Another blow to the freedom of people to associate with each other as equality rules undermine the very boundaries of religious identity and practice. The Supreme Court rules on the admissions policy of an ancient Jewish educational foundation and concluded that a pupil was rejected on the grounds of ethnicity, not religion.
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. It added that while it was fair that Jewish schools should give preference to Jewish children, the admissions criteria must depend not on family ties, but “on faith, however defined.”
I am still not clear how conversion to judaism, a religious act, can be viewed as a testament to ethnicity. But, this gives an insight into how pernicious a discriminatory law is when it trespasses on belief and its organisation. What should be private is rendered a matter of law, not of Jewish practice. Even worse is the sense of arbitrary contradiction: undermining religious belief due its peculiar mixture of people and practice whereas other systems of belief are given free rein to apply civil laws, even though they are discriminatory in gender terms.
Is this not anti-semitic in a rational sense? A law that discriminates against Judaism as its specific traits do not fit well within the universals of equality as set out under New Labour. This is not anti-semitic in a traditional sense but rather in this ironical setting. The universal principles governing equality legislation cannot encompass historical traditions or blurred categories and end up, paradoxically, discriminating against such anomalies. Reversion to liberty is the sole lesson of Britain's first anti-semitic government.
