On Being Jewish
As any older-than-their-son, divorced, single-parent, non-Jewish girlfriend of a young Temple-trained lad can tell you, the parents of a nice Jewish boytchik feel quite strongly about the importance of religion. That a prospective daughter-in-law is a shikse matters even if she does not bring any other unseemly baggage to the altar, and it becomes even more of an issue when the other negatives are a bit indelicate to raise.
This parental concern had always been explained to me thus: “To be Jewish, you must have a Jewish MOTHER." (Therefore, any child borne by a female non-Jew cannot be Jewish, and therefore parents of the Jewish father of such children are deprived of having Jewish grandchildren, all of which is a pretty serious shortfall - oy). I always assumed that this emphasis on having a Jewish MOTHER suggests something noble about the daughters of Israel.
My husband and I have been married for more than thirty years now, and whatever animosity his parents once felt for me seems to have dissipated long ago. His parents and I have never discussed the matter, but this afternoon over lunch, my mother-in-law commented that “to be Jewish you must have a Jewish mother because of course you can never know for sure who the father was.”
And to think I once contemplated converting...
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The following is excerpted from an article by Nicholas Wade in the NY Times, May 2, 2005:
A new study now shows that the women in nine Jewish communities from Georgia, the former Soviet republic, to Morocco have vastly different genetic histories from the men. In each community, the women carry very few genetic signatures on their mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element inherited only through the female line. This indicates that the community had just a small number of founding mothers and that after the founding event there was little, if any, interchange with the host population. The women's identities, however, are a mystery, because, unlike the case with the men, their genetic signatures are not related to one another or to those of present-day Middle Eastern populations.
The new study, by Dr. David Goldstein, Dr. Mark Thomas and Dr. Neil Bradman of University College in London and other colleagues, appears in The American Journal of Human Genetics this month. Dr. Goldstein said it was up to historians to interpret the genetic evidence. His own speculation, he said, is that most Jewish communities were formed by unions between Jewish men and local women, though he notes that the women's origins cannot be genetically determined.
"The men came from the Near East, perhaps as traders," he said. "They established local populations, probably with local women. But once the community was founded, the barriers had to go up, because otherwise mitochondrial diversity would be increased."
In ancient Israel, the Jewish priesthood was handed from father to son. But at some time from 200 B.C. to A.D. 500, Jewish status came to be defined by maternal descent. Even though the founding mothers of most Jewish communities were not born Jewish, their descendants were.
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