The structure and nature of the Jewish people has gone through several changes over the millennia. Despite the fact that Noah and his family were saved and he himself "walked with God", he is not regarded as the founding father of Judaism. That honor is traditionally held to belong to Abraham. Abraham's covenant with God was sealed or confirmed through circumcision. And Abraham circumcised not just himself and Ishmael, but also "All the men of his household, born in the house and those bought for money from outsiders, they were circumcised with him." Initially it appears to have been the norm that joining a household or a tribe meant joining the tribal religion too. From Abraham onwards through his grandsons, tribal loyalty seems to have been crucial with men importing wives from a variety of external tribes, some more approved of than others.

Conquest followed by circumcision, in those early days, was the way to join the Tribes of Israel and nothing more. It might have been obvious to the men of Shechem that if they wanted to ally themselves with the sons of Jacob they would have to adopt their customs, yet the only law discussed with the sons of Jacob was circumcision. When the Children of Israel left Egypt they were joined by "a mixed multitude". But there is no indication that they were "converted" in any recognizable way, and we know from the Book of Joshua that no one was obliged to become circumcised in the forty years they wandered in the wilderness. Similarly, the "Son of an Israelite woman and he was the son of an Egyptian man" who was punished for cursing may have joined as an automatic member through his mother; but, again, there is an absence of detail. There are similar lacunae as to what happened with Jethro and his tribe, whether they joined or simply allied themselves to the Children of Israel, and whether Miriam's complaint against Moses' wife being black was because of her affiliation or because of an issue over how Moses was treating his wife.

The Torah does lay down laws forbidding intermarriage with the Seven Canaanite Tribes, as well as the men of Ammon and Moab. But this interdiction is not applied as a universal against all peoples or indeed against the female members of those two tribes. Ruth the Moabitess abandoned her idolatrous people and her expression of faith is taken, to this day, as the paradigm of genuine conversion. However, with her, too, the sources omit any mention of a formal ceremony of conversion. Did King David or King Solomon convert their non-Jewish wives and concubines? Again, the text remains silent. The case of the woman captured in war who was brought home and went through a process of mourning prior to becoming a full wife may indicate a general process of conversion, but it would be difficult to extrapolate from this special case that there was an established conversion procedure.

It is Ezra who clearly forbids intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews. Nevertheless, even after Ezra there was some ambiguity as to what exactly a "ger" was, because the word now means both "a convert" and "a stranger". It is clear that the Biblical term "ger", meaning "a stranger", did not necessarily mean a convert. There were two kinds of "strangers": the Ger Toshav, a stranger who lived amongst the Jews and abandoned idolatry, and the Ger Tsedek, the Convert. The Gemara debates whether the Ger Toshav was obliged to simply abandon idolatry, or to keep the Seven Noachide Commandments, or more. Maimonides in his code accepts the seven Noachide laws as defining the Ger Toshav. After the destruction of the Temple and the exile, the concept of the Ger Toshav was abandoned. Many of the fifty-six times that the word is used in the Torah do not have relevance to conversion. The five times that we are commanded to remember what it was like to be "gerim", strangers, in the land of Egypt are certainly not to be taken as describing us as having been converts to the Egyptian religion. But no other idea is repeated as often as this one of being sensitive and understanding of the position of the outsider, whether as a passing visitor, or as a resident, or as a convert.

The Canaanite slave who became his master's property had to go through circumcision and then had to obey those commands of the Torah which were not related to time. As soon as he was freed, he automatically became a full member of the Jewish community. The Talmud records that Rabbi Eliezer entered a synagogue and found they needed one more person to make up the minyan, so he freed his slave on the spot. But other ambiguities remained. The Samaritans claimed that they were Jewish. Some authorities insisted they were non-Jewish, while others were prepared to accept them without conversion. The Samaritans, often called Cutheans in the Talmud, were the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom who had been brought in by the Assyrians to replace the Ten Northern Jewish tribes who had had been exiled in 722 B.C.E. They adopted many Jewish customs and may have been joined by returning remnants of exiled Jews. Initially they fought the return of the Babylonian Jews, but later on they seem to have accommodated themselves to co-existence. Their status remained an ongoing issue. One opinion says that a Cuthi is a complete Jew, and another opinion says that a Cuthi is a complete non-Jew!

2

At this Biblical and early post-Biblical stage, there is no indication of any objection or hesitation in accepting converts. The turning point seems to have been the result of the Hasmonean forcible conversion of some of the neighboring tribes. They became known as Gerei Ayarot, Lion Converts, who only did so out of fear. The term actually originated with regard to the Samaritans but it was adapted to cover anyone who converted out of fear and came within a category of suspect converts. "Whether they are lion converts, dream converts, or Mordecai and Esther converts they are only converts if they convert now (not for ulterior motives). Rabbi Yitschak Bar Shmuel Bar Marta said in the name of Shmuel that the law goes according to those who say they are converts." It is hardly surprising that the rabbis of the Talmud might have had their doubts about forced conversions. After all, the Idumeans were converted by the early Hasmoneans and Herod was descended from them. Given that he assassinated the last of the Hasmoneans and established his own dynasty, it is hardly surprising that his ancestry would have been held against him.

Nevertheless, converts were welcomed into the fold and achieved the highest positions in Jewish religious life. Shemaya and Avtalyon, the teachers of Hillel and Shammai, were either converts or descended from converts. According to one opinion, they were descended from Haman. Onkelos who wrote the authoritative Aramaic translation and interpretation of the Torah was a convert and "gloried" in the title Onkelos the Convert. There are suggestions that Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Meir were converts or the children of converts. Rav Shmuel Bar Yehuda is confident enough to point out that he is a convert in the context of a debate about the function of a convert on a court of law. "A convert who studies Torah is considered as important as the High Priest." They clearly were held in the highest esteem if their conversion was out of genuine conviction. "God loves converts," says a popular Midrash, and another says, "When a possible convert comes to you, you should stretch out your hands to bring him under the protection (the wings) of the Shechina."

Yet, ironically, we see in the different attitudes of Hillel and Shammai towards converts an indication of different philosophies. "It once happened that a non-Jew came to Shammai and said to him, 'How many Torahs do you have?' He replied, 'Two, a Written Torah and an Oral Torah.' He said, 'I believe you about the Written Torah but I do not believe you about the Oral Torah. Convert me on condition that you only teach me the Written Torah.' He attacked him and threw him out aggressively. He came to Hillel and he converted him (Hillel then sets about convincing him to trust Hillel to teach him both the Written and the Oral Torah, so Hillel was using a stratagem to bring him into Judaism). Again it happened that a non-Jew came to Shammai and said, 'Convert me on condition that you can teach me all the Torah while I stand on one leg.' He threw him out by pushing him with his builders' plane he had been holding. He came to Hillel and he converted him. He said, 'What is hateful to you do not do to your friend. This is (the essence of) the Torah, all the rest is commentary. Go and learn.'" These, and other examples the Talmud goes on to give there, illustrate different approaches. Shammai clearly feels that the non-Jew is not serious and is disrespectful. He owes it, out of respect for the Torah, not to tolerate this frivolity. He is willing to take in converts but only on his terms.

Hillel is much more flexible. He seems to be looking for any excuse to rope in as many converts as possible. He recognizes that it takes time for the fullness of the Jewish experience to become appreciated and that patience will pay dividends. This difference was not confined to Hillel and Shammai. The most often quoted anti-convert opinion is that of Rabbi Chelbo who says, "Converts are as bad for Israel as a disease." There were stories of converts with dual loyalties betraying Jews to the Romans. But the overwhelming body of opinion was positive and supportive even to the point of suggesting that giving up idolatry is enough to give a person the right to call himself a Jew. "Whoever rejects idol worship is called a Jew."

There was, as well, a philosophical debate. We might be inclined to say that someone who comes to recognize the greatness of the Jewish spiritual tradition, and voluntarily chooses to become Jewish, should be on a higher level than someone who is automatically Jewish, by accident of birth, and has not necessarily had to affirm his or her belief at any time. On the other hand, the rabbinic tendency was to argue that simple acceptance of Judaism as an act of commitment to God was a greater form of obedience to the Divine and superior to someone rationally coming to the conclusion that Judaism was "right". The latter, after all, is following his or her own mind rather than accepting a superior one. This is behind the phrase, "Greater is the person who is commanded (obliged) and does, rather than the person who is not commanded and (chooses) to do." They used this argument in regard to whether women who are not commanded to perform certain rituals should volunteer to do them or not. But this was used also to argue that there was no reason to accept converts since they were not obliged to take on the more onerous obligations of Jewish law.

Despite these arguments, there is exhaustive literature and halachic decisions about converts in the Talmud covering virtually every area of law and ritual. Can a convert use the format of blessings, "our God and God of our fathers"? Does a convert have the obligation to honor his parents? As a witness, can he be disqualified by a relative from before his conversion? If he had children before conversion what is their status? And does he now have an obligation to have more children? Who inherits a childless convert? There are laws that restrict the role of a convert. A convert can become a judge but cannot be appointed to a position of tax collector, so as not to be put in the position of having to enforce collection with all the animosity that surrounds it. One is forbidden to remind a convert of his origins. The rabbis understood human nature and wanted to protect converts from the inevitable slights they would be subjected to by the thoughtlessness of ordinary folk.

The historical situation is that conversion in the "golden" period of the Roman Empire was common. This is evidenced by the fact that the Rabbis established both a ritual procedure as well as a recommended approach. "They taught that when a convert comes to be converted nowadays (under the conditions of later Roman persecution) they say, 'What reason have you found to want to convert? Do you not know that Israel nowadays is sad, pressured, tortured, confused and awful things happen to them?' If he says, 'I know and I am not worthy,' they receive him immediately and inform him of some of the least important commandments and some of the most important commandments, and they tell him about the 'sin' (of not giving) gleanings, forgotten produce and the corner of the field (to be left for the poor), and tithes for the poor, and they inform him of the punishment for (not doing) the commandments. And they tell him, 'Before you arrived at this level you could eat fats without being punished with being cut off. If you would have broken Shabbat you would not be stoned.' But just as they tell him about the punishments for disobeying commandments, so they inform him about the rewards, 'Know that the World to Come is only for the righteous and for Israel nowadays since they cannot cope with either too much good or too much punishment.' But they should not press too much upon him and they should not be too strict on him. If he accepts all this, they circumcise him right away…and submerge him (in a mikvah) and two elders stand above and recite some light commandments and some serious ones. He dips under and comes up and he becomes a complete Jew." This text is the basis of the formulation given in the Shulchan Aruch for accepting converts, with the added requirement of a Beth Din of three to oversee the procedure.

3

If great a rabbi like Hillel was very eager to convert and was even prepared to use subterfuge to encourage converts to join, what led to the modern state of affairs where conversion is looked on somewhat askance by many and is certainly not encouraged as an active policy? It cannot be simply because Judaism allows other religious and moral standards for non-Jews requiring of them the basic Seven Noachide Commandments and therefore there is no religious requirement for them to convert to Judaism. It cannot be because Judaism is not an absolutist religion, "We are right and everyone else is wrong." Christianity is so heavily missionary because one of its cardinal beliefs is that only through their messiah can a person be saved; but such a position is not the Jewish one. All these conditions applied at Hillel's time, too, but they did not stop him from having his more lenient and open attitude.

Leaving aside the internal evidence, we know historically that the Jews were avid converters in the post Maccabee era. Monotheism was recognized by an increasing number of Greeks and Romans as a far more acceptable religion than the Graeco-Roman traditions revolving around rather sordid goings-on of the gods. The exchanges in the Talmud with Roman matrons or Roman officers indicates that a lot of dialogue and crossing over was taking place and this reached the highest levels. Licinius, who, for a while, ruled jointly with Constantine in the third century, belonged to a family that had converts to Judaism. One is tempted to fantasize on the fate of the Jews had he, rather than Constantine, won the battle of Adrianople in 323. For, following it, the Council of Nicea in 325 established Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire and forbade Jews to convert non-Jews on pain of death. Despite a brief period of respite under Julian ("The Apostate" for Christians, but a "goody" for the Jews), it became virtually impossible for Jews to convert. Not only were Jews forbidden to proselytize but someone who did convert was likely, himself, to be put to death. In 1222, Robert of Reading, a student at Oxford, converted out of love for a Jewish girl. He was burnt at the stake. And so, in effect, the Jews abandoned the process and turned in on themselves. Although the records show that individuals did go on converting to Judaism in small numbers, it was very much a low-key business and kept as quiet as possible so as not to offend the Christian authorities.

What emerges from the text of the conversion process, as used in the Shulchan Aruch, is an awareness of the poor and downtrodden state of the Jewish people and a feeling that no one in their right mind would willingly want to become a Jew. This reflected the reality of Roman, Christian, and even the less harsh Muslim hegemony. Nevertheless, it is interesting that nowhere does the law require absolute obedience to the whole body of law right away as a condition of acceptance. The emphasis does, indeed, seem to be on genuine conversion for ideological rather than for social motives.

It is only after the Enlightenment in Europe, and the freedom of belief that was accorded non-Christian communities in the last century that circumstances began to change and conversion to Judaism was no longer an act of folly, that a new set of problems arose. The opening up of society led to the possibility of social conversion, converting to marry or to mix with Jews without a strictly religious motivation. This was something that the rabbis had not considered since the time of Esther and Mordecai. The battle of Ashkenazi rabbis against the leniency of Reform led them to take very strict measures against social conversion. Their argument was that conversion for an ulterior motive was unacceptable. In Diaspora communities the Orthodox world makes it difficult to convert, in general, and almost impossible if marriage is seen as a motive. And yet the Gemara I quoted above referring to forced converts starts out like this, "'A man who converted for (to marry) a woman or a woman who converts for a man…is not counted as a convert,' says Rabbi Nechemia…Rabbi Yitschak Bar Shmuel…says that the law is that they are converts.'

So what happened? Why now are the Courts of Law much stricter? Why do they demand much stricter standards of religious behavior than the letter of the law demanded? Certainly the rabbis are not in the frame of mind to turn Judaism into a proselytizing religion and many even look askance at the dramatic efforts of Chabad Lubavitch to bring assimilated Jews back into the fold. It seems that the old antipathy to conversion, a legacy of the pre-Enlightenment era lingers. It is also true that the gulf that Anti-Semitism created in Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust have reinforced earlier reluctance to deal with non-Jews on religious matters and biases that assume that every non-Jew is fundamentally antipathetic to Jews. In addition, there is the polemic against Reform Judaism. There matters were made more complex by Reform changing the religious criteria for defining a Jew and accepting a patrilineal criterion. Orthodoxy, in response to what it sees as a challenge to its authority, is trying to define itself more rigidly and exclusively. Of course Orthodoxy is not monolithic. There are Chassidic groups that are much more enthusiastic about accepting converts than others. Despite the disagreements and differences of policy, no religious authority has ever suggested that genuine converts are other than absolute Jews, and no kind of racial or national limitation has ever been applied to conversion.

4

The State of Israel, for all its blessings, has created a range of new problems in the area of Jewish identity. Firstly, definitions of who a Jew is became confused with the intervention of purely secular authorities, the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament and the Supreme Court, in drafting legislation. Because Israel wanted to protect Jews wherever they were, they instituted the Law of Return which gave Jews, wherever they were, automatic citizenship in the Jewish State as a protective measure. Never again would a Jew be in danger because he or she had no country willing to take them in. This laudable principle led to a widening of the definition of a Jew beyond traditional religious legal limitations. According to Jewish law, a person's mother has to be Jewish as a condition of recognition. According to the Law of Return, one grandparent was sufficient. Given the criteria that the Nazis used for defining Jewish identity, one can understand why Israel would expand its definitions for the purpose of offering refuge. But from the point of view of religious identity this has proved a major source of conflict. Many came to Israel under a Law of Jewish Return who were not Jewish either by religious definition or by religious practice. One might argue that this influx has strengthened the Jewish State and thus Judaism, itself, which has flourished there. It is even suggested that a return to a policy of encouraging converts might help strengthen Diaspora communities as well. But the two-thousand year subconscious sublimation of resentment of the outsider, and the need to protect inner integrity as a defense mechanism, cannot easily be jettisoned. And where large numbers of incoming "Jews" are practicing members of Christian Churches, naturally, tensions are bound to emerge.

But if the State decides for the purpose of its "Law of Return" how to define a Jew, why should a religious person who accepts religious definitions care? Interestingly there was a case in Israel in the fifties where a Jew who converted to Catholicism and became a monk, wanted to be accepted as a Jew under the Law of Return. Brother Daniel was rejected by the Supreme Court even though it might have been argued halachically that, technically, he was still a Jew. There have been other examples of secular law and religious law diverging in Israel. One reason often given for opposition to defining a Jew secularly is that the lines of defining a Jew in a Jewish state would become blurred. There would be "Jewish Jews" and "non-Jewish Jews"! This danger was behind the original decision of Israel's first Prime Minister, the secular David Ben Gurion, to make matters of personal status subject to Jewish Law. It would, indeed, be a shame to have a dual class society but in fact this already exists. There are many Israelis whose status is religiously questionable. This only becomes a problem when a religious partner wants to marry one of suspect lineage. But rarely have these problems been insurmountable. They are no different to those experienced in the Diaspora by Jews of different denominations wanting to marry.

5

Another relevant issue is that the State of Israel has revived the earlier historical situation whereby someone coming from the outside into a Jewish community could be considered Jewish by absorption. This was behind the lenience of the late Chief Rabbi Goren in believing that converts in Israel would be influenced automatically by living in a Jewish State. Therefore he made it a policy of being supportive and lenient with potential converts who were going to live in Israel. Many Orthodox rabbis disagreed with his position and thought that he was being taken advantage of.

The issue remains an important one because the current immigration of the Ethiopians, whose Jewishness was challenged, and thousands of Russians who were avowedly atheists or, indeed, Christian, maintained the question of how to deal with converts in the public eye. The political pendulum has been constantly swinging so that policies of facilitating conversion in Israel one year are capable of being changed the next. Generally, Israeli rabbis take a more relaxed attitude to conversion or to accommodating problems than their Diaspora colleagues. They have tended to be much more accommodating to possible converts who intended to stay and integrate into Israeli society. Rabbi Goren used to include a condition in some of his conversions that it was applicable only if the person stayed in Israel. Many rabbis have questioned whether one can make such a conversion "on condition". The trouble was that some individuals converted in Israel and then moved out, raising questions about the original procedure and challenging the different standard approach.

The modern division of Judaism into different sects with widely varying attitudes to Jewish Law has created another problem in Israel. In the Diaspora each sect is entitled and free to set its own standards and criteria for conversion. Israel's concordat with the Orthodox parties has made halacha the standard for Judaism, and conversions not performed halachically are not accepted. Of course this does not mean, as some Reform rabbis like to suggest, that the Orthodox do not recognize them as Jews. The criterion is whether one's mother is Jewish regardless of the current state of one's commitment. But it does mean that they do not accept Reform rabbis, Reform conversions, and the Reform definitions of who a Jew is.

This is only a problem in Israel and, in effect, it is a political rather than a religious one. The Orthodox rabbinate controls a large and important empire with its concomitant patronage. They do not want outsiders muscling in on their patch. The problem with religious issues in Israel is that, more often than not, they are political. This is the downside of State and Religion co-habiting. But the battle for religious, halachic, recognition is one that large numbers of immigrants to Israel have gone through, from the Yemenite Jews, to the Beta Israel from India, and the Ethiopians, and many Russians. In the end, means are usually found to deal with the problems, admittedly after long bureaucratic wrangling. These examples also emphasize that, despite the political dishonesty of the United Nations in its, now rescinded, declaration that Zionism is racism, there is absolutely no racist element in Jewish Law whatsoever. There is no limitation on anyone from any race joining Judaism, whatsoever. The condition is simply one of commitment.

None of this directly affects the condition of conversion. Genuine conversion is a "noble state". It is based on the example of Ruth, from whom the ideal Jewish king was descended. It is a heritage that rabbis were proud to proclaim. "God loves converts very much."

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