Adoption creates a singular bond of filiation, one that does not pass through blood. In such a context, what can parents transmit to children they have not begotten, and how? Is the process of transmission, so essential for ensuring genealogical continuity, specific in the case of adoption, or else are adoptive families “families like the others,” and consequently adoptive fathers “fathers like the others”? Finally, how does gender work upon adoptive kinship? In other words, what is the place of each person (father, mother, daughter, son) in the family economy?
To answer these questions, for Jewish families, is above all to set out the traditional principles of filiation by adoption in Judaism and to understand how these principles take shape differentially for Jewish mothers and fathers today, but also for the institutions they encounter all along their journey toward becoming parents.
Well beyond adoption, my research has led me to interrogate the contemporary transformations of kinship, sometimes confronted with unprecedented situations1. Adoption proved to be a royal road to understanding the modes of construction of contemporary identities, in particular religious and familial identities.
Filiation in Judaism
Jewish tradition values procreation; it makes of it an imperative: peru urvu, “be fruitful and multiply,” the first commandment/blessing that God addresses to the whole of the living beings of creation, among whom Man, Adam, at once male and female.
The recitation of the toldot (begettings) shows to what degree continuity is important as a form of traditional legitimation of belonging to a lineage—a familial or clan lineage first of all, then a people with its God, its Law, its land. Each person is fundamentally begotten, a link in a genealogical chain, inscribed in this chain and named as the son or daughter of those who begot him.
Lineages are also chains of transmission of knowledge. The rvu of Genesis also evokes teaching (rav). No genealogy without transmission!
The Pirké Avot (Sayings of the Fathers) deal, from their very first sentence, with the intergenerational transmission of the Law:
“Moses received the Torah at Sinai, and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets transmitted it to the men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: be deliberate in your judgments, raise up many disciples, and make a hedge around the Torah.”
The first transmission is a revelation; thereafter it passes through men; they receive and transmit in their turn. For this, there must be a tradition (massoret) that is transmitted (messara)—one and the same word for tradition and transmission: a bond between the generations.
We are thus faced with two simultaneous conceptions of the lineage: a genealogical lineage that passes through filiation as a biological principle, and a symbolic lineage that passes through knowledge, study, teaching, the transmission of the law.
If the women of the Bible are responsible for reproduction—sterility is always a matter of women in the Pentateuch!—the lineages, for their part, are masculine. The continuators of the patriarchs are their sons, whatever the status of their mothers, women of the people or foreigners. It is only from the second century of our era that women transmit their religious status2.
It is nevertheless to women that the burden of Jewish education and of the transmission of Judaism has been assigned, in addition to that of Jewishness alone—an extension of the principle of matrilinearity (by blood) to a principle of transmission that would pass through example3. Perhaps because, all down the centuries, they are relegated to the private sphere, that of interiority, of the home, of the kitchen and the children, in most cultures4, and because the ideal of transmission has more to do today with the transmission of identities, which passes through the affects, than with that of knowledge, to which they now, moreover, have access. A certain reconstructed tradition confines them to restricted responsibilities pertaining to the intimate, limiting to three the principal commandments that would apply to them: Nidda (sexuality), Hala (cooking), Nerot (Sabbath lights)—a gendered division of religiosity, sacred spaces and times in the hands of women; reproduction, cooking, and continuity.
If filiation in the Jewish tradition is by turns patrilineal and then matrilineal and passes through blood, the Talmud sets forth a principle of non-biological filiation that directly concerns our object:
“He who raises an orphan boy or girl within his house, the Torah considers it as though he had begotten the child,” or again “He who teaches the Torah to the son of his neighbor, Scripture considers it as though he had begotten him.”5
Education, the transmission of knowledge, and study are raised by the Talmud to the rank of begetting. But the Talmud is not the law, and the rabbinic tradition has not retained the Talmudic analogy, the “as though” of begetting, as a halakhically valid filiation6. Thus to adopt, with respect to rabbinic law, is to create not a filiation but an affiliation. On this account, adoptive Jewish mothers and fathers are equal in transmitting their Jewishness.
The position of the various contemporary religious currents with respect to the filiation and conversion of adopted children
For Orthodoxy, the adopted child does not have the same status as the natural child; adoption does not create a new filiation, notably from the point of view of the laws of incest, inheritance, mourning, and levirate. Moreover, if he is Jewish through his birth mother, anonymity poses a problem, for the child may be mamzer (issued from a forbidden union: an incestuous or adulterine child, or one of whose parents is himself mamzer). If his birth mother is not Jewish7, these risks are at once set aside, and he will be able to become Jewish by conversion, that is, by affiliation.
Now, as is known, conversion in an Orthodox milieu rests on extremely selective criteria. In matters of adoption, the Orthodox currents require strict observance on the part of the parents, who must moreover give assurance that they will raise their children in the observance of the mitzvot, which very often presupposes their enrollment in the educational systems of the same currents8.
It is over the course of repeated interviews with the adoptive parents that the Beth Din of Paris, the only Orthodox authority empowered to convert in France today, will make the decision whether or not to convert an adopted child. During these interviews, until a recent period, the parents and the children, if they are of an age to answer, are questioned about their practices and their knowledge.
What is asked of Jewish fathers during these interviews with the air of interrogations, once they do not display from the outset the criteria of good Jewishness? The members of the Beth Din, three in number, make sure that the father does not work on the Sabbath and feast days (with the employer’s certificate in support), that he regularly attends a synagogue on those days and leads his sons there on foot. The adoptive Jewish father must eat kosher, pray, not shave with a mechanical razor, and, if his knowledge is insufficient, he must study to reinforce his practice9.
Finally, the Orthodox recommend that the adopted child be named in the acts of collective religious life or in contracts “as the daughter or son” of his father or his mother “who raised him,” so that the adoptive filiation be mentioned and the contract be valid. This makes it possible both to recognize the adoptive filiation and to specify its otherness.
For the Masorti, the adopted child, if he is not Jewish by birth, will be converted if his parents so desire, on condition that they commit to raising him in the knowledge of Judaism and the observance of its values. The preparation for the bar mitzvah or the bat mitzvah within the Masorti community is a sign of this will of the adoptive parents. The rabbi does not verify their degree of religious practice, and the meeting unfolds in a climate of trust and dialogue10.
The Liberals in France oppose the conversion of minor children from the religious point of view. Nor are they attached to a strictly biological definition of Jewishness, and the Jewishness of one of the parents alone suffices for the child to be considered Jewish. Jewishness can be acquired through immersion in a Jewish milieu and through education from the youngest age. Thus a child adopted before the age of three will not need to be converted11. By contrast, if the adoption occurs after this age, one will await religious majority for a conversion. In practice, the adoption of a child under the age of three may give rise to certain rites such as the mikveh (immersion in a ritual bath), which is a rite of conversion. In the Liberal world, the “presentation to the Torah,” during services, is a rite of birth and of conversion, which applies equally to adopted children. The words of the blessing then pronounced, inscribed in the prayer ritual of the MJLF, are adapted to the situation of adoption.
In all cases, adoptive Jewish fathers have a responsibility in terms of the transmission of Jewishness, of Jewish values and practices. They are asked to be a stakeholder in the education of their sons and their daughters. What is at play, whatever the religious currents, is transmission, and therefore the continuity of Judaism from generation to generation. To define who is Jewish, in each generation, is to establish boundaries between groups: inside/outside, us/them, to put things in order, and to establish the norms of the reproduction of the group and of the values it bears. To transmit, in all cases, is imperative!
If, in the case of biological families, fathers can disappear without this calling into question the identity of their children, from the moment the mother is Jewish, in matters of adoption, by contrast, the education of their children as Jews depends on their involvement. To be sure, there are indeed Jewish mothers who adopt on their own. But the existence of a father in the family configuration requires his active participation.
The name of the father
Beyond Judaism, the father also transmits his patronymic12. Through full adoption, the child receives the family name of his parents, their nationality. He is recorded at the civil registry as “born of” his adoptive parents. Only the full extract of the birth certificate mentions the judgment of adoption. Legally, then, adoption creates a new filiation.
If the choice of first name is increasingly made according to the parents’ taste and to fashion, the second name often keeps the trace of the family genealogy. Grandparents or other relatives, living or deceased, are then named as a function of the image they leave to their descendants, of the family and regional traditions of naming, of the children’s place in the sibling group.
For adopted children, naming is more specific still. It symbolically inscribes the child in a family genealogy that does not rest on blood ties. This inscription is all the more important in the parents’ eyes in that it is not automatically inherited. Thus Karine, of Ashkenazi origin, who adopts her son on her own in Latin America, names him by evoking the memory of her deceased father: “The name, yes, that’s something I think about. Let’s say I lost my father before having Émile, because, well, we’re three daughters, and Papa would have been happy to have a grandson who had his name [first and last name in this case]. Let’s say that touches me somewhere, for my father…”13
Beyond a couple’s negotiation, the choice of first name sometimes depends on the child’s history before his adoption. The younger he is adopted, the freer the parents feel to change his first name. The change of first name of an older child may be felt as a destabilizing factor, when he is already confronted with other ruptures: a possible change of country, of language, of climate, and above all of the people around him. Even for a child adopted as a baby, the parents sometimes keep something of the original first name as a trace of his history, in a world where access to origins is valued and on the way to becoming the norm.
Here, for example, is how Corinne and Marc improvise to name their daughter, adopted in Romania, taking account of her original first name and referring to Judaism: “she was named Maria-Clara, we made it Claire-Léa because Maria-Clara is a bit… We wanted to make it Clara-Léa, but it was heavy, so we made it Claire-Léa.”
Most of the time, however, adoptive parents declare that they gave their child the first name they would have given to a biological child. They often choose a Jewish first name14, which inscribes the child in a lineage, in the long memory of the Jewish people, in the Jewish heritage reactivated at the very moment when kinship is being constituted.
Certain first names impose themselves, like Nathan, which is often chosen for adopted children: the etymology is rather concordant with the situation of adoption, for Nathan, he gave in Hebrew, evokes the gift. There is also Nathan the Wise, notes a father for whom “It was clear that it was Nathan, this courageous, willful child, who had a certain strength within him, but not an aggressive strength, a deep strength—all that, it was obvious it was Nathan […] And then I think we wanted to give him a Jewish first name, and there again, I think it’s the name we would have given to a biological child. There again there was no difference. And it’s true that there’s the idea of continuity, of the transmission of a heritage; for my part I find the Jewish heritage to be extraordinary, we have every reason to be proud of it, in every respect, and it pleases me to transmit that. I don’t feel ill at ease, on the contrary, in the idea of the transmission of a Jewish heritage.”
One understands clearly here that to name is already to transmit. Moreover, the name and identity are deeply linked in representations15. For Jewish tradition the name is also a bearer of destiny, and one finds everywhere the avoidance of the first names of relatives who died prematurely or violently, and certain ritual practices: the secret of the first name until the berit mila for a boy, change of first name in case of serious illness…
The religious status of the father
The religious status of the father must not be confused with his name. A Jewish man is either Cohen, or Lévi, or simply Israël. This status is in fact transmitted to his children by birth. What of it in the case of adoption? As we have seen, the rabbinic tradition does not recognize adoptive filiation as a true filiation, and the status of the adopted child is not the same as that of the so-called biological children16.
Thus the adoptive son of a Monsieur Cohen will not be Cohen by status, even if, not Jewish by birth, he is converted. So he will have neither the ritual privileges nor the prohibitions relative to the Cohanim. Despite his name, neither will he transmit to his children a status he does not have.
In the same way, an adopted daughter converted to Judaism cannot marry a Cohen, who, for his part, can marry neither a converted woman nor a divorced woman.
Sole consolation, within these matrimonial obligations and prohibitions: a biological son of a Cohen, the fruit of a union with a non-Jewish woman, converted to Judaism, will be able to marry the adopted and converted daughter of a Jewish couple! Their sons, born Jewish, will be Cohen by patronymic but not by status…
For its part, Liberal Judaism “operates no restriction in consideration of the status of cohen or of mamzer.”17
In Israel, a country in which the political and the religious are strongly intertwined, notably on questions pertaining to “personal status,” the legislation concerning the possibilities of medically assisted procreation (MAP) is rather liberal. Everything that can facilitate procreation is legally implemented18. Thus an Orthodox couple, the man of whom is Cohen, having had recourse to in vitro fertilization with a donor, was able to benefit from a preimplantation diagnosis (PID) in order to bring a girl into the world. In their Orthodox community, the parents would have had to make public the mode of procreation of a son, Cohen by patronymic but not by status; the PID made it possible to avoid all ambiguity.
One glimpses, through these examples, the social and legal consequences of a biological conception of filiation (here the selection of an embryo fertilized in vitro for religious reasons).
The image of the father
The search for resemblances between children and parents commonly forms part of family practices from birth onward. In resemblances one seeks continuity, sometimes proofs of paternity. In adoptive families, paradoxically, resemblances are just as important in the social construction of kinship. In the first place, parents often seek to adopt children who resemble them, which sometimes determines the choice of the child’s country of origin, in international adoption. If physical resemblance is not systematically sought, a certain cultural proximity, a certain empathy with the country and its citizens, with its history, become the necessary conditions of a successful adoption. Thus the child of Romani origin will more easily be adopted by Jewish parents in the name of a community of destiny between Jews and Roma during the Shoah, the Bulgarian child because Bulgaria was not a collaborator during the war, the child from Latin America for his Mediterranean physique liable to resemble Sephardic parents…
Anne-Sophie recounts the reasons for a choice founded on very little, as she herself acknowledges: “We had looked at the Maghreb; it didn’t transport him [her husband], even though that would have been a child who could have resembled us more. And then we turned toward Brazil—so why Brazil? I have a friend who is married to a Brazilian, my husband is a soccer fanatic, there’s such an important melting pot in Brazil, that’s it. There are no deeper reasons than that, it’s really a basic reason, but it’s what made me turn, and made me push my husband to turn, toward Brazil.” Anne-Sophie also insists on the resemblance between her youngest son and her husband: “same cheeks, same appetite, same eyes…”
It is a veritable process of recognition that sets itself in place with the choice of the child’s physical or origin-related criteria. Resemblance facilitates recognition19, so necessary to the construction of parenthood. On returning from the nursery, after a first meeting with his son, born in France to a woman originally from North Africa, a father declares: “He’s very, very tanned.” The couple—father born in Morocco and Ashkenazi mother—had declared themselves ready to receive a child of Maghrebi origin, owing to the cultural proximity with that region. But the confrontation with physical difference does not pertain to a rationality expressed a priori.
Resemblance to the father also passes through the body and its ritualization; it is embodied in circumcision, an obligation that is above all paternal.
All the male children of a Jewish father in my study are circumcised20. A point in common between the father and the child, circumcision is often accepted, including by non-Jewish mothers, as a marker of an identity to be transmitted, even and perhaps especially when the child enters his family through adoption. And yet, in France, the question of circumcision torments adoptive parents. The legitimacy of transmitting an identity that is on the one hand religious and, what is more, minority; the legitimacy of ritually marking the body of a child who, in social representations, is not fully his own21—this is not assured under a regime of secularism. Adoptive Jewish parents have internalized this, and their discourse sometimes resonates like a justification.
Yaël (42, decorator) carries within her a certain ambivalence, but will react strongly when the social worker calls into question her “right to circumcise” her son: “When a child is adopted, one must ask oneself the question of circumcision, but one shouldn’t ask it because they are our children. At the same time one must ask it, at the same time one shouldn’t. So we told ourselves, they are our children, they are Jewish, we shouldn’t ask ourselves this question. Would we have asked it if it had been our biological child? I don’t think so!”
Eric (43, economist) likewise recounts his doubts: “Very quickly I told myself, in any case, if it’s my child, if I adopt him, I cannot fail to transmit to him what I believe in most fundamentally. And very quickly I told myself, I raise him in Judaism, and then he sees. But it’s my child, I do what I would do with a biological child—otherwise, otherwise I’m not consistent, you know, otherwise it makes no sense. And that too is something I thought about beforehand. And that’s why, from my point of view, the circumcision had to be done. Because it was a logical consequence; I think that’s how I had to do it.” (Let us note here that Eric is non-practicing and belongs to no specific religious community.)
The reference to the biological family, as a norm, is frequent, for the adoptive family aspires to normalization while paradoxically being in demand of recognition of its specificities.
Many Jewish adopters have felt a certain discrimination on the part of those in charge of adoption agencies22 and sometimes even from social workers belonging to public institutions, during the interviews necessary for obtaining an adoption approval or for submitting a file to an association with a view to an adoption.
Thus Yaël recounts again: “Yes, the person from the DDASS found that we weren’t very stable. I said ‘where do you get that from’—first of all Daniel and I had been married for ten years, and we held together, he comes from a family of eight children, there’s been no divorce in the family for generations, and none for me either. But it’s true that I have parents who are Russian and Czech of Ashkenazi origin, and it’s true that in 1940 one didn’t stay in Germany if one was Jewish, and my husband, who came from Algeria, no, in Algeria the parents didn’t stay in the sixties either. When she told me we weren’t very stable, I said ‘what do you mean by that?’ She says ‘your families have moved around a lot.’ I said ‘listen, madame…’ and I told myself ‘well, she’s limited,’ ‘yes, but even your grandparents…’ I said ‘my grandfather was born in Poland, there were pogroms in Poland.’ They don’t know and they don’t understand…, because she says to me ‘yes, but your family is scattered everywhere.’”
Questioned about Jewish adopting couples, a physician of the ASE23 said to me, in contempt of the principle of secularism and of the universalism proper to the French republican tradition: “Before entrusting a child to a couple belonging to a religious community that risks excluding him, we will think twice.” This remark followed the meeting between this woman physician and an adult woman, married for years and a mother, undertaking a search for her origins. Adopted as a child without the very fact of her adoption having been revealed to her by her Jewish parents, she discovers by chance, in the course of an administrative procedure, both her adoption and her probable non-Jewishness. The rabbi of her community is said to have then told her: “you are not Jewish, and neither are your children.”
It is not the secret that is here called into question24, but the adoption by Jews, which appears illegitimate. Judaism, non-proselytizing, can be considered as excluding. Paradoxically, when Jewish parents seek to transmit and to convert, proselytism is sometimes considered suspect.
Becoming a father
In the study I conducted, adoption follows, most of the time, upon the finding of a sterility25. The passage from a failure of MAP to the decision to adopt is not self-evident. When it occurs, it is at the end of a sometimes long and difficult journey, over the course of which the woman and the man generally evolve each at his or her own rhythm26.
I observed that, in couple adoptions, it is most often the woman who is ready to adopt before her spouse and who tries to convince him. Perhaps women are more directly affected, in their bodies, by treatments difficult to bear physically and psychologically; perhaps they feel more deeply the hazards of what some call “procreative relentlessness”; perhaps they have a less essentialist vision of filiation. Perhaps, finally, as the anthropologist Agnès Fine suggests, the child has become “an essential support of identity for the members of the couple, in particular for the woman”27.
Future adoptive fathers thus appear as less quick to adopt, more marked by an essentialist vision of belongings, in any case more concerned with blood ties, less dependent upon a possible paternity in their identity as men. Upstream of the adoption, men ask themselves more questions about the identity of the child to come and have less confidence in their capacity to transmit. They often acknowledge their passivity over the course of the adoption procedures, notably during the approval process.
Once they are fathers, however, they seem just as involved, if not more so than other fathers.
Thus Eric recounts his own journey and his doubts: “Yes, indeed, I think the process began later. I believed in the biological child for longer, I had more difficulty convincing myself to move to the idea of adoption because I tend to see all the problems first, all the questions it poses, and it poses fundamental questions, and I find that a certain honesty requires that one ask them, indeed. And these questions, I think, are already fundamental for any human being, and for a Jew it’s even worse given his upbringing, and so all of that had to be properly internalized.”
In the rest of the interview, Eric and Patricia, his wife, engage in a singular dialogue in which memories and interpretations of the first meeting with their son, then two years old, are reconstructed:
“Patricia: And they brought us Simon, and it’s true that the first time I saw him, I didn’t have the maternal instinct, I didn’t at all say ‘this is my son,’ as sometimes people recount certain adoptions—no, not at all, that’s it, no, no, I’m sorry. It was very charged with emotion but I didn’t say ‘this is my son’… And then they stuck Simon in my arms, he wasn’t reassured at all, the poor thing, and it lasted ten minutes, a quarter of an hour. - Eric: more than that, surely… - Patricia: Or a little more. He was so paralyzed with fright, the poor thing, that he was static. We stood him up, but then… - Eric: I’m not sure that… no, it wasn’t fright, it’s emotion, and it’s also a bit of self-control. As for me, I admired him right away. Oh yes, I found him very courageous! - Patricia: he didn’t cry. - Eric: You could feel that he was controlling himself, that he had perceived that it was a very important moment in his life. We had dressed him, so it was already a bit extraordinary, to find himself in the director’s office—that’s not very common—and then with people he didn’t know, who didn’t speak the same language… - Patricia: he was trembling, it was crazy, he was trembling… - Eric: he was trembling but he wasn’t crying; for me, my first feeling is that he was a very courageous boy, with whom, for that matter, I was completely in sympathy. I didn’t tell myself ‘this is my son’ either, but right away I found him courageous, admirable. And then, you know, when you go… you’re not proud, you tell yourself, let’s hope he likes us; we adopt him but he adopts us too. (…)
The questions I asked myself before the adoption were the following: am I sure enough of myself to go and fetch a child, make him my son, and be capable of loving him? It’s to take it on like a responsible man, but also to love him like my son.”
Eric attributes to Simon from the outset qualities reputed to be masculine—courage, self-control—that compel the father’s admiration for his son. For himself, “to take it on” in this context is both to demonstrate responsibility and love.
Love for one’s children, traditionally attributed to mothers, enters more and more into the social representations of modern fathers. It seems that adoptive fathers are more than others ready to speak of it, more apt to voice their emotions.
To become a father is also to be adopted by the child, as Eric points out. Adoptive fathers are attentive to the least sign giving them the assurance that they are desired as fathers. Gérald (42, nurse) does not content himself with watching for the signs of the child’s approval at the meeting; he provokes them: “She came to see us, we were in the director’s office, and the lawyer introduced us. He said to her ‘here is a papa and a mama who have come to see you,’ and she said ‘with a big brother.’
“‘Yes, that’s right, we’re a papa and a mama and a brother indeed, but, well, we live in France, and here you are in Bulgaria’—it was being translated simultaneously—‘and if you want to come with us, we’ll be your papa and your mama, and your big brother; you have to tell us so.’ So she said ‘yes, da,’ and I said ‘but da doesn’t mean anything, you have to say something else,’ so she put her arms around me and she said ‘yes, Papa.’ (silence).”
For Gérald, as for many others, adoptive parents must do more than others, prove to themselves and prove to others that they are good parents: “I have friends who have children who are magnificent, they adore them, they too have 36-hour days and not 24, etc. They too bend over backward, but they don’t have the need to reinforce bonds; we have this need to reinforce bonds, we always have examples of an adoption that isn’t always successful. And yet there are also children who haven’t succeeded in their family life in biological families, but when you’re a biological parent, you don’t think too much about that; when you’re an adoptive parent you think about that. It’s true that the bond—we need to build it. It’s true that we lay it on a little, we build it day by day.”
To conclude, I would like to underscore that adoptive Jewish fathers are, in the end, rather little different from other Jewish fathers. Their difference resides essentially in their experience (but this is also true of adoptive mothers). They have likewise been led to make explicit, to put into words, more than others, the manner in which their paternity was to be constructed. They have been accustomed to rendering accounts to adoption institutions as well as to religious institutions, once they have undertaken procedures to have the Jewishness of their children recognized.
Conscious of the weight that bears upon their shoulders in matters of transmission, one could say that they are Jewish mothers like the others! More seriously, if the distribution of masculine and feminine roles and statuses within contemporary families tends to become undifferentiated, adoptive families seem to be ahead in this process. In all cases, their experience contributes to shifting the boundaries between groups, to shaping representations, to opening onto otherness. This child, at the start a stranger to the family lineage and to the historical collectivity that the Jews are28, becomes the closest there could be: the child of his parents, of his family, of his people.
Let us, to finish, give the word to this father, a Jewish traditionalist and observant: “Judaism isn’t simply eating kosher, it’s a way of respecting people whether they’re Jewish or not, it’s respecting the shopkeeper when he gives back the change and makes a mistake. It’s quite a few things like that. And the thing on which adoption has had an influence is on our vision of the outside, of non-Jews. Often when one is among Jews, one often speaks of goy. And goy is a pejorative term, and ever since the children were converted I can no longer stand the word goy, it’s unbearable to me. Not that I fear the search for origins, and that I fear that one day a child will say to me ‘I’m a goy, I’m not a Jew.’ But because I believe that one must respect goys as much as one must respect Jews. Moreover, we should have had this view before having converted children, because in the parasha, at the Exodus from Egypt, God’s message is ‘you shall treat the stranger fairly, for you yourself were a stranger in the land of Egypt.’ That teaches us that with the goyim one must be as just as with the Jews.”
As we see, for fathers as for mothers, the experience of adoption transforms the representations of the world.
Notes
This research on adoption in a Jewish milieu was carried out on the basis of a sociological survey, which I conducted from 2001 to 2008, among adoptive parents, religious and institutional figures in charge of adoption, in France and in Israel. I also gathered three life stories of young women who had been adopted as children. See Construire la parenté, déconstruire les frontières (Constructing Kinship, Deconstructing Boundaries), forthcoming.↩︎
Rivon Krygier (ed.), La loi juive à l’aube du XXIe siècle (Jewish Law at the Dawn of the 21st Century), Biblieurope, 1999, “Judéité, matrilinéarité et patrilinéarité : quelle ligne suivre ?” R. Krygier, p. 167 and 168. See also, in the same work, the article by Shaye J.D. Cohen: “Le fondement historique de la matrilinéarité juive.”↩︎
This is notably the case in the discourse of a number of rabbis, including non-Orthodox ones. But one frequently finds these representations outside the rabbinic world alone.↩︎
Françoise Héritier-Augé, Masculin / Féminin, II, la pensée de la différence (Masculine / Feminine, II, The Thought of Difference), Odile Jacob, 1996.↩︎
Tractate Megillah (13A) then tractate Sanhedrin (19B).↩︎
See D. Pollack, M. Bleich, C.J. Reid, and M.H. Fadel, “Classical Religious Perspectives of Adoption Law” in Notre Dame Law Review, Vol. 79, No. 2, February 2004, 693–753. See also Schachter Melech (Rabbi Dr.), “Various Aspects Of Adoption,” The Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society, vol. IV, 1982.↩︎
Which is very much the majority case today; the adoption of Jewish children is exceptional, including in Israel, where international adoption is quantitatively more significant than national adoption.↩︎
Interview with Rabbi Assous (2001) and with parents having made a request for conversion (successful or not) to the Beth Din of Paris.↩︎
The same is asked of mothers, apart from the mode of shaving, the study, and the systematic attendance at the synagogue. By contrast, they will have to present themselves before the Beth Din with their heads covered if possible, and will have to be dressed in a “modest” manner. They are questioned about the blessings to be said on the occasion of daily gestures, but also about the commandments that are supposed to concern them specifically: Sabbath candles, kashrut, and the rules relating to sexual relations (Taara).↩︎
Interview with Rabbi Rivon Krygier (2001) and testimonies of parents who converted their children in the Masorti community.↩︎
Interview with Rabbi Gabriel Farhi (2001) and testimonies of adoptive parents affiliated with the MJLF.↩︎
The law of January 1, 2005, allows parents to give the child either the father’s name, or the mother’s name, or both joined together. It seems that this change has not profoundly transformed the traditions of naming, notably in a Jewish milieu.↩︎
For reasons of anonymity, the first names of the persons who participated in the survey have been changed.↩︎
Half of the children in the survey carried out in France (14 out of 29) bear, as a first name, a name of Hebrew origin.↩︎
See, on these questions, the text by Françoise Zonabend, “Pourquoi nommer ?” [“Why Name?”], in Claude Lévi-Strauss, L’identité (Identity), PUF, coll. Quadrige, 1995.↩︎
Words are deceptive, and the adopted child is also someone’s biological child, but not that of his legal or social parents.↩︎
This is what the MJLF website specifies in a passage on marriage: www.mjlf.org/redirection.htm?name=plateforme.asp?link=true↩︎
Susan Martha Kahn, Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel, Duke University Press, 2004.↩︎
Let us note the polysemy of the word recognition. To recognize oneself in a child, and to legally recognize a child at the civil registry.↩︎
Of the whole set of boys in the survey, only one, of a non-Jewish father and a mother herself born of a mixed marriage, is not circumcised.↩︎
Representations are very much influenced by a biologistic vision of filiation. See my forthcoming article “Adopter et transmettre en milieu juif,” in Actes du colloque EHESS des 4 et 5 juin 2009 Changements familiaux, changements religieux.↩︎
Often historically confessional.↩︎
Aide Sociale à l’Enfance [Child Welfare Services]. It is the ASE that handles the approval procedures of parents who are candidates for adoption and that may entrust to parents holding an approval children who are wards of the State. However, the adoption of wards, generally born in France, is strongly in the minority—about 800 in 2006 in France for 4,000 international adoptions—and in constant decline. As a result, the criteria for selecting the parents who can benefit from it are extremely rigorous and not necessarily clearly identifiable.↩︎
Let us recall that, from a halakhic point of view, secrecy is totally proscribed.↩︎
Only one couple I met adopted, for explicitly humanitarian reasons, two Rwandan children following the genocide of 1994.↩︎
See my article “Du désir de procréation à la décision d’adopter,” in Revue des sciences sociales, Strasbourg, no. 41, Désirs de famille, désirs d’enfant, 2009, p. 52–63. In this article I call into question the concept of mourning for the biological child, which seems to me abusive, notably as a condition for setting in motion an adoption project, and which I would not take up here.↩︎
Fine Agnès (ed.), Adoptions - Ethnologie des parentés choisies (Adoptions - Ethnology of Chosen Kinships), Paris, Édition de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1998, p. 1.↩︎
I borrow the concept of historical collectivity from the sociologist Dominique Schnapper, La relation à l’autre – au cœur de la pensée sociologique (The Relation to the Other – At the Heart of Sociological Thought), Paris, Gallimard, (nrf essais), 1998.↩︎