>Well, it would to the Israeli state and to a Nazi. Because in both cases it's a "blood" question--not a religious question and not a cultural question. If Bill showed up with a birth certificate that designated his mother's religion as Jewish, he would be Jewish; he would enjoy the right to live in Israel or the right to march into a gas chamber--depending on who was running the show
Neither of which seems very appealing. I think I'll refrain from asking to see my mother's birth certificate, just in case.
>For my own part ethnic identity doesn't mean much and I have come to understand that all forms of identification are ultimately a form of mental lazyness. But hey, History is not so wise and one would be foolish to ignore it.
Perhaps I'm missing out on something. Suddenly it occurs to me that I don't even have an ethnic identity to reject. No wonder I can't really understand it. Anyway, I will console myself with the thought that it might help to keep me out of any gas chambers, those grapes would have been sour anyway.
At 10:42 AM -0700 1/5/03, joanna bujes wrote:
>I think the motherhood things dates back to late biblical times when pillage and rapine ruled. In those cases where Jewish women were raped, the Jewish community wished to retain those babies, and therefore decided that it was the mother who determined the religion of the child.
It probably goes back further than that, to the tribal society when, for practical reasons, everyone's lineage was determined according to female parents. (One can determine with a lot more certainty who one's mother is.) All human societies did that. The Jewish culture seems to have retained this tribal tradition longer than others.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas