ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses is the boundaries of the religious community. It assesses the differential obligations and privileges of the members of the Jewish community. The struggle to preserve the historic unity of religion and nation in the face of increased calls to split them apart is a central dynamic of the religious legal tradition’s approach to questions of belonging. In the eyes of the common Jewish people, the Court surmised, ‘a Jew who has embraced another religion has withdrawn himself from the Jewish nation and has no place in the Jewish community’. The drama of sectarian schism – the splitting of the Jewish religion into different religions – that accompanied much of Jewish history through the medieval period, was replaced in modernity with denominationalism. Although the Jewish religious law recognizes conversion from other religions to Judaism, the majority view is that it simply is not possible to cease being a Jew.
