And that “non-Jewish standard of ‘Jewishness’” – that newborn
males aren’t Jewish – is, I think, precisely the standard that our government
must adopt. Our law cannot (with some excepts related to political
distinctions, such as membership in an Indian tribe) accept a notion of rights
or protections that turns on the ethnicity of a child’s forebears.
To be sure, to religious Jews an 8-day-old baby is Jewish, and bound by God’s
law. But the government must, I think, accept that child as someone who has no
religious beliefs of his own, and who may one day become a Christian, an
atheist, a religious Jew, or anything else. Whatever rationale courts or
legislatures may use in reaching whatever result they reach on the circumcision
question, I think they cannot rely on the notion that somehow circumcising the
baby protects the baby’s own religious interests as a Jew. (That is a separate
question as to whether they can rely on arguments about what the child is
empirically likely to prefer when he becomes an adult.)
Eugene
From: religionlaw-boun...@lists.ucla.edu
[mailto:religionlaw-boun...@lists.ucla.edu] On Behalf Of wlind...@verizon.net
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2012 11:02 AM
To: religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu
Subject: Re: RE: Parental rights and physical conduct
But that is invoking a non-Jewish standard of "Jewishness" (and I speak as
someone intensely exasperated by refusal to acknowledge any distinction between
"ethnic" and "religious" Jewishness.*) Someone can say "I spit on G_d, I spit
on Torah, I spit on halakhah."; He can spend Sabbath behind a desk, and never
have seen the inside of a synagogue. No one will say "You aren't Jewish'. All
that matters is who his mother was. And yes, I am acutely aware of the
cognitive dissonance in play when as soon as someone says "I believe in Jesus",
it suddenly ceases to matter who his mother was (and the israeli courts will
say so officially in applying the Law of Return.)
(* not to mention the frustration of being "Jewish" enough for any real
anti-Semites, but not for "the" Jews.)
On 07/05/12, Volokh, Eugene<vol...@law.ucla.edu<mailto:vol...@law.ucla.edu>>
wrote:
The difficulty is that newborn males aren’t Jewish in the sense
of actually believing in the Jewish religion – they are, after all, newborns.
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