The Shifting Endogamous Circle in Modern Jewry

The sessions of the past two days at the AJR conference “Patrilineal Descent in a Pluralistic Community” (http://www.facebook.com/events/202561216507836/) have led me to perceive the debate over the Jewish patrilineal issue since the 1980s as both a response and a contributor to the shifting marriage patterns among contemporary Jews. It is an outgrowth and a successor to the previous debate over intermarriage, which was also about that shift of marriage patterns.

Central to the shift and the debate is the notion of “endogamous circle”—the definition of the group within which one may legitimately choose one’s marriage partner. Though I have not found this precise usage, I have adopted it as an extension of the sociological notion of “endogamous group” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogamous_group: “Endogamous group is a community in which the members generally marry within the group. The caste in India and the tribes in many of the cultural regions of the world form endogamous groups.”). By this definition, Jewry has been an endogamous group from its historical inception until very recent times. Both the debate over intermarriage and the debate over patrilineality are responses to what may be viewed (from the traditional perspective) as violations of that norm or (from the neutral sociological perspective) as changes in that pattern.

The persistence of the Jewish endogamous norm was made clear to me as a child when my mother pointed out that our friends who lived up the block from us in Overbrook Park, Philadelphia (which in the 1950s was one of those new neighborhoods that sprung up after World War II that was over 90% Jewish) objected strenuously to their son’s proposing marriage to a non-Jewish woman. This was especially noteworthy because the friends in question were not at all religious; indeed, they were ideologically anti-religious, though they continued to identify as secular Jews. It would seem that their abandonment of Jewish religious belief and practice should have logically entailed their abandonment of the Jewish taboo on marrying outside the group. But in their case (and in the cases of many secular Jews of that generation) it did not.

As Rabbi Ethan Tucker pointed out in his presentation in this conference, the rabbis of Talmudic times were not unanimous in ruling that the child of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father was a Jew. In fact, in some texts, the opinion is recorded that the fruit of such a union is a mamzer. This is explicable as an extreme penalization of the violation of the endogamous norm. It is parallel to the rule in the Indian caste system, that a child born of a marriage that crosses caste lines becomes an untouchable, as well as the rule in rabbinic Judaism that the child born of an incestuous union is a mamzer. But the logic of this penalization is of interest. It was apparently thought by those who instituted it that by penalizing the offspring of such a union, one would create an incentive that would deter people from violating the norm. As we can observe from the contemporary discussion, that kind of logic has not disappeared from Jewish legal thinking about intermarriage and patrilineality.

Modernity happened. The Emancipation happened. Jews started to marry out. The consequence at first was rather drastic. In the first stages of Jewish emancipation, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in France and Germany, those Jews who married out generally left the Jewish community and followed their non-Jewish spouses into Christian identification. The Jews who remained within the Jewish community shunned them. The same pattern was repeated in Eastern Europe in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and in the United States during the same period. Marrying-out started as a trickle, but gradually increased.

Particularly in the United States, a counter-movement started to manifest itself, especially in the call for the conversion of the non-Jewish member of such unions to Judaism. Such conversions were viewed on the whole positively, at least among the liberal element of Jewry. From the convert’s perspective, pledging oneself to the Jewish faith should be seen not as a penalization but as a positive affirmation of a new identity. From the Jewish community’s perspective, the community has gained a new member, and once converted, that person has entered the endogamous community. Though some Jews might still look down on union with a convert, that mentality was to be repudiated among “good” Jews as a primitive tribal sentiment. Both the born-Jewish partner and the “Jew by choice” partner in such a union should be welcomed wholeheartedly into the Jewish community. The norm of Jewish endogamy has weathered a challenge and emerged intact.

On the other hand, at this stage of the discussion, intermarriage without conversion was viewed as a violation of Jewish norms and a threat to Jewish survival. Loyal Jews and their rabbis responded to this violation by penalizing it in various ways. Intermarried couples could not find a comfortable place in traditional Jewish communities or synagogues. Rabbis were strictly warned by their professional organizations against officiating at intermarriages—often on pain of expulsion. It was pointed out to me when I attended JTS that a rabbi could not be expelled from the Rabbinical Assembly for eating a ham-and-cheese sandwich on Yom Kippur, but he could be expelled for officiating at—or even attending!—an intermarriage where the non-Jewish partner did not convert to Judaism. Why so extreme? Because the norm of Jewish endogamy was considered so important to Jewish survival, that the standards of what was and was not a proper Jewish marriage had to be strictly upheld. What one ate on Yom Kippur was a private matter. What marriages one performed as a rabbi affected the integrity of the Jewish people.

And the children were penalized—at least some of them. The children born of the union of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother were to be regarded as non-Jews. Here, too, treating them as Jewish—particularly marrying them to Jewish partners under the chuppah without their being “converted” to Judaism—was a violation of Conservative rabbinic practice, subjecting the rabbi to expulsion. The norm of endogamy was being fiercely defended at every sensitive point. The line had to be clearly drawn between who was a faithful member of the Jewish endogamous group, and who was outside that line. Jews who intermarried without their partners’ converting had crossed the line. And “patrilineal Jews” were also defined as outside the line.

The “patrilineal decision” of the Reform CCAR in 1983 marked a redrawing of the lines. It was itself a response to the redrawing of the lines by the Jewish laity, who were the first to move in this process. Anyone who attends college on a co-ed campus (which includes nearly all campuses in the United States today, even such traditionally monogendered schools as Harvard and Vassar) gets a radically different sense of the “endogamous group” than in a traditional Jewish community—it comprises all of one’s fellow-students. Jews who attended college were attracted to anyone their eyes lit upon, inside or outside of class. And they married them, in increasing numbers. Unlike their counterparts in 19^th-century Germany, they felt no pressure to convert to Christianity. Sometimes, they induced their non-Jewish partners to convert to Judaism. And sometimes they did not, but settled on a religiously egalitarian (or religionless) marriage in which each party remained equally within (or without) their original faith.

The earlier rabbinic debates about officiating at intermarriages were also a response to this lay-generated reality. The position—still held officially by all Conservative and some Reform rabbis—not to officiate at intermarriages without conversion had many aspects to it. On its simplest level, it was an affirmation of the integrity of the Jewish marriage ritual as originally conceived, as a union between two Jews. But it also had a tactical aspect to it. Faced with a challenge to the norm of Jewish endogamy, it chose to stand in defense of the norm. If the non-Jewish partner could be induced to convert to Judaism, that person would then stand within the endogamous circle, and the norm would be maintained. And whoever violated the norm would be penalized. They could, indeed, shop around for a rabbi who would perform the marriage. But they would not be able to have their preferred rabbi consecrate the union.

At about the same time, Yitz Greenberg made a famous declaration, that acceptance of the Reform patrilineal position would cause a split in the Jewish people. We can say more precisely that it would create a change in the contours of the Jewish endogamous group. Jews who were loyal to the traditional definition of Jewish practice and marriage standards could still marry each other. But in the long run, these traditionally Jewish Jews would not be able to marry those Jews who broke ranks and stopped observing the traditional boundaries of Jewish lineage, marriage and identity. A change in whom Jews married, and in how they counted the Jewishness of the offspring of their unions, would radically change “who is a Jew.”

We can conceptualize these changes in terms of the shifting circle of endogamy. The Jews who went to college and married their non-Jewish classmates without asking them to convert had broadened the “circle of endogamy” to include non-Jews. The children of half of these unions comprised a new caste of “patrilineal Jews.” The Reform rabbis seconded the actions of their lay constituents by officially broadening the endogamous circle to include—not necessarily all non-Jews, but at least the fruit of these intermarriages, after the fact. The Conservative rabbis responded by tightening the definition of the circle, and penalizing all rabbis who violated either the ban on intermarriage or the ban on recognizing patrilineals with expulsion. And the Israeli rabbinate has responded to this whole situation by digging in and refusing to recognize the offspring of any of these questionable procedures (starting with the non-Orthodox conversions of an earlier generation) as Jewishly legitimate.

The Conservatives, in particular, were caught in the middle of this protracted process. They acted to preserve the integrity of the traditional Jewish endogamous circle. This meant, among other things, preserving their own solidarity within the endogamous circle with those to the right of them. To their credit, they acted as long as they could in defense of the ideal of a Jewish people in which everyone—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and secular—could marry everyone else without doing an exhaustive family history and background check. It was (in their perception) the Reform patrilineal decision of 1983 that precipitated the crisis. This was the chink in the armor, the breaking of the circle. A “patrilineal Jew” violated the code of the past 2000 (or at any rate 1500) years. If this violation could be vigorously protested, challenged and penalized, maybe the line could hold, and the integrity of the Jewish endogamous group could be maintained.

It didn’t work. It simply drove anyone who violated the traditional norm into the Reform camp, and led to the demographic explosion of the Reform and contraction of the Conservative camps. Conservatives could remain within the same “circle of endogamy” with the Orthodox only at the cost of becoming increasingly marginal.

And then the Jessica Fishman case broke. (See http://reblen.blogspot.com/2010/05/she-doesnt-live-here-anymore.html). Jessica Fishman’s mother converted to Judaism in a Reform ceremony. Jessica grew up in an ideal Conservative community, attended day school, kept kosher and walked to shul. She made aliyah, served in the IDF, and fell in love. And then the Israeli rabbinate refused to recognize her as a Jew, unless she “converted.” She broke off the engagement and moved back to the United States.

A poster child of Conservative Judaism was ruled as outside the “circle of endogamy” by Israeli Orthodox standards, which have the force of law in Israel, the Jewish homeland. Conservative efforts to appease the Orthodox and remain within their “circle of endogamy” have dramatically failed. Under these circumstances, the wisdom of penalizing those to the left—by continuing to give the cold shoulder to those patrilineal Jews whom the Reform have welcomed into their “circle of endogamy”—should be reevaluated.

The crisis in Jewish community day schools is a debate over the same issue. It is only natural that parents who send their kids to a Jewish day school do so—among other reasons—because they see in the student community a safe zone, in which their children will meet fellow-Jews who are within the same endogamous circle. But the lines have shifted. In the 1940s the line was between Jew and non-Jew. Then Jew married non-Jew and produced children. The children are of debatable status. The liberals define the patrilineals as within the circle; the conservatives define them as outside the circle—the effect of the circle having been violated in the previous generation. The red line that was previously drawn between the Jewish community and the non-Jewish community is now drawn within the Jewish community itself. Will the day schools weather this crisis and manage to keep patrilineal Jews and Jews of more traditional background under the same roof, attending the same religious services, going to the same prom? We are holding our breaths and hoping that these issues can all be resolved. But the conflicts are all too apparent.

This cannot go on. The Jewish people must remain one people, to the extent that we can make this happen. Jews should be able to marry Jews. We do not have control over the Israeli Orthodox establishment. But we need to affirm the bonds that unite those Jews with whom we come in contact, to the extent that our consciences permit it. We should reevaluate the definition of who “our fellow-Jews” are on the basis of Jewish lives lived, Jewish practices practiced, Jewish identity affirmed. We should (like Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai) accept the official representations of our counterparts as to who is a Jew—if they have certified a person’s Jewish identity by education and Bar/Bat Mitzvah (or by a letter from their rabbi), that should be enough.

“And who is like Your people Israel, one nation in the earth?”