Gentile and outcast
On marrying “in”
At the Western Wall in Jerusalem last month I was watching orthodox Jews at prayer. A friendly man with a prayer shawl approached to ask where I was from. London, I said. “Are you Jewish?” he asked. “No, I’m not,” I replied. That sounded rather abrupt, so I kept talking in an attempt to ingratiate myself: “But my wife is.”
Big mistake. It was impossible to miss the disappointment – not quite a flinch, more a flicker of the eyes – with which he acknowledged the information. So I’d fetched myself a Jewish bride. I could not have felt more guilty if he’d caught me with my fingers in his wallet.
Hours later a worse thing happened. A conversation with my Jewish guide made the perceived gulf between me and my wife even clearer. According to the orthodox, a Jew is not permitted to drive on the sabbath. And in an orthodox quarter of Jerusalem, Mea She’arim, my guide told me it is not unknown for orthodox Jews to throw stones at anybody doing so. “So what would happen if I did it?” I asked. “They would ask you to go away,” he said, matter-of-factly. “But if your wife did it, they’d stone her.” Profoundly shocked, I could think of nothing to say.
I’m horrified by the attitude of so many Jews towards intermarriage. It’s not just in Israel. You come across the same thing in England.
Yes, my wife is Jewish. And it follows that a number of my relations are Jewish, too. In fact, coming from a small family and having married into an enormous one, I find that the vast majority of my relations are Jewish.
Over the past few years, I’ve swotted up on Jewish history, more or less memorised the major festivals from Yom Kippur to Israel’s Independence Day, and on travels around Europe I’ve taken care to check out sites of Jewish interest (my favourite is an exquisite little synagogue in Cordoba). In short, I have learned a great deal about a minority group hitherto unfamiliar to me.
But if that makes me sound like some kind of sociologist, the truth is that I have simply got on with life in a Jewish family. I’ve taken part, myself, in the fascinating traditions that sociologists are content merely to watch. For example, I was an usher at the wedding of my wife’s sister. This took place out of doors, with bride, groom and both sets of parents standing beneath a little canopy. At the end of the religious bit, the groom followed tradition by crushing a glass beneath his foot. Later, along with the other ushers, I was invited to grab the leg of a chair for a traditional dance: I can’t tell you how tiring it was, carrying the bride and groom at shoulder height while others danced round us in a circle.
Sure, the fancy cutlery makes an appearance on Friday nights, for Shabbat, when blessings are intoned over the wine and the bread (or chollah), at which point we chaps cover the crown of our heads with natty little hats (and there’s a special name for those, too). But to me the most important thing has always been to consume a great deal of tasty food. And if ordinary bread disappears around Passover, so what? I like eating flat slabs of wheat with tiny holes in them (matzos).
More seriously, I have been overwhelmed – impressed is not a strong enough word – by the cohesiveness of Jewish families. Whether in the nuclear family getting together on Friday nights, or as part of a wider group assembling for festivals and rites of passage, I have been drawn into a vigorous community, a large, self-supporting network in which everybody seems to take an interest in everybody else’s welfare.
Having been deprived in childhood of all but the most elementary relations (father, mother, one sister, one brother, two aunts and uncles with one child apiece, grandparents), I have thrown myself enthusiastically into learning my wife’s exotic variants. How about these: a third cousin; an ex-uncle (divorced from an aunt); or a great-aunt on one side who became the second wife, on the other side – check this out! – of a first cousin once removed (by marriage). I have become such an expert that sometimes my wife asks me to remind her exactly how she is related to so-and-so. Nobody can measure precisely how well they have integrated into another family, but I’ll try. I watched England v Argentina with one brother-in-law, and the World Cup final with another. Two months ago, I went alone to the engagement party of my wife’s cousin (my wife was sick), and enjoyed myself a great deal. In short, I have been extended the warmest of welcomes into a Jewish family, and readily accepted it.
That’s why I was delighted to be sent by a newspaper to write a travel piece about Israel, a country largely shunned by ordinary tourists since Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. As somebody said to me before I went there, “You might as well go to Northern Ireland.” But I disagreed: Solomon didn’t build a temple in Belfast, Jesus didn’t walk on the waters of Lough Neagh, and nor did Mohammed ascend to heaven from the six counties. These things happened, if anywhere, in Israel. And for that reason – however grisly the political background – Israel will always be able to attract pilgrims. Unreligious non-Jews, however, are another matter.
After a day in Jerusalem, I’d hurried all over the country, taking in the ultramodern Tel Aviv, Caesarea (Herod’s Milton Keynes), Acre (headquarters of the crusaders), and more sites of religious importance round the Galilee and the Jordan. But there was one thing I wanted to do before leaving: visit the Museum of the Diaspora. Among the models, films and other presentations of Jewish life in centuries of exile, I was interested to see if there was much about the late-20th-century Jews of north London. I wanted to learn how my lot are regarded by other Jews, to see how they fit into the world picture. So I got into a cab and headed for the museum, a vast concrete building at the heart of Tel Aviv University.
But the only visitors generally expected in this museum, I discovered, are Jews. I couldn’t help it, I just felt out of place. Several exhibits compounded this sensation. One interactive item, for example, asked me to make a choice, “as a Jew”, based on two alternatives which had faced Jews in the course of history. It was only with trepidation that I dared to press a button: for all I knew, the responses were being logged, and would one day be collated for release as the opinion of modern Jews. I would hate to invalidate that research.
Towards the end of the museum tour, I came upon a sign inviting me to contribute towards a fantastic project: a computerised family tree of Jews round the world. This, as I’ve already suggested, was my idea of fun. I handed over a few shekels for half an hour at a terminal, and a wrinkled supervisor explained in a central European accent how to operate the system. But when I sat down, fingers hovering above the keys, I had the sudden, strong feeling that I should stop. Signs on the walls trumpeted the project’s success in logging the names of one million Jews round the world. I could contribute plenty more. But what was I supposed to do – sit down and fill in scores of names but leave myself out?
Here I was in the Promised Land, but it had been promised to my wife, not me, and I hadn’t brought her with me. Coming after the incident at the Western Wall and the chat with my guide, the episode in the museum induced a strange sense of anxiety, something between guilt and redundancy. I departed without filling in a single name.
My wife’s family has never shown the slightest unease about my non-Jewish status (after all, I’m not the first non-Jew to marry into it). But then my wife’s family are liberal Jews, regarded by others in the community as altogether too accommodating in these matters.
In the wider Jewish community, sad to relate, gentiles are by no means as welcome as spouses as I have been. The current rate of intermarriage among Anglo-Jews is around 45 per cent. But when this highly contentious subject arises, we outsiders frequently find ourselves disregarded. The focus is never on the people who “marry in”, but always on Jews marrying out.
Earlier this year, in the Jewish Chronicle – the paper for which, enthusiastically embracing my wife’s background, I wrote my second-ever published piece of journalism – the reform rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain wrote that intermarriage is “a reality, a regrettable though almost inevitable effect of living in an open and tolerant society”. My marriage, regrettable? Not to me it isn’t.
The following week, the orthodox Daniel Greenberg went further. “A Jew may not live with a non-Jew as husband or wife, whether after a civil or other ceremony or not . . . Marrying out is to be condemned . . . The action of marrying out is a public rejection of an aspect of Jewish law, and the Jewish community is therefore obliged to avoid appearing to condone it.”
Romain only appears willing to accept intermarriage if the non-Jew converts. “Encouraging them will turn mixed-faith families into Jewish ones,” he wrote, “while their conversion will help to keep born Jews Jewish.”
There’s a problem here. I don’t believe in God. Not the Jewish God, nor anybody else’s – though that doesn’t mean I shun or despise religion. Far from it. I’m fully aware that it is religious occasions that keep Jewish families so close. Friday nights, for example, are only “special” because of their religious aspect.
But that recognition is not enough for the likes of Romain and Greenberg. To them, it seems, I can’t belong to the community unless I convert. Greenberg, for example, argues that “prospective converts must have more than social reasons for wishing to join the Jewish community. They must display the devotion and commitment to Torah values and the Jewish mission which have in the past made such new arrivals a shining example to the rest of the Jewish people.”
I beg to differ. There’s no need for me to convert. That’s the magic of being Jewish: you’re born that way, even if you never set foot in a synagogue. If I have children, they’ll be Jewish by virtue of having a Jewish mother. They, too, will be entitled to be stoned by the ultra-orthodox in Mea She’arim. I may never become Jewish myself, but my family as a whole will at least be Jewish.
4 June 98
did you convert? or do you plan to?
— Grace · 10 June 07 · #