“You shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughter to his son, and you shall not take his daughter for your son, for he will cause your child to turn away from Me, and they will worship the gods of others” (Deuteronomy 7:3–4).”
One of the pro-woman attributes of Judaism is that it is a matrilineal religion. According to the traditional Jewish viewpoint, Judaism is passed down through mothers. If one has a Jewish father, but a non-Jewish mother, according to the Torah, one is not Jewish. The mother is the only parent that counts when conferring Jewish status.
As a younger woman, I always found this to be a cool fact about Judaism. It led to fantasies about Judaism being a society of strong Amazonian warrior women, whose men were merely a necessary background component to creating a Jewish people. Women were the guardians of our faith; the keepers of future Jewish generations. In that light, men seemed almost superfluous.
And….scene!
After the marketing campaign wore off, I ran across some other interesting information that didn’t seem quite as empowering. At first, it was just tidbits here or there.
First of all, I learned that while indeed Judaism is based upon matrilineal descent today, before Har Sinai, the Jewish faith (belief in one God – the precursor to the formal establishment of the Jewish people) began and was passed down through the three Patriarchs Avraham, Yitzchok, and Yaakov. An article on MyJewishLearning says:
“Prof. Shaye D. Cohen is the Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy at Harvard University, and he has written a book and several articles on this issue specifically. Cohen found that matrilineal descent evolved from an original policy of patrilineal descent. In the Torah, a person’s status as a Jew seems to come from his father. Joseph was married to a non-Jewish woman, and his children were considered Jewish. The same was the case for Moses and King Solomon. The change to a policy of matrilineal descent came in late antiquity.”
Also, although the mother’s status determines her child’s Jewish status, a child’s tribal affiliation (in today’s times this falls into the three categories of Yisroel, Levi, and Kohane) goes according to the father. Additionally, the customs that a family follows goes according to the husband/father (e.g. Ashkenzic, Sephardic, Litvak, Hasidic, etc.); with women switching from their father’s customs to their husband’s customs upon marriage (if those customs differ) and raising their children accordingly. The laws of inheritance and descent of the monarchy also go according to the father. By these examples, men do play a role in a child’s Jewish heritage.
There are certainly mystical reasons given for why mothers determine the spiritual identity of a child, whereas men determine their customs and religious educational path after birth. According to some rabbinic scholars, by growing and nurturing and suffering during labor for her child, a woman confers her essence to a baby in a profound way. She and her baby are one for nine months, and Judaism is genealogically transferred in a physical and spiritual sense from mother to child. This is an explanation for why the child of a woman who was gentile at conception, but converted during her pregnancy and was Jewish upon giving birth, is considered a Jewish baby. If a child gestates inside of a Jewish womb, even if the mother only became a Jew mid-way through the fetus’ development, that child is a Jew.
Another guess at the reasoning behind matrilineal descent is that the mother’s parentage was formerly the only one that could be physically confirmed (there were no DNA paternity swab tests during biblical times). There are usually witnesses at a child’s birth (e.g. midwives, doctors, nurses, doulas, family members), whereas there are usually no witnesses beyond the couple at a child’s conception (nor immediate confirmation of conception at the blessed moment). Although, in general, women were believed when they gave the name of the father, as proved by the fact that if an unmarried woman claimed her baby’s father was of a priestly tribe, the child would be considered to be of that tribe.
Shaye Cohen believes that Roman law influenced the rulings of the Mishna on the subject of the status of a child conceived through rape. There is a Mishna that assumes that legal paternity only exists if there exists the possibility of a valid marriage between the parents. Since marriage between a Jewish woman and a non-Jewish man isn’t possible, if a woman chose a man with whom she couldn’t have a valid marriage with instead of a Jewish man that she could have a valid marriage with, her children are considered mamzerim. A Jewish man fathering a child with a non-Jewish woman is penalized by having his children considered gentiles, and a Jewish woman whose child is fathered by a gentile is penalized by her children being deemed mamzerim.
Cohen ventures a guess that the rabbis took pity on women raped by Roman soldiers by disputing the ruling for the children of Jewish mothers and gentile fathers being mamzerim, and instead adopting the matrilineal law.
Roman law, at the time of this Mishna, said that a child was only a father’s legal heir if his mother and father were joined in legal marriage. Only Roman citizens were capable of contracting a legal marriage, or conubium. Without such a capacity (e.g. a non-citizen or a slave didn’t have this capacity) the child takes on the status of the mother (if the mother is a non-citizen, so is the child; if the mother is a slave, so is the child). Cohen theorizes that the rabbis who wrote their opinion about matrilineal determination might have taken their cues from Roman law.
Cohen also gives another possible reasoning in the form of rules for animal breeding and species designation. Scripture prevents breeding between certain types of animals, however if those breeding prohibitions are violated, what is the designation of the offspring? In the Mishna, R. Judah posits that a mule whose mother is a horse and whose father is a donkey may breed with both mules and pure bred horses, as the mule follows the status of its mother. Likewise, in human breeding, the mother also bestows the child’s designation, regardless of who the father is.
It’s tough to actually pinpoint when matrilineal descent actually took hold in Judaism, although it is clear that this wasn’t always the case. The reasons behind why mothers determine Jewish status also seem unclear, although there are those who have tried to offer mystical, sociological, and historical explanations. I myself was given the ruling that there are dissenting opinions about whether a child who has a non-Jewish father and a Jewish mother is still considered Jewish. As such, I had to undergo a conversion before my own wedding in order to satisfy all opinions, according to the posek we asked.
What is clear is that matrilineal descent isn’t a slam dunk victory proving women’s empowerment and influence within Judaism.
