer, by themselves, confer Jewish identity on children through the seed that was the continuum from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Scholars have tried to identify why this was done by the Tannaim, but have been unable to find an acceptable rationale or justification for the change.

One change alone, among many, had enormous consequences. God’s covenant with the patriarchs granted Canaan to the descendants of the male seed “zera”. Matrilineality, in the Oral Torah, abandoned the patriarchal seed and unlawfully changed the identity of “the descendants,” to the children of the mother,  thus putting in question Jewish biblical entitlement to the land of Israel.

Conversion

As observed, to be a Jew designed by God in the Written Torah, one must be born as a direct lineal descendant of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, from the seed (zera) of a Jewish father. The design is strictly genetic and does not depend upon the origin of the mother or whether the child was reared or educated in the Jewish religion. If a person, born a Jew, commits to a different faith and then wishes to return to Judaism, that person need not convert since genetically that person never stopped being a Jew. A Jew has a genetically tribal identity, but the Jewish religion can be admired and adopted by anyone without the need of a license from the Rabbinate.

Rabbinical Judaism, on the other hand, has conjured the notion that a graduate from one of its Rabbinical schools has the authority to change the genetics of one born of different peoples.

Because Rabbinical Judaism is fragmented into multiple denominations, each denomination has its own rules and procedures for effecting a “conversion.” One denomination need not accept the conversions of another, which results in abject confusion within Rabbinical Judaism as to who is a Jew.

The Written Torah has no provision for formal conversion of a Ger (person who is not born Jewish but is sojourning within the Jewish community).  However, the Written Torah makes exquisite provisions for the protection and inclusion of Gers. It preserves for them all of the rights, privileges, and protections of a Jew, with the exception of certain religious rites that require Jewish birth.

The modern impetus for attempting to convert a person to a Jew is an outgrowth of Rabbinical Judaism’s misguided venture into matrilinealism.

Today, the main reason for Rabbinical conversion is to attempt to confer Jewish genetics on a Gentile woman married to a Jewish man, so as to claim that their children are born Jewish. That charade would not be necessary had Rabbinical Judaism not erroneously adopted Matrilinealism.

The Rabbinical World to Come

In Genesis, the Written Torah goes into great detail to describe the creation of the world and its contents. After six days God rested. There is absolutely no mention or implication in the Written Torah of the existence of a second world. All rewards and punishments are done in this world.

Oral Torah Talmudic sources identify an ultimate reward for the individual Jew. The Talmud contains scattered descriptions of the world to come “L’olam Habh’ah”. It is also referred to as “Gan Eden” (The Garden of Eden). Nahmanides, (the Ramban), a medieval Jewish Rabbi, believed that the world to come would be ushered in by the resurrection of the dead and that the righteous will merit additional life. It was a notion not dissimilar from his contemporary Moses Maimonides,(the Rambam) who wrote that the righteous will enjoy spiritual, bodiless existence in the presence of God. These philosophies were adopted and expanded by Christianity as it exited from Judaism and comprised its notion of the many-tiered existence. Given God’s omnipotence and omniscience, it seems rather strange that God was so tired on the sixth day that he forgot to mention another world that he created.

Life After Death

The Sadducees, and the Karites their spiritual successors did not believe in a life or spirit that survived the death of the human body. Therefore, for them, there was no reason to conjure a world to come. It is understandable for persons to want, and therefore to create, a belief system wherein they would survive the human body and reap the rewards of a life well-lived. That notion is not supported by the Written Torah. The idea that man’s soul is immortal is not an original Judaic construct. It existed in earlier civilizations. Ironically, it found credence in Rabbinical Judaism and Judeo Christianity at or about the same time. In both faiths, it is amply used to reward compliance with the tenets of that faith.

Rabbinical Judaism’s Liberty With Verity

After the fifth century CE, Rabbis welcomed the Sabbath with the blessing of the Sabbath lights (generally two candles). Although the blessing recites that God expressly ordered that procedure, the Written Torah does not mention or provide for that procedure. It is suggested that the alleged ‘God- directed’ blessing over the Sabbath candles was prescribed by the Rabbis for practical, rather than religious, reasons. In pre-electric homes, light was provided by candles. Jews followed the Written Torah mandate to “Kindle no fire during the Sabbath.” In order to achieve light in their homes on Friday evening, Rabbinical Judaism made the lighting of candles before the commencement of the Sabbath into a religious event (The Jewish Book of Why, page 168). This manufactured “blessing” flagrantly violates one of the Written Torah’s Ten Commandments, which requires that God’s name should not be taken in vain.

Meat and Dairy: Interpretation or Interpolation

Exodus 23 (19), of the Written Torah, provides: “Thou shalt not seethe (boil) a kid in his mother’s milk”. From this provision, Rabbinical Judaism required that all milk and all meat (including chicken) from whatever diverse source, must be separated from each other. Thus, the Rabbis conclude that milk, or its products, cannot be consumed together with any meat from any source.

This Rabbinical construction is so woefully overbroad and unjustified as to, by itself, constitute a prohibited addition to the Written Torah. If God intended to separate all meat from all milk, he certainly could have so declared. As chickens do not give milk, the inclusion of chicken as a meat is a prohibited addition to the Written Torah, on steroids. Followers of Karite Judaism, strict interpreters of the written Torah, limit the interpretation of the provision to a mother animal and its offspring and do not require the separation of all meat from all milk, nor all the dishes and utensils required to serve them.

Infinite Alterations and Additions of the Written Torah by Rabbinical Judaism

Originally, the Rabbinate functioned as teachers and interpreters of biblical law contained in the Written Torah. No one, not even the Rabbis, was authorized to change that law or add to it. While their opinions as biblical scholars are valuable and should be readily available to serve the Jewish community, they cannot add to, expand or reject the laws of the Written Torah. Rabbis are not elected Jewish legislators nor are they authorized to amend the express language of the Written Torah.

Notwithstanding the fact that it is their occupation and they get paid for conducting Sabbath services, Rabbis cannot even exempt themselves from the prohibition against working on Sabbath.

Yet, they have adopted laws, known as the Code of Jewish Law (Shulchan Oruch, which was originally drafted by Joseph Karo:

There is an infinite number of other laws and regulations that may not remotely relate to subjects addressed in the Written Torah. Codifying into law the daily minutia of life, as provided in the Shulchan Oruch, is violative of the Written Torah’s proscription against adding to Torah law. Examples such as:

• What is the right way to tie shoelaces.
• Which shoe to remove first.
• What hand to be used to take care of your personal needs, how those needs should be attended, or what blessing should be said on conclusion etc.

In truth and in fact, it is hard to understand how these rabbinical laws serve spirituality or are derived from the Written Torah.

Conclusion

Judaism and Christianity were sourced in the same Written Torah. In traditional Judaism, the Written Torah is known as the Chumash and in the text of Christian Bibles, it is known as the Old Testament. Both Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity arose from the same genetic and religious source until the First Century CE, when things began to change. Ironically, in that century, both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism incubated their unique style of Judaism.

Led by a Jewish disciple of Jesus, Christianity followed the life of a charismatic Jewish preacher into the receptive hands of the Gentile world. Its departure from Judaism became complete when they began to consider the charismatic preacher a deity. Asserting such a proposition was alien to the Written Torah and to a faith whose credo is “Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God, the Lord is one”.

Judeo Christianity’s transdeification was early, direct and complete, and remains intact to this day. As Judeo-Christianity exited from Judaism in the direction of other lands, Judaism exited from Judeo Christianity because it could not sanction multitheism. Yet, almost 2000 years after the birth of Jesus, in a world with Two billion Christians, the Torah and the Tanakh represent the largest part of most Christian Bibles.

The vast majority of the 14.2 million acknowledged Jews in the world follow Rabbinical Judaism. After the destruction of the Second Temple, Rabbinical domination of Judaism grew by leaps and bounds through the support and development of yeshivas in Europe and in the Mideast. 

With each new Rabbinical group examining and opining on the Torah, the Talmud grew in size and importance in Judaism. The Rabbis, in the style of the Pharisees, tested the outer boundaries of the Written Torah, substantially changing the law, philosophy and devotional content. Ultimately, the Talmud was elevated to an Oral Torah. Rabbinical Judaism took the position that one could not extract the true meaning of the written Torah without access to the Oral Torah. The conceptual differences in the two Torahs is so significant as to suggest that they were in competition with each other or that the Oral Torah superseded the Written Torah. 

In all synagogues, the hand-scripted, immutable Written Torah is located in the most prominent place.  It is kissed as it passes through the congregation.  It is raised aloft “Hagbah” as testimony to the source of Jewish faith, existence, and law.  It is the document that brought to the Jewish community the rules of civilized conduct.  It is the document for and, in which, our martyrs died. It is the eternal light of our very existence.

It is preposterous for traditional Judaism in the Oral Torah to suggest that: 

• The Written Torah is an inscrutable instrument that requires the Oral Torah to interpret or replace it.
• There is not one, but two different Torahs created at the same time by God at Mount Sinai, even though the Written Torah expressly rejected any alterations, additions or subtractions to its written text. For example, the Written Torah designed Jews through patrilineality and the Oral Torah changed that design to matrilineality. Did that occur simultaneously?
• There are two worlds, this world and “Le Olam Habah”(the world to come). In the Written Torah, God expressly created only one world.
• There is an afterlife, when, in the Written Torah, human life is finite.
• Multiple, diverse Rabbinical opinions govern Jewish conduct, when, in the Written Torah, God’s directions are clear, simple and precise. The Written Torah says what it means and means what it says, as in the case of seething a kid in the milk of its mother. The Oral Torah expands interpretation to the point of distortion.

To exalt the Written Torah in our synagogues, while, at the same time, promoting the Oral Torah’s substantial deviations, and assertion of its authority suggests an institutional hypocrisy of grandiose proportions. Rabbinical Judaism’s transdeification is from the God of the Written Torah to Rabbinate of the Oral Torah.

As one peers through the fog of Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism’s parallel journeys away from the God of the Written Torah, one can perceive the blurred image of a Golden Calf.

Douglas Kaplan

PATRILINEAGE, NOT MATRILINEAGE, IS GOD’S DESIGN FOR THE JEWISH PEOPLE           

Introduction

Judaism has two conflicting ways of determining Jewish lineage and inherited status.  Status relates to whether a Jewish male is a Kohen, Levi, or Yisroel. It is the inherited role that men played in the religious duties of the Holy Temples. Today, it exists as an honorarium in synagogue and as a record of lineage, should a third Holy Temple be constructed.  For the first 2000 years, both Jewish identity and Jewish status were determined patrilineally (descending along the male line from the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and then on from father to son).

After the destruction of both Holy Temples, in the second century CE, the Talmud changed the method of Jewish lineage of a child to that of matrilineal origin (if the mother is Jewish, the child is Jewish). Status identification, however, remains to this day patrilineal.

Scholars have attempted to find scriptural authority, or a rational reason, for the 180° change to matrilineal Judaism. Their speculations have included such rationales as:

• Historically, the mother of a child could be easily identified, but not the father. That rationale has been mooted by the advent of DNA testing, which conclusively makes that determination;
  
• Matrilineality may have resulted from an episode of Ezra the Scribe, in particular, his travail with Jewish men marrying indigenous women, at the time of the reconstruction of the second Holy Temple;
  
• The simple notion of the intimacy of motherhood; and
  
• Multiple other conjectures.

The examination of the distinction between patrilinealism and matrilinealism is not simply an academic exercise. It goes to the very heart of the issue of who is a Jew, and whether birth is the only real way of acquiring Jewish identity.

This paper is divided into three sections.

The first section is a critical look at whether the Talmud had authority to change God’s design for the creation of the Jewish people.

The second section examines the significantly destructive impact on Judaism that resulted from the change to matrilinealism.

The final section demonstrates how matrilinealism denies 40% of all Ashkenazi Jews their Jewish identity.

I.  The Written Torah

The Written Torah (Torah Katav) is the DNA of Jewish existence. It recounts the exact details of God’s creation of the world. It contains the only history of the Jewish people, from the selection of Abraham until his descendents appear on the border of Canaan (Israel), poised to take possession of the land which God had promised to them. No other contemporaneous account confirms or denies that history.

• Without the Written Torah, the Hebrew patriarchs, matriarchs, and the stories of their lives do not exist.
• Without the Written Torah, God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants does not exist.
• Without the Written Torah, the Jewish people, their obligation to their God, and their corresponding entitlement to the Land of Israel does not exist.
• Without the Written Torah, the Ten Commandments, and associated civilized rules of human behavior would not exist.
• Without the Written Torah, the Jewish people do not exist.

It is in that Written Torah that God selected the patriarchs and their seed (“zera”) as the template for the design of the Jewish people. Reference is made to “design” because, at the time of selection, there was no people, only a man, Abraham, and his barren wife, Sarah.

Why are the seeds of the patriarchs the golden thread into which is woven the fabric of the Jewish people?  The answer is quite simple.  It is because God, in the Old Testament, repeatedly prescribed it and presumptively designed it to fit within his blueprints of human genetics: 

1. In Genesis 12(7), God appears to Abraham (then Abram) and in referring to the land of Canaan tells him, “Unto thy seed will I give this land.”
2. In Genesis 12(7), God appears to Abraham (then Abram) and in referring to the land of Canaan tells him, “Unto thy seed will I give this land.”
   
3. In Genesis 17(6-8), God tells Abraham that he will make him exceedingly fruitful and that he will sire Kings.  God promises that he will give to Abraham and to Abraham’s seed all of the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession.
   
4. In Genesis 17(10-12), God reminds Abraham of the earlier covenant negotiated between God, Abraham and the seed of Abraham and requires that a token of that covenant be represented by the circumcision of every male child.
   
5. In Genesis 26(2-4), God confirms to Isaac the covenant with Isaac’s father Abraham.  God promises to make Isaac’s seed multiply as the stars of the heaven and in Isaac’s seed will all the nations of the earth be blessed.  In Genesis 28(14), God tells Jacob that his seed shall be as the dust of the earth.
   
6. Deuteronomy 34(4-5) God allows Moses, prior to his death, to look at the land to which he has brought the Jewish people and reminds Moses that he has given this land to the seed of the patriarchs.
   
7. In all biblical references in which the word seed is used the Bible employs the word “ZERAH” which, even today, is translated as Semen.

In the multiple Torah references in which God describes the concept of his designed people, there are three essential requirements: seven

1. The People must be lineal descendants of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
   
2. Their descent must derive from the “zera” (semen) of the patriarchs and their lineal male descendants.
   
3. Male descendants of the patriarchs must be circumcised on the eighth day following their birth. It is a mandate directed to the very instrument that delivers the semen, which is the thread of Jewish continuum.

The unassailable logic of God’s patrilineal design

Patrilineality is not a cabal designed by Jewish men in order to assert masculine domination over the Jewish faith. The design of all procreation was created by God, as part of His plan of the world in which we all live. It is He, and He alone, who designed a system containing X and Y chromosomes, wherein male and female identity is determined during the mating process. It is He, and He alone, who designed the Y (male) chromosome to be virtually immutable and thus carry its message unaltered from generation to generation. It is He, and He alone, who designed the X chromosome to be subject to change with each generation.

It is God, in the Torah, who, through the provision for “zera,” takes the virtually immutable Y chromosome and makes it the avenue for the continuity of his people. Thus, the patrilineal lineage created by Him and selected by Him assures that his people will remain true to his design.

The written transcription of the Torah, delivered orally by God to Moses and the Jewish people at Mount Sinai in the Thirteenth Century BCE, is the lifeblood of the Jewish people. We love it, we honor it, we live it, martyrs die wrapped in it,we reread and internalize its contents “sedra” by “sedra,” every week of our lives.

We have accepted it as the declared word of our living God. It makes no difference whether it was written by the finger of God, as is suggested in Exodus 31(18), in Deuteronomy 9(10), or is the composite historical recollection of several scribes, it is the rootstock of our identity, our mission, and our faith.

Our Torah is not Wikipedia, subject to edit by its readers, however well-intentioned they may be. The Torah is immutable. Not the Sanhedrin, the Men of the Great Assembly, the Sadducees or the Pharisees, not the Tannaim or Ammoraim, not the Gaonim, or any of the subsequent interpreters or sages of Israel, have the authority to change one word of our Written Torah. The substitution, by the Talmud, of matrilineal descent for patrilineal descent, and the resultant disfiguration of the Jewish people was an assault on the Torah, and a rejection of the authority of God. The Torah, within reasonable limits, can and should be interpreted, but it cannot be disfigured.

During biblical times, it was not unusual for Jewish men to marry non-Jewish women. These women came within the Jewish community as” Gers” (sojourners), with their rights and privileges fully protected by the Torah. Though not technically Jewish, these women were treated as part of the Jewish community, and their children, issue of Jewish fathers, were Jewish under patrilineal law. It was a simple and workable system that continued through the end of both Holy Temples.

The rise of Talmudic adventurism

What caused the authors of the Mishnah, the Talmud’s initial work, to abandon the Written Torah’s basic rule of Jewish procreation, and to adopt matrilineality?  Many believe that it was Ezra’s consternation on finding that those sent to rebuild the second Holy Temple had established liaisons with indigenous women. When he discovered that, he assembled the Jewish men and received their promise to abandon their foreign mates. Then he did something which many feel was reprehensible and both morally and religiously wrong. He secured the men’s agreement to abandon the children who were issue of their relationships with the indigenous women.

Abandonment of children is morally wrong, but considering that the children themselves were Jews, born of the “zera” (seed) derived from the patriarchs, it was also religiously wrong. Many view this incident as the inauguration of the idea of matrilinealty, though that concept did not become Talmudic law until several hundred years later.

Shaye J.D. Cohen, in his scholarly work called “The Beginnings of Jewishness,” thoroughly examines the possible reasons for transition to matrilineality, and concludes that the reason is not fully answerable.

II.  Worse than the Talmud’s rejection of the authority of the Written Torah, was the fallout from that decision

• Jewish men who marry Gentile women feel obliged to have their wives convert so that, under matrilinealism, their children are considered Jewish. In fact, Judaism, unlike Christianity and Islam, is a genetically tribal faith. The conversion process simply invites the convertee into a relationship with Jewish law, but only a Jewish male can provide the “zera,” the semenal Y chromosome that makes one a Jew.
• Even amongst the denominations that accept rabbinical conversion, there appears to be significant disagreement as to which denomination is capable of effecting that magical process of making a Jew.  The more traditional denominations will not accept conversions by the more liberal ones, and occasionally they will reject conversion from their very own rabbis. Sadly, one can find advertisements in some Jewish communities for speedy and facile conversions to accommodate the growing intermarriage market.
• Battles among the Jewish denominations over the validity of their conversion process confuses the issue of Jewish identity in the present and for successive generations.
• Children of Jewish fathers and gentile mothers have been robbed of their Jewish identity, and are obliged to undertake a superfluous and expensive conversion process if they wish to be restored to their rightful biblical heritage. In truth, since more than 50% of Jewish males in America today are engaging in intermarriage, matrilineal Judaism is causing the loss of more Jews than the Spanish Inquisition.
• God’s covenant with Abraham in the Torah expressly incorporates the lineal descendants of the patriarchs as parties to that covenant. That is later confirmed by Moses in Deuteronomy. When the Talmud changes the Jewish children from patrilineal to matrilineal descendants, we are altering the parties to the covenant with God, and therefore significantly eroding our biblical entitlement to the land of Israel as our homeland. Not even the Talmud can switch covenant parties on God without His consent.

III.  Matrilinealism denies Jewish identity to millions of Ashkenazi Jews

There are approximately 14 million Jews in the world today. Ashkenazi Jews comprise more than 80% of world Jewry. The remaining Jews are represented by the Sephardic Jewish Community (Jews from Iberian Peninsula Jewish lineage) and Mizrahim (Middle Eastern Jews).

While recent genetic studies have concluded that the world’s distinctive Jewish populations are culturally, physically and genetically related to each other, there are differences. There is a perceivable, but nominal difference in the skin tone between Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazi Jews. Sephardic Jews tend to have darker hair coloring. There is, however, a significant difference in the diseases that uniquely impact Ashkenazis, but not the other Jewish populations.

In a June 14, 2017 article from the National Gaucher Foundation, the five most common Ashkenazi genetic diseases are listed:

• Gaucher disease (1 in 10)
• Cystic fibrosis (1 in 24)
• Tay-Sachs disease (1 in 27)
• Familial  Dysautonomia (1 in 31)
• Spinal Muscular Atrophy (1 in 41)

Those distinctions have, for some time, suggested a difference in the Ashkenazi genetic profile and history from those of the rest of the Jewish community.

That genetic difference was first scientifically identified by David Goldstein, Ph.D., from the Center for Genetic Anthropology at the University College in London, in 2002. He found that Ashkenazi Jewish women appeared to be descended from non-Jewish Europeans. In 2006, Doron Behar and Professor Karl Skorecki, of the Technion medical faculty at the Rambam Medical Center in Israel, found that 40% of the current Ashkenazi population is descendent from just four indigenous women, who originated in Eastern Europe and not from the Middle East.

Professor Martin Richard, of the Archaeogenetics Research Group of the University of Huddersfield in England, concluded that the male lineage of Ashkenazi Jews, based on Y chromosome studies, traced back to the Middle East, but the female mitochondrial origins are most closely related to Southern and Western European lineages.

These findings and others suggest that when Jewish men migrated into Europe, they brought few, if any, wives with them, and married European women. All of the scientific studies from authoritative sources, with modest variation, confirm that the female rootstock of at least 40% of the Ashkenazi Jews originated from European, non-Jewish women.

This is not a problem if we apply the principle of patrilineal descent, provided to us by the express language of the Torah. Jewish fathers breed Jewish children. If we use matrilineality to determine Jewish identity, as the Rabbinate currently does, there is an enormous problem. The 80% of the 14 million Jews that are Ashkenazi by descent represents 11,200,000 people. Thus, 40% of the Ashkenazi Jews that would be denied Jewish identity amounts to 4,480,000 Jews.

Conclusion

Under whose authority did the Talmud reject God’s patrilineal design for the creation and growth of its people?

Under whose authority did the Talmud switch the parties in God’s covenant with the descendants of the patriarchs from the children of the sons to the children of the daughters:  In Genesis, because Isaac was blind, Rebecca switched Jacob for Esau. God is not blind!

God requires obedience.  The Garden of Eden was eliminated because of a single misdeed; the Flood destroyed most of the world because some were wicked; Saddam and Gomorrah went up in smoke; a curious woman was turned to salt; in a moment of anger, Moses lost his right to enter Israel. The God of Israel is, by his own description, a vengeful God (Deuteronomy 32(35)). Clearly, it is very dangerous not to hearken to God’s word. How much more so is it, to openly challenge his authority in the creation of his people? Was it a coincidence that 2000 years of diaspora started at or near the transition to matrilinealism?

We Jews tend to venerate our sages. That is especially true if the wisdom of their judgments occured a long time ago. We view their decisions as being time-honored and part of our tradition. However, it does take character, strength and conviction to annul a decision made by the Tannaim which, though well-intentioned, is neither biblical, sagacious or beneficial to the Jewish people.

What we do not know, is whether those persons, into whom the organs of modern-day traditional Judaism are entrusted, have the leadership, strength  and courage to correct an old but unwise alteration, i.e., substituting matrilineal for patrilineal origin of the Jewish people.

Apropos of Moses’ prediction in Deuteronomy 29(30), the God for whom it was never wise to make the same mistake once, has given us a second chance. He has returned us from 2000 years of wandering the earth as denigrated second-class citizens in other people’s lands, to the land which he promised to the descendants of the “zera” (semen) of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Once again, those entrusted to the leadership of traditional Judaism have a solemn decision to make:

1. Return to God and his patrilineal design in the written Torah for the identity of the Jewish People; or
   
2. Support the Talmud’s deviation from the Torah’s design of the Jewish people and confirm matrilineal descent; or
   
3. Do absolutely nothing, and hide from the decision-making process by virtue of cowardice or by feigning indifference, with the hope that the issue will disappear.  Know that inaction is a decision in favor of matrilineality, albeit a weak and uncourageous one.

Upon your action or inaction, the future of the Jewish people rests. We are a people who are tired of underclass sojourning in other people’s lands.  May God grant you the wisdom to make the right decision and the courage to do something about it.  Remember!  The God that we love and admire has infinite virtues, but patience may not be one of them.

Douglas Kaplan

THE CONFRONTATION BETWEEN KARISM AND RABBINISM

In The Beginning

The Torah, the quintessential document of Jewish origin and creed, was delivered to a recently liberated people at Mount Sinai in the thirteenth century BCE. It did not appear in written form until the sixth century BCE.

It makes little difference whether the Torah was transcribed by the finger of God (as might be suggested in Exodus 31(18)( and Deuteronomy 9(10)), or is the composite historical recollection of several authors. It is the rootstock of Jewish identity and mission. The Written Torah prescribes the rules of conduct for civilized society. Virtually all written documents require some interpretation for proper application. The written Torah is no different, but it expressly rejects any additions, deletions or alterations to its text (Deuteronomy 4(2).

Through the process of interpretation alone, the true meaning of a phrase or document can either be identified, lost or distorted. The interpretation process requires a genuine desire to perceive the intent of the author and the restraint to withhold unintended construction. It would be a true contest, indeed, to determine whether the Torah or the United States Constitution was subject to more aggressive interpretive gymnastics.

Hermeneutics (Bible interpretation) started in earnest during the second Temple Period (516 BCE to 70 BCE) and continued through the Talmudic Period (200 CE to 500 CE). At first, it was an effort shared by all the dedicated sages of Israel.

Early Jewish Religious Philosophies

The introduction of the Written Torah during the second Temple Period generated several schools of thought regarding the Torah’s meaning and application. Ultimately, two major religious philosophies resulted:

• Pharisees:  The Pharisees were the spiritual fathers of

Rabbinism. They came from the middle or working classes of the Jewish community. Pharisees maintained that an afterlife existed and that God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous in the world to come. They believed in a Messiah who would herald a new era of world peace. Pharisees were creative in their interpretation of the Torah and in the ritualistic observances that generated from their interpretations.

• Sadducees:  Sadducees represented an aristocratic,

wealthy, and traditional elite group within the hierarchy of Judaism. They were much more receptive to the influences of Greek culture that arrived with Alexander the Great and his successors. They were firm in their belief that man has free will and can choose between good and evil. They strongly believed that the soul is not immortal, that there is no afterlife, and that there are no rewards or penalties after death. They rejected the Pharisaic use of many observances which the Pharisees used to consolidate their power. Their rejection of afterlife was in direct opposition to emerging Christianity in which afterlife was an important element.

The Ultimate Political Struggle for Religious Dominance

Following the Maccabean victory (of Channukah fame) in the second century BCE, the descendents of Mattathias founded a dynasty which took control of the Temple’s High Priesthood and the leadership of the Hebrew nation. In 103 BCE, Alexander Janneus, the great grandson of Mattathias, was not content just to inherit the high priesthood. He wanted to be King of Israel as well. When the Crown was denied him, he ordered the slaughter of the Pharisee Priests.

Many of the Pharisees, including his brother in law, Simeon Ben Shetach, fled the country. Later, in contrition, Janneus invited the Pharisees to return and appointed his brother-in-law, a Pharisee zealot, as the head of the Sanhedrin. That appointment placed Shetach in a unique position. By use of discrete maneuvers, he changed the composition of the Sanhedrin from Sadducee to Pharisee. Although supported by the Essenes, of Dead Sea Scrolls fame, the Sadducees were outmaneuvered by the Pharisees and totally disappeared with the destruction of the second Temple in 70 BCE.

Thus, in the critical transition period, starting with the destruction of the second Temple through the beginning of synagogue worship, the Pharisees and their successors, the Rabbis, held sway. The Pharisees/Rabbis were deeply appreciative for Shetach’s commitment to their cause. To this day, on the 28^th day of Tevet, he is still celebrated for having successfully completed the expulsion of the Sadducees and having replaced them with the Pharisees.

Rabbi Shetach is the same individual who sentenced 80 women to death for having allegedly been involved in witchcraft.

The Beginning of the Talmud

As the Sadducees began to decline in number and influence, the task of Torah interpretation fell to the Pharisees and the Rabbis, their successors. Their opinions were varied and often differed from each other, leaving no distinct path through the Torah to be used by the Jewish community.

By the first century CE, it became obvious that the opinions of the Pharisees/Rabbis had to be assembled and codified, lest they be lost. In the first century CE, Yehuda HaNasi (Judah the Prince) undertook the effort to codify those opinions in a work entitled the Mishnah. His work was assisted by other rabbis who functioned under the title Tannaim. Later, during the Talmudic Period, a group of Rabbinical scholars known as Amoriam opined expansively on the subject matter of the Mishna, expressing their own views. The written transcription of those writings is called the Gomorrah.

The Mishna, Gomorrah, and a third work known as the Midrash (a collection of Rabbinical commentaries, homilies, insights and exegesis on the Torah) constitute the Talmud, also known in Orthodox religious circles as the Torah She Bial Peh (The Oral Torah).

The Rise of Karism

The Karite movement surfaced in Baghdad in the seventh century CE in response to the Rabbinites deviation from the Written Torah. It arose to challenge what was viewed as a number of erroneous interpretations and unauthorized additions contained in the Babylonian Talmud authored in nearby Mesopotamia. The Karites did not reject the Talmud, but neither did they feel themselves bound by it.

The Karites insisted that the interpretation of the Torah should be limited to those conclusions that can honestly and reasonably be derived from the clear meaning of the language under examination, without rejection, addition, or subtraction, all of which are expressly prohibited by the Torah.

The term Karite is derived from the original name of the old Hebrew words for the Bible “Mikra Kara”. Karaism means scripturalists, as distinguished from Rabbis, who refer to themselves as Rabbonim or as the Talmidim (followers of the Talmud).

The Golden Age of Karism occurred between the tenth and eleventh centuries CE. Karite Jews obtained autonomy from Rabbinite Jews in the Muslim world, established their own institutions and held high positions in that environment. At one time, the number of Jews affiliated with Karism was as much as 40% of world Jewry.

Early in the 10^th century, the Saadia Gaon, head of a Babylonian Rabbinical Academy, took upon himself the confrontation between the Rabbinical and the Karite views, a battle that ended up permanently severing the two Jewish communities. Karaism in a weakened position continued in Iraq, Egypt, Persia, Lithuania and Poland to this day. Currently, it is estimated that there are approximately 40,000 Karites living in Israel, with smaller communities in Turkey, Europe and the United States.

Historians view the Karites as having channeled the views of the second Temple Sadducees in order to protect the integrity of the Torah delivered to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai. Like the Sadducees, they maintained that the Jewish people are patrilineal in origin and reject the biblically unauthorized change to matrilinealism.  They do not accept the notion of life after death in the world to come.

In the written Torah, God describes in great detail his creation of the world in which we live. Karites maintain that God in Genesis would not have inadvertently forgotten to mention a second world which he created. Could it be, they ask, that the world to come (Olam Habah) is a construct created by Rabbis to reward those who fastidiously follow the regimens of Rabbinical Halacha (law).

The interpretation of the written Torah during the latter part of the second Temple is largely responsible for the spirit and dimensions of modern day Judaism.

Examples of How Karism and Rabbinism Differ:

•  Torah as the Immutable Doctrine of Jewish Creed and Identity

Karism is especially aggrieved by the notion that the Talmud, also called the Oral Torah, is claimed to be of equal dignity with the Torah given by God at Mount Sinai. In order to provide divine authority to their Oral Torah, the Rabbis suggest that the Rabbinical disputations of the Talmud were revealed at Mount Sinai in 1280 BCE, only to be incorporated by the Rabbis in the Talmud more than 1500 years later. The Karites reject the treatment of the Talmud as a second Torah and view its conjured divine authority from Mount Sinai as a thinly veiled sham.

Two Torahs, like two presidents or two Gods, is an invitation to abject confusion and conflict. Under the Written Torah, a child born of a Jewish father and a Gentile mother is Jewish, since the child ascends through his father to the “Zera” (semen) of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as provided in Genesis. Under the Oral Torah, that same child is a Gentile since his mother is not Jewish. Under the written Torah, God created one world while under the Oral Torah there is a second world, (L’Olam Haba’ah), the world to come. Under the written Torah there is no life after death while, under the Oral Torah there is reward and punishment in response to how you lived your life on earth. Under the written Torah, a chicken salad sandwich and a glass of milk is totally permitted, while it is an anathema under the Oral Torah.

Equating a written Torah, which is the transcribed word of God, with an oral Torah, which is the transcribed word of the Rabbis, is an assault on monotheism. Essentially, the Karites believe that the Rabbis, in labeling their Talmud as a Torah have bootstrapped themselves up to the level of a deity. It is vaguely similar to the Christian notion of Trinity (which incorporates the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit), which attempts to qualify as monotheistic.

Karism seeks to identify and emulate the original Judaism. It is a composite of the Judaism practiced by the Sadducees, Boethusians, Ananites and the Essenes. Its focus is on living a Jewish life within the reasonable parameters of the Torah without additions, deletions or alterations. They reject the notion of the Pharisees/Rabbis that the interpretations of the Torah by particular teachers were divine and are elevated to the level of the Torah itself.

• The Ritual Blessing over the Sabbath Candles on Friday Evening 

After the fifth century CE, Rabbinate Jews invited the Sabbath with the blessing of the Sabbath lights (generally two candles). Karite Jews have no such requirement or custom because there is no provision in the Torah for that procedure.

It is suggested, that the alleged “God-directed” blessing over the Sabbath’s candles was prescribed by the Rabbis for practical, rather than religious, reasons. In pre-electric homes, light was provided by candles. Karite Jews followed the biblical mandate to, “kindle no fire during the Sabbath”.

In order to achieve light in their homes on Friday evening, Rabbinate Jews made the lighting of candles into a religious event (The Jewish Book of Why, p. 168). The blessing appears as a direction from God to light the Candles. Actually, no such direction ever existed. Why is this manufactured blessing not a violation of the third of the Ten Commandments, which requires that God’s name should not be taken in vain?                                                                                                                                          

• The Daily Donning of Tefillin by Post Bar Mitzvah Males

Jewish men who follow Rabbinical tradition are obliged to place tefillin (phylacteries which are constructed of leather straps and boxes containing recitations from Deuteronomy 6(5-9)) on their forehead and arm. Rabbinism does not require Jewish women to follow the same practice. The obligation comes from the scriptural provision, “and thou shall bind them for a sign upon thy hand and they shall be as frontlets between thy eyes”.

Karites are not obliged to put on tefillin. They reason that since words are normally not bound on one’s head and arms or upon the doorpost of one’s house, the mandates are simply figurative, metaphorical and aspirational. Karites apply the same rationale to affixing mezuzahs to the door posts of one’s house.

One can easily see the consternation and bizarre effect of taking biblically figurative language and applying it literally. For example, in Leviticus 26(41) and Jeremiah 4(4), reference is made to, “persons with uncircumcised hearts”.

• The Patrilineal Origin of Jewish Children

Karite Judaism historically follows patrilineal descent as was followed by the Jewish people for the first 2000 years of its existence. In the latter days of the second Temple, shortly before the birth of Jesus, the Pharisees, by fiat, simply changed the origin of Jewish children by requiring a Jewish mother instead of a Jewish father. In doing that, they effectively altered the composition of the Jewish people from that which is prescribed in

Genesis12(7), 17(6-8), 17(10-12), 26(2-4), 28(14) and Deuteronomy 34(4-5). In all of those provisions, God designs the Jewish people to be derived through the Zera (semen) of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That process can only be achieved through paternal involvement and is the same genetic formula used today to identify Cohanim as direct descendents of Aaron, the brother of Moses. The Karite community still maintains patrilineal origin of Jewish children.

• The Laws of Kashruth (Permissible Foods for Consumption)

Both Rabbinical and Karite traditions follow the Kashruth laws of the Torah. While there are myriad small deviations, there is one major departure. Exodus 23(19) provides that, “thou shalt not seethe (boil) a kid in his mother’s milk”. From this provision, the Rabbis have derived the conclusion that all milk and all meat including chicken, must be separated from each other. Thus, the Rabbis conclude that milk, or its products, cannot be consumed together with any meat from any source.

The Karites deem this Rabbinical construction woefully overbroad and unjustified and thus a prohibited addition to the written Torah. They observed that, had God intended to separate all meat from all milk, he certainly could have so declared. They view the inclusion of chicken as a meat as gilding the lily, as chickens do not give milk. Accordingly, followers of Karite Judaism, with the exception of a mother animal and its offspring, do not require the separation of meat and milk, nor all the dishes and utensils required to serve them.

• Prayer Customs and Demeanor

Judaism, like the Muslim faith, was born and matured in the Middle East. In that locale, it is customary to remove one’s shoes in the holy place and to prostrate oneself before one’s God. Karite Jews follow that regimen. While that may appear strange to Ashkenazi Jews, it is not at all uncommon in many other faiths. Asians remove their shoes in their place of worship and Christians kneel in prayer. These actions are symbolic of humbling oneself in the presence of a deity.

Conclusion

Jews who follow the Rabbinic tradition (which includes Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, etc.) have much in common. They share the same recent matrilineal genetic origin, and a faith rooted in the Torah, as modified by the Talmud. The denominations vary, not as much in their articles of faith, as in their degree of practice and how closely they have assimilated into a Gentile world.

The Torah by its express terms rejects alterations, additions, and deletions and thus implies that it is fully able to handle the needs of all future generations through reasonable interpretation of its text. That view, however, seems to be lost on the Rabbinate, which has in a number of ways added to, subtracted from and grossly modified the clear language of Torah text.

In all fairness, the United States Constitution, which many have been brought up to believe is an immutable document, has been amended 27 times. The difference lies in the fact that the Constitution provides for and contemplates amendment, while the Torah does not. The Karites believe that life in the modern era is totally amenable to the reasonable interpretation of the Torah as originally written. They maintain that their existence today is a testimonial to that belief. The original concept of Karism was that each Jew had the right to personally interpret the Torah within its reasonable parameters. The Karite synagogues of today have their own doctrinaire views of what constitute such reasonable interpretations.

What appears to trouble the Karites is that the Rabbis, through their Talmud, have set themselves up as the sole arbiter of the meaning of the written Torah and that their interpretations have significantly changed the Torah. Perhaps what aggrieves them the most is that Rabbinical changes,  interpretations and expansions of the written Torah, as appear in the Talmud, are now being offered as an oral Torah, of equal dignity with that delivered at Mount Sinai.

 Two Torahs that have diverse provisions suggests that there is more than one God, a conclusion assuredly rejected by both Karism and Rabbinism.

Douglas  C. Kaplan.

The Virus of The Politics of Faith

Judaism, the religion of a people that has survived thousands of years and untold adversaries, is now in crisis mode. Antisemitism, its chronic foe- while ever present- is not the main culprit. It suffers from a malignant alchemy of external freedom and internal obstruction. The source of the jeopardy is buried deep within the early history of rabbinic Judaism.

Prior to 1800 there was but a single Jewish religious denomination. The amount of commitment to its faith varied with individuals and communities. However, the religion did dutifully serve its people, homeless from the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in70 C.E. and confined in the ghettos of the world, by locking out potentially invasive and destructive ideas, practices and temptations.

The Change

The cultural dynamics of Europe and the Middle East were altered in the early 1800s by Napoleon, who defeated feudalism, ended the Holy Roman Empire and opened the gates of the ghettos for those who wished to leave. For traditional Judaism, the exit from the ghettos was a Trojan Horse. Life was altered significantly for those Jews who exited to live in neighboring cities and communities. They challenged the traditional constraints of the rabbinical oral law (the Talmud, codified and transcribed from circa. 200 C.E.-550 C.E.) as being too limiting and inappropriate to their lives. As genetic Jews, they did not aspire to leave Judaism, but simply make it more relevant to how they lived.

A New Face of Judaism

A significant result in Germany and elsewhere was the development of Reform Judaism, later to be followed elsewhere by Conservative Judaism and other more liberal denominations. It is easy to place the blame for religious fragmentation on traditional Judaism which conducted itself in accordance with a fixed Talmudic code established during the 6th century A.D. The blame, however, must be shared by Reform Judaism which failed to seek and achieve change within the system but simply created for itself ”Judaism de novo”.

The Reform Movements are Judaism’s exit doors to unilateral assimilation, which happens when a Jew no longer identifies himself as a Jew, but his gentile neighbors continue to do so. This occurred dramatically in Germany in the 1930s and the 1940s. Even today, 500 years after the Spanish Inquis`ition, descendants of the forced converts to Catholicism are afraid to identify their origin for fear of rejection or exclusion from their current religious community. How tragic is it for Jews to abandon their birthright and the nobility of their mission (Tikkun Olam) only be identified by the scourge of antisemitism.

According to Wikipedia, approximately 38% of all of the Jews in the world live in the United States. Since the year 2000, 58% of all American Jews marry Gentiles. The Pew Research Center reports that nearly 48% of all of Jewish millennials have only one Jewish parent. This loss to the Jewish Community is not as a result of pogroms; forced conversions; or even on a battlefield defending the State of Israel. It is a casualty of a self-inflicted wound which occurred when traditional Judaism asserted that the rabbinical opinions of the 6th Century C.E. Talmud were inspired by God and delivered to Moses at Sinai. A deified Talmud stopped, in its tracks, the development of Judaism and prevented acceptance of different opinions and the accommodation of the Torah to modern life.

The Torah (The Scroll)

Traditional Judaism teaches that the contents of the Written Torah, or Pentateuch (The Five Books of Moses) was delivered to Moses during his lifetime for instruction to the Jewish people. That is an essential tenet of Judaism. What is not explained, is just how in the 13^th Century B.C. E., the era of Moses’ lifetime, the precise language of God’s instruction to Moses was transcribed for posterity. The modern Written Torah (Old Testament Bible) has over 400 pages, and 600,000 characters of textual material. Since Moses lived in a “papyrus era”, there is a question as to how God’s instruction to Moses remained intact and unaltered from his lifetime circa 1280 B.C.E. to that of Ezra circa 474 B.C.E. when history and archaeology ascribe the assembly and canonization of the Five Books of Moses. Some modern historians suggest that these books had been written by several different authors. Nevertheless, the Torah is the written constitution of the Jewish People and is mutable only by God.

The Second Temple

The first Temple -The Temple of Solomon- was destroyed in 586 B.C.E. by the Babylonians who carried off many Jews with them into exile. In 515 B.C.E. after the Persians defeated the Babylonians, they released the Hebrew exiles to go home and reconstruct a temple on the site of the original Temple Mount. This was done under the direction of Ezra and Nehemiah sent from Babylon to oversee the task.

Necessity for the Development of a Legal System

It soon became obvious that a Council or Assembly was necessary to apply the laws of the Torah to a flourishing Jewish community. This was accomplished by an integrated Sanhedrin System in which each city could appoint a lesser Sanhedrin comprised of 23judges. The nation, however, had one supreme or Great Sanhedrin, comprising 71 members, which took appeals from the lesser courts and which decided issues of national import.

Since the instruction of the Torah came directly from God to Moses, it was immutable and could not be challenged or altered. All subsequent articulation of Jewish law had to flow from the Torah or, at the very least, not be in conflict with it. However, the sages of the Second Temple, the Tannaim soon recognized that a Torah comprised largely of historical information, commandments and ritualistic prescriptions required interpretation, direction and more rules to control the daily lives of a living and breathing community. The Tannaim, approximately 120 in number, were uniquely gifted rabbis who orally expounded on those rules and interpretations necessary to maintain an orderly society. Their ranks included such notable rabbis as Hillel, Shammai, Johanan hen Zakkai, Gamaliel, Akiba and Judah the Prince. Lest their oral wisdom be lost, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, before his death in 217 C.E. codified this assembly of tractates, statements of law and opinion into a document thereafter known to the world as the Mishna.

The Genesis of the Rabbinate

The Temple and its ordained ritual practices were in Jerusalem. With the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. the services of the Kohanim (lineal descendants of Aaron) became virtually irrelevant. In its stead houses of worship were erected in both Israel and Babylon and under the direction of religious teachers called rabbis. Mosaic law, however, did not provide for a cadre of rabbis. Authority appears to come from Numbers 27(18), in which God tells Moses to lay his hands upon Joshua as a means of transferring authority to him. Presumptively, but without express authority, Joshua in turn passed on his Mosaic ordination to a series of successors, including Ezra, and then on to rabbis like Hillel, Ben Zakki and so on.

The Dynamics of the Contest for Religious Power and Influence

The Second Temple generated an amalgam of different philosophies of faith which gravitated into politically oriented religious groups.

• The Sadducces represented an upper-class elite priestly caste whose main focus was the rituals associated with Temple practice. They were receptive to Hellenistic ideas and spurned the notion of an afterlife since it did not appear in the Written Torah.
• Insisting on a direct literal interpretation of the Written Torah they also rejected, out of hand, the rabbinically generated Oral Law, a position later adopted by the Karaites who are perceived as having succeeded them.
• The Pharisees were the largest and most middle-class of the groups. They adhered to messianic notions of redemption and subscribed to an afterlife in which God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous, Most emphatically they insisted on keeping the law as interpreted by the rabbis and sages whose practice eventually gravitated to a type of religious formalism. It is from this group that the rabbinate of today originated.
• The Essenes rejected the liberality of the Sadducees and the corruptions of life in the Temple and retired to a monastic existence outside of Jerusalem. It is from the locale of that group that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947.

These groups and other splinter sects competed for the minds and the hearts of the Jewish People.

The Mishna and The Gemara (The Oral Law) a.k.a. The Talmud

The Mishna’s oral recitations and rules promulgated by the Tannaim were codified circa 217 C.E. It was divided into six separate orders:

SEEDS (agriculture and the support of the poor)

HOLIDAYS (Sabbath and festivals)

WOMEN (rules of husband/wife relationships)

DAMAGES (civil and penal jurisprudence)

HOLY THINGS (Temple sacrifices and the laws of kashruth

PURITY (ritual purity and the laws of family purity).

The laws of the Tannaim, both in its original oral form and later as the Mishna, serviced the Jewish communities both in Israel and in Babylon.

It is important to note that a large number of the families who were originally exiled to Babylon chose not to be repatriated to Israel. They retained their identity and their religion, but appeared to remain quite comfortable in the Babylonian Diaspora.

The Tannaim were ultimately succeeded by the Amoriam, notable rabbis from both Babylon and Jerusalem. The Amoriam reflected upon the law and opinions stated in the Mishna. Their discourses were ultimately transcribed as the Gemara. As would be expected, their reflections were not always in concert with each other. Together, the Mishna, the Gemara and some selections from the Midrash, the Oral Law, constitute the Talmud. It reflected the interpretation of the Torah by the best minds of the Jewish community as it existed in that early era.

The Deification of the Talmud -Judaism’s Achilles Heel

The Talmud evolved out of rabbinical sources and was viewed as indispensable to the understanding of the Torah. As they do to this day, traditional rabbis advanced the notion that the Talmud was delivered with the original Torah to Moses at Sinai; or, at the very least, that it was divinely inspired by God and merited being referred to as the Oral Torah.

That notion- that Moses at Mount Sinai directly or indirectly, received from God, the same rules and laws espoused by hundreds of rabbis well over a thousand years later, stretches the bounds of human credulity. Worse than that, it canonized the Talmud’s rabbinical interpretation of the Torah with a Divine patina that forever locked Judaism into a long bygone era. After all, who can argue with the word of God?

The acuity of the Jews of recent generations in all fields of endeavor is legend. Their minds are of no greater or lesser quality than those of the sages of the Talmud. Modem Jewish thinkers, however, come armed with thousands of years of social and scientific development unavailable to the rabbis of the Talmud. What if the Talmud were loosed of its Divine protective veneer to flow freely with current Jewish thinking and interpretations of the Torah? Would the results be the same? Given DNA, would the progeny of Jewish fathers and Gentile mothers still be excluded from the Jewish People?

Would the simple biblical phrase that was interpreted to create the separation of meat and dairy, with all of its resultant complexities, still be construed the same way? What would constitute biblically prohibited “Sabbath work “in an electrified and mechanized world? Would the divisive six different flavors(denominations)of the Jewish religion still be relevant?

The Karaites

During the7th Century C.E., the Karaites a significant segment of the Jewish population, took issue with what they viewed as a usurpation of the reins of Jewish law by the rabbis. Within the Karaite group there was no objection to the idea of a body of interpretation of the Torah. They did reject the notion that the rabbis could bootstrap their own work product into Canonical law. The Karaites rejected the Oral Law (same as the Talmud which includes the Mishna and the Gemara), not because it was unworthy, but because the pretense that the Oral Law came directly from God made it unquestionable and unmodifiable. Amongst other reasons cited were:

The Mishna quotes many conflicting opinions

• The Mishna does not define in which opinion truth lies, but rather it sometimes agrees with neither opinion.
•  The Oral Law is not even mentioned in the Torah.
• The Torah states, “you shall not add to the word that I am commanding you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of YHVH, your God, which I command you.” Deuteronomy (4:2).

Why the deification of the Talmud? One need not be a prophet to understand that where there are groups competing for the minds and hearts of the Jewish people, it is helpful to have their work product canonized.

The Karaites believe that their lives must be directed by the express language of the Torah and not by the often conflicting disputations of the Talmud. It is estimated that there are approximately 30,000 Karaitic Jews presently living in Israel and an additional 20,000 in communities elsewhere in the world.

The Talmud’s Construction of the Torah divinely sealed in 6th Century C.E. has so frustrated the modem Jewish community that many have declared themselves secular Jews. They identify themselves with the state of Israel, Jewish communities and charities, but distance themselves from all aspects of normative religious Judaism. Following blindly the opinions and dictates ofa6th Century Talmud has caused no small amount of confusion and distress in the arenas of matrilineal Judaism, conversion, Sabbath observance, and the dietary laws.

Intermarriage

To understand the complexity of this phenomenon, we would do well to reflect on the ghetto communities of feudalistic Europe. Within the physical and social walls of those communities, young Jewish men and women were exposed to persons of similar religious and cultural rearing. Often, marriages were arranged by parents to whom intermarriage would be cause for mourning. As noted, until early 1800, there was only one Judaism, and Jewish intermarriage was virtually unknown. With the French Revolution, Napoleon’s unlocking of all of Europe’s ghettos, young Jews could now mix socially and economically with the rest of the populations of the host nations. They were exposed to education, ideas, temptations and world views that were alien to, and discouraged in the ghetto. The Judaism that had formerly embraced them in the ghetto was frozen into an era of over 1000 years earlier, and could not meet the challenges of liberation.

Especially was this true of those Jews who emigrated to the United States from the former ghettos and villages of the Pale in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Economic opportunities which quickly raised them to the socio-economic levels of their neighbors was another complicating factor. Their desire to “embrace the American Dream” generated an internal confrontation between an exciting and free country full of opportunities in education and commerce with a historic religion confined to the restraints ofa6th Century reality.

For most of the emigres, the religious teachings of their youth sustained them against the temptations of America. As each generation succeeded them Jewish education gave way to training that would better equip the youth in this new land of opportunity. The transition was from “Jew” to” American Jew” to “an American of Jewish extraction”. The education went from “Yeshiva” to “Hebrew School” to “Bar Mitzva training, if you want it”.

Is it any wonder that a large percentage of Jewish youth have started families whose children will no longer identify themselves as members of the Jewish community? It is difficult not to consider whether the outcome would have been different, and Judaism more relevant, had the interpretation of the Torah not been exclusively bound to a Talmud completed in the Sixth Century A.D.

Matrilineal Descent

What is a Jew? The answer to that historic conundrum can best be attempted by a series of inquiries:

• Did your mother and /or father, or someone on their behalf, tell you that they and their antecedents were Jewish?
• If so, does the fact that you consider yourself totally secular, or even anti-Semitic exclude you from Jewish identity?
• If you are born Jewish and voluntarily convert to one or more other faiths are you still a Jew? Should you decide to return to the Jewish community is it necessary to convert back to Judaism, or is the abandonment of the other faith sufficient?
• If you sincerely declare yourself to be a Jew, although you were not born of Jewish parents or converted, are you Jewish?
• If your parents were not Jewish, and you were converted to Judaism by a rabbi who was not of an Orthodox or traditional denomination, are you Jewish?
• What, if anything, do your answers to the forgoing questions tell you about the role of genetics in Judaism?

The Patriarchs, in the growth of Jewish identity, were mindful of the selection of their wives. They left Canaan for Egypt as a family to avoid famine. Subsequently, slavery in Egypt molded them into an identifiable and cohesive people, who subsequently returned to their ancestral home where they lived until dispossessed by the Babylonians.

Years later, when Ezra returned from Babylonian exile to rebuild the second Temple, he viewed the Jews as a people of common genetic origin, an essential condition worth preserving. When he found on his arrival that an earlier contingent of Temple builders had taken indigenous wives who had borne children, Ezra went ballistic. He insisted and received compliance in the separation from their wives and children. The obvious rationale for the act was that one could identify the mother of the child but would never be sure of the child’s paternity. While that vision was clear, it was a rather strange edict, given the fact that the wives of Joseph, Moses, Solomon and others were not Jewish, yet their children were not denied inclusion in the Jewish people.

The Torah Describes Prohibited Marriages

Scriptural opponents of intermarriage point to Deuteronomy 7(1-4) for authority. It referred specifically to intermarriage with the seven named nations that occupied Canaan and to no other nation.

Deuteronomy 7(1)”When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;”

Deuteronomy 7(2)”And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them;”

Deuteronomy 7(3) “Neither shall thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son”

Deuteronomy 7(4)”For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods; so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you and destroy thee suddenly.”

G-d, having specifically named the seven Canaanite tribes that were destined for annihilation as being unacceptable for Jewish marriage, can we assume that God meant, but did not include, everyone in the world who was not born of Jewish parents? Ifni fact that were true, how do we include into the Jewish community the progeny born of Jewish mothers and Gentile fathers? On the other hand, if God meant to exclude only the seven enumerated tribes, how does Judaism exclude the progeny of Jewish fathers with Gentile mothers who were not of the seven excluded tribes?

Matrilineal Judaism

It is difficult to see how the Talmud (Mishna Kiddushin 68b) relying on Deuteronomy 7(3- 4) could have promulgated matrilineal Judaism. Ironically, the Torah does not explicitly discuss the conferring of Jewish status through matrilineality. On the other hand, the Karaites who are not bound by the Talmud, and directly interpret the Deuteronomy 7(3-4), conclude that Judaism is passed through the father and therefore maintain patrilineal origin of Jewish children.

The Talmud’s endorsement of matrilineal Judaism not only appears out of context with the Written Torah but lacks the wisdom of modem biological sciences. It makes little sense today when we recognize that each parent contributes 23 chromosomes to the creation of child.

How can one justify that the chromosomes provided by the Jewish mother are significant in the creation of the Jewish child while the chromosomes provided by the father may be randomly abandoned. Indeed, how can the Talmud’s practical solution of accepting only children from a Jewish womb be accepted today, when DNA can easily and accurately identify the father?

As long as traditional Judaism maintains that the product of the learned religious jurists of the Talmud are divinely inspired by God, no real development or change can take place. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish children, descendants of Jewish fathers, are denied their heritage due to the deification of some of the archaic laws of the Talmud that both science and time have made irrelevant.

Conversion

For many Jews who are born issue of the blessed seed of Abraham, it is difficult to understand how anyone not so endowed can be converted to Judaism. After all, neither education, circumcision, nor immersion will change their genetic composition. Indeed, how can someone with Gentile genes breed Jewish children? Parenthetically, the opposite is true as to those Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism during and after the Spanish Inquisition. Why would they require conversion on their return to Judaism? Does your genetic composition change with the prayers that you were instructed to recite, or with the adoption of a belief in one who you were taught was “God’s real Messiah “?

The notion of conversion is generated out of the practical necessity for an open Jewish community. Every living religion or societal community, of necessity, must have an entrance and exit. Closed societies, such as the Essenes, were destined to oblivion.

Early Biblical Period

In the early biblical period Judaism did not constitute a religion. Rather, the Hebrews were a people whose God was a national God who oversaw their needs, i.e., release from slavery, oversight in the desert, victory in the conquest of Canaan, etc. During that time, Judaism as a faith had not as yet been formalized. When the Jews left Egypt, reportedly a number of other individuals who melded into the Jewish community. Non­ Jewish women simply came to live with their husbands. They and their children were just absorbed into the community.

Several things, however, changed after the destruction of the first Temple and during the early Babylonian exile. The God of the Jews remained with the Jewish community in Babylon, and was not tied to the homeland in Israel.

The absence of the Temple sacrifices following the destruction of the first Temple was replaced by an assembly, with rabbis offering prayers to God – the beginning of collective worship.

Subsequently, in the Fifth Century B.C.E., with the construction of the second Temple, a sea change took place. Ezra saw the Jewish people as a genetically connected nation. He roiled against inclusion of men from tribes of other nations. For a number of years there were major controversies about what to do with strangers who wished inclusion in the Jewish community. The Sadducees, rabbis who were contemporaries of the Pharisees, opposed inclusion of strangers, while The Pharisees supported it. A method was generated by the Pharisees and their successors, the Tannaim, in which persons not born of the seed of Abraham could conclusively become members of the Jewish Nation. It was a prescription not found in the Written Torah. The formula involved circumcision for males, education and the immersion for both sexes and an expressed desire to become part of the Jewish people. The formula remains the same today.

More Recent Times

There has been a disinclination to open wholesale proselytization to groups wishing to enter the Jewish community. The formula for conversion can easily be used to discourage Gentiles by simply expanding the amount of time necessary for the educational element required for the conversion process. Ironically, in prior years, large groups have rarely sought conversion to Judaism because in several of the Christian and Moslem countries that was considered a capital offense.

Ultimately, the Jewish people have, for practical reasons, allowed for the inclusion of strangers. For sundry reasons, there has always been a genuine need for conversion. Because the numbers of applicants are rarely large, the notion is that the inclusion of strangers would not significantly impact the genetic pool.

The philosophical question regarding conversion raises a totally different issue. In Genesis 12(7) God gave the land of Israel to the seed of Abram. Since the Written Torah does not provide for conversion, by whom, and how, is conversion authorized to be performed? Where do the rabbis obtain such authority? They are neither authorized by God nor elected by the Jewish people. Judaism has a strong, but not exclusive, genetic component. But what is Jewish conversion? What authorizes the person performing the conversion to give an individual and their progeny genetic access in perpetuity to the people of Israel?

The Sabbath Shabbos

Singularly, the Sabbath is one of the most important gifts from God. Both Exodus 31(12-17) and Exodus 35(2-4) are among the many Torah references that provide “Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the Sabbath of rest, holy to the LORD”

So important was the Sabbath in the eyes of God that it provided a capital offense if violated. In the Written Torah we are not treated to a definition of the word “work”. Clearly the underlying thesis is that the seventh day is a day forest. God created the universe in six days, and recognized the importance and value forest, reflection and renewal on the seventh day. Given man’s propensity for continuous work it was totally an enduring and necessary gift. What is work?

Is work in the 21st Century C.E. the same as work in the 5^th Century C.E.?

The problem with identifying the appropriate way in which to comply with the Sabbath is that the Torah provides very little example and instruction. Essentially the Torah tells us in multiple sites that we are not to work on the Sabbath. It does instruct us however that there are two specific things that we cannot to do on the Sabbath:

·       “Abide ye every man in his place, let no man go out of his place on the seventh day. Exodus 16(29)

·       “Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations on the Sabbath day” Exodus 35(3)

The Meaning of the Word Work

While the Torah cannot change without being altered by God, the nature and description of the word work changes in every generation with the advent of design, science, invention, and ingenuity. Creating a fire in a biblical desert is not the functional equivalent of simply striking a match.

When put to the test, the Tannaim defined the word work by including 39 prohibited activities which were needed for the construction of the tabernacle while in the desert. It is no secret that the Jews of the world today live a different life from that of our ancestors. Lives have been changed by thousands of years of development, innovation, science, agriculture, invention and engineering. One can only imagine how the authors of the Talmud would have construed the word work had they been tasked with the obligation while living in a world that contained electricity, smart phones, airplanes, autos, elevators air conditioners and the like.

What is more work, walking up six flights of stairs to an apartment, or pressing an elevator button?

Is it more work to drive to shul on the Sabbath or to walk 1 ½ miles in the hot sun to get there? 3)Societal changes, as well, must be taken into consideration. Who can deny that pulpit rabbis and cantors who earn a salary for working on Sabbath are in fact violating classical notions of the Sabbath

“Let no man go out of this place on the seventh day” Exodus 16(29)

When God instructed Moses the Jewish people were in a vast desert in route to the holy land. There was nothing of value or interest around them and synagogues had yet not been envisioned. The instruction that all Jews were to remain in their habitation during the entire Sabbath might not have appeared so strange.

A thousand years later the Tannaim recognized that the environment and society had changed and that confining Jews to their homes for 24 hours during the Sabbath was no longer relevant to God’s will. The Tannaim had the courage to propose, ex nilo, the idea of encircling all or part of a community with a Rube Goldberg concoction offences, doors and wires so as to suggest an enclosure qualifying as” one’s place” and allowing exit to attend synagogue and for other non­work purposes. This ability to honestly recharacterize the nature of work in a modem society is denied traditional rabbis because of the limitations of a deified Talmud.

Kindle no fire

“Ye Shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the Sabbath day”. Exodus 35(3). That one sentence alone has engendered a fierce controversy within the Jewish Community as to which modem innovations violate the Sabbath, and promote such questions as:

• Does the word kindle, in this context, mean start, or start and maintain?
  • Why would anyone be prevented from starting a fire if it were lawful to maintain it, as the Talmud apparently allows by Shabbos Candles and pre- lit cooking elements? A possible answer lies in the fact that the creation of the fire during biblical times required work which would be prohibited on the Sabbath.
  • Does the fact that we can now strike a match and produce fire suggests that it is no longer work and therefore not in violation of the Sabbath?
  • If work were the consideration, why was lighting a fire limited only to habitations? Isn’t maintaining and feeding afire as much, or more, work as starting one?
  • Was it Gods intention to restrict the Jews to their habitation on the Sabbath (Exodus 16(29) and provide no warmth during the cold nights in the desert? Or, did the no fire rule relate to cooking Friday’s manna on Saturday since manna was not provided on Sabbath?

There is a significant controversy as to whether the use of electricity is in fact the use of fire. Most traditional sources suggest that using a switch to complete a circuit is an act that constitutes work prohibited on the Sabbath and thus they avoid the characterization of electricity.

Is there a traditional shul that does not utilize electric lighting, air conditioning/heating, some form of amplification that considers their use authorized so long as it was not turned on and off by a Jewish person or member of the congregation. That conclusion would compel the notion that one could use fire, or its stepchild electricity, as long as that person himself did not initiate, or kindle it. But, how can you use the services of another to violate the Sabbath when the Decalogue itself, Exodus 20(10) expressly prohibits the use of a manservant, maidservant or stranger in order to violate the Sabbath? How is the utilization of the Shabbos goy justified?

God is a better Lawyer

The act of a Jew to avoid violation of sabbath, whether by mechanism initiated prior to sundown, or by Shabbos goy after its commencement, is still that Jew’s act and still violates the Sabbath. Try escaping liability for a wrongful act against another for a plan put in place prior to the event, or for an injury to another caused by a person you hired to do the job.           ·

Constraining the definition of work to an experience 3000 years earlier has boxed Judaism into ill­ conceived notions of the word, and occasional deceptive workarounds: e.g.

Recently, it has been reported that traditional Jews who, rather than close their business on a sabbath, prefer to sell it to a Gentile for Friday night and Saturday only. The fact that a contract is used does not conceal the sham nature of the undertaking. Assuredly, God knows that the real party in interest is the purported vendor, who would have a heart attack if the place burned down on Saturday in the hands of his surrogate. The vendor prefers to keep the comfort and goodwill of his customers rather than close his place of work on the Sabbath.

A sixth century Talmud operating in the 21st century has also promoted an era of Trap Door devices designed to avoid the consequences of stubborn reliance on some anachronistic interpretations of work in the Written Torah, e.g.:

• Sabbath elevators Shabbos Goys
• Kosher lamps
• Kosher clocks
• Shabbos safe hotplates
• Kosher Fridge (holds down the refrigerator light on Saturday) Pre-cut Toilet paper
• Sabbath contracts
• Eruv (An artificial means of expanding the area of the Torah’s Sabbath home limitations.

WHAT HATH MAN WROTH?

Dietary Law (Kashruth)

The basic laws relating to food that a Jew can consume come directly out of the written Torah and are immutable. They include:

• The animals that can and cannot be eaten (See LeviticusI1(39) and Deuteronomyl4(6 9andl l);
• How slaughter of animals is to be arranged (See Deuteronomy 12(27) and Numbers 1(22);
• The requirement for the elimination of blood before consumption

Derivative laws and rules include:

•  The separation of meat and dairy; Talmud
• Utensils used in the food preparation process; Talmud

Jews who choose to avoid the dietary laws frequently claim that the laws were imposed for antiquated hygienic reasons and that they are no longer relevant in the modern society. Many whose lives are irretrievably involved with the dietary laws find in it a spiritual, benign and respectful treatment of the food animals. While the rationalizations for the existence of these laws are interesting, they are nevertheless fundamental principles of Judaism and require compliance by observant Jews.

Some issues regarding the dietary laws arise from the Talmud’s confounding interpretation and construction of the Written Torah’s laws.

The laws relating to mixing milk and meat stem from the following reference in the Written Torah: Exodus23(19) 34(20) and Deuteronomy 14(21): “thou shall not seethe(cook) a kid in his mother’s milk”. The interpretation of the foregoing ten words by the Talmud and subsequent rabbinical commentators has, for generations, dominated Jewish lives and Jewish households. It has required the strictest separation of all sources of meat from all sources of milk products, including separation of all dishes, pots, pans, cooking utensils, dishtowels, and even periods of digestion.

Would dedicated modern Jewish minds, unbound by the restraints of the” Talmud” come to the same conclusions, if they asked questions like these?

• Why did the exact language at three separate Torah sites limit itself to only a goat and its milk if its intention was to include all Kosher food animals and all milk? Certainly, God in other parts of the Written Torah was very precise as to His meaning?
  • Why did the language on all three separate sources limit the origin of the milk to the mother of the goat rather than milk from any source? Do the specifics help to identify that it was intended as a humane rule?
  • Why, and by what authority, is the scope of the provision expanded from milk of a single goat to all milk of whatever source and the meat of a single kid to all meat of whatever source?
  • More importantly how could anyone have come to the foregoing expansion in the light of God’s direct mandate in Deuteronomy 4(3)”Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish aught from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you”

If that were not a sufficient quandary, consider the fact that chicken is considered as a meat and cannot be consumed with milk or milk products. Is this not adding to the law in violation of Deuteronomy 4(3) considering the fact that chickens do not even give milk. They give eggs which are allowed to be consumed with the chicken and with milk products. Strange?

The burden on Jewish Women

The rabbis have ordained that each traditional household should have a separate set of dishes and silverware for meat and for dairy use, and separate sets of each for Passover. This was not ordained by the Written Torah, but obviously generated out of the rabbinical desire that not even a scintilla of milk from any source should ever touch a scintilla of meat.

However, traditional rabbis have already acknowledged that glass does not retain residue in its pores when properly washed. Modern glazed dishes and flatware are likewise free of residue when properly washed. Is it not suitable now that the unnecessary and perhaps unjustified burden of multiple sets of dishes and silverware be alleviated for Jewish wives, for whom God also promised Sabbath rest from her labors?

Conclusion

The Written Torah embodies the history, the character and the faith of the Jewish people. It is immutable because that Torah was delivered by God to Moses at Sinai as the life force of the Jewish nation.

The Oral Law (The Talmud) contains the opinions, ideas, and interpretations of a coterie of brilliant religious scholars. The frame of reference from which they viewed the Torah was from circa 150 B.C.E. to 550 C.E. Although many interpretations and judgments may still be relevant, their views and conclusions were made in the context of that period.

A serious misjudgment took place when the Oral Law, opined by man, was reported to have been delivered to Moses at Sinai or, at least, to have been divinely inspired by God. That position had the effect of freezing all access to the interpretation of the Torah to the world as it existed in the Sixth century CE. Politics and religion are a hazardous admixture.

As collateral damage, by having the word of God exit from hundreds of the rabbinical mouths of the Tannaim and the Amoraim it implied a core of prophets to which the rabbis themselves laid no claim. Minhag, custom and tradition -as they are charmingly identified in “Fiddler on For the Roof’- are not a substitute for Torah or Judaic values.

What was done by man, man can undo.

The dated brilliance of the Tannaim and the Amoraim must be uncoupled from the silent implied authority god. It must be allowed to flow confluently with the great Jewish minds and times of today. No generation or era has a monopoly on wisdom. In that way, the Torah will be free to express God’s will for every generation.

For the 2000 years of diaspora, stateless Jews of the world floated on a life raft of sixth century Talmud. The State of Israel has been in existence for more than 68 years during which time it has generated great strides in defense, science, medicine, electronics, engineering, agriculture, music, films and literature.

Weare no longer a wandering people without will or resource to demonstrate God’s relevance and presence in contemporary life.

It is time for the Jewish scholars of the world, including our respected rabbis to review our Talmud in the light of the 21s1 century; to retain that which is still relevant; to discard what is extraneous; to reestablish a reunited strong Jewish faith; and to rebuild Judaism for the next 4000. years.

By Douglas C. Kaplan

1. Jeremy Kalmanofsky in Foward.com March 8, 2015

2. Gregory Smith, Pew Research Center, November 12, 2013

3. Max Dimont, The Indestructible Jews

More than 85 percent of World Jewry lives in the United States, Canada and Israel, countries where they enjoy high standard of living, education, freedom of expression and movement. Yet, thousands of descendants of the Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism by sword or extreme duress remain in Third World nations, unaware of their true identity. Except for a number of devoted individuals and several dedicated organizations, relatively little is done to find, educate and return these descendants, remnants of the Spanish Inquisition -hostages of a captor culture and religion.

Affiliation with any religion is subject to change by wits, whim or whip. Given a choice, one can choose to be Jewish today, Catholic tomorrow, Protestant the next day and Muslim the following day. What is not mutable or changeable is one’s genetic inheritance, the 23 chromosomes that each parent invests in the creation of a child.

Today, collectively, millions of genetic descendants of the stolen Jews of the Spanish Inquisition live in the Americas, Europe and Africa, unaware of their people, their culture and their spiritual inheritance.

In the 14th century, before many Jews were forcibly converted to Catholicism, approximately one million Sephardic (Spanish) Jews lived in Spain. Ashkenazi Jews, those from Germany, France and East Europe constituted no more than half that number. Thus, there were roughly two Sephardic Jews for every one Ashkenazi Jew. Yet, of the 14.2 million Jews in the world today, more than ten million are Ashkenazi and roughly 4 million are Sephardic. Given relatively equal birthrates between the two groups, we are missing in excess of 15 million Spanish Jews, a giant population.

The missing Sephardic Jews (also referred to as Conversos, Crypto-Jews and Marranos) and their descendants have been captive of and tethered to an alien faith and culture for over 500 years. No more pitiable form of captivity exists than where the captives themselves are unaware of their captivity.

During the 2000 years that the Jews have constituted a diaspora population, in virtually every generation, Jews have stepped forward to ransom their brethren. Yet, not until post World War 11 and the stirring of the Sleeping Converse Giant has the Jewish community started to marshal significant efforts to awaken the Giant and bring it home.

Where It All Began

Since the first century C.E., some Jewish trading settlements could be found along the coast of the Iberian Peninsula (hereinafter referred to as “Peninsula”). The Peninsula included modern day Spain and Portugal and was originally part of the Roman Empire. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E., the Peninsula’s population was increased by additional”Jews who fled the Romans or were forcibly settled there by the Roman legions.

The Visigoths, in control of the Peninsula at the time, were initially indifferent to the growing Jewish communities. However, two events occurred to alter that circumstance: the Visigoths adopted Christianity as their official religion in the fourth century and the Moors invaded Spain from the south in the eighth century. Both the Christian and Muslim communities imposed special taxes and severe restrictions on the Jews. Nevertheless, those Jewish communities demonstrated a distinct vitality, growing in size strength and influence.

While all of Europe was immersed in the Dark Ages from the ninth to the twelfth centuries C.E., the Jewish communities of the Peninsula were producing a vibrant scientific, artistic, philosophical, cultural and religious era of enlightenment. Notables such as Moses Maimonides, Solomon lbn Gabrial, Benjamin of Tudela, Moses lbn Ezra and Yehuda Halevi impacted the scientific, religious and cultural life of that era.

Despite the limitations, restrictions and taxes imposed upon them, Jews enjoyed a virtual Golden Age in Spain until the twelfth century when religious extremism became a dominant force, fed by the fires of the Crusades. By the fourteenth century, Jews were forced to wear identifying insignias, isolating them from their Christian neighbors. Jewish communities became the subject of anti-Semitic attacks by Christian zealots, who were bent on destruction or converting Jews to Catholicism.

On June 6, 1391, a Catholic mob attacked the Juderia in Seville. Four thousand Jews were killed, while most of the rest submitted to baptism to escape death. Communities of Jews in Catalonia, Aragon and Mallorca were not spared a similar fate. On August 5th of that same year, hundreds of Jews were slain in Barcelona. The bloody excesses of 1391 continued unabated and were exacerbated by the Dominican Vincent Ferrer, who is said to have forcibly baptized 4000 Jews in Toledo. The remaining Jews were prohibited from holding public office, practicing medicine, hiring Christian servants and dealing in bread, wine, flour or meat.

The Reconquista And The Granada Decree

By 1492, Christian forces had repatriated all of the Iberian Peninsula from occupancy by the Moors (known as the Reconquista). The final victory was at Granada where, on March 315\ the reigning monarchs of Catholic Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, issued their edict of expulsion. The Jews were given 120 days to convert to Catholicism or leave Spain. Those leaving could not take with them currency, precious metals or jewels. The travail of the Jewish community was of legendary proportions.

It is estimated that nearly half of the Jewish population of Spain was baptized and remained in Spain. The remaining Jews, devoted to the faith of their fathers, fled to Portugal, Turkey, Greece, Morocco, Holland, Italy and elsewhere. The vast majority of those remaining in Spain as converts were known as Anusim, a Hebrew word meaning those who had been forcibly converted. However, some converts undoubtedly accepted baptism out of personal religious conviction or their perception of certain social and economic benefits.

The Jews who fled to Portugal were offered a period of eight months of sanctuary. If they remained beyond that time, they became subject to being slaves of the realm. Sadly, many could not leave in time and ended up in servitude. Several of the children of these unfortunate souls were taken to an island off of Brazil to be raised as Christians. When a subsequent king came to the throne, he recognized the economic value of having Jews in his realm and reversed the decree of slavery. In order to entrench his power, the new king felt obliged to marry the daughter Ferdinand and Isabella. They would not agree to the union until he rid his nation of its Jewish population. To retain the Jews of Portugal and still have a totally Catholic nation, he gathered them in one place and, without their consent, baptized them. Thus, he had both his Jews and his new queen.

In Spain, Jewish converts were called “New Christians,” thus distinguishing them from Spain’s old Christian population. Conversion, which some Jews thought would bring safety, peace and stability, simply opened the door to a nightmare of pain and anxiety. The old anti-Semitism that had given rise to the destruction of Spain’s Jewish communities did not simply disappear. Many viewed “New Christians” as Jews hiding under a thin, protective camouflage of Catholicism. To a significant degree, that was true. Predictably, the change of overt religious practices by the baptized Jews did not affect their inclination for advancement and achievement, greatly provoking the “Old Christian” community.

Everywhere within the Peninsula, New Christians were obliged to prove that they had not reverted to their former Jewish practices. These New Christians were so frightened of being labeled heretics that they attempted to demonstrate their loyalty by hanging pork to dry in front of their homes, arranging card games in lieu of Friday night Sabbath worship or attending regular church services.

The baptized Jews demonstrated a varying degree of commitment to Catholicism. While Converses practiced a kind of recalcitrant acceptance of the faith imposed upon them by the circumstances, Marranos (a Spanish word for “pigs,”), outwardly practiced the new Catholic faith, but inwardly adhered to the essential tenets of Judaism. Jews prefer to use the term Crypto-Jews instead of Marranos.

The Inquisition

By the 1480s, Spain had begun to realize that many forced converts were returning to Judaism. To combat such heresy, Torquemada, an extremist priest, who was the Confessor to Queen Isabella, adapted for Spain the infamous Inquisition trials employed late in the twelfth century by Pope Innocent Ill. Inquisitions assembled a court of inquiry into the religious fidelity of Roman Catholics. Those found wanting or even questioning these tenets of the faith, were dealt with severely. Punishment for even a marginal infraction or reversion to Jewish practices meant having one’s property appropriated by the tribunal, then being sentenced to life in prison or being burned alive in a public execution. In some instances, if a Jew admitted to an active reversion, that person might then be “charitably” garroted before submitting his or her body to the flames.

Thousands of Conversos were presumably executed or died in Inquisition prisons between 1480 and 1808. The Crown and ultimately the Inquisitors were rewarded by the appropriation and distribution of their victims’ property. The converts were second-rate citizens in a land which submitted them to the agonies of the Inquisition and the loss of life and property. In a unique and painful irony, the scourge of the Inquisition was used against people who the Church and State forced to convert, but could not be used against those retaining their Jewish faith, as they could not be charged with heresy.

Many sought to escape the Inquisition by leaving the Peninsula for lands that might be free of the Inquisition and provide an opportunity to resume their lives as Jews. Spanish and Portuguese realms in this New World seemed like attractive options for the converts. There, the converts could retain their customs and language, free of the anxieties of the Inquisition. However, as fate would have it, the Inquisition followed Converses and Crypto-Jews to Mexico in 1571 and to Cartagena, Peru and elsewhere in the Spanish and Portuguese New World in 1610.

The Inquisition continued in full force and effect in both Europe and the New World for 345 years. By 1834, considerable numbers of Conversos and Crypto­Jews had moved to Mexico, portions of which later became New Mexico, Texas and Arizona following the Battle of the Alamo. Others settled in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. Many of these people revived some of the practices of their Jewish ancestors, the culture constrained and rejected by the religion that was imposed by conversion.

The Awakening

Although the Inquisition had officially ended in 1834, it did not result in an immediate abandonment of Catholicism by lineal descendants of the forced converts. Those Latin American communities in which many found themselves were committed religiously and politically to Roman Catholicism. Descendants were born into and reared in the Catholic faith. Any suspicion that they were “different” from the others in their Catholic community arose from occasional whispers among kinfolk or from strange religious customs unwittingly continued by family members. Secrecy was the byword, lest they be identified as returnees to “that despised faith that caused the death of the Christian God.”

Nevertheless, by some programmed genetic mandate, many in the Converse and Crypto-Jewish community continued to marry among themselves, thus preserving the uniqueness of the group and their heritage. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a subtle but doctrinaire form of anti-Semitism, preserved in many of the Christian communities in Europe and Latin America, frequently found expression in selected religious texts or from Church pulpits.

In the years following World War II, however, with the universal awareness of a Holocaust in which six million Jews were systematically exterminated by the Germans (occasionally with the support of other Christian nations), important transitions occurred that would impact the Converse and Crypto-Jewish communities. The post World War II environment was altered significantly for Converses and Crypto-Jews in that:

1. The perceived infallibility of the Catholic Church as a moral foundation eroded with multiple accusations of deviations, concealment, and failure to root out faulted priests.
   
2. The Catholic Church became conflicted from within by contentious issues like contraception and celibacy of the priesthood.
   
3. Catholicism, in Latin America, became weakened by the rapid growth of the Evangelical Church.
   
4. In the mid-twentieth century, there arose, like a Phoenix out of the ashes of Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen Belsen and other death camps, a new and vital Jewish national existence. As the State of Israel grew, so did its pride and ability to defend itself against multiple enemies. With Statehood came extraordinary strides in agriculture, science, medicine, philosophy, electronics, literature and poetry. Jews were no longer itinerant occupiers of other people’s countries. They had a land and a nationhood of their own.
   
5. For those living in rural communities, whose vistas rarely had extended beyond the villages or towns in which they resided, the availability of radio, television and Internet, as well as affordable education and transportation, opened minds, eyes and hearts.
   
6. Although anti-Semitism did not disappear, it was no longer popular to be an overt anti-Semite.
   
7. The Catholic Church and its Prelates, accused of moral indifference to the events of the Holocaust, became more ecumenical in their views; more liberal Popes were elected; and the Church, confronting the Judea­Christian origin of its faith, de-emphasized the polar positions between Christians and Jews.

These and other developments fertilized the dormant seeds leading to a rediscovery and prompted such questions as:

Why did my great grandmother light candles on Friday nights?

Why did my parents say that pork was not good for us?

Why did members of my family cover the mirrors when a family member died? Why does my family salt meat before cooking it?

Why do the children in our family have Old Testament names?

Why do we say adio (one G-d) instead of adios?

Those queries in thoughtful minds would assuredly lead to soul-searching questions like: Why do I feel like an alien in my own community? Why do I feel more comfortable with Jewish friends and professionals? What is the origin of my interest in the welfare of the State of Israel? Why have I not pursued family rumors about a different or unique origin?

A Beacon Back

Such inquiries have spawned organizations with a mission of providing history, information and assistance in finding a path back to Judaism. These include groups like Shevei Israel, Kulanu, The Society of Crypto-Judaic Studies, B’nai Anusim and SephardicGen. Some organizations are focused on descendants in a specific Latin American country, others concentrate on returning descendants to Orthodox religious practices and still others focus only on Crypto-Jews

(seemingly abandoning Converses as a lost cause). Albeit all do a great service to the descendants and to the Jewish community, these groups resemble a series of unrelated notes in search of a single, unified melody. The absence of an orchestrated cohesive and funded international Jewish effort to bring back the “descendants of the Stolen Jews” speaks less of what they have become and more of what we have become.

The first step back to a personal rediscovery frequently starts with one’s own family name. An ample history of Sephardic family names is easily accessible on such Internet sites as: Sephardim.com, SephardicGen Resources, Nameyourroots.com.

These sites and others provide not only Sephardic names, but demonstrate where those names are used historically in Sephardic context. Once an individual can identify that his matrilineal surname is Sephardic in origin the next step is to trace family history. Although a number of genealogical organizations can be helpful, it is doubtful (though not impossible) that one can trace lineal origin back to Pre-Inquisition times. Genie Milgrom, a Cuban expatriate reared in Catholic Miami, Florida, succeeded in tracing her heritage through 15 grandmothers to identify her personal Jewish roots. A firebrand in the process of rediscovery, Genie now lives a traditional Jewish life.

DNA, another magical “genie,” facilitates the discovery of one’s way back along a trail of ancestors to a particular point in history. lgenia, a recognized DNA Service, maintains that “(a) DNA test by lgenia provides you with clear evidence of whether you have Jewish roots.” Another respected company, Family Tree DNA, represents that its services will help you “discover your Jewish Ancestry” and touts that its comparative databases are the “largest in the world.”

Those descendants who returned to the Jewish People are often the most ardent and selfless guides to other returnees. The number of inquiries by individuals seeking their true identity have increased dramatically. It is as if the events of the twentieth century cured the collective paranoia born of the anxieties and excesses of the Inquisition. A visit to the Internet and to the stories of those who have struggled their way back to Judaism is enough to generate tears of joy in the eyes of the clay Golem.

The Road Back Has Many Challenges For The Descendants

Many in the religious community maintain that 500 years of separation from the Jewish people (over 15 generations) is too long a hiatus for a continuum of Jewish identity. Without proof of a direct matrilineal line of Jewish ancestors, many in the rabbinate require conversion for reentry. Such historical genetic evidence is virtually impossible to achieve. Sadly, absent such proof, Crypto­Jews and Converses seeking reentry would merely be treated as gentiles seeking to convert to Judaism.

Resistance to the restoration of Conversos and Crypto-Jews into the core of the Jewish community may come from multiple sources:

• Family and Friends: The greatest hurdle to rediscovery and adoption of Jewish identity can be someone’s own family. Parents, siblings and children are often active members of a Catholic church and kindred organizations. Public awareness that a member of that family is re­identifying himself as a Jew often strikes angst in the hearts of blood kindred. Will they now be viewed as Jews and excluded from the religious, social and commercial relationships in the Catholic community in which they have lived all of their lives? Re-identification is a difficult hurdle for those seeking to retain the love of their families, while simultaneously rediscovering their Jewish heritage.

• The Catholic Church: how will the Church respond to effective efforts by the Jewish community to recapture the lineal descendants of those forcibly converted? Admittedly, the Catholic Church of today is quite different from that which existed in the Middle Ages. Considering the manner in which Spanish Jews were converted, under what moral grounds (Christian or otherwise) could the Church resist the return of the descendants? Indeed, the Church should and will responsibly provide its records and encourage and assist those who genuinely wish to return to Judaism.

• The Jewish Religious Community: The sheer will and effort necessary to wrest oneself from the bonds of a lifetime’s religion and face rejection by one’s own family takes uncommon dedication and commitment. Should that effort be confronted by a Jewish response that insists that you need to be converted because you are really not one of us? The same benefits can be achieved by simply requiring a program of education to acquaint that re-entrant with the duties, obligations and joys of life in the Jewish community. Ironically, there are so many accepted versions of Jewish life, i.e. Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Secular, Sephardic, Ashkenazi and others, that one would be hard put to know who could provide a returning descendant with the key to re-entry.

• The State of Israel: Many of the Converses and Crypto-Jews seeking return will come from lives of poverty within Latin American countries or certain sectors of North Africa. How will Israel qualify these persons if they seek the privileges of Israel’s Law of Return? Must there be a separate judicial determination in addition to any religious accommodation? How, too, will Israel deal with Converses and Crypto­Jews of mixed blood? It is doubtful, even with the benefit of modern DNA, that a person of pure Jewish blood could be identified. What percentage of Jewish blood is necessary to qualify under the Law of Return? Can the relatively compact size of Israel today accommodate the infusion of an additional large new population? Ought a statue be erected in Haifa Harbor with an outstretched hand beckoning the return of the descendants of the “Stolen Jews”?

• Descendants of Those Who Did Not Submit to Conversion: The current Sephardic Jewish Community consists of descendants of those who elected to flee with little or nothing, rather than convert. Their ancestors presumably were subject to the same violence, threats and duress that changed their former brethren into New Christians. Yet, those who fled remained faithful to Judaism. Is there the perception that the descendants of the New Christians are merely the fruit of a poisoned tree and should not be received in the body of the Jewish People? Or, more likely, will they be welcomed back by the ironical use of the Christological doctrine of “the Return of the Prodigal Child”?

Conclusion

It is nothing short of miraculous that a rivulet of descendants, after 500 years, has found its way back to the mainstream of their people. This may be our last clear chance to bring back the descendants to the core of the Jewish People. We have a moral, historical and religious obligation to inform, educate and welcome the children of our lost brothers. The ultimate irony lies in the fact Spain and Portugal, in an obvious effort to return to the days of their glory, have offered citizenship to the descendants of the traumatically expelled Sephardic community. Can the Jewish community do less?

It is estimated that today 20 percent of the people of Spain and Portugal are of Sephardic descent. An even larger percentage would have immigrated to the New World to escape the Inquisition. Mere casual academic interest or delivery of responsibility for the descendants to a handful of underfunded organizations, represents an abandonment of our brothers’ children. The Jewish community must assemble itself into a unified force and provide the funding and leadership necessary to bring our people home. “Home” is the community and does not necessarily relate to the degree of religious practice.

It is no surprise, that one of the most fundamental tenets of membership in the Jewish community is the principal of Pidyon Shvuyim, the obligation to redeem one or more Jews from captivity. That is a sacred obligation of membership in an extraordinary and ancient people. The Israelis were so sensitive to that obligation that they did not rest until one Jew, Sgt. Gilad Shalit, was returned to his people even at the price of a thousand Palestinian prisoners.

Every time a child, who is a lineal descendant of the Stolen Jews, reaches maturity and does not know of his origin and heritage or is fearful to acknowledge it, a new captive is born. It is the obligation of every Jew to educate and assist those descendants in learning their identity, reclaiming their Jewish heritage and thus releasing them from their captivity.

Regretfully, six million victims of the Holocaust are beyond our salvation. The descendants of the Stolen Jews of the Spanish Inquisition are not. It is time to awaken our sleeping giant.

By Douglas C. Kaplan

In the beginning

The People of Israel were born with God’s selection of Abram, as their patriarch, almost 4000 years ago.

The Nation of Israel was born at Mount Sinai, in 1280 B.C.E., hardened by the contractions of 400 years of slavery, and nourished by the receipt of the civilizing statutes of Torah.

Until the Roman destruction of the second Temple in 70 C.E., the Hebrew People’s relationship with their God was that of a tribal deity. Worship was largely accomplished in the Temple by gifting and sacrificing food animals whose flesh was used to sustain the families of the priests and the Levi support personnel.

When animal sacrifices were no longer possible, Jews assembled in community meeting places for the purposes of reading the law received at Sinai and uttering devotions to their God. Learned men stepped forward to lead such congregations and to author communal prayers. Thus, out of Temple deprivation was born the synagogue, the rabbinate and a more organized form of a Jewish community.

Rabbis, as distinguished from the early sages, do not appear on the scene until about 200 C.E., and are the philosophical successors to the Pharisees. While this congregational activity resembled a religion, it was not simply accessible by the same kind of pledges of faith and formalities which opened the doors to both Christianity and the Muslim faith. Anyone could reflect and mimic classic Jewish religious procedures, but for one to actually practice Judaism, he or she must first be a Jew.

The laws which God requires of his people were delivered in the desert at Mount Sinai during the thirteenth century B.C.E. Historians believe that those laws, together with the narrative history of the Jewish people in the form of the written Torah, first appeared with Ezra upon the construction of the second Temple in the middle of the sixth century BCE.

It is axiomatic that no code, however explicit, can anticipate all of the circumstances to which it will be applied. For it to have universal application there must be a body politic that interprets and applies that code.

Analogously, for the United States Constitution, that body is the United States Supreme Court. With regard to the Torah, during the second Temple period, that task fell to The Men of the Great Assembly (Anshei Knesset HaGedolah), a group of 120 scribes, sages and prophets, and to the San Hedron. It was their responsibility to discuss, interpret and apply the Mosaic law. The Torah was quite explicit, in that such interpretations and applications must totally be within the spirit of the laws expressed. Under no circumstances was there authority to add or subtract from the law as given to Moses (Deuteronomy 4(2)and(13-32)).

Early Jewish Religious Philosophies

The introduction of the written Torah during the second Temple period brought with it several schools of thought as to its meaning and application:

• The Pharisees: The Pharisees were the spiritual fathers of Rabbinism (Rabbinic Judaism). They maintained that an afterlife existed and that God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous in the world to come. They also believed in a Messiah who would herald a new era of world peace.

• The Sadducees:  Sadducees represented an aristocratic, wealthy, and traditional elite within the hierarchy of Judaism. They were much more receptive to the influences of Greek culture that arrived with Alexander the Great and his successors. They were firm in their belief that there is no fate and that man has free will and can choose between good and evil. They strongly believed that the soul is not immortal, that there is no afterlife, and that there are no rewards or penalties after death. They rejected the pharisaic use of many observances which were not written in the law of Moses and of the Oral Law created by the Pharisees to consolidate their power. Their rejection of afterlife was in direct opposition to emerging Christianity in which afterlife was an important element.
  
• The Essenes: This group emerged out of the dissatisfaction with the other two. They believed that the others had corrupted Jerusalem and the Temple. Their conclusions led them to the desert where they adopted strict dietary laws and a commitment to celibacy. It is from their collection of documents that the Dead Sea Scrolls were ultimately found.

• The Boethusians: This was a group closely related to the Sadducees. They did not believe in afterlife or the resurrection of the dead. While the Sadducees were politically opposed to the Pharisees, the Boethusians advanced the religious arguments against them.

Birth of the Talmud

The opinions and disputations of the scholars of the Men of the Great Assembly were at risk of disappearing into obscurity. Fearing that oral traditions might be forgotten, Rabbi Judah HaNasi in 189 C. E., undertook the mission of consolidating the various opinions of the sages into a code of law which became known as the Mishnah. It consisted of 63 tractates which codify Jewish law and which constitute the basis of the Talmud .

The Mishnah was followed by two different works, each called Gemara which comprised rabbinical analysis and commentaries on the Mishnah. One of them originated from the Babylonian Jewish community and the other from Jerusalem. These efforts involve the work of rabbinical scholars known as Amoraim.The Mishnah and the two Gemaras together with the Midrash, (a hybrid of commentaries on the Written and Oral Torah), constitute the Talmud also known as the Oral Torah. The Talmud, transcribed from 189 C.E. to 500 C.E., is uniquely a work of the rabbis.

Inasmuch as the Torah was revered as having been originated from the revealed word of God, it was viewed as immutable and as a divine resource. The Mishnah and the Gemara, on the other hand, arose out of rabbinical opinions from the Jewish community, in service of the interpretation and application of the Torah. Occasionally the zeal of the rabbis, in trying to identify the outer limits of Mosaic law, resulted in creative endeavors. Consistency gave way to imagination, and the laws of the Torah began to change.

Countering those efforts were, however, elements of the Jewish community who were awed by the imaginative excesses of the Tannaim and the Amoraim and sought to restore the Torah to a more personal relationship with the people it served.

Karite response to Rabbinical excesses

By the middle of the eighth century, there arose Persian biblical scholars who took issue with the excesses of rabbinism and founded the Karite movement. Just as the rabbis were the philosophical heirs of the Pharisees, the Karites arose out of the ashes of the Sadducees who disappeared after the destruction of the second Temple.

While the  Karites took no issue with the reasonable construction of the Torah, they rejected, out of hand, those man-made laws which repudiated portions of the Torah, or gratuitously added to it.  The Pharisees/rabbis believed that the interpretation of a particular teacher was divine and elevated these teachings to the level of the Torah itself. After a time, these teachings were incorporated in the Oral Torah. The rabbis went so far as to claim that when two teachers taught diametrically opposed interpretations of the Torah that they both originated with God.

Despite efforts by the rabbinists such as the Saadia Gaon to eliminate all other forms of normative Judaism, the Karites have survived to the twenty first century. Some 40,000 are believed to reside in Israel with smaller communities in Turkey, Europe and the United States.

One People …One God … One Faith … One Torah

Rabbinism asserts that there is more than one Torah. It confirms the existence of the Written Torah, which contains the law given by God to Moses at Mount Sinai in the 13^th century B.C.E. It then alludes to the existence of a second Torah which it refers to as the Oral Torah which includes the Mishnah, the Gemara, and the Midrash, together known as the Talmud.

It is difficult to conclude that the Oral Torah is a Torah at all, Since it is essentially an attempt to create a body of law based upon rabbinical interpretations of the Written Torah. Even the traditional rabbinate who seek to bootstrap the Talmud to the divine level of the Torah have their own, not so well concealed misgivings.

Traditional Judaism’s body language of distinction

In the Holy Ark of every synagogue appear multiple Torah scrolls, while the volumes of the Talmud are notably absent. To be kosher, the Torah must be handwritten by a sofer (a dedicated and knowledgeable scribe), while the Talmud appears in multiple commercially printed volumes. It is the Torah, and not  the Talmud, that is lifted during the Hagbah portion of every Torah service.  It is only the Torah that is kissed by the parishioners as it makes its way through the aisles of every synagogue. The traditional fasting imposed on those who have viewed a Torah drop is not imposed if a similar event occurs to a volume of the Talmud.

The authority to create is the authority to amend

The United States Constitution, like the Torah, is an instrument that incorporates a body of rules for the maintenance of a sustainable and orderly social structure. However, the two differ in the source of original authority by which they were created. The United States Constitution was an instrument created in 1789 from the authority, and by the will of ,those whose conduct was to be governed by that instrument. The Torah, on the other hand, originated from the divine authority of the tribal God of the Jewish people gathered at Mount Sinai in the 13^th century BCE. Both documents are universal, inasmuch as their authority seeks to endure long beyond the time of their origination.

The United States Constitution provided for a manner in which it could be amended and it was, in fact, amended on 27 different occasions. The source of authority for authorizing the amendment was the very body politic of citizens that created it in the first place. They had simply reserved the right to make the document a living instrument which could be changed in accordance with social and physical changes which occur regularly within a community.

Since God was the authority for the creation of the Torah and since the Torah did not provide for the manner in which it could be amended to accommodate change, only God could alter its provisions. But God has not presented himself recently to assist with the modification of the Torah in order to accommodate a more modern society.

There was, however, one exception to Torah amendment authority.  In Deuteronomy 18:(15-19), we are told that God will raise up from amongst the people a prophet and then God will put words in his mouth to which the people shall heed. The passage warns the nation to be aware of false prophets who can be identified when their prophecies does not come to pass. Of special note was the fact that the prophet would come from amongst the people through whom God could send a message to Israel. The passage presages the era of the prophets and is clearly not intended to create another deity or semi-deity in competition with God.  The rabbis were in a quandary as to how to keep pace with both physical and social changes.

The Torah prohibited all additions, subtractions, or alterations to the rules in the original document. In the exercise of their authority to interpret and apply the law, the rabbis made a number of sweeping changes and additions, often tantamount to the rejection of portions of the Torah.

• From what might well may have been a political expedient, the rabbis created, out of whole cloth, L’olam Habah (the world to come). That is, if one faithfully obeyed rabbinical law, that person would be admitted to the domain inhabited by God, the Angels, and others who passed life’s tests to merit entry into this promised, joyful domain. The difficulty with this concept is that there is not one scintilla of mention of the world to come in the Torah. It is as if God were so tired on the sixth day, from creating our world that he forgot to mention the other world that he had created for afterlife. No doubt that those who struggled for a living with little reward in this world found such a promise hopeful and that they would be moved in the direction of rabbinism.

• For approximately 2000 years (from Abraham to the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 A.D.), the Jews were a patrilineal society. That is, the 12 tribes of Israel carried the names of Jacob’s sons; children were named by the origin of their father; and the laws of inheritance and those of religious hierarchy were patrilineally influenced. Most importantly, the Hebrew entitlement to the holyland flowed directly through the Zerah (semen) of the patriarchs and their male descendents. By the end of the second Temple, and in accordance with rabbinical fiat, the rabbis changed the required origin of Jewish children from a Jewish father to a Jewish mother. Certainly, it was then easier to identify the mother of a child rather than the father. Could that fact alone justify the rabbis to negate the Torah and overturn the underpinnings of the Hebraic social structure?                                                                                                                                        

• Interpretation by the rabbis of a single statement in the Torah could result in distortion of its meaning beyond any reasonable concept. Classically, the rule concerning mixing meat and milk is one of the most egregious. Exodus 23 (19), 34(20), and Deuteronomy 14(21), all provide “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.”  A reasonable construction of that provision would tell us that it prohibits the cooking of a kid in the milk of its mother. A more expanded, and perhaps ethical, interpretation would tell us that no animal should be cooked or eaten in its mother’s milk. There is no suggestion by the biblical text that all meat should be excluded from all milk, a statement that God could easily have prescribed should that have been his intent.

The very fact that it was limited to a mother-child relationship in one species of one animal attests to the fact that it was not a universal theme. To expand the restriction to the milk of one animal as relates to the issue of  another animal, or the milk of one species and the meat of another, is a distortion and a violation of the rule against adding to Torah laws. Perhaps the most curious application of this law is the fact that chicken is considered meat and cannot be consumed with milk, even though chickens don’t give milk, and chicken and eggs may be consumed together.

Homemade Divine authority

To justify the conflict between the Torah, the revealed word of God, and the Oral Torah, a rabbinical product, divine authority had to be found or manufactured. In order to justify modifications to the Torah, traditional Judaism created a retrofitted bridge from the end of the Talmud era approximately 500 C.E. to God’s appearance at Mount Sinai in 1312 B.C.E. (1812 years). The Talmud was then identified as the Torah Shel Bial Pe Misinai (The Oral Torah that originated at Mount Sinai).

To accept the Oral Torah as divinely originated one must believe that:

• God deferred his instruction of the Oral Torah for over 1800 years, until it outed from the mouths of the Tannaim, the Amoraim and the rabbis at the conclusion of the Talmudic Era.

• God who spoke definitively and without equivocation in the Torah was now presenting multiple disputations on the law without conclusive mandates.

• God was amending and making additions to the rules He provided at Sinai at the very same time he was declaring those rules.

• God saved those disputations to be uttered from the mouths of rabbis who were not acknowledged prophets.

Ultimately, the ham-handed way in which divine authority was manufactured by the rabbis painted all of Judaism into a static corner. The rabbis could not again go back to the Sinai well and conjure more divine authority to accommodate changes after the Oral Torah (the Talmud).

From the sixth century onward, Jewish law was condemned to live in a sea made turbulent with the conflicting legal opinions of the Tannaim of the Mishna and the Amoriam of the Gemorah.  Decisions, of necessity, were made by consensus. While the Written Torah spoke with one voice, the Oral Torah spoke with many. Worst of all, as time progressed Jewish law remained locked in the sixth century since the Sinai well remained closed.

A time to make choices

However, by the twelfth 12^th century and the birth of Moses Maimonides, help was to come. The Rambam, as he was known, recognized the difficulty of rabbinical law with no specific accepted and acknowledged rules. In his masterful work called the Mishnah Torah, he selected from the multiple rabbinical choices on each legal issue one specific interpretation and rule which was to be followed and rejected the others. In the Mishnah Torah, he wisely omitted the names of the rabbis whose opinions were rejected. Since there was one accepted opinion for each issue of law in the Mishnah Torah it significantly reduced the study of the raw and conflicting opinions in the Mishnah and the Gemara. Sadly, the Rambam’s choices were of necessity rooted in the world of the sixth century, since there was no divine authority for real change beyond the Talmud.

A similar but less extravagant work was done in the sixteenth century by Joseph Caro who created the Shulchan Orach, a virtual handbook on the applicable laws and rules governing how a person should conduct himself in accordance with Jewish law.

Napoleon…Liberation and Fragmentation

While the chaos of disputations of the Talmudic era had largely been addressed, the basic rules of Jewish law were still sourced in the sixth century of the Oral Torah. In the ghettos and shtetls of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, there was little personal or social contact with the Gentile community. That constraint was viewed by some as a gift that kept the Jewish people together in troubled times. However, those times changed with the onset of the Napoleonic era. The Royal houses of Europe were beginning to lose dominance.

The ghettos were opening and their residents given access to the urban communities of the host countries. In sites such as Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, England and Holland, Jews began to engage socially and commercially with the Gentile community. They acquired homes in formerly forbidden areas, competed in commerce, entered their school children in public schools, and sought parity with their Gentile neighbors. In doing so, they were hobbled by interpretations of the Torah rooted back to the sixth century. In Germany, especially during the early 1800s, Jews confronted multiple choices:

• Conversion

• Abandonment of the more restrictive rules of historic rabbinic Judaism

• Reinterpretation of the Torah so as to liberalize Jewish practices

• Retain traditional classic rabbinic Judaism 

For the most part, conversion was not a popular choice. While it was recognized that one can change one’s religious practices, the convert cannot change his genetic identity, either in his own eyes or in those of his Gentile neighbors.

A number of German Jews chose to retain their identity but to abandon many of the trappings of traditional Judaism. This included the wearing of traditional Jewish identifiers, such as skull caps, beards,prayer shawls, sideburns, etc. It evolved into the abandonment of much of the Hebrew in- temple worship, and into the shortening of their services. The restrictions on Sabbath activity and the prohibition against eating non-kosher food were also significantly eroded.

Thus in 1818, Reform Judaism was born in Germany and ultimately was transported to other Judaic enclaves. As the process continued in the United States and other Jewish communities, it became even more liberalized by the creation of denominations, such as Reconstruction Judaism and Humanistic Judaism. All of this occurred while traditional rabbinic Judaism remained vital and active in Jewish communities throughout the world.

As some communities liberalized, Orthodoxy circled the wagons

Orthodox Jewish communities were not unaffected by the rigid and anachronistic nature of the Oral Torah. Those communities, however, dealt with it in three different ways:

 1) Accommodation by relating current activity to an analogous circumstance in the early Biblical era

Orthodox communities related every new physical or social innovation back to a biblical origin. A cardinal rule in Jewish law is that the seventh day (the Sabbath) is a mandated day of rest. No work can be performed on that day since Jews are taught that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. But, what constitutes work? For a definition of work, early Jewish law looked to the building of the Tabernacle, the portable temple of God used by the children of Israel. The notion is that any activity necessary in the creation of the Tabernacle constituted work. One of those activities was the creation of fire, which in 1200 B.C.E., and assuredly required significant effort and constituted work. The idea that creating a fire was a work effort was further confirmed in Exodus 35(3) where the Jewish community was directed “Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitation on the Sabbath day.”

The advent of electricity and its many uses became challenging. Electricity was viewed as a form of fire and thus all uses of electricity constituted work and were prohibited on the Sabbath. The idea that the effort of making a fire, in the matchless world of thirteenth-century B.C.E. (Mount Sinai) was not the same as the Zippo lighter era of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, either was never considered or dismissed out of hand. Thus, the religious Jews of today live in an anachronistic world.

Today, it is not considered working on the Sabbath to walk upstairs to your apartment on the sixth floor, but it is considered work to press a button in an elevator to arrive at the same location. It is not considered work to walk, in a driving rainstorm, a mile to your favorite synagogue on the Sabbath, but driving your car to the same destination is a gross violation.

Orthodox homes or establishments often provide stacks of separated toilet tissues so that one is not obliged to tear sheets from a roll on the Sabbath day. Listening to a dissertation on the weekly portion of biblical law on an electronic device which requires an off and on button is equally a violation.

The restrictions of this relation back doctrine, analogizing modern life to laws or events that existed thousands of years earlier, exists in multiple other aspects of Jewish life today.

2) The prayer mantra

By the late 1400s, the Jews, as an itinerant, landless people, had traveled from host nation to host nation for centuries. With them, they carried their Torah scrolls, which was the source of the instruction they were to provide to their neighbors and themselves. In their synagogues, the reading of the Torah remained paramount. Nevertheless, prayer in a formalized fashion gained significant momentum.

The circumstances of the Jew in the diaspora was rarely favorable and thus there was much to ask of God. Eventually, the prayers, often in the form of poems and supplications, became formalized both with reference to language and time of presentation. Personalized prayer, as a means of communication with one’s God, took a backseat to prepared prayers, prescribed for specific times and dates. The advent of the printing press and the printing of prayer books accelerated the process. Those most devout demonstrated their devotion by how quickly they could read the prayer or recite it from memory. Spontaneity, in supplication, became a lost art. It has been suggested, undoubtedly in jest, that God’s failure to appear since biblical times may be as a result of boredom with the thoughtless and repetitious utterances of the rote daily prayers.

In addition to stylized prayers, traditional Jews have often adopted the dress of host countries (black hats, fur hats, long black coats, etc.). This dress would be more familiarly found in seventeenth-century Poland than in biblical Israel or elsewhere in the modern world.

3) Create a work-around that frequently has the appearance of a sham

In Exodus 16(28-29), God reproved the Jewish people for violating his commandments by leaving their home on the Sabbath day. He requires “let no man go out of his place on the seventh day.” That requirement represented a significant problem for rabbinic Judaism. How could the Jewish community attend services, if restricted to their home site?

From that quandary, the notion of eruv was born. It was an artificial way of extending one’s place or household beyond the normal household limits. The idea was that if one can create a confined area in which the household is located, it becomes part of that household. Virtually every traditional Jewish community has its own eruv. The eruv of the borough of Manhattan, New York, is constructed by eighteen miles of translucent wire around most of that community, essentially declaring that all homes in the eighteen mile circumference are part of a single residence. Any comment on how this might comply with the express words of the Torah appears superfluous.

To be sure, the Sabbath elevator was not an invention of the early sages of Israel. Nevertheless, it is a feature of many hospitals in which there are Jewish physicians and patients. To avoid having to press an elevator button, and thus create an electrical impulse, which has its religious origin in fire, Sabbath elevators in many hospitals are obliged to automatically stop on every floor. Curiously, how a Sabbath elevator that runs on electric avoids the criticized use of electricity on the Sabbath is a conundrum worthy of deep thought.

Many religious Jews are disinclined to leave lights or air conditioning on from before the Sabbath on Friday so that it may be used on Saturday. To avoid that dangerous and expensive alternative, they turn to the use of what has traditionally been called “the Shabbos goy.” That is a Gentile who is procured to come during the Sabbath and initiate the electrical system that provides the light, air conditioning or heat. The rationale is that inasmuch as he is not a Jew, he is not prohibited by doing work on Sabbath.  It is as if the introduction of a Gentile third party to perform a Sabbath violation insulates the person who acquired the service. Nothing could be further from the truth in any civilized society. The act of the agent is the act of the principal. Otherwise one could, with impunity, hire a hitman to do in an adversary.

Some observant Jews are owners of business establishments that need to be open on Saturday in order to be viable. It has become a popular device to create a sales contract wherein the business is sold to a Gentile on Friday afternoon, only to be repurchased by the original owner on Sunday morning. The rationale here is that it is not owned by the religious Jew during the Sabbath, when it is open for business on that day. This shameless sham, which purports to be a bona fide transaction, would be fully revealed if the weekend owner set fire to the business on Saturday afternoon.

Conclusion

After the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and the futile revolt against the Romans by Simon bar Kokhba in 132 CE, the control of the Jewish people passed into the hands of the rabbis as successors to the Pharisees.

The Torah had no provision for alteration or amendment in order to accommodate to physical, environmental or social changes. God no longer appeared directly or through prophets to accommodate to the changing circumstances of the people. Essentially, the rabbis had two choices in order for the Jewish people to keep pace in a changing world:

• The rabbis could broadly construe the Torah to accommodate the changing times in such a manner as to stay true to the spirit, focus and intent of the Torah.

• The rabbis could depart from portions of the Torah by rejecting them, out of hand, and/or by adding rules and regulations that were alien to the original provisions.

Whether by design, frustration or misadventure, rabbinical law (Halacha) began in part to depart from the Torah and to establish a jurisprudence of its own in direct violation of the provisions of Deuteronomy 4(2) and (13-32).

There obviously came a time when the rabbinate realized that they could not offer the Torah as the revealed word of God and then depart from portions of it at will. There had to be some divine authority which would authorize rabbinical departures from the strict letter of the Torah. In what may have been an act of desperation, the rabbis reached back more than 1800 years from the completion of the Talmud (500 C.E.) to the delivery of the Torah at Mount Sinai (1320 B.C.E.) in order to “borrow” divine authority for its Oral Torah, the Talmud.

As a result of rabbinical creativity, the Judaism of today is significantly different from that of our ancestors. The rabbis created their own world, their own people and their own Torah.

The New Rabbinical Jewish World

In the Torah we find only one world, the world created by God, in which all of his creatures dwell. From the rabbinate, we have acquired a new world, L’Olam Habah, the world to come. It is a world that promises afterlife and benefits for living a life mindful and in compliance with rabbinic halacha. Has anyone consulted God?

The New Rabbinical Jewish People

For approximately 2000 years from God’s selection of Abram, a Jew was an individual who is born of a Jewish father (a patrilineal society). By rabbinical fiat, that rule was changed to replace the requirement of a Jewish father with the requirement of a Jewish mother (a matrilineal society). The change constitutes a direct rejection of the Torah and is an alteration of the composition of the Jewish people. Who are we?

The New Rabbinical Jewish Torah

The Torah was given to Moses and the Jewish people in the fourteenth century B.C.E. The Written Torah, from the days of Ezra the scribe, serves the Jewish people today as the sacred and disclosed word of God. The rabbinate has provided the world with the Mishna, the Gemoras, and the Midrash, together the Talmud. They are the writings and opinions of multiple rabbis, often in disputation with each other with regard to the interpretation, and application of the Written Torah. The rabbis have chosen to elevate the status of the Talmud to that of an Oral Torah, albeit it is a series of rabbinical texts and opinions in service of the written Torah. Both God and his Torah are singular. Even under the guise of service, no one claim equivalency with the Creator or the divinity of his teachings.

May the Jewish people and their Torah wander no more.

By Douglas C. Kaplan

Intermarriage

The miracle of 4000 years of Jewish survival is legend.  Virtually half of that existence occurred as a landless people escaping anti-Semitism by traveling from host nation to host nation while still retaining Jewish identity and faith.  Ironically, one of the greatest challenges to Jewish existence occurred when the Jewish law of inclusion was changed to encompass only children born of Jewish mothers, regardless of the religion of the father.

Prior to the construction of the second Temple (Circa 450 BCE), the wives of Jewish males, from whatsoever origin, sojourned with their families within the Jewish community and they and their children were simply accepted as part of that community.  Intermarriage was quite frequent in the early Israelite society.  The practice was well reflected in the story of Ruth, a Moabite woman.  On the death of her Jewish husband, she pledged to her mother-in-law Naomi that, “wherever you go, I will go.  Wherever you live, I will live.  Your people shall be my people and your God will be my God.”  The Scriptures do not describe a formal conversion of Ruth because undoubtedly there was no formal conversion ceremony nor did any rabbis then exist to perform it.  King David, Ruth’s great-grandson, is a testament to the inclusion of Ruth and her descendents into the covenant of Israel. 

The Blessed Seed of the Patriarchs

Four of the twelve tribes of Israel (Dan, Naphtali, Gad and Asher) resulted from Jacob’s relationships with Zilpah and Billah, the servant women of his wives Leah and Rachel.  Joseph was married to Asenath, an Egyptian woman, who the Pharaoh gave to him as a wife.  Kings Saul, David, Solomon and successor monarchs married many foreign wives, often the result of international agreements.  Moses was married to a Midianite woman.  No one would suggest that their progeny were not part of the Hebrew nation.  What all of the children of these mixed marriages had in common was that they were conceived with the blessed seed of the patriarchs. 

Why are the seeds of the patriarchs the golden thread into which is woven the fabric of the Jewish people?  The answer is quite simple.  It is because God, in the Old Testament, repeatedly prescribed it and presumptively designed it to fit within his blueprints of human genetics: 

1. In Genesis 12(7), God appears to Abraham (then Abram) and in referring to the land of Canaan tells him, “Unto thy seed will I give this land.”

• In Genesis 17(6-8), God tells Abraham that he will make him exceedingly fruitful and that he will sire Kings.  God promises that he will give to Abraham and to Abraham’s seed all of the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession. 

• In Genesis 17(10-12), God reminds Abraham of the earlier covenant negotiated between God, Abraham and the seed of Abraham and requires that a token of that covenant be represented by the circumcision of every male child. 

• In Genesis 26(2-4), God confirms to Isaac the covenant with Isaac’s father Abraham.  God promises to make Isaac’s seed multiply as the stars of the heaven and in Isaac’s seed will all the nations of the earth be blessed. 

• In Genesis 28(14), God tells Jacob that his seed shall be as the dust of the earth.

• Deuteronomy 34(4-5) God allows Moses, prior to his death, to look at the land to which he has brought the Jewish people and reminds Moses that he has given this land to the seed of the patriarchs.

• In all biblical references in which the word seed is used the Bible employs the word “ZERAH” which, even today, is translated as semen.

All of the described biblical conversations between God and the patriarchs expressly included reference to the seed of the patriarchs.  It is as if the patriarch’s seed were an essential party to the prediction that Israel would become a great nation and to God’s covenant granting the land of Canaan to Israel.  None of the predictions or covenants were addressed to the matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, Leah or Rachel or to the fruit of their womb. 

Prohibited Relationships

Supporters of Matriarchal Judaism point to Deuteronomy 7(1-4), which names seven Canaanite tribes with which Jewish men and women cannot marry.  In Deuteronomy 7(4), the Scripture explained that the purpose of this provision was, “for they will turn away thy son from following me that they may serve other gods.”  Two thoughts naturally proceed from the express language of that provision: 

• Although it is a prohibited relationship, God treats the issue of a Jewish man and a female from one of the prohibited tribes as belonging to his people of Israel.  Why else would God be concerned with the mother talking the child into other gods and religions?

• No mention is made concerning possible religious redirection of the daughter from such a prohibited union, presumptively because the daughter does not pass on the blessed seed of the patriarchs. 

Some resources have expanded this provision to mean that Jewish men and women cannot marry outside of the Jewish community.  Yet, ironically, traditional Judaism today confirms that the issue of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father is born into the Jewish community. 

The express directions of God in the Torah have never been circumspect.  God specifically describes those animals which are prohibited to be consumed by the Hebrew nation (Leviticus 11(3-8) and Deuteronomy 14(4-8)).  In a similar vein, God specifically identifies how the holiday of Passover should be observed (Exodus 12).  In God’s infinite wisdom, he recognizes the editorial nature of his creations and enjoins his people, “ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you” (Deuteronomy 4(2)).

 In Deuteronomy 7(1), God actually names the seven specific local tribes that Jews are prohibited to marry into:  Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites.

To expand the list of the seven tribes to all persons of non-Jewish extraction would:

• Suggest that God went to a lot of trouble to name all seven tribes when he really intended to prohibit marriage to anyone outside of the Jewish community.

• Violate God’s injunction to the Jewish people not to add to his directives.

• Conflict with traditional Judaism’s acceptance of children born from a relationship between a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father. 

Rabbinical Challenge to Divine Authority

In all of the Tanach (compendium of Torah and Books of Prophets and Scribes), the identity of each individual is established through the name of his or her father.  This is especially true in regard to the thousands of persons named in the book of Ezra, the Scribe where lineage is traced through the male parent.  Yet, in one of the great ironies of Jewish history, a sea change appears to take place when Ezra arrives from Babylonia to the construction site of the second Temple in Jerusalem.  Many of the Jews in that community have fathered children with women of the indigenous tribes which were those expressly prohibited in Deuteronomy 7(1).

 Ezra was so distressed by what he saw that he prayed, wept and cast himself down.  In crisis mode, he appropriately demanded that those unions espoused to women of the prohibited tribes be set aside, but then erroneously went one step too far.  He demanded that the issue of these relationships, children born of the blessed seed of the patriarchs, be abandoned to their mothers and rejected from acceptance as Jewish children.  In doing this, Ezra brings into fruition God’s expressed concern in Deuteronomy 7(4) that these children will be turned away from God and will serve other gods. 

There appears little doubt that Ezra’s erroneous decision was buoyed by the rationale that you can identify the mother of a child but not the father.  That unauthorized rationalization, if it had any merit, long ago disappeared with the science of DNA.  Ezra’s decision and its subsequent acceptance by the authors of the Talmud effectively abandoned the seed of the patriarchs as the instrumentality for the continuum of the Jewish people.  As the Jewish female was presumed to produce a Jewish child, a Jewish male could only breed a Jewish child when in union with a Jewish female.  The seed of the patriarchs was held for naught.

Who had the authority to change God’s directive that the people of Israel would be forthcoming only from the seed of the patriarchs?  Who had the authority to change the source of the Jewish people from the seed of the patriarchs to the ovum of Jewish women?  Was there some Divine directive wherein God directed the sages of the Talmud to change his early plans for the development of the Jewish people so that they would be generated from a different source?  It is interesting to note that the Sadducees and their presumptive successor the Karites, whose interpretation of the Torah differed from the Pharisees\ Rabbis, declined to abandon the seed of the patriarchs as the source of Jewish children. 

The Y Chromosome and the Seed of the Patriarchs

Although many biblical Jews were engaged in animal husbandry, they lacked the knowledge of modern geneticists.  They had no special awareness about how genetic traits were passed down through the generations.  It was not until 1905 when Nettie Stevens of Bryn Mawr College and Edmund Beecher Wilson independently discovered the mechanisms of the unique Y chromosome.  All normal males have both an X chromosome and a Y chromosome while all females have two X chromosomes.  The work of these two scientists and subsequent contributions by other geneticists proved that the Y chromosome established the male sex of a child and passed its genes unaltered from father to son. 

Given these facts, one has to wonder how the early Jewish community knew and understood that the priesthood, the Kohens, (which stemmed from Aaron’s lineal descendents) could only descend from father to son.  The uniqueness of the Jewish nation originated with the Creator’s inclusion of the Y chromosome’s unchanged path from father to son as part of the design of the human species.  By providing in Genesis 12:7, 17:6 – 8, 17:10 – 12, 26:2 – 4 and 28:14, that the seed of the patriarchs, which incorporated the Y chromosome, was the root stock of the people of Israel, God assured that the integrity of his people, would remain pure and un-diluted.

The Benevolent Autocracy of the Creator

In every structured society, the governing rules of conduct are established either by man or law.  Where they are created and enforced by man, such as a monarchy or an oligarchy, the laws are subject to change on the whim of the king or oligarch.  Where the rules governing the society stem from a written instrument, such as a constitution, the instrument remains the paramount and exclusive source of authority in that society.  Customarily, such instruments provide for the manner in which they can be amended.  However, the rules are different in a religious community, where the basic document contains the direct or transcribed word of the Creator.  The Torah can only be amended by God, its source, and not by man.  Man may, however, make rules and regulations in concert with the express provisions of the instrument but not inconsistent with it.

 In Genesis, the patriarchs are told that God’s covenant is with them and their seed.  Meaning no disrespect, the covenant is not with the matriarchs or with the fruit of their womb.  The Torah advises that it is through the patriarch’s seed that Israel will become a great nation and it is with that seed that God has covenanted to deliver the land of Canaan as an everlasting possession. 

Who then had the authority to decree that Jewish women, through whom that holy seed could not pass, were the exclusive instrumentality for the origin of Jewish children?  Today, the child of a righteous Jewish husband with a non-Jewish mate is not Jewish, but the child of an atheist Jewish woman fathered by a gentile Holocaust denier is Jewish. Not all of the brilliant scholars of the Mishna, Gomorrah, Gaonim, Rashi or Maimonides have the authority to change God’s covenant with the patriarchs and their seed or to alter the physiological path through which membership in the Jewish people is delivered.

Conclusion

For the last seven decades, we have maintained to the world our just entitlement to the land of Israel.  That right is largely based upon God’s biblical covenant with our patriarchs and their seed.  For 2000 years, we have wrongfully rejected that seed as the avenue for the continuity of our people.  What terrible damage has been done to the authority of our entitlement to the land? 

Over the last 2000 years (except in modern reform and liberal congregations), hundreds of thousands of Jewish children and their successor generations have been wrongfully denied access to their own people.  Every time a child is born to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother and is denied entry into the Jewish community a gross injustice has been done.  It is a wrong that demands prompt remediation. 

The erroneous matrilineal path is deeply rooted in traditional Judaism and thus therein lies the affirmative obligation for correction.  Before we, as Jews, can undertake the repair of the world (Tikkum Olam), we must first have the courage to repair ourselves.  Tradition, which is seeped in thousands of years of erroneous misdirection, is not justification for the denial of birthright into the People of Israel.

In the correction of this wrong, may the wisdom of the patriarchs lead us to a path where we promptly return to the ample blessings of God’s covenant.

By Douglas C. Kaplan

Genesis, the first Book of the Old Testament, is imperiously dismissed by some as an imaginative allegory about the creation of the universe and the origin of the Jewish People.

Hidden in the treasure trove of its narrative are many answers to the mysteries of an ancient people, its obligation to repair the world and the origin of anti-Semitism

A vengeful God’s remorse

Genesis begins with God’s creation of the earth and its wondrous inhabitants. It identifies a Garden of Eden in which Adam and Eve lived a beautiful, exotic, and carefree existence. It was a perfect world. Yet, when God’s human creatures failed to obey a single order, He threw them out of the garden, consigned them to a finite life in which they were obliged to support themselves through their own efforts.

At a subsequent time when God’s human creatures did not comply with His moral code, His anger was once again kindled and, with the exception of Noah and the contents of his ark, He flooded the earth and all living things were destroyed.

When wickedness became rampant in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah God once again became wroth. With the exception of Lot, his wife and two daughters, He destroyed both communities. However, when Lot’s wife, out of natural curiosity, but against instruction, turned to see the destruction, she ended up as a pillar of salt.

God was quick to anger, and aware of His vengeful nature (Deuteronomy 32(35)). In one of the most sensitive moments of biblical literature, God, the creator of the world, turned to His own creations, Noah and his sons, and pledged to them that He would never again destroy the earth (Genesis 9(11-17). So contrite was God that He pledged that every rainbow in the sky would iterate His covenant in perpetuity to humanity.

In the very same chapter (Sedra) of Genesis, called “Noah,” we meet “Abram” and begin to learn how God intends to put guardrails on His anger. If He can control the wickedness of His creations, He will not need to respond with vengeance. What is needed is an on-site presence that can instruct the peoples of the world, God’s creations to whom He has granted free will, how to live in accordance with God’s law and mandate.

God chose Abram as the rootstock of a people whom He designed. There was no chosen people

The notion of a chosen people is an erroneous and contentious concept. It generates from Genesis 12(2-3), and elsewhere, where Abram is made a unique offer by God, who pledged that he would make Abram and his descendents a great nation. At that point of time, Abram had no children and only a barren wife. He was certainly not a people or nation. However, in the selection of Abram, God uses some interesting language: “In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed”. It is an expression that foreshadows God’s intended use of Abram’s descendents to spread God’s declared rules of civility (Torah), so as to repair a wicked world and thus to save it from His vengeance.

Specifications of a designed people

God’s design starts with the selection of one man, Abram, whose name is later changed to Abraham. It then grows into a family, a tribe, a series of tribes and ultimately into the Hebrew nation. In Genesis 12(7), 17(6-8), 17(10-12), 26(2-4), and 28(14), God covenants with Abraham and subsequently with his son Isaac and grandson Jacob that from their semen (Zerah) there will be forthcoming a great nation. God covenants to them that He will protect them, but they must abide by his requirements. As to qualified males, however, God (in (Genesis 12 (7)), additionally requires circumcision of the instrument through which the Zerah is delivered, as an everlasting memorial to His covenant with the Hebrew people. In anticipation of the work to be done by the people whom God created, God commits to grant them the land of Canaan (Israel) as an everlasting possession.

Thus, a female, or a circumcised male, as a descendent of the semen (Zerah) of the patriarchs, is a Jew whether or not that person is secular, adherent of another faith, agnostic or atheist. By the same token, one who is not born of the Zerah (semen of the patriarchs), who so loves Judaism that he or she strives to comply with all of the 613 Torah mitzvot is not a Jew perforce of that commitment or dedication alone.

In the waning days of the Second Temple, by virtue of rabbinical fiat and contrary to the express Torah prescription, a Jew was identified as one born of a Jewish mother, without regard to male zerah origination. It is a thesis that is still maintained within traditional Judaism today. Query, can a designed people change the design of their own origination?

The change from patrilineal descendants of the patriarchs to those born of female Jews has obviously modified the composition of the Jewish people. They are different from those with whom God covenanted, through the patriarchs, to deliver the land of Canaan in perpetuity. We must ask ourselves the difficult question as to whether the change in the composition of the Jewish people has adversely affected our entitlement to the Land of Israel.

Reform Jews, in 1983, reintroduced Jewish patrilineality by proposing that a child born of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother is a Jewish child if the child is reared in the Jewish home. While that is a desirable step, the notion of rearage is irrelevant to identity.

A child born of a Jewish father originates from the Zerah of the patriarchs and therefore is a Jew, not a Gentile and not a half-Jew. Jewish identity, by definition, is a function of birth, not of rearage.

Intermarriage

With the exception of seven named Canaanite tribes (Deuteronomy 7(1-4), the Torah does not preclude Jewish men from relationships with Gentile women. In biblical times, relationships with non-Jewish women were most common. Of the 12 tribes of Israel, the tribes of Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher were the result of Jacob’s relationships with two Egyptian women, Zilpah and Billah. Joseph was married to Asenath, an Egyptian woman whom the Pharaoh gave to him as a wife. The kings of Israel: Saul, David, Solomon and their successors married hundreds of foreign women in pursuance of political relationships with neighboring people. Moses was married to a Midianite woman. Who would suggest that the children born of these marriages were not part of the Jewish nation? What all of the children of these mixed marriages had in common was that they were conceived by Jewish men endowed with the blessed seed (Zerah) of the patriarchs. Assuredly, these Gentile women did not all convert to Judaism, especially since rabbis did not appear on the scene until hundreds of years later.

When man plays God

The requirements of Jewish conversion are different from that of the other major faiths. In both Christian and Muslim faiths, conversion takes place by ceremonies of acceptance and dedication to their special deities and religious practices. However, a Muslim convert is not automatically turned into an Arab and a Christian convert does not automatically become a Semite.

In Judaism, however, because it originated as a tribal faith of a single people, it requires the practitioner to to be a member of the tribe as well as to commit to the faith and its practices. Thus, Jewish conversion would be obliged to render the convertee a Jew as well as a co-religionist.

However, the rite of the conversion does not and cannot change the convertee into a Jew. A Chinese convertee still retains his Asian appearance, skills and attributes of birth. His or her children will remain Chinese in appearance and will inherit the genetic traits of that people.

Science has not as yet acquired the ability to change the total genetic makeup of a live person so as to re-create him or her as someone else. Assuredly, it is a skill not yet taught in rabbinical school and awarded with diplomas from yeshivas, or institutions like Hebrew Union College or Jewish Institute of Religion. Religious school credentials do not provide the ability to invest Gentiles with the seed (Zerah) of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. No study, blessing, or immersion can alter a person’s genetic heritage.

The DNA of a Gentile convert to Judaism will remain unchanged after the conversion process has been completed.

Attempts at conversion by rabbis are an embarrassment

The fragmented denominations of the Jewish faith, i.e., Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstruction, etc., all adopt their own standards and procedures for conversion. Recently, the chief Rabbi of Israel, where almost one half of all Jews reside, announced that only conversions performed by Orthodox rabbis will be recognized. The effect of this action is to attempt to legitimize an impossible and biblically unauthorized procedure, but only with regard to conversions conducted by Orthodox rabbis. At the same time, they would reject inclusion of children born of Jewish fathers (conceived with the Zerah of the patriarchs) if the mother is not Jewish. Conservative Jews are obliged to follow the same standard, but their conversions, according to the Orthodox, are unworthy.

Reform rabbis, who deal more frequently with intermarriage, are much more liberal with the conversion process. It is no wonder that in recent centuries, there is so much confusion as to who is a Jew. The issues have become one of the politics of religion.

It is not by inadvertence or indifference that the Torah makes no reference to conversion. It is high time for the rabbinate to abandon the perilous road of conversion and to resort to the effective clarity of the biblical law of Ger Toshav.

Ger Toshav, the biblical solution to the perils of conversion

During early biblical times, intermarriage between a Jewish man and a Gentile wife were handled more efficiently and with less formality. The Gentile wife simply entered the Jewish community and remained there with her husband and her children as a Ger Toshav. The term applied to a permanent sojourner with the Jewish people in the Jewish community. At the end of the day, their issue, having been sired by a Jewish father, were Jews and were automatically accepted as members of the Jewish community.

The Torah was especially mindful to instruct the community to treat such sojourners with kindness and equality.

In Deuteronomy 10(18-19), God teaches the obligation of loving the stranger (Ger) and in giving that person food and raiment. God reminds the Jewish people that they were strangers in the land of Egypt. Jews are informed that “cursed is the one who perverts the justice of the stranger” (Deuteronomy27 (19). The Torah, in Numbers 15(15), provides that “ there shall be one law for you and for the resident stranger; it shall be a law for all time throughout the ages. You and the stranger shall be alike before the Lord.”  In multiple ways the Torah goes to great lengths to equate the rights and living conditions of the sojourner to that of the populace.

In order to justify the rite of conversion, the modern rabbinate often turns to the Book of Ruth in the Tanakh, suggesting a historical justification for conversion. The book tells a simple story during the time of the Judges (600-400 BCE) of a Jewish widow by the name of Naomi with her two sons who married Moabite women. Both of her sons died and she was left with her two Moabite daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. As Naomi prepared to return to her own people in Judah, she bade farewell to Orpah, but Ruth cleaved to her saying “whether thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” These beautiful words by Ruth evince more of a dedication to her mother-in-law, Naomi, than a desire to convert to the God of Israel.

There is no indication in the text that Ruth was ever formerly converted to Judaism, or even that there existed at that time rabbis, or others, who could have effectuated such a conversion. Ruth entered the Jewish community as a Ger Toshav, accompanied by her mother-in-law Naomi. Nevertheless, in accordance with Scripture, she was provided with the rights of a Jewish widow and afforded a Leverite-like procedure to allow Boaz, a kinsman of Naomi to marry her. Notwithstanding the fact that Ruth was a Moabite, since Boaz her spouse was a Jew, the lineal descendents of that relationship, including her great-grandson King David, were Jews. 

The “Chosen People” misconception and anti-Semitism

To justify the animus against Jews, anti-Semites suggest such rationales and libels as: the Jews control the world economies; the Jews control the press; the Jews are always focused on money and wealth; the Jews killed the Christian God Jesus etc. Genesis, however, provides a more logical explanation.

In Genesis 17(6-8) God selects Abraham as the father of a designed future people who will act as God’s surrogate in instructing the world on living a moral and ethical life. In anticipation of, and reward for, the performance of their duties, God grants the people of Israel the land of Canaan in perpetuity. That is the origin of the often expressed, but little understood, notion of tikkun olam.

Israel was then a small nation, both geographically and in population. It had little chance to accomplish the work for which it was designed. Opportunity, however, did accrue as BCE changed to the CE.

Shortly after the death of Jesus in 32 CE, his disciple Paul, a Jew, was convinced that Jesus was the anticipated Messiah.  Thus, Paul undertook to export the Jewish tribal faith, as modified by the notion of the divinity of Jesus, to neighboring Gentile nations. He preached that one need not be a genetic Jew in order to partake of their faith. In support of his efforts, he provided the Torah and all of the books of the Tanakh, together with a history of the life of Jesus, to a pagan or godless world. This modified form of Judaism was ultimately identified as the Christian religion.

Christianity grew in the Middle East and in the Roman Empire under the nurture of the Catholic Church, only to be fragmented in the Middle Ages by the Protestant Reformation and by unique national interests. Today there are multiple Christian denominations who publish their own form of the Christian Bible. Significantly, all of the Christian Bibles, of whatever denomination, contain a verbatim translation of the Torah, as well as most of the books of the Tanakh (Phrophets and Scribes). Essentially the Christian world has adopted the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and a modified version of the Jewish faith to which they remain devoted. Many male Christians have received the rite of circumcision.

Howsoever devoted Christians are to the Old Testament, they lack the genetic lineage from the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and therefore are not includable in the people that they erroneously believe were chosen by God as his people.

For some Gentiles, devoted to the God of Abraham, anti-Semitism takes the form of anger over an erroneous notion that their love, in the eyes of God, occupies a secondary place behind that of the Jewish People.

Analogously, in Genesis, we see the tale of Cain and Abel. Abel’s gift to God is acceptable and Cain’s is rejected. Cain’s bitterness and jealousy, in what he perceives as the denial of God’s love, results in the murder of his brother.

Similarly, in Genesis, the sons of Jacob were angered over what appeared to be Jacob’s greater love for their brother Joseph, upon whom Jacob conferred a coat of many colors. Only upon the plea of one brother to sell Joseph into slavery was Joseph’s life saved from death at the hands of his jealous brothers.

For some Christians, even inflicting pain upon the Jews is not enough to soothe the wounds of shame of being second-class citizens in the world of the God that they have adopted and love.

The ultimate question

Was the creation of the Hebrew nation, for the purposes of spreading the civilizing effect of God’s Torah and to defeat world wickedness, successful? History strongly suggests that it accomplished little if anything. We live in a world bereft of morality and beset with national and personal greed. Our societies are rank with dishonesty, perversion of justice, rape, sexual promiscuity and wars of such magnitude that we have the capacity of total self-destruction.

The failure of the Hebrew nation’s mission is confirmed by the fact that, for 2000 years, Jews have been obliged to wander the surface of the earth, despised, landless and without Temple, going from host nation to host nation until rudely cast out.

Assuredly, the vengeance which God sought to deny himself through the creation of the Hebrew people, was directed to that very same people as a result of its failure to accomplish its mission.

Ah! But like all other Judaic critical self-examinations, there is always “the other view”.

God’s vengeance against all of his creatures has not been rekindled and he has not, as yet, again destroyed the world.

On reflection, what better way could God’s designed people have to spread the essential civilizing aspect of his Torah than to travel from nation to nation throughout the world for 2000 years educating its peoples on the essential aspects of God’s moral imperative through Torah.

Could it be that the Galus (2,000 years of wandering) was part of the Hebrew mission?

Viewed from yet a different perspective

The Christian world believes that the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, born to Mary at the start of his Era, had a special relationship with the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob.

If that were so, he would join a number of other of God’s human creatures, Noah, Jonah, Moses, and others who God selected to perform designated tasks on behalf of the Almighty. While they were all men of honor and respect, none were deities or lesser deities, nor could they be, given God’s declaration of his exclusiveness in both the first and second of the 10 Commandments.

On reflection, the service performed by Jesus, John the Baptist, the Hebrew preacher, the 13 Jewish apostles, and the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus (Paul) was totally consistent with the mission to bring Torah to the world, assigned by God to their Jewish nation. Paul, along with Christian doctrine, introduced the Torah and the other sacred Hebrew texts to the known world.

Christianity today is the largest religion in the world and comprises 2.1 billion members. A survey by the Bible Society concluded that around 2.5 billion copies of the Christian Bible were printed between 1815 and 1975, but more recent estimates put the number at more than 5 billion. In every Christian Bible there appears the Torah, the Prophets and the Scribes (the Tanakh) as an essential part of their sacred text. How they are absorbed and considered is a function of God’s grant of freedom of will.

Did the early Christians know that their efforts were instrumental in bringing the Torah, given by God to the Jews at Mount Sinai, to the Gentile world?

At this stage of history Only God knows!

By Douglas C. Kaplan