On May 8, 1945, World War II ended in Europe. I was 14 years old and my mother took me to Manhattan to observe the jubilation of the victory of the Allied forces over Nazi Germany. There was a public celebration like never before seen in this country. People were laughing, crying, embracing total strangers, especially anyone in uniform. Dead by his own hand was Adolf Hitler, the bestial Nazi leader and self-styled genealogist, who used a single inquiry to identify his next victim: Is his or her grandmother or grandfather Jewish?
The Aftermath of the War
During a brief period of time following the War, many of the diverse segments of the US population, having successfully fought together, socialized without significant overt racial and religious overtones. For the Jews, however, the loosening of the social and racial constraints was both a benefit and a danger. They appreciated the expressions of compassion by the Gentile community for the loss of six million Jews in Europe. However, Jewish parents feared the loosening of religious restraints on their children could lead to intermarriage. While there had been isolated instances of intermarriage earlier, those events generated such angst in some Jewish parents that they would reject their offending child and go into mourning, as if the child had died. After all, a mixed marriage would have the effect of breaking their family’s link in the genetic chain of Jewish identity, which originated with the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The result might well be that their grandchildren and successive generations would no longer be Jewish. Was this anxiety just a cultural instinct or a simple religious and scientific fact?
To find the answer, one must first identify who and what is a Jew and how is that status achieved or lost. Before answering that question, we should note that there were a number of available groups of people at the time God first spoke to Abraham. God did not select them for the special task He required. Rather, He chose Abraham and Sarah, an aged and childless couple, from whom he could design de novo a unique people that would satisfy His requirements.
The Genesis of the Jewish Identity
The word Jew is derived from the name Judah, one of the 12 sons of Jacob, who was also known as Israel. Jacob, his father Isaac, and his grandfather Abraham constitute the patriarchs of the Jewish people. All of the three patriarchs granted their fidelity to the God of Israel and received in return God’s promise of support and protection, and the assurance that God would make their descendants a great and mighty nation.
A famine brought Jacob’s family to Egypt, where they resided for a period of time. Eventually, a later Pharaoh, fearing that the Jews would rise up against his rule, enslaved them. After several hundred years of slavery in Egypt, God, aided by Moses, led the Jewish people out of captivity and enabled the capture of Canaan, the land which God had promised to the descendants of the patriarchs.
Following the conquest of Canaan, the descendants of nine of Jacob’s sons, representing eight tribes and two half tribes, living in Northern Israel (Samaria), were conquered and dispersed by the Assyrians. They constituted the 10 lost tribes of Israel. The remaining three tribes of Judah, Simon and Benjamin became the Southern Kingdom of Judah. Although that Kingdom was ultimately subdued by the Babylonians, they survived intact until repatriated to the land of Israel (Judea) by the Persians. It is from that segment of the tribes of Israel that the Jews of today stem and derive their identity as Jews.
The Arrival of the Written Torah
The Children of Israel were designed by God to render unique services on His behalf. That is likely why God chose to create his own nation rather than to select among the extant nations of the world. After the Persians freed the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, they provisioned Jews to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Holy Temple. In 516 BCE, the Second Temple was completed on the original Temple site in Jerusalem.
A Curious Coincidence
In the middle of the fifth century BCE, two significant, synchronous events took place: 1) The prophecy of Molokai, the last of the Hebrew prophets, ended and 2) Ezra the Scribe brought the Masoretic Text of the Torah from Babylon to the Second Temple. The transcribed laws of the Written Torah, uttered by God at Mount Sinai, was now available to govern all of Judea and God chose to no longer communicate, one and one, directly with human recipients.
Thereafter, if Jews were to follow the word of God, they would be obliged to glean it from the Written Torah. Thus, the answer to who qualifies as a member of the Jewish people is found in the Written Torah.
The Instructions
The answer to that query is both simple and ample. God spoke through the Written Torah and instructed the creation of a chain of semen (biblically translated as seed and described in Hebrew as Zera). That chain starts chronologically with the Patriarchs and then proceeds successively through each Jewish male to the next generation.
There are at least six instances in the Written Torah that confirm the foregoing:
- 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.
- 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.
In every one of the foregoing instances, the operative word describing the continuum of the Jewish people is Zera (semen, translated as seed). The early rabbis (Tannaim) erroneously rejected crucial parts of the Written Torah and declared Jewish women to be the source of the continuum of the Jewish identity.
The main reason offered by the modern Rabbinical community is that the mother of a child is known, but the father is not. That is a rationale which wanders in the dark, in search of logic. For 2000 years, from the birth of Abraham through both the First and Second Holy Temples, until the advent of the Rabbinical authority in the third century A.D, patrilineal-ism was the standard used by the vital, Israelite people.
- Even today, patrilineal-ism is the only standard used by Rabbinical Jews in determining who is a Kohen, who is a Levi, and who falls into the rest of the Jewish community identified as Kol Yisrael.
- The alteration by the rabbis, rejecting God’s design for the Children of Israel and substituting an alien concept, is in direct violation of the Written Torah itself, which prohibits Torah modification in Deuteronomy 4(2).
- Last, but assuredly not least, is the fact that women cannot produce semen to qualify for the continuing, unalterable seed chain of Jewish identity.
Modern Science Confirms the Biblical Formula for Jewish Identity
Interestingly, it has taken 3000 years for science to confirm the Biblical formula for the continuum of the Jewish people. In 1905, Nettie Stevens, of Bryn Mawr College, and Edmund Breecher Wilson independently discovered the mechanisms of the unique Y chromosome. All 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 establishes the male sex of the child and passes its genes unaltered from father to son.
A Child Born to a Jewish Woman with a Gentile Man
Under current Rabbinical law, a child born of a union between a Jewish woman and a Gentile man will be told that he or she is a Jew, when, in fact, that child is not. All successive generations from that child will be told that they are Jews, when, in fact, they are not. With the passage of time, the swath of that erroneous conclusion becomes exponentially wider and wider.
A Child Born to a Jewish Man and a Gentile Woman
A child born to a Jewish male and a Gentile female will be told that he or she is not a Jew when, in fact, that child is a Jew. Such children are often denied a Jewish education, entry in the Jewish community, access to a Jewish spouse, and their entitlement to the rich culture to which they were born. They will see themselves as a Gentile and ultimately be lost to the Jewish people.
As an accommodation to the large number of intermarried couples, Reform congregations now include as a Jew a child of a Jewish father who has raised that child as a Jew. Additionally, all Rabbinical Judaism congregations provide for conversion to Judaism of a Gentile woman so that she may comply with their requirement that the mother of a Jew must be a Jew. Neither of the foregoing thinly veiled constructs have any effect on the genetics of the child.
Identity as a Jew is exclusively a function of genetics, which are vested at birth, and has nothing to do with a person’s subsequent rearing or of religious conversion, neither of which can alter one’s genetic identity
The Bottom Line
It should be obvious from the foregoing, that at the present time, thousands of Gentile children are being erroneously identified as Jews and that number is destined to grow exponentially as time progresses.
On the other hand, thousands of genetically Jewish children are being denied their Jewish identity and heritage and are being abandoned to the Gentile world.
These two factors are destined to produce two sequential periods of great injury to the Jewish community. The first period, which we have already entered, is one in which confusion abounds as to who is a Jew. The second period will occur when the majority of people who identify themselves as Jews are not, in fact, Jews. When that occurs, Judaism will cease to be a significant player on the world stage. In recent years, the Pew Research Center has identified that 58 percent of all Jewish marriages are intermarriages. The era of loss of Jewish identity looms in the not too distant future.
The Price of Indifference to Judaic Identity
The world’s acquiescence to the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel is irretrievably tied to the Old Testament, wherein God promised to deliver the land to the descendants of the patriarchs. If it should appear that the contemporary Jewish community is not now genetically the community for whom God’s covenant was made, Muslims and others would likely describe Jewish occupancy of the Land of Israel as a sham and react accordingly.
The 4000-year-old strength and vitality of Jewish culture, which survived Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Greece, Rome, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Diaspora and Nazi Germany, would give way to an admixture of peoples of different and diluted cultures and would lack the dynamic strength and vitality of investiture by the God of Israel.
Jewish culture would find its way to that sorrowful dark hole in world history where the remnants of the Egyptian, Greek and Roman and other cultures are buried. Ironically, the cause of such a terrible loss would not be by a superior military power, but rather by the intransigent nature of Judaism’s own religious clergy.
Survival of Jewish Identity
Since the end of World War II, matrilineal-ism has done significant damage to Jewish identity and its culture. If allowed to continue intact for just a couple of additional generations, the Jewish people as an identifiable entity will no longer exist. What will remain is an anomalous assemblage of people, of different origins and cultures, with a faint notion that a family member may have been connected to a historical group known as Jews. The spiritual house that God built for his people will have a new and indifferent tenant.
The Ashkenazi Community is Matrilineal-ism’s Achilles Heel
Eighty percent of the 14.8 million Jews in the world today are of Ashkenazi extraction. Ashkenazi Jews stem from a modification in genetic Jewish origin. It occurred when Jewish prisoners of war, businessmen and residents on the European Continent were unable or unwilling to return to Judea following the failed Bar Kokhbar revolution against Roman rule. Modern genetic sciences disclose that the largest number of their children were issue from European women who did not qualify as Jewish birth mothers under Rabbinical matrilineal-ism. Sadly, that might be you and me. Under biblical patrilineal-ism, however, children of Jewish fathers are Jews.
Rabbinical Judaism’s modern Rabbinate was not alive when its Tannaim erroneously planted the tainted tree of matrilineal-ism. Today, however, Rabbinical Judaism holds sway over more than 90% of the American Jewish religious community. In that position of numerical authority, it holds in its hand the last clear chance for the continued survival of the identity of Jewish people. It is not a time for hand wringing, temerity or accusations.
Only with decisive action by the Rabbinate to restore patrilineal-ism to its vital role in the origin, growth and continuity of Jewish identity will the nation of Israel survive.
Douglas Kaplan