Matrilineal Descent and Ezra 9-10

    Until a few decades ago it was universally accepted in the Jewish world that the children of a Jewish mother were considered Jewish regardless of the religion of the father.  It was only starting in the 1950s that the Reform movement began to accept as Jews , children who had one Jewish parent.  Nevertheless the origins of matrilineal descent are somewhat obscure.  (Much of what I detail here is found in some essays and book chapters written by Prof. Shaye Cohen)

    The sources for understanding the origins of matrilineal descent are the Tanach, the Mishnah and the Gemara.  Looking through the entirety of Tanach one is hard put to find any evidence of matrilineal descent and for that matter conversion to Judaism.  There are a myriad of examples of Israelite men marrying gentile women.  Through marriage the women became part of the Israelite community.  Nowhere is a process for converting mentioned.  The first source suggesting conversion is in the book of Judith, an apocryphal book of the 1st or 2nd century BCE.

    Possibly, the only source in Tanach which may could be construed as indicating evidence for matrilineal descent during biblical times is in the last two chapters of the book of Ezra.  This episode relates that Ezra was informed that the people of the land, some of whom had come with the first "Aliyah" with Zerubavel had married foreign women.  This bothered Ezra greatly.  It would seem that for Ezra, conversion was not  a solution to the problem.  There is also an emphasis on the Cohanim and Leviim who have married foreign women.  The women they married include: Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites.  Are we to believe that in post exilic times there were still Jebusites , Hittites and Perizzites?  It would appear that the author of Ezra is attempting to show that a Torah law was transgressed  by these marriages and hence the urgency to correct the problem.  But regarding the question of matrilineal descent, one Shecheniah says to Ezra that the women should be expelled with their children.  Ezra does not specifically endorse the expulsion of the children- only the mothers.  Does Shecheniah want to expel the children because their mothers were gentile and hence they were also gentile?  The whole episode lacks a certain consistency.

    It seems to me that we are not dealing here with strict halachik themes.  Rather the returning Babylonian exiles had undergone the punishment of exile and in a sense were "purified".  The magnitude of the intermarriage was so great in Ezra's eyes that it superseded any legal remedies such as conversion.  This might be similar to the episode in Leviticus 10 where Moshe is upset that the chattat sacrifice was not eaten.  Milgrom feels that because the death of Nadav and Avihu in the sanctuary precincts was such a serious breech of purity that the usual rules regarding a High Priest and mourning did not apply.  It was an ad hoc decision by Aaron , much as the decision of Ezra was an ad hoc decision.