Osvaldo Bayer is concerned that the Jews don’t appeared to have learned anything from their history.
But there are also those people who have tragic experience of persecutions, such as the Jews, who have laws that lead to humans being humiliated. It’s well known that the State of Israel doesn’t recognize marriages between Jews and non-Jews. [… ] It has thus become fashionable for Jews who want to marry a non-Jew to go to Cyprus to do it. Quite an industry has built up on the island to allow non-Jews and Jews to get married. According to Jewish law only those born of Jewish mothers are regarded as Jewish.
Later in the text Bayer slips in a whispered recognition of the fact that in Israel the real problem is the lack of civil marriage, something that affects Israelis of all denominations and none. The state doesn’t recognize marriage between Christians and Muslims. Jews and Druze or any other combo you might like to mention because it only recognizes marriages carried out by officially authorized religions and they won’t marry you unless you sign up for their team. So, not only is a religiously mixed marriage impossible on Israel soil, there’s no marriage between members the same religion either if the parties don’t fancy jumping through the hoops set for them by their own clergy.
Is this a defensible state of affairs? No, it is not. The state has effectively handed over responsibility for one its most basic functions to a dodgy crew of holy book brandishers. Bayer isn’t interested in this though. He’s only interested in demonstrating the uniquely perverse nature of the Jewish people, a people who, in his view, haven’t learned the lessons of the genocide inflicted on them by compatriots of his.
And you’ve got to love the last line of the quote above. The excruciatingly progressive and secular Bayer fancies himself as an expert on Jewish law. A fascination with Jews, their crimes, their thought, their laws, their state and their general refusal to disappear - or at least reduce themselves to the level of a folk dancing club - is a the sign of a healthy mind.
“It’s well known that the State of Israel doesn’t recognize marriages between Jews and non-Jews. [… ] It has thus become fashionable for Jews who want to marry a non-Jew to go to Cyprus to do it.”
As is always the case with “progressive and secular” Jews who fancy thremselves experts on Jewish law, he misunderstands (or DISunderstands?)the situation. There is no civil marriage in Israel but the state recofnizes such marriages when they are presented as a “fait-accompli”. Hence the solution of Cyprus. It is hardly a “fashionable” custom but one of common sense and necessity, which has been around for as long as Israel existed, and before. There is another possibility that some opt for, and that is the legal marriage contract, performed by a lawyer in Israel, which circumvents the constraint imposed by the state on marriages.
It is also important to note that “the system is based on the Millet or confessional community system inherited from the times of the Ottoman Empire and not substantially modified during the British Mandate period nor since the establishment of the State of Israel. The system is also in use by several Muslim countries of the Middle East and beyond.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_Israel
As usual, it is Israel that is selected for the
author’s approbrium for reasons that I suspect are entirely unconnected with the very frustrating and real problems that some Israeli Jews encounter on their way to marriage.
A couple of excellent posts by Eamonn, and in August too.
Congratulations.
Noga is absolutely right. Ben Gurion decided to make a lot of compromises and many books have been written on subject matter. However marriages between Jews and Non-Jews are recocnised in Israel.
And many such couples live in Israel.
“The excruciatingly progressive and secular Bayer fancies himself as an expert on Jewish law.”
Is Bayer a Jew? The title of the articles seems to suggest that he is.
Or is he just prey, like so many, to a “fascination with Jews, their crimes, their thought, their laws, their state and their general refusal to disappear” ?
Bayer, as far as I am aware, isn’t a Jew and I’´m sorry that the title of the post has led some to think that he might be. He is definitely obsessed about Jews.