#dubnow

Dubnow's thought is almost unassailable, and so I believe some things can be explained with contemporary terminology.  I'm talking about his controversial views on blood, and how this is a factor for determining one's Jewishness (Rosenzweig weirdly shares this idea, despite coming from a very assimilated family further west and almost converting. Dubnow was raised in a very traditional, eastern European setting, but became rather irrelgious). 

"A person is not made a member of this nationality or that, but is born into it," Dubnow writes in his second letter in Old and New Judaism.  This evokes, in reverse, de Beauvoir's famous line, "one is not born a woman, but becomes one." But Dubnow, too, hints at post/structuralism; that is, the fields of power that circumscribe one's identity.  Let's put his quote in context.   "One may become a member of a some artificial, legal or social-political grouping, but it is impossible for a person 'to be made' a member of a natural collective group, of a tribe, or peope, except through mingling of blood (through marriage) in the course of generations, through the prolonged process of shedding one's national individuality" (emphasis mine). 

There are no such things as individual Jews.  When one converts to Judaism, it presupposes a continuation of Judaism within the community through the ger/giyoret,  the one who converted (they also take on gendered nouns! sorry).  This is meta-religious.  It entails not lifestyle choices, or rituals, but generational ramifications.