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.
