Jews: Faith or Nationality?

What is a Jew? A member of a religion, a culture, a nation — or all three?

That was the old and perhaps unanswerable question faced last week by the Israeli Supreme Court. Understandably, the court preferred to sidestep the issue rather than try to give a firm answer, but the case that raised the problem did so in a particularly interesting way.

The petitioner before the judges was Benjamin Shalit, 33, a psychologist and a lieutenant commander in Israel's navy; the respondent was the Minister of the Interior. Israeli law requires all parents to register their newborn children by religion and nationality. Though a sabra (native-born Israeli), Shalit is a professed atheist, and after the birth of his children—Oren, now four, and Galia, 20 months —he tried to register them as Jews by nationality but nonbelievers by religion.

Each time the Interior Ministry refused to permit distinction between Jewish faith and Jewish nationality.

The Ministry's reasoning was based on Halakha (religious law), which says that to be considered a Jew, a person must be born of a Jewish mother or be a convert to the faith. Shalit's wife Anne is a Scottish gentile who immigrated to Israel in 1960. Like her husband, she is an atheist, and she was never converted to Judaism.

Cultural Factors. Shalit argues that the Interior Ministry had no right to use religious standards in judging the secular issue of nationality. He also maintains that as a nonbeliever he cannot be forced to adhere to a decision grounded on religious law. "It is not faith that unites us as a nation," he insists. "Too many people do not practice religion for that. The cultural and sociological factors are the ones that determine who is a Jew, not the memory of a primitive religion. My children were born in Israel, speak Hebrew, live in a Hebrew culture, will go to Hebrew schools. They know nothing else. How can the Interior Minister say they are not Jews?"

One precedent for his case, says Shalit, was the court's decision regarding Father Daniel (TIME, Dec. 14, 1962), a Carmelite friar who sought admission to Israel under the Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew who wants to live in the country. A convert to Roman Catholicism, Father Daniel was born of a Jewish mother. In his case, the court ruled that Halakha did not apply and that on the basis of secular law and the common-sense opinions of men he would no longer be regarded as a Jew.