ABSTRACT
The first issue this chapter addresses is the boundaries of the religious community. Phrasing the inquiry in terms of conversion into the religion and conversion out to another religion, as this volume does, already glosses over one of the most central features of Judaism: the historic unity of Judaism as a religion and national entity. Thus, a Jew from birth who has no religious commitments or even one who converts to another religion is still a Jew in the eyes of the religious legal tradition (B. Sanhedrin 44a; Shulhan Arukh, Even Haezer 44:9). True, converts to Judaism must evidence religious commitment, but there is today a serious debate within the religious legal sources whether a desire to join the Jewish people, even in the absence of sincere religious commitments, may suffice for conversion. Before the Jewish emancipation, when Jews lived largely segregated lives within communities structured around Jewish religious practices, there was little need to resolve the theoretical question because religious identity and national identity were one and the same. Today, the questions ‘who is a Jew?’ and ‘who is a convert?’ are one of the most intractable questions dividing the Jewish community, most especially in the modern state of Israel, where criteria of belonging have profound state legal consequences. The struggle to preserve the historic unity of religion and nation in the face of increased calls to split them apart is a central dynamic of the religious legal tradition’s approach to questions of belonging.
