Arguably, mixed families with less-than-strict observance are not the best Jews around, but their children can return to Judaism. To strip them of Jewish identity is counterproductive. The practice runs at odds with the historical norm, when Jews married Gentiles and converted them on the spot just before marriage. Joseph married an Egyptian priest’s daughter—obviously, she didn’t convert, but their children started two Jewish tribes.

Rabbis decry missionary work and discourage newcomers to Judaism. There’s no reason to doubt the gospel evidence of pharisaic rabbis being active missionaries. The later anti-missionary attitude is unwarranted: why not spread the message? Rabbis restrict proselytizing in order to maintain a monopoly over the flock: presumably, newcomers are more diverse in their opinions because they lack Jewish tradition. The concern is valid: look at Afro-American “Jews” to see the kind of Judaism we don’t want.
But the diversity problem can be addressed by standard halachic means of different status. There’s a Talmudic ban on proselytes marrying born Jews: only after the converts have proven their adherence for a generation do they become eligible to marry Jews. Orthodox Jews usually set stricter standards and refuse the convert’s descendants for several generations. Despite that rule, it was common for Jewish males to marry local Gentile females and have them converted.

Another possible status for converts is that of God-fearers, semi-Jews who accept only basic commandments—which is still better than conservative Jews today

Of course, we don’t want the entire Sudan converting to Judaism in order to move to Israel. Converts can only be allowed in the West Bank, and also Jordan and Sinai after we annex them. Or, converts and their descendants for four generations might not be eligible for immigration to Israel.
Practical differences can be solved, but we need more Jews. Ethnic diversity is not a problem, as Israel has admitted Arab and African Jews. In the modern world, monotheistic Judaism with a strictly incorporeal God appeals to a huge audience. As faithless Jews leave Judaism, other people can embrace our faith. More adherents strengthen Judaism and Israel, and must be welcomed, even sought.

Monotheism has become universal: even Hindus and Buddhists tend to profess a belief in a supreme deity, to which others are subservient like angels. Christians declare their monotheism and treat the purported divine hypostases as emanations, not unlike some Jewish concepts.

Dire atheists embrace Shabbat—and also Sunday, and the 35-hour working week. They might not follow the rabbinical law with its myriad Shabbat regulations, but they refuse to work on weekends with the zeal of an ultra-Orthodox Jew.

Vegetarians surpass kosher laws in their concern for animal life, and modern meat processors cause less animal suffering than Jewish Shehita slaughter.

Contemporary rules of warfare are more humane than the Jewish ones, if only in theory, and modern treatment of criminals does not fail the Torah’s strict safeguards.

And there are some Jewish laws which cannot be realistically practiced: a lamb from every Israeli family, even one from every ten families, would translate into more than a hundred thousand animals slaughtered in the Temple during Pesach, which is impossible for any slaughterhouse.

Haredi Jews strive to remain distinct, with their odd look and myriad observances unrelated to the Torah. What about the rest of us? What specifically Jewish things does God want us to do?

There is no secret: God told us repeatedly what is expected from Jews. We have to make a particular country holy. Judaism is a land-centered religion. Religious practice in itself is pointless: Saudis and Iranians practice much more of the Torah than a typical Jew from San Francisco. We need to establish, so to say, a beachhead for God on earth, his kingdom. Yes, it would be a fundamentalist state which proscribes homosexuals, sort of like Iran only smarter. But the great difference is that that state would be located on this very special land and populated by God’s very special people. No less than Sabbath and kashrut, we have the commandment to conquer a state from Suez to Litani and from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates. It is likewise a commandment to expel the land’s non-Jewish inhabitants.
French Christians are only different from Spanish ones in that they are French rather than Spanish. For thousands of years, Jews held different values and observances from the rest of the world. Our ancestors could remain Jewish while living in Poland. Not anymore. Today, Jews can share their value system with many peoples, and can only differentiate ourselves by living in our land.

After we conquer it, cleanse it, and make it secure.

The most important factor was the rabbis’ accepting attitude. We have no reason to doubt the gospel’s account of rabbis “traversing sea and earth to find a single convert.” That activity was complemented with the special status of God-fearers, semi-Jews who accepted a few basic commandments—many more than a typical Reform “rabbi.” The concept of a semi-Jew is rooted in the Torah: the gerim—the word is grossly mistranslated as “strangers”—were just such quasi-converts. They were forbidden pagan practices and more or less everything else prohibited to Jews.

It was not only the Temple’s destruction that enabled the Pharisaic rabbis to succeed over the Sadducean Temple priests; the Essenes, a similarly Temple-conscious sect, survived without the Temple. The rabbis managed to draw wealthy and influential pagans as God-fearers, and thus became the Jewish voice in the pagan world. Eventually the rabbis expanded their position from being Jewish representatives in official pagan circles to also being the empire’s representatives to the Jews. Thus rabbinical Judaism became the official sect recognized by pagan powers.

In the modern world, rabbis have taken political place of the Sadducees: ultra-conservative and unwilling to expand Judaism, in the Diaspora they fall behind the Reform movement. That situation is especially regrettable when the world is poised to embrace Judaism. Even among Christians, plenty of people question the anthropomorphous father-son relationship and prefer to worship an abstract God without images. They will not become Jewish, but a lot of them can embrace basic commandments which, according to the letter of the gospels, are also binding on Christians.

The unholy merger between the rabbinical establishment and the state—which was decried by Rambam—merged the religious and political definitions of Jewishness. Rabbis fought for their right to determine Jewishness, but the backside of it is that any adherent of Judaism is allowed into Israel. Thus we’ve got 140,000 Ethiopians here. Even supposing they truly adhere to Judaism, which most of them do not, they cannot be considered Jewish in a national-political sense. Fearing a massive influx of third-world immigrants into Israel, rabbis put unreasonable strictures on conversion.

Rather, a distinction should be made between Jewish people and adherents to Judaism. Rabbis recognized that distinction and banned proselytes from marrying Jews. Converts should be encouraged and Jewish efforts at proselytism expanded. We need more supporters around the world. If they don’t want to circumcise, fine, recognize them as God-fearers. After four generations, when they lose their pagan roots, then adherents can become Jewish. Those who have been with us for four generations can be considered a part of our people.

This both simplifies and restricts intermarriage. Suppose we return to an earlier rabbinical practice, without basis in the Torah, which regarded children of intermarriage as dubiously Jewish and allowed them to marry other such questionable Jews only. This way, all intermarried families are legalized without conversion, but for one to four generations they can only marry among themselves. Once their commitment to Jewish life is time-tested, they are welcome. This might not be the most just treatment, but it is perhaps the simplest and most workable on a large scale.

In rabbinical tradition, Jewishness is matrilineal while clan affiliation is patrilineal. This leaves an “interfaith” family without a clan and, consequently, with no land to settle in. The assumption that “interfaith” families settled in the land of the wife’s clan is impractical: she did not inherit the land and physically had no place to live in. Women went to live in their husband’s clan’s tents; the suggestion that a man moves into the home of his wife’s clan amounts to matriarchy, which is alien to the Jewish Bedouin mind. Such an arrangement for mixed families would put intermarried women at an advantage compared to their properly married sisters: an intermarried sister would have gotten a land plot while the one married to a Jew would not. The Torah cannot mean to prescribe such an unjust arrangement.

Sages accepted patrilineal descent for all other nations. Rashi cites Kiddushin 67b: “A son follows his father” to assert the originally patrilineal descent. Also, the Pharaoh ordered the killing of Jewish boys rather than girls when he sought to extinguish the people. Rabbis counter without much proof that Jewishness was patrilineal, as it was with other nations, until the law was given on Sinai. That contradicts their other doctrine that the forefathers observed the law before it was given to the entire people; never mind that the forefathers married pagans unreservedly.

In practice, Jewish women certainly married the strangers who settled in the Land of Israel and adopted Jewish customs. They lived in towns without inheriting land plots, or they rented them. If the male stranger (ger) observed Judaism, their children were Jewish, according to their father’s new religion. If the woman married a non-observant foreigner (toshav), their children obviously followed the father’s religion. To all practical purposes, Jewishness was patrilineal.

The Jews-by-father were frowned upon: Leviticus 25:45 distinguishes between “your brother” and “someone rooted in ger’s family.” The skeptical attitude is unsurprising: landless converts-gerim were likely to take off and leave Israel along with Judaism. After a few generations, the descendants of gerim fully assimilated and often attained significant positions in Jewish society.

In rabbinical Judaism, the entry into Jewishness is religious while the exit is biological. Religious conversion is required to enter the nation, but the children of baptized Jews are considered Jewish. A more consistent definition would be, “Children of somewhat Jewish families are Jewish.” A foreign woman who marries a Jew and casts her lot with the Israelis—her children are Jewish. The self-hating Peace Now Jews cannot impart the Jewish soul into their children.

The issue of government funding is never clear cut. Is it moral to pay for infrastructural projects while the same money can directly save lives if invested in healthcare? At least, such questions pit Jewish life versus the quality of Jewish life. Often enough, it is Jewish life versus the quality of the others’ lives.

The Torah law is straightforward: we only aid fellow Jews and proselytes (gerim, which is often mistranslated as strangers). The legist does not indulge in political correctness. We don’t need his omniscience to understand that any money devoted to foreign causes is money taken from Jewish ones. In effect, aiding foreigners means robbing Jews.

This logic is particularly relevant to Jewish charity organizations, whose donors count on their money being spent for Jewish causes. Robbery or breach of trust, you choose. The charities often misrepresent that their large, politically motivated donors are content with aiding foreigners. In truth, the large donors are really small. For many years the Bronfmans posed as the financial pillar of the World Jewish Congress, which allowed the alcohol manufacturers great financial clout. Not long ago, internal strife in the WJC brought out the ugly fact that Bronfman donations accounted for only a small percentage of the budget, with most of the money coming from the very small donations of hard-working Jews. Had they wished to support foreign causes, they had plenty of appropriate charities to give to. The fact that they gave money to Jewish charities confirms beyond doubt their intention to subsidize Jewish causes only.

The rabbis expanded the law a bit. First they allowed foreign visitors to Jewish towns to benefit from local charity—but only after Jewish needs were satisfied. Perhaps that was their tongue-in-cheek way of saying, “never.”

The Exile necessitated further expansion: Jewish charity funds were made available for gentile neighbors. Permission for this was nominal at best: in their closed communities, Jews rarely interacted with gentiles on social matters. More important is the rabbinical reasoning behind the permission: we only give money to gentile paupers lest they harm us. The harm might stem from the paupers themselves or from their communities.

The criterion for aiding the foreign poor is this: they will harm us unless we aid them. Thus, we don’t give money to nations at war with us (like Indonesian tsunami aid), neutral nations (like Brazil), those unable to realize their hostility (like Poland), or nations where we don’t fear violence even if we refuse donations to local gentile causes (like the United States). Certainly we should not donate to Israeli Arabs. If there is the slightest reason for Jews to fear them, the commandment tells us to expel them.

Charity to hostile gentiles is appeasement at best, extortion at worst. The rabbinical view on extortion is clear: we don’t ransom Jewish hostages because that endangers other Jews. Channeling Jewish charity funds to Israeli Arabs increases their demands and induces them to stay in Israel, endangering many Jews. A strong Jewish state has no reason to submit to extortionists.

Jewish charity to others is immoral, as it leaves needy Jews without aid. Hundreds of Jewish organizations aid thousands of irrelevant causes while many American Jewish families cannot afford to send their children to Jewish schools. To me—indeed, to any normal Jew—a Jewish child’s education is more important than any number of people left homeless by the tsunami in Muslim Indonesia. Consider the impropriety of taking money from the United States government and pro-Israeli Christian organizations while spending Jewish money on Muslims and pagans.

If that sounds rude, think of the good Christians who bequest their money to specifically Christian causes, from churches to orphanages. The exclusion is offensive; inclusion is not. It would be offensive, though not necessarily wrong, for a Christian to be willing to help any group except Jews, or for a Jewish charity to aid anyone but Poles. It is normal to benefit one’s own: Christians help Christians, and Jews help Jews.

Aiding one’s own is charity’s raison d’etre: we help those who are statistically likely to help us.

Likewise, Jewish leftists want to imagine a new Jewish nation rising up in the colonized land of Israel, where tsabra Jews differ from their ghetto ancestors. Not in the least. The frightened Exile mentality didn’t go anywhere: from the mass grave-digging before our surprising victory in the war in 1967 to life in Sderot under fire. Jews take being murdered for granted, and submit to the governments complicit in their murder. Public mood swings from the desire to kill as many Palestinians as possible when military operations are successful to the desire to abandon them in their own state after major, if isolated, terrorist attacks. This is a typically Jewish bipolar disorder on a national scale.

Besides history, Jews have a rational reason for the continued ghetto mentality: in Israel, they are as insecure as in any Polish ghetto. Probably they are much less secure because there is no authority to intervene, if belatedly, in the worst-case scenario. Despite of its reputation as the fourth-strongest army in the world, IDF suffers from a major deficiency which devalues it to the level of a Belgian militia: the lack of staying power. Bereft of Sinai and soon of the Golan Heights, Israel simply lacks depth of defense. In modern mobile war, Jews cannot afford to lose a single battle, or they risk being wiped out. Size does matter, and minuscule Israel besieged by enemies is essentially a mega-ghetto.

In the open world, one cannot keep Jews Jewish forcibly like in the ghettos. The last time the world was open was the time of the Roman Empire: Jews could freely move out from Judea and settle safely just about anywhere. At that time, Judea had to compromise on the strictness of religious law in order to retain its Jewish population. Now that mobility is even higher, enforcing any values is not an option. For the first time, the Jews who remain attached to God will do so truly of their own volition.

Those Jews will be different, the first Jews to lose our Exile mentality.

As recently as a hundred years ago, giyur was unheard of in Jewish communities: anyone who wished to take in a gentile or Muslim spouse just did so with very few formalities. Many countries prohibited conversion to Judaism, but intermarriages still happened and the rabbinical position was unequivocal: no long-term conversion is necessary. Indeed, a long-term conversion process would have been impossible: a Muslim bride cannot practice observing Jewish law for several years in her parents’ house, but also cannot move in with her Jewish groom until marriage.

The Torah solved the issue of conversion with truly divine simplicity: conversion by settling. Everyone who lives in the Jewish state must observe Jewish laws. Whatever the immigrant’s beliefs are, he is only allowed to worship God. He must partake in Jewish wars, abstain from work on Shabbat, food on Yom Kippur, and leaven on Pesach. Immigrants were similar to Jews in the basic aspects of Jewish religious law. That explains the Torah’s repeated calls to love the stranger: he is similar to Jews and must be dealt with likewise.

Ancient rabbis also encountered a less than idyllic situation. In their times pagan settlements dotted the Holy Land, and many immigrants flouted Jewish religious obligations. The rabbis chose the path of the least regulation: they simply allowed proselytes to marry their kind only. Tellingly, the rabbis also allowed them to marry illegitimate-born Jews; to the rabbis, the proselytes’ Jewishness was similarly questionable. After a generation of living as Jews, the proselytes fully assimilated and received all the rights: the prominent rabbinical leaders Shemaya and Avtalion descended from pagans.

So the real problem is not the hundreds of thousands of Slavs in Israel, but the millions of Jews. Both must be made to observe the basic laws of Judaism. As long as Jews-by-grandfather are willing to live by our laws, they are more than welcome.

The Torah recognizes a semi-Jew status. Bastards cannot “enter the assembly of the Lord” even if both their parents are Jewish. Likewise, Moabites cannot enter the assembly even in the tenth generation (Deut23:4), which implies that they can live among Jews for generations without assimilating. Egyptians can enter the community in the third generation (v.9) of living among Jews.

The conversion formula is laid down in Ruth: “For where you go, I will go; and where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” Note the staggering difference from the rabbinical conversion: joining the Jewish people is put before attaching oneself to God; nationalism precedes religion. Move to Israel, live in Israel, share in the life of the people of Israel, and only then become somewhat religious. I say, “Somewhat” because accepting God as the king does not necessarily mean accepting the yoke of the commandments. Rabbis recognized such lower status when they proselytized to numerous God-fearers in antiquity. In our time, recognizing Israeli gentiles as God-fearers can solve the problem of conversion.

The rabbinical approach of limiting the inflow of converts with unrealistically high demands of religious observance is literally murderous. All closed tribes perish—look at the Native Indians. In the open world, many people live in tribes, and the only way for them to persist is to bring new members in. A closed tribe usually dwindles in absolute numbers and always dwindles relative to the population of the rest of the world. It takes only 1.5% intermarriage on the part of American gentiles to rack up intermarriage rate among American Jews to 100%. By recognizing the rule of maternal lineage as wrong we can immediately double the number of potential Jews in the world. By relaxing the Jewish observance to Torah—accepting the Oral Torah rather than the heap of modern halacha and outdated ethical norms—we can bring in millions of converts attracted by the Jewish concept of abstract monotheism. Then let individual Jews decide who is a good Jew for them. In a couple of generations those who adopted bad definitions would assimilate and cease to identify as Jews. The good definitions will proliferate and explode the numbers of Jews.

The rabbis further mused that we won’t accept converts in messianic times because nations will see the power of the God of Israel and convert for practical reasons rather than faith. Note that faith only exists when definite proof is lacking. Classical commentators would have definitely categorized our time as messianic fulfillment of the return to Zion. Thus, conversion today is either banned or at least highly suspicious.

Jews are not only a religion but also a nation. We don’t need a British supreme court decision to know this. Leading rabbis recently embraced the position on in vitro fertilization that we had held all along: IVF children belong to the egg donor’s nation rather than to the bearing woman. That’s a sharp statement of Jewishness being defined biologically through bloodline. As the British court noted correctly, Jewishness is an ethnic trait because it is passed automatically from parent to child. Where the court went wrong, by the way, is ignoring the fact that Christian babies are baptized too early for any possibility of their consent, and Christianity by that standard is also an ethnicity, thus Christian schools are guilty of the same “racial” discrimination the court alleged on the part of Jewish schools.

We must add that Jewishness is also a matter of a common historical path. Jews were persecuted in Morocco just as in Poland and rounded for Nazi extermination in Tunisia just as in the Ukraine.

Every nation is defined in no small part by how it is viewed by foreigners. Jews, at the very least, are viewed as smart and educated.

None of those traits can be seen in the Hindu converts to Judaism who proclaimed themselves the descendants of the tribe of Menashe. Forget for a moment that real Bnei Menashe live near us: they are Samaritans with their beautiful biblical Hebrew, their original performance of rites, and attachment to this land, which they have never abandoned. The Hindus lack our culture, history, work ethics, education, and brains—they are not us. Fine, they are good converts who have practiced our religion for 50 years; we don’t charge royalties. Does anyone in his right mind imagine that they converted because abstract monotheism is intellectually superior to their pagan beliefs? They didn’t know the word “intellect” then, and might not know it now. Neither did they convert out of admiration for the Jewish people who persevered in their beliefs for four thousand years until the reform movement came along. They simply, followed yet another preacher who happened to preach Judaism. They would have embraced enlightened cannibalism no less eagerly.

A great danger is ahead. Some six billion people on earth are dirt poor compared to Israelis. Certainly, they are even poorer compared to the Americans, but one cannot convert to Americanism. Worse than being poor, they are credulous. It only takes an easy combination of a zealous Jewish preacher and the Jewish Agency’s lust for aliyah to put millions of converts at our doorstep. Political parties would only welcome new voters: right-wing parties would welcome them because paupers are generally conservative, and the left-wing would embrace them because paupers’ votes can be bought cheaply with subsidies. The problem is, the converts would observe Jewish rituals very properly and even with the zeal expected of newcomers. They won’t be economic converts per se. Certainly, they won’t have converted into the religion of a people poorer than themselves, and snobbishness regarding rich and famous Jewish people clearly played a role. But their conversion is ultimately kosher because they responded to a fiery rabbi. Two thousand years ago, when religious cynicism overtook the world and logistical and informational advances resembled our own time, hordes of pharisaic rabbis roamed gentile lands in search of converts. On a side note, the converts often were affluent and influential, and supported rabbinism to become a dominant movement in Judaism, eventually the only movement recognized by foreign governments. With the number of orthodox Jews in Israel standing at a mere 600,000, rabbis will find it hard to resist an easy opportunity to double their flocks. After the Bnei Menashe affair, nothing stops them in religious or political terms.

The answer is this: adherents to Judaism are not necessarily Jews. If they lack a biological or cultural affinity with our nation we need not bow down to political correctness and consider them as Jewish as Polish mamas. Their conversion is a great thing. Now let them worship God for two thousand years in foreign lands as we did. Let them feel others’ hatred yet persevere in their faith. Let them study well and outsmart others in every generation to survive in hostile environments. Let them serve as a light to the nations as Satmar shines in New York. Let them be our peripheral strategy, a source of Israeli strength and influence in their lands.

But they must not be allowed to immigrate to Israel.

The goal now is to jump off the ship and not sink along with it. Israel makes many American Jews uncomfortable as she reminds them of their own unwelcome roots. Their conscious choice—to normalize Israel by making her as liberal and peaceful as America—is based on their subconscious wish that Israel cease to exist. By connecting Israel to American Jewry, Israelis subject themselves to untold political pressures.

More importantly, American Jews act as a beacon to post-Zionist Israeli Jews. If Jews can live outside Israel, be respected, and dictate US policies, then it would be sensible to move from Israel to America. Decadence is sweet, and assimilated American Jews draw their Israeli brethren. So far, America has not used its major weapon against Israel—immigration policy. The day the United States opens its borders to Israelis, our demography will change radically.

This will happen unless Israel decries foreign assimilation in the strongest terms, abandons ties with Jewish organizations that tolerate interfaith families, and tells her youth that they can be Jews in Israel, or good people in America, but never both.

People are not only a stomach, but also a brain. Not only brain, but also heart. Not only I, but We. I wouldn’t like a person who insults me continually, much less someone who insults us. The Bible says, “Love your neighbor,” but a neighbor is one who deviates from accepted ways along with you, not one who abandons you to join the accepted ways. Had I been born just a few years earlier, I would have had two chances out of three to end up in a gas chamber—and I’m very sensitive to Jews who finish the Nazis’ job. Such people remain Jewish, but they are Jewish criminals. Had they murdered an old lady, I would have helped them evade prosecution, but they murder the Jews in themselves, in their children and grandchildren. And there is no room for tolerance.