one of the most consequential questions in jewish history is a very basic one who is a jew now you
might think that this is a settled law that there is really no question about it but in fact when
you look a little more deeply at jewish history you see that there are several periods in history
when it becomes a very important question for the vast majority of jewish history in particular the
last two millennia most jews have regarded a jew as someone who has a jewish mother that is it is
matrilineal the nominal identity of a person follows that personal status regardless of
affiliation with a religion or self-identification but that has not always been the universal case
for jewish history what i'd like to do today is focus on this question as we introduce the
question of women in ancient israel in general now let us recall that this is certainly a
controversial question as of the late 20th and early 21st century and this is primarily because
of a decision that was made by the reform movement in 1983 that recognized patrilineal descent
more precisely it's it's both matrilineal and patriarchal descent but in other words
uh this represented an acknowledgement by a major jewish movement that as long as one parent was
ethnically jewish however you define that jewishness then the child could also be jewish
there's more to it than that and perhaps one of the most important things to think about is
you know did this decision um you know initiate change or was it simply a recognition of change
that had already happened because um intermarriage especially in american jewry was was at such a
high level that we already have the phenomenon of children who have like a jewish father rather
than a jewish mother and wish to identify with the jewish community and they find that they are shut
out because the matrilineal principle has been the dominant one for the last two thousand years and
it's resulted in a lot of really painful moments for example in this article by shoshana tikva
written in 2019. it's a very difficult and personal issue in this particular video i mainly
intend to just go over the historical issues and i will leave the philosophical and religious and
indeed sociological and even psychological issues to people who are more expert so the question that
we really have is you know when did the matrilineal status become effective or when
did it become the norm we can see when you read the bible it's very clear uh two things first
of all there is a strong prohibition very you know clearly worded uh against intermarriage
with canaanites in particular but one can easily generalize that it refers to you know
intermarriage in general and at the same time you see in particular some really important
figures like joseph and moses and solomon who all apparently marry non-jewish women so how do you
square these things and by the way of course joseph moses and solomon's their children are
recognized as being jewish how is this the case so we're going to go into some of the major issues
here but i want to point out that perhaps the most significant study of this is by shia jd cohen the
beginnings of jewishness which he he goes through a lot of really important issues in the classical
period especially issues of conversion and issues of matrilineal versus patrilineal descent and so
on now i don't necessarily agree with all of his conclusions but there's no question
it's a masterful survey of the sources and there's a lot of value in this particular work
so trying to square this conundrum of on the one hand we have this long-standing practice of
matrilineal descent and on the other hand we have these biblical examples that seem to contradict it
there are three logical ways to approach the challenge the first is to say that well let's
say the law of matrilineal descent this concept of principle was not always described in the text
meaning that yeah moses married a midnight but the midianite woman went through a conversion and
joseph married you know an egyptian woman but she went through a conversion if that is the case then
you have to wonder well why doesn't the text tell us this why doesn't the torah reveal that this
is in fact what happened wouldn't we be prone to be misunderstanding the text if it doesn't
say something which actually happened that's one possibility another logical possibility to
say that yes the law was always in effect uh the jews always adhered to this matrilineal principle
but it was sometimes ignored you know you have that sometimes where uh as rabbi barrow wine often
likes to say you should never confuse judaism with jews right jews do not necessarily behave
in normative acceptable ways so perhaps you know the examples we have in the bible are you know not
in conformity with the way jews are supposed to behave now that would be obviously an acceptable
answer except the fact that you know these figures moses joseph solomon and others you know they're
really important people and are we really going to uh assert that they were behaving contrary to law
that's definitely problematic there's also a smaller problem which we won't go into right now
but the midrash has a principle that even before the torah was given uh jews of that level at any
rate uh certainly behaved in conformity with the torah itself like for example the laws of keeping
kosher were not given until the torah was given but you still wouldn't have the the patriarchal
matrix going out for non-kosher food god forbid that kind of thing but that's a smaller problem
let's just avoid that for now the third logical possibility is that maybe the law wasn't always
in effect uh maybe the law of uh matrilineal descent or the principle of matrilineal descent
was introduced later in jewish history which would mean that the the earlier biblical figures who
followed apparently a patrilineal principle were not contravening the law again there's that small
midrashic objection which is reasonable but not for us today but if that is the case that we say
the law was not necessarily in effect when did it change so that's the the three possibilities
let's look at them in turn but let's look start from the basic one let's say when's the first
unequivocal statement of this principle so the first one of course is the torah itself
and here's one classic passage uh it's in the book of deuteronomy devarim chapter 7 verse 4. so verse
3 says do not intermarry with them meaning the surrounding non-jewish nations do not give your
daughters to the sons or take their daughters for your sons and then in verse four it says
the abdu's
right now let's look at the translation it says for they will turn your children away from me to
worship other gods and the lord's anger will braze forth against you and he will promptly
wipe you out right really strong uh word of criticism i think the problem with this
particular passage and normally safaria is amazing but you know they're relying on translations that
in many cases are already extant and this translation is a little bit of a distortion
if we look carefully at the english it's not for they which is in the third person plural it really
should be for he right the the uh word in hebrew is ki yasir which is male masculine singular
uh for it's really he will turn your children now your children is also not in the plural
it should be uh in the singular masculine for your son which in this context would mean your grandson
wait so let's understand this properly it says for he meaning your son-in-law it can't be your
daughter-in-law because it would say for she it would put it in the feminine and by the way
in hebrew there is no neuter gender every single noun or pronoun has to be either male or female so
it's binary here there's no other choice and it is masculine so this means that if
you have to imagine yourself as a grandparent if your uh daughter marries a non-jewish male
if you as a jewish person have a daughter who is jewish and she marries a non-jewish male
the non-jewish male according to this verse will turn your son which is your grandson
away from god that's the statement of the verse here let's look at it in the commentary
of rashi i have it abbreviated on the right here but let's look at it in greater detail
so rashi here is quoting the talmud tractate yvonne 23a and it reads like this
high i.e the son of the heathen meaning the non-jew when he marries thy daughter will turn
away thy grandson whom thy daughter will bear unto him from following me are you following god this
teaches us that thy daughter's son who was born of a non-jewish father is still called your son
but your son's son who was born of a non-jewish woman is not called your son right because the
verse only talks about the situation in which your grandson by your non-jewish son-in-law would
go away from god it does not even bother talking about your grandson from your non-jewish
daughter-in-law because according to rashi quoting the talmud that person that grandchild is not even
jewish that's the clearest biblical statement of the matrilineal principle and as you can see it's
not explicit at all it has to be drawn out through this midrash which is expressed in the talmud and
expressed uh later in rashi's commentary so that's how the the principle is derived now that's the
now if we take this from a theological perspective at the very least the matrilineal principle then
is put in place in the uh period of the giving of the torah which is obviously
quite ancient we're now talking about the exodus period and would have been you know the the norm
all through ancient judea but when we look at the historical data it's a little more confusing
so by the way here's a beautiful painting by anna flarovna she has so many of these studies of
women lighting candles with their children looking on very kind of traditional romanticist kind of
view but really very powerful she just passed away in 2020 but very you know beautiful work still
available for sale in many galleries today at any rate um the we see a uh a biblical narrative that
describes how this was actually put into place you'll recall that in the 6th century the jews
are exiled by nebuchadnezzar in the year 586 and then they return within a few decades from
persia from babylonia to israel under ezra and in chapter 9 of the book of ezra he laments the
long prayer there where he he expresses tremendous regret that so many of the jews that returned have
brought with them their non-jewish spouses meaning that intermarriage is rampant then in chapter 10
one shachanya benifil of elam sends away the foreign wives and their children he does not or
doesn't mention what he does with the foreign men that is the the the jewish men who have married
non-jewish wives their families are broken up and the wives are sent away along with their children
uh which seems to be a it's you can imagine how how difficult this might have been and how harsh
it must have been but you know beyond the sympathy for the human drama involved it seems like a very
clear statement of the matrilineal principle in effect in the sixth century before the common era
now that would that would be a clear illustration of it however as dr cohen points out when you go
700 years later and you look at non-rabbinic texts such as the jewish philosopher philo who
we'll speak about in in a few weeks god willing josephus who we spoke about extensively and even
paul and you have to understand that in some cases in some ways the uh the new testament uh the
christian writings are kind of like a historical commentary on jewish society as well so it's very
useful to kind of like flesh out what's going on in the first century in some ways at any rate
all these three important figures and sources they seem unaware of the matrilineal principle
you know you have to look in dr cohen's book to see the specific examples but it seems
pretty clear that they're they're clueless about this to give you one example josephus
you know he speaks about king herod herod the great and uh he goes on and on about how herod's
own pedigree is questioned by the jewish community he's called the idomian he's called the half jew
because his father came from the idumean people who had been forcibly converted prior to this
uh in the era of the maccabees the heir of the hashmoniem under john hierkonos in particular
so in other words because his father descended from a people that had a questionable conversion
there are doubts about herod's own jewish identity but no one seems to be bothered by the fact
that his mother wasn't jewish his mother was an arab woman so what's going on it's like totally
you know not relevant their mother so now there are ways you can approach this you can say that
josephus is not necessarily the best you know exemplar of rabbinic judaism at all and it could
be that only the pharisees were really observing this kind of level of observance that that became
normative what dr cohen argues is that in reality the whole institution of conversion had not really
coalesced by this time uh and that there was kind of like a different standard for women
marrying jewish men that their marriage itself constituted the understanding of conversion in
that era fascinating argument whereas men if they wanted to convert into judaism required a much
more you know complex process which involved among other things circumcision so that's why
when men would marry into herod's family then there was a whole big deal about you know yeah
they went through this and they they had to con they had the circumcision and so on uh but
there's no discussion of when non-jewish women are incorporated into that dynasty for certain however
by the time you get to the mishnah which is about the turn of the year 200 about the turn of the
third century there's no question that rabbinic judaism is absolutely down with the idea of the
matrilineal principle reaffirming what we saw in rashi quoting the talmud which the
talmud of course is not going to be written until quite a bit later but the idea is that
matrilineal principle is very very strong in the rabbinic tradition certainly from the mishnah
and onwards and again a little theological note here from the perspective of orthodox judaism
the mishna although it only achieves a written form with yehuda nasi around the year 200-220
it was the embodiment of oral teachings that went back far earlier and in fact the core teachings
of the mishnah go back to mount sinai itself which corresponds with the way the talmud read
that particular passage in deuteronomy okay so to wrap this all up basically we have a matrilineal
principle that can arguably be extended all the way back to mount sinai through a pharisaic
interpretation of the texts when we look at the actual behavior of jews we see that they're not
always conforming to this matrilineal principle sometimes at great cost to themselves as we see
in the book of ezra and that even by the first century of the common era some very prominent
jews seem to be out of touch with the matrilineal principle but by the time the mishna is codified
uh this becomes the dominant view without question overwhelmingly so and any uh deviations from this
be are taken in a very serious way i should mention one last caveat that i think is a
very important one uh we started by talking about how basic this question was and one of the things
that we tend to see in jewish history is that you know jews can handle a tremendous degree of
descent there's room for a lot of diverse opinion within the large you know tent of jewish identity
but this particular question of whether or not a person is jewish is one of those third rail
type questions that tends to result in fissures in schisms and when it remains unresolved it has very
dire consequences for the integrity of the larger jewish population but i leave that for people who
are you know expert dealing with this i hope you found this short video useful and we're
going to continue with our discussion of women in ancient israel next thank you for watching