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.

The Germans introduced the Nuremberg laws for the purpose of oppressing the Jews. The laws did not protect German racial purity at all, but dealt only with sexual relations with Jews. In the framework of the Nuremberg laws, “Aryans” could legally marry blacks, Arabs, Slavs, and just about anyone except Jews.
Aryan racial purity is a science fiction, as in many districts of Germany the core population is not Nordic or Germanic. Bavarians, for example, lack the facial features and character traits the Nazis attributed to the Nordic archetype. The population of Germany intermarried for millennia, and racial purity does not exist there.

If the Germans believed that racial purity was a viable objective, they had every right to achieve it by consent. A German doesn’t have to marry a Jew. Some ideas and national objectives are enforced on populations without their consent, but at least such an idea must justify the oppression. A fictitious racial issue doesn’t pass such a test.

Jewish strife over intermarriage is a different case. The strife does not single out any group for oppression; it is a struggle for rather than against. For Jews, not against gentiles. The difference should be obvious, but here are a few examples. Positive ads (buy this product) are okay, while negative ads (don’t buy from that manufacturer) are very offensive. Preferring locally-made products (Made in USA) is fine, while boycotting a particular country is a last resort. A Jewish girl who rejects specifically the option of marrying an Arab is nationalistic at best, but a girl who wants to marry only a Jew is perfectly ethical.

Unlike the aforementioned science fiction, Judaism is a real thing. It is not an issue of theism or atheism. Most hard-core atheists of Jewish origin accept the significant value of Judaism. In other words, I don’t like modernist paintings but I accept that they’re valuable, if only in the monetary terms. Judaism is a real thing at the very least in a cultural sense. If firemen risk their lives saving modernist paintings from a burning museum, then surely Judaism is worth introducing some restraints into one’s life.

States conscript their populations and send them to wars, often of pure aggression, sometimes of defense against non-lethal threats. Invaders usually do not seek extermination, but only political and cultural dominance. So people die en masse defending themselves against political and cultural encroachment. That modus operandi of all states is universally accepted. Besides the religious issues, intermarriage represents a political and cultural assault on Jewishness, and must be resisted similarly to any invasion. Just as states force their citizens to oppose invaders, so the state of Israel can force her Jewish citizens to oppose intermarriage. Just like citizens are banned from collaborating with an invader who brings his cultural values, so citizens can be banned from marrying gentiles whose values are different from Jewish values.

The issue of Intermarriage must be clarified. Marrying a gentile who sincerely wishes to attach herself to Jews is acceptable. The details of conversion might be debated, ranging from political attachment to Orthodoxy, from de facto to de jure, but once a conversion is passed it is no longer an intermarriage, but a good Jewish marriage. Intermarriage is marrying a gentile who wishes to remain non-Jewish, and the children of such a union won’t unambiguously feel their Jewish origin. Being Jewish is hard, not so much in terms of Jewish law as in terms of Auschwitzes big and small. Jewish children must be very unambiguous about their Jewish origin.

Germans, on the other hand, rejected Jews who wanted to be good Germans. Now you can start screaming at me, because I give thanks to Nuremberg. The Germans did in Nuremberg what every decent—every less than totally indecent—rabbi would say and do: prohibited Jews from intermarriage. Oh, that was so offensive to the Jews who wanted to assimilate, to melt, to be good Germans! German Jews were assimilating rapidly, like everywhere else in Europe. If not for the Nuremberg laws, in two or three generations, German Jews would have almost entirely melted into the German nation, as they did in America and in Europe.

But they died Jewish.

Religious difference, such as Judaism, can be a source of tremendous pride, but such pride requires tremendous knowledge. Unless one is pushed to study from childhood, why would he suddenly start learning something that seems irrelevant? A few would learn, but most wouldn’t.

For most of history, Jews were pressed into being different. The very early, almost forced education, social pressures, low mobility, and universal hostility precluded them from baptizing and assimilating. When the hostility was absent, as in India, Jewish communities assimilated.

Ancient Jews were notoriously un-Jewish, and consistently provoked the prophets who lashed out against their iniquities. They bowed to idols and surely didn’t keep anything resembling the vast rabbinical law. Jews survived then by being a political entity, having their own country.

In the Exile, rabbinical law and Christian hostility preserved Jewish nation. Today, however, we cannot survive as a strictly religious entity. Christianity has already dissolved into myriad sects, and lost its significance for self-identification for most people. Jewish assimilation is not unique, but follows the Christian model. In a time of religious cynicism, religious identity cannot survive.

Our only choice is the ancient choice: a militant, highly unusual, recognizable state. Jews need a clear political identity, and this requires a clearly Jewish state with no Arabs. After becoming zealous patriots, Jews would seek to rationalize their nationalism, and adopt Judaism as the national religion. This is a sure way to preserve Jewish identity for the foreseeable future. It requires a very strong political entity.

The common argument that Israeli Slavs became Jewish by serving in IDF is mistaken. They would have served equally well in the army of anti-Semitic Russia had they stayed there. They serve in the army for the very reason they pay taxes: the state’s compulsion. They cannot claim religious reasons for draft evasion, and so they serve.

The fact of living in Israel also does not make them Jewish. Russians in Latvia hardly feel themselves to be Latvian, and Israeli Jewish symbolism and nationalism is much stronger than Latvian.
The problematic number of non-assimilated Slavs is much larger than the commonly reported figure of 300,000. That figure counts only those who are not halachic Jews and have come within the past twenty years. To be sure, some of them are practically Jewish; often, children of Jewish fathers and Gentile mothers strongly identify with Jews. There is a much more suspect group: Jews by grand- or great-grandmother. Though halachically Jewish, they do not share our identity in the least. That’s besides their frequently forged documents. Moreover, non-Jewish immigration did not start in 1988: Gentile spouses have entered our country since its inception and did so in small numbers even before then. Before the 1960s no one even bothered to verify their Jewishness; they wrote whatever they wanted on their immigration papers. They produced non-Jewish children with perfectly Jewish papers. The most conservative estimates put the total number of practically fake Jews at 800,000.

Moreover, more than 100,000 Israeli women with fertility problems received eggs from Eastern European donors; biologically, their children are completely un-Jewish. Add to these the great numbers of mamzerim, who are technically bastards ineligible for marriage because their Jewish mothers did not obtain proper divorces before remarrying. Throw in a commonly ignored rabbinical prohibition for Jews to marry converts. Consider the Torah’s prohibition against cohen—priestly descendants—marrying converts; and many cohens don’t know of their origin.

The government deliberately made the problem irresolvable by abrogating the use of religion for ID papers. Officiating rabbis desperately try to prevent assimilation by requesting all kinds of corroborating evidence from marrying couples, usually Soviet-era documents which specified religion/nationality. The second generation of Russian Israelis won’t keep their parents’ Soviet papers, and there will be no way to check their Jewishness in most cases.

Rather than distilling Jews from Israelis, we should ban non-Jewishness. The ban would equally apply to Jews and Gentiles alike. In times of old, foreigners could only reside in the Land of Israel with the status of ger, a de facto convert.

Several of the commandments exist to expunge non-Jewishness from the Land of Israel. No one can work on Shabbat or keep leaven on Pesach “in your towns,” eat blood or animals slaughtered in a non-kosher manner, or commit sexual immorality. Foreign worship, idolatrous statues, icons, and practices are proscribed from this land. Once Israel enforces the basic commandments, the problem of non-Jews would fade away. If they want to live in the Land of Israel, risk their lives, observe basic commandments, abandon foreign worship, pass for Jews, and marry Jews, then we have no reason to consider their children non-Jewish. This is not an innovation, but a return to the traditional practice, which did not know conversion but relied on de facto Jewishness.

The ger option is closed to Arabs: the Torah commands us to leave no native in the Land of Israel because they would always hate us for robbing them of their country.