from the enlightenment to the state of israel 451
to wear clerical dress inspired by their Christian colleagues, eschewing
traditional Jewish dress, including sidelocks, and emphasizing expertise
in university as much as yeshivah learning. For the leaders of these
acculturated communities, it was important that the rabbi they hired as
spiritual leader should have the qualifications to be addressed as ‘Dr’
and not just as ‘Rabbi’.^17
The role of rabbis in the State of Israel is more complicated. Problems
of modern life, such as rules about abortions and autopsies, inevitably
require decision by the state, and the balance of power between parties,
in a democratic system using proportional representation, has often
given a strong voice in government since 1948 to parties which stand for
election on religious platforms. Among the religious decisions of most
significance made by the state has been the definition of Jewish status
for those who wish to settle in Israel under the Israeli Law of Return,
which gives all Jews the right to become Israeli citizens. The state has
decided, for instance, that Ethiopian Jews (Falashas) are to be classed as
Jews despite the opposition of some rabbinic authorities, and that those
immigrants from the Soviet Union who could not demonstrate their
Jewish birth because of the paucity of records should nonetheless be
treated as Jews if that is what they claim to be. An amendment to the
1950 Law of Return clarified the definition of Jewishness with regard to
citizenship (but not in religious matters such as marriage and burial) to
include relatives of Jews, since such people had suffered in the Holo-
caust for being Jewish: ‘The rights of a Jew under this Law ... are also
vested in a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the
spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew.’
There have, however, been limits to this liberality. The amendment also
stated that a Jew means a person ‘who is not a member of another reli-
gion’, following the celebrated case in 1962 of Brother Daniel, a Polish
Jew who had been hidden by Catholics and baptized as a Christian but
still felt himself to be a Jew and wished to settle in Haifa. Judge Silberg,
in a landmark verdict in the secular court, stated, in contradiction to the
Nazi definition of Jewishness, that ‘a Jew who has become a Christian
is not deemed a Jew.’ The ruling was agreed by orthodox rabbis despite
being more stringent than the halakhah.^18
Nearly 2,000 years of development in the diaspora with little or no
political power left Judaism ill prepared to tackle from a religious per-
spective some of the moral and ethical problems arising from the
foundation of a Jewish state. Christians had adapted to the dilemmas
incumbent on governments with the conversion of Constantine in the