Pedro Lilienfeld

What is a Jew? A recent family conversation has elicited this question. The answer is far from simple and has been a subject of disputation since time immemorial. One simple answer is that a Jew is someone who considers himself/herself as such. But that skirts the issue. Is Jewishness a religious classification, an ethnic grouping, a genetic trait, a social categorization? I will not attempt to address this quandary by reciting the arguments and disquisitions that can be read in books, learned papers, internet websites, including a long Wikipedia entry entitled, indeed, “Who is a Jew?”. I may, however, take the liberty to refer to some particularly relevant paragraphs of this rather exhaustive entry.

My own views on this matter have been conditioned by my life’s experiences and my family’s influence and beliefs (or rather absence of beliefs) and principally, my observations of friends and acquaintances. My family considered itself as Jewish, both on my paternal and maternal sides. The flight from their ancestral Germany was, unequivocally, a response to the pervasive antisemitism of the German Nazi government that took over in 1933.

Religion played essentially no role in that family Jewishness. From my father’s side, he and his father were freethinkers, i.e., non believers. My paternal grandmother, Dola, and her second husband, Luis Fourestier, embraced theosophism, religiously unrelated to Judaism. On my maternal side, my mother was a nonbeliever and her father, Erich Anker, was not religious but had attended temple rituals at high holidays in Berlin, before emigrating.

So, what was my family’s tie to Jewishness? It was primarily a matter of genealogy. We all descended of Jews, as far back as could be ascertained. This, to me, reflects an ethnic character to the identification of being Jewish. Here, we tread on a shifting sand characterization. It implies that being Ashkenazi Jews, our genetic makeup is predominantly — but not exclusively — Jewish, i.e., descended from Jews of the early Diaspora created by the Roman expulsion from Palestine, 2000 years ago. Genetic admixtures had to have occurred, however, especially in my maternal ancestry; my mother was blond when young and had striking blue eyes, her cousin, Gerhard Anker, had a distinctly “Arian” appearance. Jews were, however, genetically rather inbred as they lived, predominantly, in social isolation for almost two millennia. Even before the Diaspora, Israelites had tended to isolate themselves from the surrounding peoples.

In the U.S. there has been the tendency to classify people by their religious affiliation. You are either Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, Mormon, or Moslem, etc. And so, being Jewish has often been equated to being a member of another such religious affiliation. That is a fundamental error. We Jews, are not simply another religious group. I call that an attempt at “Protestanization” of Jewishness. We are descendants of a people who happened to have been tied together by a set of religious beliefs which, sometimes, diverged in their ritual and behavioral aspects. Jews have been — and still are — grouped according to their origin. Ashkenazi Jews are predominantly those who had settled in Western Europe during the Roman Empire and then drifted toward Eastern Europe as they were persecuted and expelled from countries like England, France and what was to become Germany.

Sephardic Jews had settled in Spain and Portugal during the early phases of the Diaspora and flourished there until their expulsion at the end of the 15th century, after which they settled in North Africa, Italy, Greece and Turkey. Many Sephardim speak ladino, also known as Judeo-Spanish, derived from Old Spanish, the language spoken in most of Spain at the time of the Edict of Expulsion against the Jews in 1492. To a modern Spanish speaker, ladino is nearly fully understandable.

Another geographic separation within the Ashkenazis was, and is, to be noted: Eastern European vs. Western European Jews. That distinction became more pronounced after Jewish emancipation/assimilation in the West at the beginning of the 19th century. Those in the East, especially in several of the the countries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia remained isolated in so called “shtetl” (from a diminutive of the German word Stadt, city), pious communities following Orthodox Judaism. Western Jews then tended to look down on those of the East because of the more advanced cultural level attained by the former as a result of incorporation into the gentile society. I experienced that separation while living in Quito, there was a clear split between the two groups, even within the exceedingly small Jewish community of that city. My family spoke about “Ostjuden” (Eastern Jews) with a certain degree of benevolent contempt. There were, indeed, some illiterate Jewish families in Quito originating from Bessarabia, a region in eastern Europe, now divided between Moldova and Ukraine.

As far as the religiosity of those who classify themselves as Jews, the range of variability is truly enormous, larger than that of any other religious affiliation. Adherence to religious rules ranges from thorough atheism to Ultra-orthodoxy. This, to me, is symptomatic of the ethnic nature of Jewishness, i.e., you belong to a people regardless of the religious aspect. The Haredim, as the Ultra-orthodox are called, live a life that is totally disconnected from modern reality; a listing of their prescriptions, proscriptions, rituals, behavioral characteristics, beliefs, etc. would be too lengthy within this writing and places them outside of the rest of society. As far as I’m concerned, they could belong to an alien civilization. Among my acquaintances, including some members of my family, belonging to the Jewish community implied principally a social requirement. You acknowledged Jewishness by being a member of a temple. Within that dictum, people adhered to a range of rituals and rules, chacun à son goût, as the French would say. My mother’s cousin, Gerhard Anker, only abstained from eating pork but, otherwise, ate all non-kosher food. We have friends who aim to be strictly kosher with all its rules and constraints but may not be ‘religious’ as far as beliefs are concerned. My maternal grandfather, Erich Anker, attended a Berlin temple at high holidays, as I have mentioned, but had no dietary constraints. My parents did not participate in any rituals and never attended any temple services. Similarly, Evelyn and I have neither religious nor social links to Jewishness, but acknowledge our descent from Jews.

So, what is the answer to the question of who is a Jew? To me, it is simply and acknowledgement of Jewish ancestry but to the majority of Jews the requirements are more involved ranging, as I have mentioned above, from mere temple membership, all the way, to ritual ultra-orthodoxy.