Mixed marriages: matrilineal or patrilineal descent?

There is doubtless no question that today divides the various currents of Judaism — Orthodox, Masorti, Liberal, or indeed secular — as much as that of the transmission of Jewish identity. The rule applied by the Orthodox is the one that emerges from the Talmud: a Jew is anyone born of a Jewish mother or converted according to the halakha. It is also applied by the Masorti movement which, as its name indicates, intends to place itself within the tradition, except that it is far more welcoming to mixed families than the Orthodox current. The Liberal movement accepts transmission through either parent insofar as the child receives a Jewish education. As for secular Judaism, it intends to transmit a deeply felt identity without reference to the religion of the father or the mother.

The rule of matrilineal descent is the one against which, today in France and elsewhere, children born of mixed marriages whose mother was not converted prior to their birth come up. They may be denied a bar/bat mitsvah or a marriage to a Jewish spouse, even if they demonstrate religious knowledge far superior to that of certain Jews according to the halakha. The strict application of the rule thus leads to absurd situations: a child issued from a Christian or secular marriage will be permitted to marry in a Consistorial synagogue if he proves that his mother, even if raised outside Judaism, is herself of a Jewish mother. Is this not the principle of matrilineal descent applied in all its excesses, without regard for the essential thing, which is the transmission of a lived Judaism?

A few biblical and historical reminders should make it possible to call into question the strict application of a law that creates incomprehension, dramas, and often the rejection of a Judaism seen as an “ethnic” religion that some even interpret as racist. This law is presented by its proponents as a biblical law (halakha leMoshe miSinai — a law given to Moses at Sinai). What is the truth of the matter?

The Bible mentions chiefly marriages of men related to the Patriarchs with foreign women. The only reverse case, that of Dinah, ends tragically, as we know. There can be no question of calling Jews such biblical heroes as Joseph, who marries the daughter of an Egyptian priest, or Moses, who marries the daughter of a Midianite priest. Judaism, which is the religion of the kingdom of Judah around the Temple of Jerusalem, does not exist in those distant times, and no law then forbids exogamy. What is, on the other hand, permanently denounced in more or less historical contexts is the seduction that foreign women may exert upon minds still poorly anchored in monotheism; thus the Hebrews, upon leaving Egypt, let themselves be tempted by the Midianite women until Pinhas set things in order.

The most disconcerting example is without contest that of King Solomon who, in his old age, lets himself be drawn into various idolatrous cults by the many foreign princesses he has married. We will also see the Phoenician princess Jezebel introduce the cult of Baal into the kingdom of her husband Ahab. These examples stigmatize masculine weakness at least as much as feminine intrigues. The belonging to the people of Israel of children born of these unions is at no moment called into question.

It is indeed the principle of patrilineal descent that seems to have prevailed in these patriarchal societies. A trace of it survives even in present-day legislation, since the status of cohen or levi is still transmitted through the father and not through the mother.

The case most often cited in the historical period is that of the reform of Nehemiah in the 5th century. The Jewish — that is, Judean — governor, returned from Babylonia, observes that among his compatriots who had remained in the land, some had taken “women of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab, and half of their sons spoke the language of Ashdod and were unable to speak the Judean tongue” (Nehemiah 13:23–25). Nehemiah rebukes them violently, citing the example of Solomon who was led into sin by his foreign wives. Nothing else is said of the children; one can only infer that the forgetting of the language corresponds to infidelity to the religion of their fathers, and a return is not excluded.

The story of Ruth is most often interpreted by scholarship as a response to the measures of expulsion of Nehemiah: “It was found written that the Ammonite and the Moabite should never enter the assembly of the Lord, because they had not come to meet the children of Israel with bread and water, and because they had paid Balaam against him to curse him” (Nehemiah 13:1–2). Ruth the Moabite chooses to follow her mother-in-law Naomi after her widowhood, all the way to Bethlehem of Judah, the family’s town of origin. She pronounces a promise that may appear as the first explicit formula of conversion: “Your people shall be my people, and your god shall be my god” (Ruth 1:16). Subsequently, the rabbis will explain the acceptance of a Moabite either by saying that the prohibition touched only the men and not the women, or by arguing that the ostracism is void because one can no longer distinguish the peoples mentioned in the Bible “ever since Sennacherib threw the world into confusion” (Yebamot VIII, 3; Yadayim IV, 4). The fact remains that Ruth underwent no ritual of conversion (which certainly did not exist at the time); her voluntary adherence sufficed for her to merit being the ancestor of David and thus of the Messiah to come.

The question of mixed marriage and of the belonging of children only began to arise acutely with the development of the diaspora and the appearance, in the land of Israel, of ever more numerous populations of pagan origin.

The principal echoes of the diaspora come to us from Alexandria. It is there that the first Jewish novel in the Greek language was doubtless born, that of Joseph and Aseneth, which poses explicitly the problem of mixed marriage: how could the handsome Joseph, faithful to his God, have married the daughter of an idolatrous priest? The question is resolved by the conversion of the young woman (and not by a supposed kinship with Dinah, as the rabbis later suggested). The Jewish philosopher Philo attests that there were women who nearly fell victim to the first “pogrom” of Alexandria in the year 38 because they were living with Jews, and were released when it was established that they were not Jewish by birth (In Flaccum 96). He himself does not encourage those who remain between two worlds and become “cultural bastards,” but he gives a stirring eulogy of the true converts.

If there existed a ritual of conversion for men, it is not at all certain that a ritual of conversion existed for women around the dawn of the Christian era. Thus, no rite of conversion is required of Queen Helena of Adiabene, whereas for her sons two Jewish points of view stand opposed as to the necessity of circumcision (Antiquities of Flavius Josephus XX, 38–48). In truth, little is known of the marriages of ordinary individuals, but one can on the other hand try to draw some lesson from princely marriages. It is from Herod onward — himself born of a father descended from an Idumean convert and of a Nabatean Arab mother, of whom no conversion is recorded — that one sees mixed marriages appear. Herod is doubtless not ethnically Judean, but he is Jewish by religion, for the religion transmitted by his father is not contested in his case. Among his wives is a Samaritan, Malthace, whose origin does not prevent her sons from laying claim to the succession. The eldest son of Herod and of the Hasmonean princess Mariamne marries Glaphyra, daughter of Archelaus, king of Cappadocia, a marriage considered flattering for the dynasty without the people finding anything to object to in it. The quality of being Jewish does not seem to have been denied to their children. The tetrarch Herod Antipas marries, in first marriage, the daughter of Aretas, king of Petra, and if John the Baptist reproves him, it is because he dared to repudiate his lawful wife in order to marry his (Jewish) sister-in-law Herodias, contrary to biblical law.

One may observe, on the other hand, that Herod refuses to grant the hand of his sister Salome to the Arab prince Syllaeus unless the latter embrace Jewish customs. A granddaughter of Herod, Drusilla, gives up marrying Antiochus, king of Commagene, who had drawn back before conversion, and ends by marrying Azizus, king of Emesa, who, for his part, had accepted it, circumcision included (Jewish Antiquities XX, 139). The famous Berenice married, in third marriage, Polemon, king of Cilicia, who likewise had to convert.

An echo of mixed marriages among ordinary individuals is given to us in the Acts of the Apostles with the case of Timothy, son of a Greek and of a Jewess¹. He is not circumcised at the time of his encounter with Paul, and the apostle imposes this rite upon him to assist him in his mission among the Jews.

These testimonies gathered in ancient texts, dating from the 1st century, should suffice to prove that there was, in the history of Judaism, a complete reversal of the halakha concerning the belonging of children born of mixed marriages. Because of the ambiguity of the term Yehudi or Ioudaios (in Greek) or Judaeus (in Latin), there has always been, in the notion of Judean or Jew (it is the same term in these languages), a confusion between religion and something akin to citizenship (certainly not race). In the time of the Talmud, a Roman citizen is a child born of a Roman father and a Roman mother. The acceptance of only one of the two parents already represents a considerable easing relative to such a rule. However, according to a juridical study by Shaye Cohen, founded on the Talmudic texts, which we summarize here, one cannot exclude an influence of Roman law upon Judaism². Just as the child of a Roman and of a slave or of a non-Roman woman is not Roman, because it does not imply a justum connubium, so the child of a Jewish father and of a slave or non-Jewish woman does not have the quality of being Jewish, because the marriage is not valid. The introduction of the notion of the validity of marriage would be a novelty introduced from the time of the Mishnah, around 200.

Doubtless one should not exclude the advances of rabbinic legalism as a cause of the rule of matrilineal descent that prevails to this day. To place oneself solely on this ground seems to me, however, to abstract from historical reality. Judea experienced, between 132 and 135, a revolt against Rome very costly in Jewish lives. Children born of rapes or of free unions with pagans, owing to the lack of Jewish men, incurred the unenviable status of mamzerim (Mishnah Yebamot 7:5). The halakha that ended by triumphing is situated in the second half of the 2nd century, since it is attributed to Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai: “Your son born of an Israelite woman is called your son, but your son born of an idolatress is not called your son; he is her son” (Yebamot 23a, Qiddushin 68b). It is also at this period that one sees attested a ritual of conversion by immersion that applies to men as well as to women (Yebamot 47a–b). However, still at the end of the 3rd century, a rabbi of Tyre privileges patrilineal descent (Jerusalem Talmud, Yebamot 4a, Qiddushin 64d). The controversy stretched over several generations of amoraim³.

This historical demonstration will doubtless not win the assent of those who believe that matrilineal descent was proclaimed at Mount Sinai. It simply recalls that the rabbis of Antiquity showed far more openness than today’s “orthodoxy,” and that, when it was necessary to confront particularly dramatic situations, they had the courage to revise the preexisting halakha. Should not the demographic loss of the Jewish people in our own day prompt such a revision?

Notes