Source: www.nytimes.com
LONDON, ENGLAND, November 8, 2009: The questions before the judges in Courtroom No. 1 of Britain’s Supreme Court were as ancient and as complex as Judaism itself. Who is a Jew? And who gets to decide? On the surface, the court was considering a straightforward challenge to the admissions policy of a Jewish high school in London. But the case, in which arguments concluded Oct. 30, has potential repercussions for thousands of other parochial schools across Britain.
In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.” The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism. “The requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act,” the court said.
[HPI note: We believe there are state-supported Hindu schools in the UK, though we don’t know how they might be impacted by this unusual ruling. The court is adopting a specific definition of religious affiliation, that one is of the religion one says he or she is, rather than by any other criteria. In this case, the court is at odds with Jewish tradition that a Jew is only one born of a Jewish mother. A parallel would be to say that a Hindu is only someone born in India or to Hindu parents, a criteria which would be rejected under this court’s logic.]