Download e-book for iPad: Pledges of Jewish Allegiance: Conversion, Law, and by David Ellenson, Daniel Gordis

By David Ellenson, Daniel Gordis

ISBN-10: 0804778051

ISBN-13: 9780804778053

Since the past due 1700s, whilst the Jewish group ceased to be a semiautonomous political unit in Western Europe and the USA and person Jews turned integrated—culturally, socially, and politically—into broader society, questions surrounding Jewish prestige and identification have occupied a renowned and contentious position in Jewish criminal discourse. This ebook examines a wide range of criminal reviews written by way of 19th- and twentieth-century orthodox rabbis in Europe, the U.S., and Israel. It argues that those rabbis' divergent positions—based at the comparable felony precedents—demonstrate that they have been doing greater than supplying felony reviews. as an alternative, they have been crafting public coverage for Jewish society based on Jews' social and political interactions as equals with the non-Jewish people in whose midst they dwelled.

Pledges of Jewish Allegiance prefaces its research of recent evaluations with a dialogue of the classical Jewish resources upon which they draw.

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It is to examples of these rulings that we now turn. 37 Tw o Trends in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth- Century German Orthodox Responses to Conversion and Intermarriage 38 The 1840s witnessed the emergence of a nascent Orthodox attitude toward intermarriage and conversion. By this point in Western European Jewish history, the question of intermarriage and subsequent problem of the religious identity of intermarried couples and their offspring had been transformed from a theoretical issue into a social reality.

42 Geirim is not the only source to address directly the motivations of the convert. A baraita in the tractate Kiddushin of the Palestinian Talmud makes a similar claim: “One who converts out of love, and similarly, a man for a woman or a woman for a man, or converts of Kings’ Tables [who sought access to royalty] or converts out of fear of lions43 and the conversions [in the time of] Mordecai and Esther—these, we do not accept. ” Note the subtle difference between the claims of Yevamot and Palestinian Kiddushin.

The convert began the process of conversion by denying the authority of the Oral Torah; he simply did not believe that it was from the mouth of God. 46 A simple reading of the text, however, does not comfortably support Rashi’s claim. A more compelling reading holds that what is at stake is the convert’s willingness to accept the authority of the Oral Torah. And 27 28 Conversion in Jewish Tradition the narrative is clear; Hillel converts him despite the convert’s unwillingness to do so. A very different narrative in Menahot raises similar questions about the degree to which a convert’s motivations must be “for the sake of heaven” in order for the conversion to be valid.

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