Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, Barry Goldwater, Wesley Clark, Casper Weinberger, William Cohen, and, apparently, George Allen. All prominent non-Jewish politicians with recent Jewish heritage. This makes me wonder about how many Americans there are who have at least one Jewish grandparent, but who aren't Jewish, and about how many of these Jewish parents or grandparents hid their origins from their families, as did Albright's parents, John Kerry's grandparents, and perhaps Allen's mom. It seems like hiding this information was not uncommon in prior generations; one of my grandfather's first cousins had a falling out with his family, changed his name, moved to the Midwest, married a Christian, and never told his children or grandchildren about his origins, though they knew that "something was funny" about their family history (we found this out when a cousin was tracking people down for a family reunion.) I don't begrudge anyone who leaves the Jewish fold for whatever reason, but there is something downright creepy (because it suggests either shame or fear) about going out of one's way to avoid telling your kids that your family was Jewish.
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I'd challenge that. In a few cases, it is Jews themselves who are the first to say that someone is no longer Jewish. If they convert to Christianity, for example, and call themselves "Messianic Jews", that seems to be regarded as especially offensive. Moreover, it means the claimant is regarded as not covered by the Law of Return.
I was raised Catholic. I converted to Protestantism in my mid-twenties. Generally speaking, if I argue theology with Catholics, I don't go out of my way to say "I was raised Catholic..." because this attracts particular vituperation. It indicates disloyalty and betrayal, not merely theological disagreement. I realise it's not a precise analogy, since Catholicism is less of an ethnic identity than Judaism is (although it is much more of an ethnic identity than Protestantism is), but it suggests why Jews would prefer that former co-religionists who think Jesus is the Messiah would stop labelling themselves "Jewish".
The number is probably pretty high. The intermarriage rate among Jews is currently around 40%. Furthermore, less than 20% of the non-Jewish spouses in those intermarried couples converts to Judaism. There is probably no way to know how many of those intermarried Jews tell their children though.
A third, non-creepy explanation is that for evangelical Christians of a certain persuasion, they don't believe they have the "right" to call themselves Jewish. A large chunk of Christian theology is built on the idea that the covenant was originally prepared for the blood descendants of Abraham, and only afterwards was God's offer extended to the Gentiles (see eg St Paul's Epistle to Romans, early chapters). Non-Jews have been "dealt with under emergency regulations", as CS Lewis once put it. Claiming to be Jewish is, in certain Christian circles, claiming to be on the A-list rather than the B-list of those invited the wedding feast (as per Jesus' parable) and might be viewed as "passing yourself off" if you hadn't been devoutly practising Judaism, or at least publicly identified as a secular Jew (like Lewis' wife, Joy Davidman) immediately before converting to Christianity.
What about the possibility that, instead of "hiding" evidence of a Jewish ancestor, that they don't really care or consider it that important.
I know that we have a distant relative (more like great grandparent) named Israel Israel, and never considered it particularly important whether that relative was Jewish or not. Is it creepy (or worse) that we don't care?
I think your use of the term "creepy" to describe what were essentially secular Jews who decided to leave their past behind them shows a lack of historical perspective on your part.
I have a friend, now deceased, who only learned in adulthood from his Hungarian father that his mother, a Polish woman, was from a Jewish family. She grew up in a non-religious family and was the only member of her family to survive the Nazis. My friend was told of his mother's background upon becoming an adult with the clear understanding that he was never to let his mother know that his father had disclosed this fact to him.
I suspect that Madeline Albright's parents made the same decision. Rather than looking at this choice from the perspective of today, try to place yourself in their shoes in the late 1930s when they fled first to Britain and then to America. Might it not be possible that they decided that it would be in their child's best interest if their daughter never knew about their past in an uncertain world where being considered a Jew imposed a price in the best of times?
1) A not insignificant number of Jewish children (some orphans, some not) were left with Gentiles to protect them, and then raised Gentile. In some cases, the ruse was discovered, and the children killed--the resources spent on this in the midst of wartime puts the lie to the revisionist claim of anti-Semites that the Germans had any motive other than genocide. When the children survived, in some cases, parents came back for the children after the war; in some cases, the parents never had the chance to come back. Either way, there are going to be issues with self-identification. That's sad, but not for the reasons Professor Lubet seems to be implying.
2) In pre-WWII Europe (and, to a lesser extent, America), anti-Semitism was rife enough that assimilating was an economically savvy option. Many Jews converted. The Nazis did not care about self-identification, and a number of people who never thought of themselves as Jewish discovered that they had a convert grandparent that caused an adverse classification.
Separately, the statistic is that 47% of Jewish newlyweds marry outside the faith, while 33% of all married Jews are in intermarriages. So both of you are right.
Paul B, the fact that an action is creepy doesn't make the person who does it a creep. If the Albrights chose to hide their Jewishness for "safety," that's creepy, because it shows how fearful Jews were for their safety, even in America.
I worked with a guy for about five years and was told one day I'd have to cover for him because he was taking a holiday. 'What holiday is that?'
'Rosh Hashanah.'
I had sat next to him for 5 years and had no idea he was Jewish. Exactly, I think, the way it should be, unless he wanted to bring it up, which he didn't.
First, I know people who are reluctent to bring up their Jewish ancestry because they think that it would be presumptuous. Friedrich Foresight, 8:53pm above, mentions some possible religious reasons for this behavior, but I have more frequently seen it for social and economic reasons. The people I am thinking of are from lower-middle class or middle class backgrounds and, rightly, see Jews as a remarkably accomplished and affluent group of people (at least on average this is true). These people (at least the ones that I know) therefore view discussing their Jewish ancestry as being phony and pretentious, in the manner of trying to claim something good that is not really rightfully theirs. Clearly this attitude is unlikely to minifest itself in an elite, aristocratic family, so it is likely more common amoung the non-famous than amoung the famous.
A second group consists of people who are partly of Jewsih ancestry who are embarassed to have any non-Jewish ancestry. Interestingly, although I have known several people like this, I have never met any such person where the non-Jewish ancestry was anything to be ashamed of. In the case of a friend and former collegue of mine the non-Jewish ancestry was old-line Ivy League graduate WASP.
The creepy attitudes that David describes appears to be on the decline, and may they decline even more and for good reason. In any case, attitudes towards partial Jewish ancestry are quite varied in the USA today, at least in my experience.
My grandmother converted from Catholic to Baptist because it was easier in North Georgia (the one next to Alabama, not the other one.) I didn't know until I was probably 25. Is that also creepy and hard to explain?
And if George Allen is a Christian, why should it matter to any voter if his mother is Jewish? He is free to choose his religious faith. And why should a politician's religious faith be important to any voter?
At one point, Christians objected to intermarriage with Jews. Today, Christian parents are generally more enthusiastic about intermarriage with Jews than Jewish parents are.
It was not only an economic option. It could also be a cultural option for those who found the traditional community confining in one way or another. It is interesting, for example, to note that a relatively large number of Austrian Jews converted to Protestantism. The protestant church in Austria was very small and relatively liberal, and such a conversion was a way of not only distancing oneself from Jewish orthodoxy but also from majority Catholicism.
Aha. ... Otherwise they'd have just swapped "No pork on Fridays, or indeed on any other day" for "No pork on Fridays, or indeed any other meat".
I've never said it again. I got the distinct impression that I was not welcome.
Also, my experience is similar to Helen's. The few times that I have mentioned my grandmother's background to Jewish acquaintances of mine, the reaction has been negative, if not downright hostile. As a result, it is an issue that I now avoid with Jewish friends and colleagues of mine.
This isn't quite accurate. According to Jewish law, someone who was born of a Jewish mother and converts to Christianity is still Jewish, and if he renounces the conversion, he is welcomed back to Judaism with no need to "re-convert" (and neither would his descendants, if they could prove continuous matrilineal descent). "Messianic Jews" are especially offensive b/c they claim that belief in Jesus as the Messiah is in line with traditional Jewish thought, which it clearly isn't. Nevertheless, while such people are ostracized, their personal status as a Jew is still intact.
This situation was source of conflict after the expulsion from Spain in 1492. Those Spanish Jews who left and reestablished themselves in the Ottoman Empire or elsewhere in Europe (e.g., the Netherlands, Italy, parts of Eastern Europe) later discriminated against Jews who remained in Spain and converted but then managed to escape and wanted to rejoin their former Jewish communities in the new lands. The rabbis insisted that they should be allowed b/c by Jewish law they were still Jewish, but the laypeople who had left during the expulsion were angry that the others had tried to hold on to their position in Spain. They were viewed as traitors who had converted to save their own skins (and their money and property) while other people left with nothing in order to preserve Judaism. It was quite the opposite of the notion today that the Marranos or "crypto-Jews" were heroes.
The law of return is an Israeli law and is not based on Jewish law. It grants citizenship to those whom Jewish law does not regard as Jewish, such as someone with only one Jewish grandparent. It's logic is that since the Nazis would have considered anyone with that connection to be Jewish and therefore liable to be killed, the Jewish state, which exists partly to ensure that the Holocaust doesn't happen again, should similarly consider those people Jewish. But that's a political decision, not a religious one.
After my Grandfather's death in 1968 as "Raymond Lauderdale Howard," of Memphis, Tennessee, my father discovered that he was really the son of "Louis Horowitz" of New York, New York. Apparently the Memphis Court House burned down around World War I, destroying all birth records, and anyone could write to them asking for a copy of their burned up birth certificate and get a new one.
Since my Mother was a teenager in Nazi Germany during World War II, and had some more distant relatives serving in the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS, it makes for an interesting lineage combination.
(1) I once read somewhere that something like 10% of Hungarian Jews converted to Christianity in the 19th century, most famously the ancestors of the Gabor (Zsa Zsa and Eva) family. I've certainly met Jewish Gabors.
(2) I don't know why anyone Jewish would react with hostility if you told them you have a Jewish ancestor.
(3) I also don't see any reason to allow the Orthodox definition of "Jewish" under Jewish law to hold any particular weight unless one is Orthodox. Jewish descent was patrelineal for much of Jewish history, and Reform Judaism, which has far more adherents in the U.S. than Orthodox Judaism, has abandoned matrelineal descent as the standard. As a practical matter, if someone has a Jewish parent, was raised Jewish, and considers himself/herself Jewish, in the American context that person is Jewish.
(4) Converting to another religion is far worse from a Jewish perspective, religious or otherwise, than being an atheist. I really don't know of anyone who would argue otherwise. The interesting question is whether that mentality will change if and when at least some fracton of "Messianic Jews" keep their Jewish identity for several generations, while "Jewish atheists" in societies like America lose their ethnic ties.
"I once read somewhere that something like 10% of Hungarian Jews converted to Christianity in the 19th century, most famously the ancestors of the Gabor (Zsa Zsa and Eva) family. I've certainly met Jewish Gabors."
The Gabor sister's mother, born a Tileman, was from a Jewish family. It is not unusual for Hungarian families with German names to be of Jewish origin, but this is not exclusive -- plenty of Christian Hungarians and Hungarians of German ethnicity also have German family names. There is, however, a widespread trend to Hungarify names, and changing your name to a more Hungarian name is a relatively unbureaucratic procedure in Hungary. For example, the recently deceased composer, Ligeti, carried a Hungarified version of the family name Auer (the violinist Auer was his uncle and Ligeti ("park") is a fair translation of Auer ("meadow")) "Gabor" (= "Gabriel") is both a common Hungarian Christian and Jewish name; the paternal line of the Gabor family may or may not have had Jewish roots.
Perhaps a more interesting phenomenon in Hungary is the tendency for those with Jewish connections to receive clearly christian first names, or to identify firmly with the Calvinist church, which in Hungary has a strongly nationalist identity. Given the anti-Semitism of both the Horty era and the era following the 1956 uprising (both the Council Republic under Bela Kun and the early socialist state are widely viewed as regimes with strong Jewish participation), these practices may be viewed as precautionary measures.
Friends of the family were holding a wedding. The groom was half Irish, half Japanese by ancestry and looks entirely Japanese. The bride was half Spanish, half Eastern European Jewish by ancestry and is, to my mind, not easy to pigeonhole as to ethnicity.
They had the ceremony at the beach, with the full Jewish regalia. There was a public sidewalk, with tourists strolling by, and you could tell which ones came from communities with lots of Jews: while about half the tourists walked by without much reaction other than idle curiosity, the other half gave startle reactions and the 'funny, you don't look Jewish' look passed across their faces.
I'm reminded of a joke.
A very secular Jewish couple ends up sending their daughter to the local Catholic school. One day the father asks, "what did you learn in school today, honey?" She replies, "about the Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit." The father gets very agitated. He tells her forcefully, "listen, their is only one G-d, and we don't believe in Him."
I get the joke, but to be a pedant, Christians don't believe there is any conflict between "one God" and the Trinity, any more than Jews using "Elohim" instead of "El" indicates polytheism. Of course, it is easy to see how to a non-Christian the Trinity would look like three gods.
It should be noted that "the Orthodox tradition" is not devoid of its pragmatic element. Although traditions often seem to be based in religious practice, the reality is often otherwise. The current situation with multiple denominations creating problems for "conversions" is not dissimilar from past situations where different localities feuded on whether some families may or may not be considered Jewish. The greatest problem of this sort was in the Dutch Republic and the Netherlands in general, following the expulsion from Spain and forced conversion in Portugal (15-17th centuries). The families who were forcibly converted often tried to revert to Judaism upon escaping from the Iberian region. In many cases, this also applied to the families that converted--at least in appearances--voluntarily. Those who ended up in the Middle East, especially Palestine, found little difficulty in being declared Jewish again (I find myself in slight disagreement with Larry Rothenberg above). Those who resettled in other parts of Europe (viz a vie Spain, not the Middle East), particularly in the Netherlands, were ostracised by the local Jewish communities and found it much more difficult to return to Judaism (being barred from the local Synagogue had a bit to do with it). The extra complication was that some communities were almost entirely formed by refugee families and thus could re-claim their Jewish status without rabbinical obstructions.
One important result of this is that the "Dutch" Jews started the modern secularist tradition. Another is that it created a rabbinical precedent that has now resulted in the Law of Return and a number of other archane rules in Israel.
I have a rather dim view of Orthodox claim to the supremacy in determining who is or is not a Jew. I also abhor when people try to claim that Jewish identity is religious--as David has pointed out in the past, the Nazis and other anti-Semites rarely care(d) for one's religious convictions.
Another comment I wanted to make concerns Average Joe's division of the reluctant Jews into two groups. I would add a third, of which there are some rather prominent members. Collin was mentioned by several people earlier. But also Karl Marx, whose family converted. And to that I would add the Russian anti-Semite and pseudo-nationalist Zhirinovsky, whose own brand of anti-Semitism may well have arised from his attempt to rid himself of his Jewish ancestry. And now, it appears, we can add George Allen to this list, as it is highly likely that he was, in fact, aware of his mother's Jewish identity and tried to run away from it. I would hypothesize that it was this very conflict that prompted him to seek a new identity among the white supremacists and not just mere youthful indiscretions (which is how his display of the confederate flag has been described). Allen has repeatedly approached racist groups either with his behavior or openly embracing them and, it seems, the macaca comment only reinforced this view. Of course, even calling someone macaca will not save him from his fellow nutballs if they find out that his mother is Jewish--hopefully, a befitting end to a shameful political career.
I've never said it again. I got the distinct impression that I was not welcome."
I'm sorry that Helen was spoken to rudely or harshly and felt unwelcome, but technically, you can't be half Jewish. Judaism is a religion. Its kind of an all or nothing thing, either you believe in it or you don't. Further, the reform movement believes in patrilineal decent so, one could be Jewish for that purpose with a Jewish father. Reform Judaism is very welcoming. If someone like Helen wanted to practice Judaism, I am sure any Reform Temple would be pleased to have her as a member.
A Reform Temple though would consider other factors in determining if one was Jewish like what one observes, what one believes (for examples, if one accepts Jesus Christ as one's personal savior, one is not Jewish no matter what one's parents were born) and whether one has converted to or practiced, depending on the bounds, another religion. One cannot be half Jewish in the way one cannot be half Catholic and half Protestant. Each one involves beliefs are diametrically opposed to each other.
Have you ever read CS Lewis? Or a lot of other Anglicans?
Couldn't Samaritans or Karaim be described, very broadly, as "half-Jewish"?