A Study Of Jewish Identity And Its Present And Futrue Development In Modern Israel

In the Jewish history, Jewish identity is a very important issue. The different factions and different people have different views and opinions about the identity. There have been conflicts and struggles between them. This paper aims to compare the literature of the identity, and analyse social and historical background of these different views and opinions. Generally, there are two main standards for Jewish identity:the first is blood standard; the second is religious standard. Talmud that is Jewish classic provides that:only the Jews who were born by Jewish women can be classified as pure Jews. This is from the blood to ascertain the Jewish identity. The Jews and the Jewish nation is united. If there is no Judaism, there would be no Jews. Judaism is th religious standard to the Jewish identity. Besides Talmud and the religious discussions of Jewish identity, there are also some important Rabbis and Jewish scholars who expressed their views on this issue. It is very important to analyse the Jewish identity. In history, there happened some events that had a profound impact on the Jewish identity, such as Marranos and the Holocaust. The State of Israel, found in 1948, is the only Jewish-majority state in the world. Some Jews who were in Diaspora all over the world immigrated to Israel after the founding of Israel and this promoted the development of the state. But, at the meantime, a lot of problems have also occurred. The complexity of the Jews makes the problem of the Jewish identity more increasingly prominent. In the Diaspora, Jews had to contact with other countries and nations, which brought the unavoidable assimilation. So the Jews may be forced to be assimilated (or maybe be active to do this). When these Jews living the complex environment with different backgrounds immigrated to the state, the differences between them have inevitably been taken place. There is not an only standard to the Jewish identity. Therefore, in the modern state of Israel, because of historical and migration factors, Jewish identity is becoming more and more complex. Based on kinship and religious criteria, whether the numbers of residents in Israel are Jews can't be easily determined. It is full of controversies, and thus provokes the conflicts and cultural struggles. In order to reconcile the contradictions and solve this problem, the government promulgated the Law of Return. It said:as long as a Jew is born by a Jewish mother; or when born by the non-Jewish mother, s/he has to convert to Judaism and not belong to another religion, s/he is considered to be the Jews. Government has made great efforts to ease the struggle between religion and secularity, but ultimately does not solve the problem of Jewish identity. In this context, we can speculate that three possibilities may occur about the Jewish identity in the future:the religious resolute, the secular resolute, and Jewish/secular duality. The first two may be just theoretically possible; and the coexistence of both religious and secular is the reality and it will be in the future. In dealing with the relation between religious and secular, as the world's only Jewish-majority country, the State of Israel has its responsibilities and obligations. Religious, secular camps and the government are taking active measures for better development of the Jewish and Jewishness.