The British High Court ruled yesterday (16 December 2009) that a partly state-funded Jewish school in the UK may not use Jewish law to determine who is a Jew. The school had, in response to lower-level court decisions of a similar sort, already replaced the Orthodox matrilineal-descent criterion with a battery of religious-practice criteria. This High Court ruling makes that change irreversible: any educational institution in the UK whose admissions policy appeals to Jewish law to determine who is a Jew is henceforward in breach of UK law.
This decision is not exactly surprising. The UK is several steps further along the road of deploying civil and criminal law to constrain the free exercise of religion than is the US; and there is a long and distressing history of anti-semitism there, especially active at the moment on the British left, that makes a decision like this with respect to Jews easier than it might be with respect to Catholics or Muslims. But even if not surprising, the decision is dramatic: it shows very clearly, elegantly even, that liberal democracies are normative systems whose self-understanding requires them to tell religious people how to interpret their own doctrine and discipline. The British judiciary has now told Orthodox Jews in the UK that they may not decide for themselves who is a Jew: the courts will do it for them. (The British legislature, to its credit, opposed this decision.)
Catholics should care about this for at least two reasons. The first is that we are more intimate with the people of Israel than with any other community: without them we cannot exist, and their interests are more nearly ours than are those of any pagan state. The second is that this UK court decision shows clearly the tendency of pagan states (and the USA is one every bit as much as the UK) to arrogate to themselves the right to interpret the doctrine and discipline of the churches, and to use the law to enforce those interpretations when they conflict with those the churches offer.
Catholics of course have no business offering opinions about who is a Jew. We do, however, have a duty publicly to oppose pagan states when they require that Jewish judgments about that matter be subordinated to their own.
