The Zionists' Dilemma
The Israel Supreme Court's decision that a Jew ceases to be a Jew when he adopts another religion solved one problem for the Israeli autho- rities and their fellow-Zionists, but may well turn out to have created others. Brother Daniel is a convert from Judaism to Roman Catholicism, and his demand for legal recognition as a Jew by nationality put to the test the claim that the Jews in Israel were a nation like all other nations (the claim first made by East European Zionists who had modelled their movement on the nineteenth- century nationalism of the Poles, Batts, Hun- garians and South Slays). A decision in his favour would have incensed the Orthodox, whose cleri- cal parties hold the balance of power; it would also have offended the many others for whom feeling counts more than Zionist logic, and created difficulties among the western Jews on whose financial, moral and political support Israel still leans heavily. The court confined itself to the question : 'Who is not a Jew?' and its answer certainly reflected the prevailing climate of opinion. Will the Israeli authorities now feel obliged to reconsider the question: 'Who is a Jew?.' It is difficult in the circumstances to see how an increasing tendency to clericalism can be avoided. How ironical it is that the very Zionist ideologists who for half a century have been insisting that the Jews are not a religion but a nation, and that a Jew is always a Jew what- ever else he calls himself, are now obliged to proclaim in effect the exact opposite—and also in effect to create a second class of citizenry.
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