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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