The head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, has attracted attention for his recent comments about intermarriage among Jews. Speaking to The Tel Avivian and the Rabbinic podcast last week, he declared: “My children are Jews and they will create Jewish families in Jewish households. End of story. Non-negotiable.”

Greenblatt is an outspoken Zionist, and the ADL has a well-established commitment to Israel. His comments were therefore seized upon by critics as evidence of a supposedly ethnonationalist worldview. Some compared his position to that of white supremacists who rail against “miscegenation”, arguing that both rest on the idea that intermarriage threatens the integrity of a particular people.

Jews have long occupied an uncomfortable position in this debate. They are accused of at once being too separatist while simultaneously using assimilation as a means of infiltrating and subverting the body politic. But the truth is that many immigrant communities and ethnic minorities hold similar views to Greenblatt. Interfaith marriage is also a fraught issue among Muslims. In both Judaism and Islam, the point isn’t about protecting “blood purity” so much as it is about preserving cultural traditions and religious continuity. Prospective parents wish to pass on the culture and traditions in which they were raised because these things carry meaning and sentimental value. It follows that this task is far easier when spouses share the same cultural or ethnic background.

Of course, this attitude can easily produce chauvinism. Behind it, though, is a fear of assimilation translating to the erasure of one’s own “community”. As the narrator of Zadie Smith’s 2000 novel White Teeth says, the immigrant fears “disappearance, dissolution”. That fear becomes more acute in a modern cosmopolitan society, where assimilation and admixture is more common. Quite often, individuals exercise their freedom to marry whomever they wish, regardless of their elders’ preferences.

Given that the global Jewish population remains below its pre-Holocaust level, intermarriage carries particular significance for religious Jews concerned with the continuity of their people. Some Orthodox figures and Kahanist elements in Israel have gone so far as to describe diaspora intermarriage as a “second Holocaust”. The concern is that, over successive generations, fewer children will be raised Jewish, and the Jewish people will gradually dwindle into history.

Indeed, the Zionist diagnosis of the so-called Jewish question was based on the observation that post-Enlightenment Jewry found itself at a crossroads. Either they would continue to be persecuted by hostile gentile societies, or they would be assimilated into their respective communities at the expense of their Jewish identity. A Jewish-majority state was seen as the answer to the question of whether the race would survive.

Assimilation is often treated as a dirty word. In our multicultural age, it is sneered at as the erasure of difference. But there is a liberal core to the ideal of assimilation that is focused instead on communal “belonging” being subject to individual consent. It proposes that the group into which someone is born should not exercise tyranny over them, and that individuals can fashion themselves into something they weren’t simply born to be.

Being Jewish and participating in the Jewish community, for example, is therefore a matter of free association in any liberal society. Intermarriage doesn’t prevent Jews from raising their offspring as Jewish, however they see fit, as long as they wish to. This is the emancipatory dimension of liberal assimilation, and it is one that we should not lose.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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