Choosing to be Among the Chosen

Other than the fact that to date no such cleansing has ever happened no.

One of the troubling things about this question for me is that it attempts to compel us to continue to place everyone in there own little compartments. Each of us is more than the sum of his/her genetic and cultural heritage.

As several Jewish writers have already pointed out Jewish identity means different things to different people. The same is very much true of Christians and Muslims as Well Not to mention say Armenian Americans, African Americans and European Americans.

This will be a much freer and likely more prosperous country the minute we quit trying to shoe horn ourselves and others into neat and tidy little boxes.

Life isn't neat and tidy and attempts to make it so tend to get people killed in wholesale lots.

Can you comment on apartheid iisrael's ethnic cleansing of palestinians.

The Jewish People have survived for over three thousand years.

(The earliest reference to Israel is from the funery stela of the Egyptian Pharoah Merneptah, now in the Cairo Museum, which dates to 1209 B.C.)

All other empires that persecuted the Jews, from the Arameans to the Moabites, from the Babylonians to the Assyrians to the Selucids, from the Romans to the Spanish Inquisition to the Nazis to Communists, have fallen.

Yet the Jewish People are still here.

Yes, they are very tiny: there are only 13.2 million Jews in the world, compared to 1.7 Billion Muslims and 2 Billion Christians. However, I believe they will continue to survive.

Today, every Jew by birth that is alive is not only a descendent of the people of ancient Israel, but a descendent of those who survived great persecution and pressure to convert over countless centuries.

This is a great privilage and an incredible legacy.

Yet, today many Jews are ignorant of their own heritage, from the Hebrew Bible itself to the archaeology of Israel, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the great works of the Rabbinic Era.

Thus, in this country and others they are intermarrying, turning away from the sacrifices of their ancestors and casting out this heritage.

Pressured by societies that still hold true to the ideas of Replacement Theology--the theology that the Church, or the Islamic Ummah, has replaced the Jewish People as G-d's choosen--they often want to assimilate into the maintstream.

Without the knowledge of their history they cannot understand the religious roots of Replacement Theology and how it evolved into anti-Judaism and then anti-Semitism. They simply, and tragically, internalize it.

So, will the Jewish People disappear over time?

No, it cannot be a coincidence that after 2,000 years of Exile the Jews have returned to their ancestral homeland to build a state, as it was predicted by Jeremiah and Isaiah.

Here is the future of the Jewish People, and as they have done for three millenium, they will--however small their numbers become--continue to survive and continue their ancestral legacy.

You wrote, of the newly invented patrilinearity: "but that status was not recognized by orthodox Jews."

That status was also not recognized by the Conservative movement. Nor by the Israeli verion of Reform Judaism. It's a break of 2000+ years of Jewish law and tradition.

The principle of Matrilineal determination of "Who is a Jew" starts with Abraham, Sarah and Hagar.
Sarah was the mother of Isaac, the branch that led to the Hebrews, and Hagar was the mother of Ishmael, the progenitor of the Arabs. To the descendants of Isaac would go Canaan, and to the descendants of Ishmael would go all the lands EAST of his brother's patrimony, according to the Bible.
To break the tradition is to cause a mess. It is possible to become a Jew through conversion, though not easy, nor meant to be easy, as being a Jew is being a member of a small tribe. Children of non-Jewish mothers are not Jews, and this is the price of marrying a non-Jewish woman that every Jewish male should keep in mind before they tie the knot. Of course, the offspring can choose to convert to Judaism, if that is what he or she wants, but it is a totally private and personal decision, and a difficult one to make, because joining or being a member of this particular tribe is not easy, nor meant to be.

Israel is a tiny country never meant to be the homeland of a large people, and so those who drop away by intermarriage, well, that is the decision they chose to make, whether they were informed about it or not. The tribe has always been small, but it has so far managed to endure many difficult challenges. And I hope it will continue.

Hello Baroness,

You concluded: " The real question is whether, in free societies, that is enough to make people feel they want to stay involved, or whether they will just disappear, and deny their Jewish identity or simply forget it."

That's it. But I am not too sure whether people will deny their Jewish identity or heritage if they don't know of it. I do sense a greater personal comfort, confidence and ease among my British Jewish friends than American ones.

I am not too certain whether this is good or bad in the long run for the "identity" of British Jews. Sometimes, a feeling of being discriminated, marginalised or excluded may sharpen the awareness and assertion of "identity" of race and religion. Ironically, that makes a group more determined and politicised to ensure its "identity" as a people be maintained and survive.

Is it possible that if there was no discrimination, no persecution, no Holocaust of Jews in Europe, most European Jews would have long been "secularised" or "mainstreamed" or "assimilated"?

Thank you and best regards

"J"