Matrilineal Descent and Judaism

For many centuries, Judaism has determined that someone is Jewish if their mother is Jewish. In recent years, controversies have erupted around whether having a Jewish father (or no Jewish parents at all) can qualify one to learn Torah in a pluralistic Jewish program, and whether Jessica Meir is a Jewish astronaut when only her father was Jewish, and even though she identifies as Jewish. Does the traditional rule of matrilineal descent make sense, and what relationship does it have more broadly to gender equity?

To explore these issues, it is helpful to understand the history of the rule of matrilineal descent within Judaism. It generally might seem surprising that Judaism turns to the mother, rather than the father, to determine whether a child is Jewish, especially when much of the rest of Jewish law looks to the father to determine important questions of status, including priestly status within Judaism. The rule of matrilineal descent dates back to the second century. (Kiddushin 30b) Indeed, work by Rabbi Professor Shaye Cohen finds that Judaism previously had a rule of patrilineal descent in place, and the change to the focus on the mother was perhaps influenced by the Roman legal system. More broadly, a popular explanation of matrilineal descent is that it made determinations of Jewish status easier, because it was generally more straightforward and reliable to identify a person’s mother than their father. Yet, if that were comprehensively true, why was Judaism looking to paternity to establish other important aspects of status? Rabbi Meir Soloveichik suggests as an answer that God is depicted to have a maternal relationship with the Jewish people, and will therefore not abandon them, just as motherhood typically comes about after a woman carries a baby over the course of a nine-month pregnancy and then labors to give birth, both of which forge a deep connection between mother and child. On this basis, he concludes that “the intimacy of the mother-child relationship is the foundation of the matrilineal principle.”

Orthodox and Conservative Judaism continue to be guided by the rule of matrilineal descent in establishing Judaism. In 1983, Reform Judaism broke with the rule of matrilineal descent, holding instead that a child with one Jewish parent—be it mother or father—can be considered Jewish. Even if one is not deemed Jewish by one of these rules of descent, one can undergo a conversion to Judaism, but this can be intensive and less desirable than being accepted as Jewish to begin with.

Depending on the perspective, it is possible to see the traditional rule of matrilineal descent as either biased against women or as supportive of women. Jessica Fishman tends to see it as undermining gender equality because “one of the ways that women are controlled is through the concept of matrilineal lineage.” She elaborates that Orthodox Judaism’s treatment of her own mother—who raised her and her siblings as Jewish—as non-Jewish merely because of matrilineal Jewish descent was an “emotionally violent” imposition on her mother’s body. By contrast, Dr. Reut Paz stresses that a rule of matrilineal descent is one of the few “legal privilege[s]” actually given to women in Judaism, so it could be harmful to undermine it.

Either way, one must wonder whether a rule based predominantly on lineage is sensible in contemporary times. For one thing, in Nazi-era Germany, people were considered Jewish if they had at least three Jewish grandparents. Post-Holocaust, it seems either eerily similar or poignantly subversive for Judaism to insist on lineage as the primary path to establishing one’s Jewish status. For another thing, as genetic tests become more in-depth and widely available, results pinpointing Jewish heritage of varying amounts can raise all sorts of new, yet nuanced, questions about what constitutes Jewish lineage. Finally, in an era of self-identification and intersectional identities, one reasonably contemplates whether a person’s opting to be Jewish and observation of Judaism should suffice to render them Jewish, especially when studies have found that children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers have felt especially unwelcome within Judaism, despite efforts to fit in.