From the Moabite Ruth to Norly the Filipino: Intermarriage and Conversion in the Jewish Nation State

Abstract

In Israel, unlike in other countries, the vast majority of Jews marry other Jews. Interreligious marriages are not common, comprising about 5 percent of all marriages (The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute 2006: 11). Most interreligious families in Israel are those in which both spouses are immigrants from the former Soviet Union. However, some of them are comprised of a native Jewish-Israeli and a non-Jewish immigrant, and thus are international, intercultural, and sometimes interracial, as well as interreligious families. This article focuses on the latter. Through these families’ experiences, and the sociolegal regime in which they are shaped, I shall discuss the relations between gender, religion, and citizenship in the country that defi nes itself as the Jewish nation state. Though we know very little about intermarriage in Israel, preliminary data I received from the Ministry of the Interior suggest that it is a gendered phenomenon. During 1998-2006, 21,379 requests for citizenship were submitted to the Ministry of the Interior by spouses of Israelis: 7,428 by men and 13,738 by women. Since, as will be elaborated below, Jewish immigrating spouses receive automatic citizenship and hence do not need to submit such a request, these figures are mostly of requests made by non-Jewish men and women who wish to join their Israeli spouse. These quantitative figures suggest that more women than men leave their cultural group and follow their Israeli spouse to his homeland. Moreover, the data I received from the Rabbinical Courts Management on conversion to Judaism in Israel suggest that the citizenship request figures do not tell the whole gendered immigration story of interreligious couples. In 2001-2006, 5,682 men and boys and 19,026 women and girls were converted to Judaism by the Orthodox state conversion tribunals — that is, 77 percent of those who convert are females. While about three-quarters of those converted are immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, the remaining converts immigrated from all over the globe, and it is reasonable to assume that many of them came to Israel to live with a Jewish-Israeli spouse. This shows that the conversion of immigrants, which in some cases is related to intermarriage, is also a gendered phenomenon. In this chapter I wish to expand on these crude quantitative data and inquire into a few of the stories behind them. These stories shed light on the gendered motivations for converting to Judaism and on the costs and benefits of conversion as shaped by the interrelation between gender, religion, and citizenship in Israel.