On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Nathan Newman wrote:
> My original point was not that Israel's policies are desireable, just
> that they are not particularly odious when compared to most countries
> immigration rules.
Agreed. But that's not because Israel's citizenship laws are not ethnically based. It's because most countries' citizenship laws are ethnically based (i.e., based on what citizenship your parents have, rather than where you are born).
> A multiracial state is not only desireable in Israel, it's a reality
> even within Green Line Israel . . . A country that needs guest workers
> is a country that needs to change its immigration and citizenship
> criterion.
Completely agreed.
> A multiracial state is not only desireable in Israel, it's a reality
> even within Green Line Israel, including not only a racial diversity
> of Jews
We still have to clear this mistake up. Legally speaking, in either Israeli or Halakic law, there is no such thing as a racial or ethnic diversity of Jews. You persist in confusing legal ethnicity with cultural and body-mark ethnicity. They are not at all the same. A state can be ethnically homogenous so far as legal ethnicity is concerned, and ethnically diverse so far as cultural or body-mark ethnicity is concerned. Such is Israel. Legally -- and legal ethnicity is what matters for citizenship law, obviously -- all the Jews there are of one race, one ethnicity, no matter how different they look and sound. By legal definition. The cultural diversity comes from outside the law -- from the fact that the ethnic group was widely dispersed over a long period of time and, clearly, intermarried with the locals, since no matter where they come from, they look a lot like the locals from there.
The law of return clearly allows a great ingathering of different ethnic types. But this is not the result of a discrepency between cultural and ethnic definitions of Judaism. This is the result of a discrepency between ethnic law and ethnic reality -- between the legal and the cultural/physical definitions of ethnicity.
> Let's start with a broad statement- Judaism is really, really odd.
It's odd, but it's not that odd. How many Israeli citizens do you think (a) acquired their Judaism by conversion and (b) aren't married to a Jew? The reason the latter is important is because it would gain a person admittance to any other ethnic state. And it gains admittace to Israel as well -- spouses of Jews don't have to convert to become citizens, nor do parents. Thus 99.9% of the precondition for Israeli citizenship is passed on by descent or by marriage, just like in any other ethnic state. When it comes to distinguishing Judaism from other ethnicities, conversion is theoretically interesting, but leads to very little practical consequence.
As for the transnational aspect, that is not an exception, that's the rule. That is the raison d'etre of every ius sanguinis -- that it defines people outside the land borders of the state as being citizens. Every such state has a formative relation to its diaspora, and every such state has national minorities within its borders.
A German that lived in Russia 150 years ago and a Jew that lived in the same town both passed their citizenship down to their children in exactly the same way. And the same would be true if they both had lived in Morocco.
> It is precisely the transnational nature of Judaism and the ability to
> voluntarily convert in order to join that makes Judaism an
> "allegiance" not a race.
Nathan, you can call us anything you want. But the bible and the state of Israel call us a people.
In America, Judaism is a voluntary ethnicity. But then, here, so is every ethnicity that isn't too visible. Under Israeli law, it's a legal ethnicity.
Michael __________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com