It is widely believed, and practiced, that someone is a Jew only if born to a Jewish mother. This version we are taught from an early age, and it is very much a Rabbinical reading. However, this does not appear to be logical, if we read the Torah.
The Book of B'Midbar (Numbers) opens in Ch1 with a discussion of counting who is an Israelite.
2 'Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of
Israel, by their families, by their fathers' houses, according to the
number of names, every male, by their polls;
18 And they assembled all the congregation together on the first
day of the second month, and they declared their pedigrees after their
families, by their fathers' houses, according to the number of names,
from twenty years old and upward, by their polls.
19 As the LORD commanded Moses, so did he number them in the wilderness of Sinai.
All the tribes are listed and counted according to the Father's house, not the mother's! Now, the case of Judah/Yehudah, from whom Yehudim (Jews) is also mentioned, and this is no different:
26 Of the children of Judah, their generations, by their
families, by their fathers' houses, according to the number of names,
from twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go forth to war;
27 those that were numbered of them, of the tribe of Judah, were threescore and fourteen thousand and six hundred.
The Torah is saying something quite revolutionary - it is saying that those whose fathers are NOT from the tribe of Yehuda, are not Yehudim/Jews. This is precisely the opposite of what the Rabbis claim - that one can have a non-Israelite father, even an uncircumcised one, and if the mother is a daughter of a Jewish tribe, then the child will automatically receive "Jewishness" from the mother. But according to B'Midbar, the child will not be "Jewish", and perhaps not even an Israelite at all.
Some rabbis will admit, that this was the case in the days of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but the Torah changed the law. However, this is not consistent with the text. Before people accuse me of encouraging intermarriage, it is no more an encouragement than the rabbinical system. The difference is that the rabbinical system "encourages" intermarriage with males of foreign nations.
The ultimate identity of a child is today a social construction. if 90% of the Jewish population accept matrilineal identity, that is how it is. The purpose of this post is to show that the Torah says precisely the reverse of what the Rabbis do, and not to encourage intermarriage, of either variety.
If the Torah says patrilineal descent, then that is how it is, not what 90% of Jews falsely believe. This is what needs to be changed if we are to escape from the constant threats that we face!
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