The essence of Judaism and of Jewish identity is tribalism. Jews are a tribe. They are an extended family partly in-bed (to use Steve Sailer’s definition of a race).
As a convert to Orthodox Judaism, let me tell you that Jewish life largely runs on genetic relatedness. A typical Jew, when he meets with fellow Jews, has a sense of a connection that goes back thousands of years.
The more genetically related people are, the more likely they are to get along. Genetic relatedness is not the only thing that bonds people, but it is a powerful force, probably the most powerful.
A person with few if any Jewish genes is going to have a tough time of connecting in Jewish life. As far as I know, I have no Jewish ancestors, and though I have managed to connect in Jewish life according to my merits, I recognize the challenge all round of bonding with people who have different genes from me.
My late mother was a shiksa — tall, strawberry blonde and Midwestern — and that’s often enough for other Jews to disown and dismiss me: “Oh, so you’re not actually Jewish.” No matter that my father sought refuge from Soviet anti-Semitism, first in Israel and then in America, or that his immediate family fled the Nazi invasion on cattle trains leaving Odessa. Never mind that my mother insisted on sending me to crunchy Jewish summer camp every year, and prepared a beautiful seder. Forget that it was my father, not my mother, who talked me out of a bat mitzvah ceremony.
The sad irony is that what matters to far too many of my fellow Jews is the “purity” of my blood. I cannot be married or buried as a Jew in Israel, for example, because those institutions are under the control of an Orthodox rabbinate to whom I’m irrelevant, at best. My only option to avoid discrimination is a full-blown conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Other options, including Reform Judaism, agnosticism and even atheism, are reserved for purebreds.
