title: Who is a Jew?

text: According to historian Shaye J. D. Cohen, in the Bible, the status of the offspring of mixed marriages was determined patrilineally. He brings two likely explanations for the change in Mishnaic times: first, the Mishnah may have been applying the same logic to mixed marriages as it had applied to other mixtures ("kilayim"). Thus, a mixed marriage is forbidden as is the union of a horse and a donkey, and in both unions the offspring are judged matrilineally. Second, the Tannaim may have been influenced by Roman law, which dictated that when a parent could not contract a legal marriage, offspring would follow the mother.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: All Jewish religious movements agree that a person may be a Jew either by birth or through conversion. According to "halakha," a Jew by birth must be born to a Jewish mother. "Halakha" states that the acceptance of the principles and practices of Judaism does not make a person a Jew. However, those born Jewish do not lose that status because they cease to be observant Jews, even if they adopt the practices of another religion.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, as movements which reject the concept of "halakha", often accept a child as Jewish when only the father is Jewish, provided that the child chooses to identify as Jewish. As conversion processes differ, those performed by more liberal denominations are not accepted by more orthodox denominations.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: According to "halakha", to determine a person's Jewish status (Hebrew: ) one needs to consider the status of both parents. If both parents are Jewish, their child will also be considered Jewish, and the child takes the status of the father (e.g., as a kohen). If either parent is subject to a genealogical disability (e.g., is a mamzer) then the child is also subject to that disability. If one of the parents is not Jewish, the rule is that the child takes the status of the mother (Kiddushin 68b, Shulchan Aruch, EH 4:19). The ruling is derived from various sources including , , . Accordingly, if the mother is Jewish, so is her child, and if she is not Jewish, neither is her child considered Jewish. In Orthodox Judaism the child of a non-Jewish mother can be considered Jewish only by a process of conversion to Judaism. The child is also freed from any disabilities and special status to which the father may have been subject (e.g., being a mamzer or kohen) under Jewish law.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The Orthodox and Conservative branches of Judaism maintain that the halakhic rules (i.e. matrilineal descent) are valid and binding. Reform and Liberal Judaism do not accept the halakhic rules as binding, and most branches accept a child of one Jewish parent, whether father or mother, as Jewish if the parents raise the child as a Jew and foster a Jewish identity in the child, noting that "in the Bible the line always followed the father, including the cases of Joseph and Moses, who married into non-Israelite priestly families." (However, according to the oral tradition of Orthodox Judaism, the spouses of both Joseph and Moses converted to Judaism prior to marrying them.) The Reform movement's standard states that "for those beyond childhood claiming Jewish identity, other public acts or declarations may be added or substituted after consultation with their rabbi". Advocates of patrilineal descent point to and . This policy is commonly known as patrilineal descent, though "bilineal" would be more accurate.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In 1983, the Reform Central Conference of American Rabbis passed the Resolution on Patrilineal Descent, declaring that "the child of one Jewish parent is under the presumption of Jewish descent. This presumption of the status of the offspring of any mixed marriage is to be established through appropriate and timely public and formal acts of identification with the Jewish faith and people ... Depending on circumstances, mitzvot leading toward a positive and exclusive Jewish identity will include entry into the covenant, acquisition of a Hebrew name, Torah study, Bar/Bat Mitzvah, and Kabbalat Torah (Confirmation). For those beyond childhood claiming Jewish identity, other public acts or declarations may be added or substituted after consultation with their rabbi."


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Rabbi Mark Washofsky summarizes the 1983 CCAR resolution and subsequent interpretations in Reform responsa literature as follows:


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Waiving the need for formal conversion for anyone with at least one Jewish parent who has made affirmative acts of Jewish identity was a departure from the traditional position requiring formal conversion to Judaism for children without a Jewish mother.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The CCAR's 1983 resolution has had a mixed reception in Reform Jewish communities outside the United States. Most notably, the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism has rejected patrilineal descent and requires formal conversion for anyone not born of a Jewish mother.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Karaite Judaism believes that Jewish identity can only be transmitted by patrilineal descent, on the grounds that all descent in the Torah went according to the male line, basing this idea "on the fact that, in the Bible, tribes are given male names and that biblical characters are always referenced by their fathers' names. However, a minority of modern Karaites believe that Jewish identity requires that both parents be Jewish, and not only the father.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The divergence of views has become an issue because Orthodox and Conservative communities do not recognize a person as Jewish if only their father is Jewish. For the person to be accepted as Jewish by an Orthodox or Conservative community (for example, on an occasion of their bar or bat mitzvah or marriage), they require a formal conversion (in accordance with halakhic standards). Orthodox Judaism has a predominant position in Israel. Although Orthodox and Conservative Judaism do not recognize Jewishness through patrilineal descent, "it should also be noted, however, that in the case of a child born to a Jewish father but to a non-Jewish mother, most Orthodox rabbis will relax the stringent demands normally made of would-be converts", and the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement "agreed that 'sincere Jews by choice' should be warmly welcomed into the community".


title: Who is a Jew?

text: All mainstream forms of Judaism today are open to sincere converts, with most subgroups having a specific process for accepting converts. Not all conversions are recognised by all varieties of Judaism.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In Rabbinic Judaism, the laws of conversion are based on the classical sources of Jewish law, especially discussions in the Talmud, and the law as codified in the Shulkhan Arukh. This corpus of traditional Jewish law (halakha) is regarded as authoritative by the Orthodox and Conservative movements. The traditional halakhic requirements for conversion are instruction in the commandments, circumcision (if male), and immersion in an acceptable body of water before valid witnesses, and acceptance of the commandments before a rabbinical court. If a male is already circumcised, a drop of blood is drawn from the penis.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Orthodox authorities require that conversions be performed in accord with traditional Jewish law and recognise only those conversions in which a convert accepts and undertakes to observe Jewish law as interpreted by Orthodox rabbis. Because rabbis in the other movements do not require that converts make this commitment, Orthodox authorities do not generally accept as valid conversions performed outside the Orthodox community.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Conservative authorities likewise require that conversions be conducted according to traditional Jewish law. Conducting a conversion absent the traditional requirements of immersion in a ritual bath and circumcision for males is a violation of a Standard of the Rabbinical Assembly and grounds for expulsion. Conservative authorities generally recognize any conversion done in accord with the requirements of Jewish law, even if done outside the Conservative movement. Accordingly, Conservative rabbis may accept the validity of some conversions from other non-Orthodox movements.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The Union for Reform Judaism states that "people considering conversion are expected to study Jewish theology, rituals, history, culture and customs, and to begin incorporating Jewish practices into their lives. The length and format of the course of study will vary from rabbi to rabbi and community to community, though most now require a course in basic Judaism and individual study with a rabbi, as well as attendance at services and participation in home practice and synagogue life." Its Central Conference of American Rabbis recommends that three rabbis be present for the conversion ceremony. The Rabbinical Court of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism requires an average of a year of study to become conversant in Jewish life and tradition. Following this, converts are required to immerse in a ritual bath, be circumcised if male, and accept the commandments before the rabbinical court.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Although an infant conversion might be accepted in some circumstances (such as in the case of adopted children or children whose parents convert), children who convert would typically be asked if they want to remain Jewish after reaching religious adulthood – which is 12 years of age for a girl and 13 for a boy, as required by Jewish law.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Karaite Judaism does not accept the oral legal traditions of Rabbinic Judaism. It has different requirements for conversion and refrained from accepting any converts until recently. Traditionally non-proselytizing, on August 1, 2007, the Karaites reportedly converted their first new members in 500 years. At a ceremony in their Northern California synagogue, ten adults and four minors swore fealty to Judaism after completing a year of study. This conversion came 15 years after the Karaite Council of Sages reversed its centuries-old ban on accepting converts.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Syrian Jewish communities do not normally carry out conversions, particularly where the conversion is suspected of being for the sake of marriage. Nor do they accept such converts from other communities, or the children of mixed marriages or marriages involving such converts.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In general, Orthodox Judaism considers individuals born of Jewish mothers to be Jewish, even if they convert to or are raised in another religion. Reform Judaism views Jews who convert to or are raised in another religion as non-Jews. For example "... anyone who claims that Jesus is their savior is no longer a Jew ..." [Contemporary American Reform Responsa, #68].


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Historically, a Jew who has been declared to be a heretic () or Christian (, meaning "Nazarene") may have had a "cherem" (similar to excommunication) placed on him or her; but the practice of communal and religious exclusion does not affect their status of Jewish birth. Judaism also views as Jewish those who involuntarily convert from Judaism to another religion (Hebrew: "anusim," אנוסים, meaning "forced ones"), and their matrilineal descendants are likewise considered to be Jewish.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Judaism has a category for those who are Jewish but who do not practice or who do not accept the tenets of Judaism, whether or not they have converted to another religion. The traditional view regarding these individuals, known as Meshumadim (), is that they are Jewish; however, there is much debate in the rabbinic literature regarding their status vis-a-vis the application of Jewish law and their participation in Jewish ritual, but not to their status as Jews.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: A Jew who leaves Judaism is free to return to the religion at any time. In general, no formal ceremony or declaration is required to return to Jewish practices. All movements of Judaism welcome the return to Judaism of those who have left, or been raised in another religion. When returning to Judaism, these individuals would be expected to abandon their previous practices and adopt Jewish customs.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The same rules in principle apply to the matrilineal descendants of such persons, though some rabbinical authorities may require stricter proof of Jewish descent than others. Whether such persons are required to undergo a full formal conversion depends on the community and their individual circumstances. For example, a male who has had a brit milah, who has a general understanding of Judaism, but who has been raised in a secular home might not be required to undergo ritual conversion. However, a male who has not had a brit milah, a male or female who has converted to or been brought up in another religion, or an individual raised in a completely secular home without any Jewish education, in most communities, may be required to undergo a full ritual conversion. For full participation in the community (for example, to marry with the participation of a rabbi), they may be required to display sincerity, such as a declaration of commitment to Judaism.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Another example of the issues involved is the case of converts to Judaism who cease to practice Judaism (whether or not they still regard themselves as Jewish), do not accept or follow halakha, or now adhere to another religion. Technically, such a person remains Jewish, like all Jews, provided that the original conversion is valid. However, in some recent cases, Haredi rabbinical authorities, as well as the current Religious Zionist Israeli Chief Rabbinate, have taken the view that a given convert's lapse from Orthodox Jewish observance is evidence that he or she cannot, even at the time of the conversion, have had the full intention to observe the commandments and that the conversion must therefore have been invalid.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: A valid Jewish court of sufficient stature has the ability to revoke a person's or a group's status as Jews. This was done for the lost Ten Tribes of Israel and the Samaritans.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: According to the traditional Rabbinic view, which is maintained by all branches of Orthodox Judaism and Conservative Judaism, and some branches of Reform Judaism, only "halakha" can define who is or is not a Jew when a question of Jewish identity, lineage, or parentage arises about any person seeking to define themselves or claim that they are Jewish.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: As a result, mere "belief" in the principles of Judaism does "not" make one a Jew. Similarly, non-adherence by a Jew to the 613 Mitzvot, or even formal conversion to another religion, does not make one lose one's Jewish status. Thus, the immediate descendants of all female Jews (even apostates) are still considered to be Jews, as are those of all their female descendants. Even those descendants who are not aware they are Jews or practice a religion other than Judaism, are defined by this perspective as Jews, as long as they come from an unbroken female line of descent. As a corollary, the children of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother are not considered to be Jews by Halakha unless they formally convert according to Halakha, even if raised fully observant in the Mitzvot.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Those not born to a Jewish mother may become accepted as Jews by the Orthodox and Conservative communities through a formal process of conversion to Judaism in order to become "righteous converts" ('—). In addition, Halakha requires that the new convert commit himself to the observance of its tenets; this is called ' (), "Acceptance of the Yoke of the Commandments". "" () is used by Reform Judaism in accordance with reform responsa and Halakhah.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Both Haredi Judaism and Modern Orthodox Judaism accept a similar set of rules regarding Jewish status based on classical rabbinic Judaism, including both matrilineal descent and requirements that conversions be performed by Orthodox rabbis and that converts promise to strictly observe elements of traditional Judaism such as Shabbat and Niddah. However, their application of these rules have been different, and the difference has been increasing in recent years. Modern Orthodox authorities have been more inclined to rule in favor of Jewish status and to accept non-Orthodox Jews' word in doubtful cases involving people claiming to be Jews, while Haredi authorities have in recent years tended to presume non-Jewish status and require more stringent rules and standards of evidence in order for Jewish status to be proven, and have tended to distrust the evidence of Jews who are not personally Orthodox. Haredi rabbis have tended to look at a convert's current personal observance and to regard deficiencies or lack of Orthodoxy in current observance as evidence that the convert never intended to validly convert. In addition, the contemporary situation is further complicated by the fact that some Haredi rabbis no longer regard some Modern Orthodox rabbis as reliable.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Karaite Judaism relies on the Tanakh to indicate that Jewishness is passed down through the paternal line, not the maternal line as is maintained by Orthodox Judaism (though a minority holds that both parents need to be Jewish). Karaite Jews are eligible for Aliyah under the Law of Return. The eligibility of converts to Judaism through the Karaite movement to make Aliyah under the Law of Return has not yet been addressed in Israeli courts.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Several verses in the Bible mentioning about laws of family inheritance depending on the paternal lineage of the tribe:


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Reform Judaism recognizes a child as being Jewish if either parent is Jewish and the child is being raised Jewish. Voices within the Reform movement say that the law, which changed to matriarchal around 2,000 years ago (originally in the Torah the offspring was determined by patriarchal descent) and was based on the tragic circumstances the Jewish people were facing, was once helpful but is no longer relevant.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Modern Progressive Jewish denominations have a conversion process based on their principles. In the US, an official Reform resolution in 1893 abolished circumcision as a requirement for converts, and Reform does not require converts to have "tevilah," ritual immersion. A "prospective convert declares, orally and in writing, in the presence of a rabbi and no less than two lay leaders of the congregation and community, acceptance of the Jewish religion and the intention to live in accordance with its "mitzvot"".


title: Who is a Jew?

text: One issue arises because North American Reform and UK Liberal movements have changed some of the halakhic requirements for Jewish identity in two ways:


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Secondly, Orthodox Judaism asserts that non-Orthodox rabbis are not qualified to form a "beit din." This has led to non-Orthodox conversions generally being unaccepted in Orthodox communities. Since Orthodox Judaism maintains the traditional standards for conversion – in which the commitment to observe halakha is required – non-Orthodox conversions are generally not accepted in Orthodox communities because the non-Orthodox movements perform conversions in which the new convert does not undertake to observe halakha as understood by Orthodox Judaism.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: A third controversy concerns persons (whether born Jews or converts to Judaism) who have converted to another religion. The traditional view is such persons remain Jewish. Reform Judaism regards such people as apostates, and states regarding Messianic Jews: Messianic Jews' claim that they are Jews, but we must asked ourselves whether we identify them as Jews. We can not do so as they consider Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah who has fulfilled the Messianic promises. In this way, they have clearly placed themselves within Christianity. They may be somewhat different from other Christians as they follow various Jewish rites and ceremonials, but that does not make them Jews." Regardless, such people do not count as Jewish for the purposes of the Israeli citizenship laws.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: A fourth controversy stems from the manner in which the Chief Rabbinate of Israel has been handling marriage and conversion decisions in recent years. Conversions and marriages within Israel are legally controlled by the Orthodox Israeli Chief Rabbinate; therefore, a person not proven to be a Jew to the Rabbinate's satisfaction is not legally permitted to marry a Jew in Israel today. Although the Rabbinate has always refused to accept non-Orthodox conversions, until recent years it was more willing to accept the Jewish parentage of applicants based on personal testimony, and the validity of conversions based on the testimony of Orthodox Rabbis. However, in recent years the rabbinate, whose rabbis historically had a more Modern Orthodox orientation, has increasingly been filled by the more stringent Haredi camp. It has increasingly been inclined to presume that applicants are not Jewish until proven otherwise, and require more stringent standards of proof than in the past. It has implemented a policy of refusing to accept the testimony of non-Orthodox Jews in matters of Jewish status, on grounds that such testimony is not reliable. It also has been increasingly skeptical of the reliability of Orthodox rabbis ordained by institutions not subject to its accreditation, particularly in matters of conversion. Accordingly, non-Orthodox Jews born to Jewish parents, and some Jews converted by Orthodox rabbis, have been increasingly unable to prove their Jewishness to the Rabbinate's satisfaction, because they are unable to find an Orthodox rabbi who is both acceptable to the Rabbinate, and familiar with and willing to vouch for the Jewishness of their maternal lineage or the validity of their conversion.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: There have been several attempts to convene representatives of the three major movements to formulate a practical solution to this issue. To date, these have failed, though all parties concede the importance of the issue is greater than any sense of rivalry among them.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: "Ethnic Jew" is a term generally used to describe a person of Jewish parentage and background who does not necessarily actively practice Judaism, but still identifies with Judaism or other Jews culturally or fraternally, or both. The term "ethnic Jew" does not specifically exclude practicing Jews, but they are usually simply referred to as "Jews" without the qualifying adjective "ethnic".


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The term can refer to people of diverse beliefs and backgrounds because genealogy largely defines who is "Jewish". "Ethnic Jew" is sometimes used to distinguish non-practicing from practicing (religious) Jews. Other terms include "non-observant Jew", "non-religious Jew", "non-practicing Jew", and "secular Jew".


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The term may also refer to Jews who do not practice the religion of Judaism. Typically, ethnic Jews are cognizant of their Jewish background and may feel strong cultural (even if not religious) ties to Jewish traditions and to the Jewish people or nation. Like people of any other ethnicity, non-religious ethnic Jews often assimilate into a surrounding non-Jewish culture, but, especially in areas where there is a strong local Jewish culture, they may remain largely part of that culture instead.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: "Ethnic Jews" include atheists, agnostics, non-denominational deists, Jews with only casual connections to Jewish denominations or converts to other religions, such as Christianity, Buddhism, or Islam. Religious Jews of all denominations sometimes engage in outreach to non-religious Jews. In the case of some Hasidic denominations (e.g. Chabad-Lubavitch), this outreach extends to actively proselytizing more secular Jews.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The 2013 Pew Research study of American Jews found that 62% thought that being Jewish was mainly a matter of ancestry and culture, while 15% thought that it was mainly a matter of religion. Of those who stated themselves to be Jews by religion, 55% thought that being Jewish was mainly a matter of ancestry and culture, while two-thirds thought that it was not necessary to believe in God to be Jewish.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: During the Middle Ages there was no need to ask the question "who is a Jew?", because the difference between the Jewish and the non-Jewish community was clear to both sides. For example, a person born to a Jewish family was Jewish, marriages between Jews and non-Jews were not allowed, and the only way to leave the Jewish identity was through not only leaving the religion, but also cutting all ties to the Jewish community, including family and friends. To Medieval Jews the most essential difference between them and others was not about faith but about the peoplehood, to which their religious community was tied into, and they called themselves "Israel".


title: Who is a Jew?

text: As the emancipation for Jews in Europe became relevant, the ideology of nationalism started rising and in parts of the Western Europe religion became more clearly separated from ethnicity, the question of what kind of a group the Jews were, religious, cultural, racial, national or something else, became discussed more. Due to emancipation, Jews were expected to assimilate into European nations. Religious difference was tolerated better than ethnic, and Jews were now sometimes defined just as a religious group, e.g. Jews in Germany were defined as Germans who practice "Mosaic faith". Jews themselves were usually not happy with this definition. Yet, as seeking for equal civil rights and to prove that Jews can be a part of Western civilizations as well, some Central European Jews started highlighting their identity more as a religious group, with some rejecting ethnic definitions of Jewishness completely and some consciously getting rid of their "oriental" habits. Many Jews however, especially in Eastern Europe, criticized Western Jews for losing their Jewishness. Still, simultaneously, the concept of "Semitic race", which included the Jews, was coined. This also lead to pseudoscientific ideas of Jews being racially inferior to "Aryans". Later the Holocaust caused some more Jews to avoid attaching ethnic or racial elements to being Jewish. In the former Soviet Union, "Jewish" was a nationality by law, as with other nationalities such as Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians and others, and Soviet Jews themselves had a strong sense of ethnic Jewishness (""Yiddishkeit"") which would have separated them from surrounding ethnic groups. There were certain restrictions on their civil liberties in the early years of the Soviet Union.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The modern genealogical DNA test of ethnicity is a non-religious definition of 'who is a Jew?' as increasing numbers of persons discover their biological and cultural origins outside the traditional religious setting. There has been controversy about the use of DNA tests in Israeli rabbinical courts as a test of Jewishness.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In the United States and Europe, because of intermarriage, the population of "half-Jews" is beginning to rival that of Jews with two Jewish parents. Self-identified "half-Jews" consider the term a familial category, which reflects multiple heritages and possible Jewish cultural or spiritual practices. Other similar terms that have been used include: "part-Jewish" and "partial-Jews". The term "Gershom", "Gershomi" or "Beta Gershom" has also been seldom used as an alternative to "half-Jewish" and "part-Jewish" in connection with descendants of intermarriage, Gershom being the biblical son of Moses and his Midianite wife Zipporah. The term typically has no religious meaning, as terms like Jewish Christian do, but rather describes ethnic Jewry.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The Society for Humanistic Judaism defines a Jew as "someone who identifies with the history, culture and fate of the Jewish people". In their view it is, therefore, possible for a non-religious individual to adopt Judaism and join a Humanistic Jewish community, and for the Society for Humanistic Judaism to adopt the person wanting to be part of the Humanistic Jewish family. As Israeli author Amos Oz puts it, "a Jew is anyone who chooses or is compelled to share a common fate with other Jews." Oz summed up his position more succinctly in a monologue published in "Tikkun", saying "Who is a Jew? Everyone who is mad enough to call himself or herself a Jew is a Jew.". From a similar perspective it is possible for a person born and raised as a Jew to leave Judaism and no longer be a Jew: famous historical examples are Heinrich Heine, Benjamin Disraeli, Gustav Mahler, Georg Brandes.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Israeli constitutional documents have not defined "who is a Jew" although the decision whether someone is Jewish or not has important legal, social and financial ramifications. This lack of definition has given rise to legal controversy in Israel and there have been many court cases in Israel that have addressed the question.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: , anyone who immigrated to Israel after 1990 and wishes to marry or divorce via the Jewish tradition within the state limits must go through a "Judaism test" at an Orthodox Rabbinical court. In this test, a person would need to prove their claim to be Jewish to an investigator beyond a reasonable doubt. They would need to present original documentation of their matriline up to their great-grandmother (4 generations), or in the case of Ethiopian Jews, 7 generations back. In addition, they should provide government documents with nationality/religion shown as Jewish (e.g., birth/death certificates, marriage documents, etc.).


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In the case of people whose original documents have been lost or never existed, it may take considerable effort to prove they are Jewish.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The court rulings are not final, and any clerk has the power to question them even 20 years later, changing one's citizenship status to "on hold", and putting them in jeopardy of deportation.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Following the birth of the modern State of Israel in 1948, the Law of Return was enacted in 1950 to give any Jew the right to immigrate to Israel and become a citizen. However, due to an inability on the lawmakers to agree, the Law did not define who was a Jew, relying instead on the issue to resolve itself over time. As a result, the Law relied in form on the traditional halakhic definition. But, the absence of a definition of who is a Jew, for the purpose of the Law, has resulted in the divergent views of the various streams of Judaism competing for recognition.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Besides the generally accepted halakhic definition of who is a Jew, in 1970, the Law extended the categories of person who are entitled to immigration and citizenship to the children and grandchildren of Jews, regardless of their present religious affiliation, and their spouses. Also, converts to Judaism whose conversion was performed outside the State of Israel, regardless of who performed it, are entitled to immigration under the Law. Once again, issues arose as to whether a conversion performed outside Israel was valid. The variation of the definition in the Law and the definition used by various branches of Judaism has resulted in practical difficulties for many people.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: It has been estimated that in the past twenty years about 200,000 non-Jews and even practicing Christians have entered Israel from the former Soviet Union on the basis of being a child or grandchild of a Jew or by being married to a Jew.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: However, there is an exception in the case of a person who has formally converted to another religion. This is derived from the "Rufeisen Case" in 1962, in which the Supreme Court ruled that such a person, no matter what their halakhic position, is not entitled to immigration under the Law; they concluded that "no one can regard an apostate as belonging to the Jewish people".


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Current Israeli definitions specifically exclude Jews who have openly and knowingly converted to or were raised in a faith other than Judaism, including Messianic Judaism. This definition is not the same as that in traditional Jewish law; in some respects it is deliberately wider, so as to include those non-Jewish relatives of Jews who may have been perceived to be Jewish, and thus faced antisemitism.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The Law of Return does not, of itself, define the Jewish status of a person; it only deals with those who have a right to immigration to Israel.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In the early 1950s, the Israeli Chief Rabbinate originally objected to the immigration of Karaite Jews to Israel, and unsuccessfully tried to obstruct it. In 2007 Rabbi David Chayim Chelouche, the chief rabbi of Netanya, was quoted in the Jerusalem Post as saying: "A Karaite is a Jew. We accept them as Jews and every one of them who wishes to come back [to mainstream Judaism] we accept back. There was once a question about whether Karaites needed to undergo a token circumcision in order to switch to rabbinic Judaism, but the rabbinate agrees that today that is not necessary."


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In relation to marriage, divorce, and burial, which are under the jurisdiction of the Israeli Interior Ministry, the halakhic definition of who is a Jew is applied. When there is any doubt, the Israeli Chief Rabbinate generally determines the issue.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In terms of social relations, most secular Jews view their Jewish identity as a matter of culture, heritage, nationality, or ethnicity. Ancestral aspects can be explained by the many Jews who view themselves as atheists and are defined by matrilineal descent or a Cohen (Kohen) or Levi, which is connected by ancestry. The question of "who is a Jew" is a question that is under debate. Issues related to ancestral or ethnic Jews are dealt with by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Orthodox halachic rules apply to converts who want to marry in Israel. Under these rules, a conversion to Judaism must strictly follow halachic standards to be recognised as valid. The rabbinate even scrutinizes Orthodox conversions, with some who have converted by orthodox authorities outside Israel not being permitted to marry in Israel.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: If one's ancestral line of Jewishness is in doubt, then a proper conversion would be required in order to be allowed to marry in the Orthodox community, or in Israel, where such rules govern all marriages.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In the registering of "nationality" on Israeli identity cards, which is administered by the Ministry of the Interior, a person had to meet the Halakhic definition to be registered as a "Jew". However, in a number of cases the Supreme Court of Israel has ordered the Ministry of Interior to register Reform and Conservative converts as Jews. The right of people who convert in the Diaspora under Reform or Conservative auspices to immigrate to Israel and claim citizenship as Jews is detailed in Israeli law.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Until recently, Israeli identity cards had an indication of nationality, and the field was left empty for those who immigrated not solely on the basis of being Jewish (i.e. as a child, grandchild or spouse of a Jew only) to indicate that the person may not be a Jew. Many Israeli citizens who are not recognised by the Rabbinate as Jewish have been issued with Israeli identity cards that do not include their Hebrew calendar birth date.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In 2010 the Labour Court of South Africa addressed the question of who is a Jew for the purposes of the Employment Equity Act. The question has also arisen in the United Kingdom, where religious schools are allowed to select all or a proportion of their intake based upon religion. A 2009 ruling, "R(E) v Governing Body of JFS", determined that the definition of Jewish religion based upon descent constituted discrimination on ethnic grounds, and therefore contravened racial discrimination laws. Also in the UK, under the Sunday Trading Act 1994 "a person of the Jewish religion" who observes the Jewish Sabbath can open their shops on Sundays. The Act defines "person of the Jewish religion" as someone who holds a certificate that they are Jewish from a Rabbi, synagogue secretary or the representative body of British Jewry, the Board of Deputies.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: There have been other attempts to determine Jewish identity beside the traditional Jewish approaches. These range from genetic population studies to controversial evolutionary perspectives including those espoused by Kevin B. MacDonald and Yuri Slezkine. Historians, such as the late Kamal Salibi, have utilized etymology and geography to reconstruct the prehistoric origin of the Jewish people in the Arabian Peninsula.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: As with any other ethnic identity, Jewish identity is, to some degree, a matter of either claiming that identity or being perceived by others (both inside and outside the ethnic group) as belonging to that group, or both. Returning again to the example of Madeleine Albright—during her Catholic childhood, her being in some sense Jewish was presumably irrelevant. It was only after she was nominated to be Secretary of State that she, and the public, discovered her Jewish ancestry.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The relative importance of these factors may vary enormously from place to place. For example, a typical Dutch Jew might describe their Jewish identity simply as "I was born Jewish," while a Jew in Romania, where levels of antisemitism are higher, might say, "I consider any form of denying as a proof of cowardice."


title: Who is a Jew?

text: During the time of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, conversion to Roman Catholicism did not result in total termination of the person's Jewish status. Legally, the converts were no longer regarded as Jews and thus allowed to stay in the Iberian Peninsula. During the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, however, many Jews were forced to convert, but thereafter were regarded by many people, though not in a legal form, as New Christians, distinguishing them as separate from the Old Christians of non-Jewish lineage. Since legal, political, religious and social pressure pushed many people to untrue conversions (public behaviour as Christians while retaining some Jewish beliefs and practices privately, a kind of crypto-Judaism), they were still treated with suspicion, a stigma sometimes carried for several generations by their identifiable descendants.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The "limpieza de sangre" ("Cleanliness of blood") required public officials or candidates for membership of many organizations to prove that they did not have Jewish or Muslim ancestry.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Jean-Paul Sartre, who was not Jewish, suggested in "Anti-Semite and Jew" (1948) that Jewish identity "is neither national nor international, neither religious nor ethnic, nor political: it is a quasi-historical community." While Jews as individuals may be in danger from the antisemite who sees only "Jews" and not "people", Sartre argues that the Jewish experience of antisemitism preserves—even creates—the sense of Jewish community. In his most extreme statement of this view he wrote, "It is the anti-Semite who creates the Jew." Conversely, that sense of specific Jewish community may be threatened by the democrat who sees only "the person" and not "the Jew".


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Hannah Arendt repeatedly asserted a principle of claiming Jewish identity in the face of antisemitism. "If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man, or whatever"; "A man attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or a Frenchman. The world can only conclude from this that he is simply not defending himself at all."


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Wade Clark Roof (1976), a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, proposed that social sectors in modern life, in which traditional symbols and rituals are meaningful, provide an alternative approach for explaining the social basis of religion in a secular order, in doing so, he turned to the local community as a sphere in modern society that still persists "as a complex system of friendship and kinship networks, formal and informal associations, as well as symbolic attachments, very much rooted in family life and ongoing socialization processes".


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The question "who is a Jew?" is also sometimes of importance to non-Jews. Historically, it had exceptional significance when it was considered by anti-Jewish groups for the purpose of targeting Jews for persecution or discrimination. The definition can have an impact on whether a person may have a certain job, live in certain locations, receive a free education, live or continue to live in specific countries, be imprisoned, or executed.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The question was of critical importance during the rule of the Nazi party in Germany, which persecuted the Jews and defined them for the government's purposes by the Nuremberg Laws. In 2009, a United Kingdom court considered whether the question was a racial issue, in the case "R(E) v Governing Body of JFS" (2009).


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The Nazi regime instituted laws which discriminated against Jews, declared a race by the Nazis, and thus needed a working definition of who is a Jew as to its law-defined race system. These definitions almost completely categorised persons through the religions followed by each individual's ancestors, according to membership registries. Thus, personal faith or individual observance, as well as the religious definitions of Judaism as given by the Halacha, were mostly ignored.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In Germany itself, the Ahnenpass and the Nuremberg Laws classified people as being of the Jewish race if they were descended from three or four grandparents enrolled in Jewish congregations. A person with one or two grandparents enrolled in a Jewish congregation could be classified as "Mischling", a crossbreed, of "mixed blood", even if they were not a member of a Jewish congregation at the time the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. The Mischling Test was introduced in order to identify Europeans with Jewish blood, and these were classified as "Jews of the first or second degree". Only people with at least two grandparents of "German blood" could be German Reich citizens. Other Germans were dropped into a new second class group of citizens, the so-called "state subjects" (Staatsangehörige).


title: Who is a Jew?

text: If a person with grandparents of the same religious combination was enrolled as a member of a Jewish congregation in 1935, or later enrolled, they switched from the discriminatory class of Mischlinge into that of Geltungsjude, "Jew by legal validity" even if they did not meet the criterion of descent from three or four Jewish grandparents. In the eyes of the Nazi government, one could not become a non-Jew by seceding from one's Jewish congregation, becoming non-practicing, marrying outside the religion, or converting to Christianity. Thus any Mischling could move into the class of Geltungsjude by joining a Jewish congregation, but the Nuremberg Laws provided that the classification of any Geltungsjude would not change even she or he tried to evade harm by withdrawing from their Jewish congregation after 1935, considering such secessions as being of no effect. Similarly, after 1935, any Mischling with two Jewish grandparents (colloquially called a half-Jew) who married anybody classified as a Jew would drop into the Geltungsjude class. Mischlinge with one Jewish grandparent were usually forbidden from marrying anybody with any Jewish grandparents.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws forbade new marriages between people who were classified as Jews and people who belonged to other classifications. Earlier contracted marriages between spouses of different classifications (so-called mixed marriages; Mischehe) provided the Jewish-classified spouse with uncertain protection from some discriminations and atrocities.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: There were very few Karaites in Europe during the Nazi era; most of them lived in Turkey, Greece, and the Crimea. Karaites were not considered Jewish for the purpose of the Holocaust extermination policy; according to SS Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, writing on November 24, 1944, discrimination against the Karaites had been prohibited due to their proximity to the Crimean Tatars, to whom Berger views the Karaites as being related. Nazis still retained hostility towards the Karaites, on grounds of their religion; and there were a number of small scale massacres of Karaites.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In German-occupied France, an ordinance defined a Jew as an individual who belonged to the Jewish religion or who had more than two Jewish grandparents.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The Vichy régime in southern France defined a Jew as an individual with three Jewish grandparents or two grandparents if his/her spouse was Jewish. Richard Weisberg points out that this was a potentially broader classification than the one used in Occupied France, for example, a Mischling could not be classified a Jew under the Nazi dictate, by her/his spouse's classification if the marriage was contracted before the imposition of anti-Semitic marriage laws there, but would be deemed one under the Vichy act if he/she had married a Jew, regardless when.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: There are various groups besides Jews which have claimed to be descended from the biblical Israelites. The question nowadays arises in relation to Israel's Law of Return, with various groups seeking to migrate there. Some claims have been accepted, some are under consideration, while others have been rejected by Israel's rabbinate.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Some sources say that the earliest Jews of Cochin, India, were those who settled in the Malabar Coast during the times of King Solomon of Israel, and after the Kingdom of Israel split into two. There is historical documentation of the Jews being in Cochin after the fall of the Second Temple, from around the first century CE. Later additions were smaller immigration of Sephardic Jews from Europe in the sixteenth century after the expulsion from Spain, and Baghdadi Jews, Arabic-speaking Jews who arrived in the late eighteenth century, at the beginning of the British colonial era. Following the independence of India and the establishment of Israel, most Cochin Jews emigrated to Israel in the mid-1950s. Some have gone on to North America or Britain.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The Bene Israel in India claim to be descended from Jews who escaped persecution in Galilee in the 2nd century BCE. The Bene Israel resemble the non-Jewish Marathi people in appearance and customs, which indicates some intermarriage between Jews and Indians. The Bene Israel, however, maintained the practices of Jewish dietary laws, male circumcision and observation of the Sabbath as a day of rest. From the late eighteenth century, other Jewish communities instructed them in normative Judaism.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Initially, the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel said that the Bene Israel would have to undergo conversion in order to marry other Jews, as matrilineal descent could not be proven. In 1964 the Israeli Rabbinate declared that the Bene Israel are "full Jews in every respect".


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The Bene Israel claim a lineage to the Kohanim, the Israelite priestly class, which claims descent from Aaron, the brother of Moses. In 2002, DNA testing revealed that the Bene Israel shared some genetic markers of the Kohanim. These are not exclusive to the Kohanim, but appear among them at a higher frequency. These are also shared with some non-Jewish Semitic peoples.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Many of the Bene Israel emigrated from India to Israel, where around 6,000 Jews of this group reside. About 5,000 remain in India. They maintain 65 synagogues in Israel.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The Beta Israel or Falasha is a group formerly living in Ethiopia who have a tradition of descent from the lost tribe of Dan. They have a long history of practicing such Jewish traditions as kashrut, Sabbath and Passover, and had Jewish texts. In 1975, their claim of Jewishness was accepted by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and the Israeli government. The government assisted them in emigrating "en masse" to Israel during the 1980s and 1990s as Jews under the Law of Return, when Ethiopia was undergoing a civil war. Some who claim to be Beta Israel still live in Ethiopia.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The Bnei Menashe is a group in India claiming to be descendants of the half-tribe of Menashe. Members who have studied Hebrew and who observe the Sabbath and other Jewish laws in 2005 received the support of the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel to arrange formal conversion to Judaism. Some have converted and immigrated to Israel under the Law of Return.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The Kaifeng Jews, a Mandarin-speaking group from Henan Province, China, experienced first contact with Europeans in 1605 via the religious scholar Matteo Ricci. Modern researchers believe these Jews were descended from Persian merchants who settled in China during the early Song Dynasty. They prospered during the Ming Dynasty as Confucian civil servants, soldiers, and merchants, but they quickly assimilated and lost much of their Jewish heritage. By the beginning of the 19th century, the last rabbi with knowledge of Hebrew died, leaving no successor. The community had become extinct religiously by the late Qing Dynasty due to anti-foreign persecutions brought on by the Taiping Rebellion and Boxer Rebellion. There are a small number of Chinese people today who consider themselves to be descendants of these Jews.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Despite their isolation from the rest of the Jewish diaspora, the Jews of Kaifeng preserved Jewish traditions and customs for many centuries. In the 17th century, assimilation began to erode these traditions. The rate of intermarriage between Jews and other ethnic groups, such as the Han Chinese, and the Hui and Manchu minorities in China, increased. The destruction of the synagogue in the 1860s led to the community's demise. However, J. L. Liebermann, the first Western Jew to visit Kaifeng in 1867, noted that "they still had a burial ground of their own". S. M. Perlmann, the Shanghai businessman and scholar, wrote in 1912 that "they bury their dead in coffins, but of a different shape than those of the Chinese are made, and do not attire the dead in secular clothes as the Chinese do, but in linen". To date, there is only one scholar, Zhou Xu, who doubts the Kaifeng community's Jewishness and claims them to have been a western construct.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: Today, 600-1,000 residents of Kaifeng trace their lineage to this community. After contact with Jewish tourists, the Jews of Kaifeng have reconnected to mainstream Jewry. With the help of Jewish organizations, some members of the community have emigrated to Israel. In 2009, Chinese Jews from Kaifeng arrived in Israel as immigrants.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: The Lemba, group of people from southern Africa, primarily Zimbabwe and South Africa, speak the Bantu languages spoken by their geographic neighbours and resemble them physically, but they have some religious practices and beliefs similar to those in Judaism and Islam, which they claim were transmitted by oral tradition. They have a tradition of ancient Jewish or South Arabian descent through their male line. Genetic Y-DNA analyses in the 2000s have established a partially Middle-Eastern origin for a portion of the male Lemba population. More recent research argues that DNA evidence does not support claims for a specifically Jewish genetic heritage.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: A small Hispano group of Sephardic Jews in northern New Mexico may be one of the oldest groups of practicing Jews in North America, dating back to the early Spanish settlers of Jewish descent who had been forcibly converted to Catholicism as Conversos or New Christians, or both after 1492. Some families of Conversos began to settle in Mexico City in the 1530s and 1540s. Some converted back to Judaism; others maintained some Jewish beliefs and practices in secret. After the Spanish Inquisition came to the New World in 1571, the conversos were threatened with death if it was found they were practicing Judaism.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In 1598, the first expedition was made to New Mexico and included conversos. After that, other conversos fled to the northwestern frontier of the Spanish Empire, today the North-American Southwest, to evade the scrutiny and threat of discovery in the more monitored settlements. Outwardly Catholic, these forced converts maintained Jewish practices and customs for generations in secret, hence their name, "Crypto-Jews". They have been the subject of recent academic study. Some of New Mexico's Crypto-Jews have begun to return to normative Judaism in recent years, through study and ritual conversion. Others feel enlarged by learning this part of their history but continue as practicing Catholics.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: A genetic study of men in the early 2000s showed that many Hispanos of the North-American Southwest are descended from Anusim (Sephardic Jews who were forcibly converted to Roman Catholicism). Only Catholic Spanish were allowed to go to the New World with the exploration and colonial expeditions. Families first kept their secrets for protection and then out of habit. Michael Hammer, a research professor at the University of Arizona and an expert on Jewish genetics, said that fewer than 1% of non-Semites possessed the male-specific "Cohanim marker" or Cohen Modal Haplotype, which is prevalent among Jews claiming descent from hereditary priests. 30 of 78 Latinos tested in New Mexico (38.5%), were found to have Y-DNA with the Cohanim marker. Wider DNA testing of Hispanic populations has revealed between 10% and 15% of men living in New Mexico, south Texas and northern Mexico have a Y chromosome associated with the Middle East. Their history makes it most likely that they are Jewish rather than Arabic Muslims.


title: Who is a Jew?

text: In 2008, a gene mutation that is typically found only in Ashkenazi Jews, and is linked to a virulent form of breast cancer in women, was discovered in a cluster of Hispanic Catholic women in southern Colorado, many of whom trace their family's roots to northern New Mexico. It was conclusively shown to be related to Jewish ancestry, given the history of the people in the area, and many families reported knowledge of a high incidence of cancer. After testing and notification of families, researchers worked with the extended families on genetic counseling and to develop health strategies for monitoring, early detection and treatment, as they were faced with the higher risk associated with the gene.


title: Hinduja Group

text: Hinduja Group is an Indian transnational conglomerate. The group is present in eleven sectors including automotive, oil and specialty chemicals, banking and finance, IT and ITeS, cyber security, healthcare, trading, infrastructure project development, media and entertainment, power, and real estate. The Hinduja brothers have around 100 billion dollars of assets around the world. The Hinduja family has around 50 billion dollars of assets in America. The current (2022) net worth of the Hinduja brothers is 32 billion dollars.


title: Hinduja Group

text: The company was founded in 1914 by Parmanand Deepchand Hinduja, who was from a Sindhi family based in India. Initially operating in Shikapur (in modern-day Pakistan) and Mumbai, India, he set up the company's first international operation in Iran in 1919. The headquarters of the group remained in Iran until 1979, when the Islamic Revolution forced it to move to Europe.


title: Hinduja Group

text: Group Chairman Srichand Hinduja and his brother Gopichand, also Co-Chairman, moved to London in 1979 to develop the export business; the third brother Prakash manages the group's operations in Geneva, Switzerland while the youngest brother, Ashok, oversees the Indian interests.


title: Hinduja Group

text: The group employs over 200,000 people and has offices in many major cities around the world including in India. In 2017, Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja were described as the wealthiest men in Britain with an estimated wealth of £16.2 billion in the "Sunday Times" Rich List 2017.


title: Hinduja Group

text: In 2015, at The Asian Awards, the Hinduja brothers were honoured with the Business Leader of the Year Award. Ashok Hinduja was felicitated with the ABLF Global Asian Award at the UAE Government-backed Asian Business Leadership Forum in 2017. OneOTT Intertainment Limited (OIL), the Media Vertical arm of Hinduja Group, was awarded the 2019 Innovation Leaders award by Telecomlead.com.


title: Hinduja Group

text: Srichand, Gopichand and Prakash Hinduja were connected with the investigation into the Bofors scandal, in which Swedish firm Bofors was alleged to have paid illegal bribes to government officials and politicians in connection with the 1.3 billion sale of 400 howitzers to the Indian Government in 1986. The three brothers were charged by the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation in October 2000, but in 2005 the High Court in Delhi threw out all charges against them, citing a lack of evidence and saying that documents central to the prosecution case were "useless and dubious" since their provenance could not be verified. Judge RS Sodhi said: "I must express my disapproval that 14 years of trial and of public money was spent on the case. It has caused huge economical, emotional, professional and personal loss to the Hindujas."


title: Hinduja Group

text: In January 2001, it was revealed that UK government Minister Peter Mandelson had telephoned Home Office minister Mike O'Brien on behalf of Srichand Hinduja, who was at the time seeking British citizenship, and whose family firm was to become the main sponsor of the "Faith Zone" in the Millennium Dome. Consequently, on 24 January 2001 Mandelson resigned from the Government for a second time, insisting he had done nothing wrong. An independent enquiry by Sir Anthony Hammond came to the conclusion that neither Mandelson nor anyone else had acted improperly.


title: Hinduja Group

text: In January 2001, immigration minister Barbara Roche revealed in a written Commons reply that Keith Vaz, Member of Parliament for Leicester East and at the time a Foreign Office minister, and other MPs, had also contacted the Home Office about the Hinduja brothers, saying that Vaz had made inquiries about when a decision on their application for citizenship could be expected.


title: Hinduja Group

text: On 25 January, Vaz became the focus of Opposition questions about the Hinduja affair and many parliamentary questions were tabled, demanding that he fully disclose his role. Vaz said via a Foreign Office spokesman that he would be "fully prepared" to answer questions put to him by Sir Anthony Hammond QC who had been asked by the Prime Minister to carry out an inquiry into the affair. Vaz said that he had known the Hinduja brothers for some time; he had been present when the charitable Hinduja Foundation was set up in 1993, and had also delivered a speech in 1998 when the brothers invited Tony and Cherie Blair to a Diwali celebration.


title: Hinduja Group

text: On 26 January 2001, Prime Minister Tony Blair was accused of prejudicing the independent inquiry into the Hinduja passport affair, after he declared that Keith Vaz had not done "anything wrong". On the same day, Vaz told reporters that they would "regret" their behaviour once the facts of the case were revealed. "Some of you are going to look very foolish when this report comes out. Some of the stuff you said about Peter, and about others and me, you'll regret very much when the facts come out," he said. When asked why the passport application of one of the Hinduja brothers had been processed more quickly than normal, being processed and sanctioned in six months when the process can take up to two years, he replied, "It is not unusual."


title: Hinduja Group

text: On 29 January, the government confirmed that the Hinduja Foundation had held a reception for Vaz in September 1999 to celebrate his appointment as the first Asian Minister in recent times. The party was not listed by Vaz in the House of Commons Register of Members' Interests and John Redwood, then head of the Conservative Parliamentary Campaigns Unit, questioned Vaz's judgement in accepting the hospitality.


title: Hinduja Group

text: In March, Vaz was ordered to fully co-operate with a new inquiry launched into his financial affairs by Elizabeth Filkin, who was Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards at the time. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, Vaz's superior, also urged him to fully answer allegations about his links with the Hinduja brothers. Mr Vaz met Mrs Filkin on 20 March to discuss a complaint that the Hinduja Foundation had given the sum of £1,200 to Mapesbury Communications, a company run by his wife, in return for helping to organise a Hinduja-sponsored reception at the House of Commons. Vaz had previously denied receiving money from the Hindujas, but insisted that he made no personal gain from the transaction in question.


title: Hinduja Group

text: In June 2001, Vaz admitted that he had made representations during the Hinduja brothers' applications for British citizenship while a backbench MP. Tony Blair also admitted that Vaz had "made representations" on behalf of other Asians. On 11 June 2001 Vaz was dismissed from his post as Europe Minister, to be replaced by Peter Hain. The Prime Minister's office said that Vaz had written to Tony Blair stating he wished to stand down for health reasons.


title: Hinduja Group

text: In December 2001, Elizabeth Filkin cleared Vaz of failing to register payments to his wife's law firm by the Hinduja brothers, but said that he had colluded with his wife to conceal the payments. Filkin's report said that the payments had been given to his wife for legal advice on immigration issues and concluded that Vaz had gained no direct personal benefit, and that Commons rules did not require him to disclose payments made to his wife. She did, however, criticise him for his secrecy, saying, "It is clear to me there has been deliberate collusion over many months between Mr Vaz and his wife to conceal this fact and to prevent me from obtaining accurate information about his possible financial relationship with the Hinduja family".


title: Hinduja Group

text: In February 2005 Ashok Leyland, an India-based flagship company of the brothers' Hinduja Group, announced an agreement to supply 100 army vehicles to the Sudanese Defence Ministry. It was alleged by arms campaigner Mark Thomas that this contravened UK arms export legislation, as a number of the company's directors were UK residents or citizens.


The 2020 United States presidential election in Wisconsin was held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, as part of the 2020 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated. Wisconsin voters chose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote, pitting the Republican Party's nominee, incumbent President Donald Trump, and running mate Vice President Mike Pence against Democratic Party nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his running mate California Senator Kamala Harris. Wisconsin has 10 electoral votes in the Electoral College.


title: 2020 United States presidential election in Wisconsin

text: The 2020 Democratic National Convention was scheduled to be held at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, but it was moved to the nearby Wisconsin Center due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


text: Polls of Wisconsin in the lead-up to election day showed a clear Biden lead, averaging in the high single digits. Prior to election day, most news organizations considered that the state was leaning towards Biden. Wisconsin was ultimately won by Biden by a narrow 0.63% margin over Trump, who had won it in 2016 by 0.77% against Hillary Clinton; however, Biden carried the state with a slightly larger margin than Al Gore or John Kerry did in either 2000 or 2004, respectively. Once again, Trump massively outperformed his polling average, which had Biden up 8.4 points in the state, but it was not enough to win it. Trump held his own in counties in northern Wisconsin and also in the WOW counties. Biden became the first Democrat to win the White House without the once-strongly Democratic counties of Kenosha and Forest since Woodrow Wilson in 1916 as well as the first to win without Pepin County since 1944. However, Biden won the highest vote share for a Democrat in Waukesha County, at 38.8%, since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Trump carried Brown County, which is Republican-leaning but competitive, though Biden won the city of Green Bay and improved on Clinton's margin in the county at large by about 3.7 points. Biden won back Sauk County, a county in the driftless region of southwestern Wisconsin; Biden also flipped Door County, which has voted for the winning candidate in each election since 1980, save for 1992.


text: On November 18, Trump announced that he would request a recount in Milwaukee County and Dane County. On November 29, both counties re-affirmed Biden's victory, giving him a net gain of 87 votes over Trump.


text: With Ohio, Florida, and Iowa backing the losing candidate for the first time since 1960, 1992, and 2000 respectively, this election established Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania as the states with the longest bellwether streak still in effect today. The last time any of them voted against the winning candidate was 2004, when all three voted for losing Democrat John Kerry.


text: Wisconsin voted 3.77% more Republican than the nation-at-large. This is the first time since 2004 that Wisconsin did not vote for the same candidate as neighboring Iowa.


text: Incumbent President Donald Trump ran unopposed in the Republican primary, and thus received all of Wisconsin's 52 delegates to the 2020 Republican National Convention.


text: In August 2020, the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission voted to keep rapper Kanye West, an independent presidential candidate, off of the 2020 general election ballot in a 5-1 decision on the basis that West's application arrived too late—arriving in person seconds after the deadline.


text: The Commission was split along party lines in a 3-3 decision to keep Howie Hawkins, the Green Party presidential candidate off of the 2020 general election ballot. Hawkins gathered 3,623 valid signatures; however, forms with 1,834 signatures had a different address for Hawkins' running mate Angela Walker. The partisan board voted only to certify the 1,789, placing Hawkins/Walker below the 2,000 signatures required to be on the ballot.


text: Walker subsequently filed a legal petition to be included on the ballot. On September 10, 2020, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the election officials had to wait to mail absentee ballots until the court decided whether or not to include the Green Party on the ballot. Some municipal election commissions had already mailed out absentee ballots while others were concerned that they would miss the September 17 deadline by which Wisconsin state law required absentee ballots to mailed out to those who requested them. On September 14, 2020, the court ruled that the ballots would remain as-is without Hawkins or West on the ballot stating, "given their delay in asserting their rights, we would be unable to provide meaningful relief without completely upsetting the election."


text: These slates of electors were nominated by each party in order to vote in the Electoral College should their candidates win the state:


text: Between 2016 and 2020, the number of voters in Milwaukee suburban counties voting for the Democratic presidential candidate increased.


text: Despite narrowly losing, Trump won 6 out of 8 congressional districts in Wisconsin, including one held by a Democrat.


text: Wisconsin has voted Republican in gubernatorial and senatorial elections a few times prior to 2016, but Wisconsin was still seen as a lean-Democratic state, as it had a blue streak going back to 1988 and had only gone Republican four times since 1964. As such, it made up part of the blue wall. Trump pulled off a surprise win in the state in 2016, in large part due to a collapse in support for Hillary Clinton in the state.


text: Both the Democratic and Republican candidates improved on their performances in the state in 2020, with Trump achieving a record total number of votes for a Republican candidate in the state of Wisconsin, nearly matching George W. Bush's 2004 performance in percentage. Conversely, Biden had the second most votes ever for a Democrat in Wisconsin, behind Obama's performance in 2008. While Biden's margin of victory was narrow (0.6%), and well behind Barack Obama's performances, it was nonetheless wider than Al Gore's 0.2% in 2000 and John Kerry's 0.4% in 2004.


text: Joe Biden received strong support in the city of Milwaukee, improving on Clinton's 2016 performance by 3.6 points in its county; Biden received 92% and 60% of the black and Latino vote respectively, with most of that electorate living in Milwaukee County. Both candidates performed well in the state with whites, with Trump carrying whites overall by 6 points, though Biden performed better with college-educated whites. Cementing Biden's victory was his strong performance in Dane County, which he carried by nearly 53 points. Biden would also carry La Crosse County by 13 points, Eau Claire County by 10 points, and flipped Sauk County and the bellwether Door County, while only losing Brown County by 7 points, winning the county seat Green Bay. Biden even made in-roads in Waukesha and Washington counties, nearly breaking 40% in the former and breaking 30% in the latter, though Trump still held these counties with large margins.


text: On the other hand, Trump was able to hold much of the Driftless region in southwestern Wisconsin; many of these counties, such as Vernon, Crawford, and Grant were reliably Democratic during the latter half of the 20th century, but Trump maintained his results from 2016, solidifying a Republican shift in this part of the state. Additionally, Trump performed strongly in the more traditionally conservative northern counties of Wisconsin. Finally, Trump kept Kenosha County in his column, with both candidates improving there; Kenosha County is significant, as it was the site of the Jacob Blake shooting, which triggered nationwide protests. Biden thus became the first Democrat to win the presidency without carrying Kenosha County since Woodrow Wilson in 1916, and the first Democrat to win the presidency without carrying Pepin County since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944.


text: In terms of partisan lean, Biden was able to win 7% of Republicans in the state, which is significant, as they voted in this cycle by about 5 points more than Democrats. More importantly, Biden won independent voters by 12 points; Hillary Clinton lost this bloc to Trump by 10 points in 2016.


text: On November 6, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said: "There have been reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results." No evidence of such "irregularities" has been provided by the Trump campaign.


text: On November 18, the Trump campaign wired nearly $3 million to the Wisconsin Election Commission in a petition for a partial recount of the 2020 presidential election results. The recount would take place in Milwaukee and Dane counties. "These two counties were selected because they are the locations of the worst irregularities," the campaign claimed in a release.


text: Milwaukee certified its recount results on November 27, 2020, and led to Joe Biden gaining a net 132 votes. Dane certified its recount results on November 29, 2020, and led to Donald Trump gaining a net 45 votes. In total, the recount across the two counties led to Joe Biden increasing his lead by an additional 87 votes.


text: In July 2022 the Wisconsin Supreme Court stated that despite their widespread use in the 2020 presidential election "ballot drop


text: On November 30, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers certified Wisconsin's electors for Biden. The following electors all cast their vote for Biden:


title: Zipf's law

text: Zipf's law (, ) is an empirical law formulated using mathematical statistics that refers to the fact that for many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences, the rank-frequency distribution is an inverse relation. The Zipfian distribution is one of a family of related discrete power law probability distributions. It is related to the zeta distribution, but is not identical.


title: Zipf's law

text: Zipf's law was originally formulated in terms of quantitative linguistics, stating that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word ""the"" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word ""of"" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by ""and"" (28,852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus.


title: Zipf's law

text: The law is named after the American linguist George Kingsley Zipf, who popularized it and sought to explain it, though he did not claim to have originated it. The French stenographer Jean-Baptiste Estoup appears to have noticed the regularity before Zipf. It was also noted in 1913 by German physicist Felix Auerbach.


title: Zipf's law

text: The same relationship occurs in many other rankings of human-created systems, such as the ranks of mathematical expressions or ranks of notes in music and even in uncontrolled environments, such as corporation sizes, income rankings, ranks of number of people watching the same TV channel, cells' transcriptomes and so on. The appearance of the distribution in rankings of cities by population was first noticed by Felix Auerbach in 1913, leading to a broad literature of Zipf's law for cities. However, more recent empirical and theoretical studies have challenged the relevance of Zipf's law for cities.


title: Zipf's law

text: Empirically, a data set can be tested to see whether Zipf's law applies by checking the goodness of fit of an empirical distribution to the hypothesized power law distribution with a Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, and then comparing the (log) likelihood ratio of the power law distribution to alternative distributions like an exponential distribution or lognormal distribution.


title: Zipf's law

text: Zipf's law is most easily observed by plotting the data on a log-log graph, with the axes being the logarithm of rank order, and logarithm of frequency. For example, as described in the introduction, the word ""the"" would appear at = log(1) (order rank = 1), and It is also possible to plot reciprocal rank against frequency or reciprocal frequency or interword interval against rank. The data conform to Zipf's law to the extent that the plot is linear.


title: Zipf's law

text: Zipf's law then predicts that out of a population of elements, the element of order rank , has the normalized frequency


title: Zipf's law

text: Zipf's law holds if the number of elements with a given frequency is a random variable with power law distribution formula_9 (  is the value of the expression immediately above).


title: Zipf's law

text: It has been claimed that this representation of Zipf's law is more suitable for statistical testing, and in this way it has been analyzed in more than 30,000 English texts. The goodness-of-fit tests yield that only about 15% of the texts are statistically compatible with this form of Zipf's law. Slight variations in the definition of Zipf's law can increase this percentage up to close to 50%.


title: Zipf's law

text: In the example of the frequency of words in the English language, is the number of words in the English language and, if we use the classic version of Zipf's law, the characterizing exponent is 1 (minimum possible). The value will then be the fraction of the time the th most common word occurs.


title: Zipf's law

text: The simplest case of Zipf's law is a "" function, with Given a set of Zipf-distributed frequencies, sorted from most common to least common, the second most common frequency will occur half as often as the first, the third most common frequency will occur as often as the first, and the ‑th most common frequency will occur as often as the first. However, this cannot hold exactly: Because items must occur an integer number of times, there cannot be 2.5 occurrences of a word. Nevertheless, over fairly wide ranges, and to a fairly good approximation, many natural phenomena obey Zipf's law.


title: Zipf's law

text: In human languages, word frequencies have a very heavy-tailed distribution, and can therefore be modeled reasonably well by a Zipf distribution with an close to 1.


title: Zipf's law

text: As long as the exponent exceeds 1, it is possible for such a law to hold with infinitely many words, since if then


title: Zipf's law

text: Although Zipf's Law holds for all languages, even non-natural ones like Esperanto, the reason is still not well understood. However, it may be partially explained by the statistical analysis of randomly generated texts. Wentian Li has shown that in a document in which each character has been chosen randomly from a uniform distribution of all letters (plus a space character), the "words" with different lengths follow the macro-trend of the Zipf's law (the more probable words are the shortest with equal probability). Vitold Belevitch, in a paper entitled "On the Statistical Laws of Linguistic Distribution", offers a mathematical derivation. He took a large class of well-behaved statistical distributions (not only the normal distribution) and expressed them in terms of rank. He then expanded each expression into a Taylor series. In every case Belevitch obtained the remarkable result that a first-order truncation of the series resulted in Zipf's law. Further, a second-order truncation of the Taylor series resulted in Mandelbrot's law.


title: Zipf's law

text: Zipf himself proposed that neither speakers nor hearers using a given language want to work any harder than necessary to reach understanding, and the process that results in approximately equal distribution of effort leads to the observed Zipf distribution.


title: Zipf's law

text: Similarly, preferential attachment (intuitively, "the rich get richer" or "success breeds success") that results in the Yule–Simon distribution has been shown to fit word frequency versus rank in language and population versus city rank better than Zipf's law. It was originally derived to explain population versus rank in species by Yule, and applied to cities by Simon.


title: Zipf's law

text: "Atlas models" are systems of exchangeable positive-valued "diffusion processes" with drift and variance parameters that depend only on the rank of the process. It has been shown mathematically that Zipf's law holds for Atlas models that satisfy certain natural regularity conditions. Atlas models can be used to represent empirical systems of time-dependent multivariate data, including, e.g., the frequency of words in a written language or the size of companies. An Atlas model that represents an empirical system will have the same stationary distribution as the empirical system, so if the Atlas model follows Zipf's law, the system will also follow Zipf's law. Since Atlas models that satisfy natural regularity conditions follow Zipf's law, this accounts for its universality.


title: Zipf's law

text: In the figure above of the 10 million Wikipedia words, the log-log plots are not precisely straight lines but rather slightly concave curves with a tangent of slope -1 at some point along the curve. Such distributions are usually referred to as "quasi-Zipfian" distributions, and most systems of time-dependent empirical data that are said to follow Zipf's law are actually quasi-Zipfian. Quasi-Zipfian systems can be represented by "quasi-Atlas models", and quasi-Atlas models are amenable to mathematical treatment similar to that for Zipf's law.


title: Zipf's law

text: "Zipf's law" in fact refers more generally to frequency distributions of "rank data", in which the relative frequency of the "n"th-ranked item is given by the zeta distribution, 1/("n""ζ"("s")), where the parameter "s" > 1 indexes the members of this family of probability distributions. Indeed, "Zipf's law" is sometimes synonymous with "zeta distribution", since probability distributions are sometimes called "laws". This distribution is sometimes called the Zipfian distribution.


title: Zipf's law

text: A generalization of Zipf's law is the Zipf–Mandelbrot law, proposed by Benoit Mandelbrot, whose frequencies are:


title: Zipf's law

text: The "constant" is the reciprocal of the Hurwitz zeta function evaluated at "s". In practice, as easily observable in distribution plots for large corpora, the observed distribution can be modelled more accurately as a sum of separate distributions for different subsets or subtypes of words that follow different parameterizations of the Zipf–Mandelbrot distribution, in particular the closed class of functional words exhibit "s" lower than 1, while open-ended vocabulary growth with document size and corpus size require "s" greater than 1 for convergence of the Generalized Harmonic Series.


title: Zipf's law

text: The Zipf distribution is sometimes called the discrete Pareto distribution because it is analogous to the continuous Pareto distribution in the same way that the discrete uniform distribution is analogous to the continuous uniform distribution.


title: Zipf's law

text: In the parabolic fractal distribution, the logarithm of the frequency is a quadratic polynomial of the logarithm of the rank. This can markedly improve the fit over a simple power-law relationship. Like fractal dimension, it is possible to calculate Zipf dimension, which is a useful parameter in the analysis of texts.


title: Zipf's law

text: It has been argued that Benford's law is a special bounded case of Zipf's law, with the connection between these two laws being explained by their both originating from scale invariant functional relations from statistical physics and critical phenomena. The ratios of probabilities in Benford's law are not constant. The leading digits of data satisfying Zipf's law with s = 1 satisfy Benford's law.


title: Zipf's law

text: In information theory, a symbol (event, signal) of probability formula_14 contains formula_15 bits of information. Hence, Zipf's law for natural numbers: formula_16 is equivalent with number formula_17 containing formula_18 bits of information. To add information from a symbol of probability formula_14 into information already stored in a natural number formula_17, we should go to formula_21 such that formula_22, or equivalently formula_23. For instance, in standard binary system we would have formula_24, what is optimal for formula_25 probability distribution. Using formula_23 rule for a general probability distribution is the base of Asymmetric Numeral Systems family of entropy coding methods used in data compression, whose state distribution is also governed by Zipf's law.


title: Zipf's law

text: Zipf's law has been used for extraction of parallel fragments of texts out of comparable corpora. Zipf's law has also been used by Laurance Doyle and others at the SETI Institute as part of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.


title: Zipf's law

text: The Voynich Manuscript, which is a 15th-century codex, also falls in line with Zipf's law, indicating that text is most likely not a hoax but rather written in an obscure language or cipher.


title: Hugh Skinner

text: Hugh William Skinner (born 6 January 1985) is an English actor. He is best known for starring in sitcoms "W1A" (2014–2017) and "The Windsors" (2016–2020), and his appearances in musical films "Les Misérables" (2012) and "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again" (2018).


title: Hugh Skinner

text: Skinner grew up in London and Tunbridge Wells, and attended Eastbourne College from 1998 to 2003. He lived in Perth, Australia, for a year at age four. He graduated from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in 2006.


title: Hugh Skinner

text: Skinner's first professional acting role was in the English Touring Theatre's 2007 production of "French Without Tears". In addition to his work on stage, he played supporting roles in the BBC series "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" as Felix Clare in 2008, and "Any Human Heart" as Lionel in 2010. He also played the role of Joly, one of the student revolutionaries, in the 2012 film of "Les Misérables".


title: Hugh Skinner

text: In the autumn of 2013, Skinner played the role of Luis Carruthers, a closeted gay man who is in love with the show's protagonist, Patrick Bateman, in the world premiere of "American Psycho" at the Almeida Theatre. He also appeared on the London cast album, which was released in 2016. While performing in "American Psycho," he began filming the first series of the comedy "W1A", playing the role of Will Humphries, an inept yet endearing intern at the BBC. The first series was released in 2014, with subsequent series airing on BBC2 in 2015 and 2017.


title: Hugh Skinner

text: Skinner played the role of Dr. Barnaby Ford in the BBC series "Our Zoo". He also appeared at the Theatre Royal, Bath as Camille in Helen Edmundson's adaptation of "Thérèse Raquin," and as Yephidikhov in Simon Stephens' new translation of "The Cherry Orchard" at the Young Vic. He returned to the Young Vic in the summer of 2015 to play dual roles in Nick Gill's adaptation of "The Trial". In the autumn of 2015, it was announced that he had been cast as Unwin Trevaunance, an aspiring Member of Parliament, in the second series of the BBC production of "Poldark", which aired in 2016.


title: Hugh Skinner

text: Skinner starred in "The Windsors", a spoof of the British royal family, as Prince William which aired on Channel 4 in 2016. The same year, he had a role in "Fleabag", a BBC3 and Amazon production, where he played the protagonist's hapless boyfriend Harry. The following year, he played Sir George Howard in the first series of "Harlots", an 18th-century costume drama that premiered on ITV Encore and Hulu in March. Also in 2017, he played a supporting role in "Hampstead" opposite Diane Keaton and Brendan Gleeson, and appeared in "".


title: Hugh Skinner

text: Skinner co-starred in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again", the 2018 sequel to the 2008 film "Mamma Mia!", in which he played Young Harry, a version of the character originated by Colin Firth in the first film. In 2018 he also starred in the eighth and final episode of Matthew Weiner's anthology series "The Romanoffs", playing the role of Simon Burrows.


title: Hugh Skinner

text: He reprised his role as Harry in series 2 of "Fleabag", which was released on BBC3 in March 2019 and was released on Amazon Prime in May 2019. On 5 April 2019, it was announced that Skinner had joined the cast of the period drama "Little Birds", which premiered on Sky Atlantic in August 2020. In December 2019, it was announced that he would be co-starring in the film "Falling for Figaro" with Danielle Macdonald and Joanna Lumley. In September 2021, he featured in the Radiohead music video for the song 'If You Say The Word'.


title: Hugh Skinner

text: Skinner is gay. Commenting on his sexuality in 2018 he stated: "I feel like if I talk about being gay I have to say something and I don’t know what to say other than that just is my life and I haven’t got anything very interesting to say about it. It just is".


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: Elric of Melniboné is a fictional character created by English writer Michael Moorcock and the protagonist of a series of sword and sorcery stories taking place on an alternative Earth. The proper name and title of the character is Elric VIII, 428th Emperor of Melniboné. Later stories by Moorcock marked Elric as a facet of the Eternal Champion.


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: Elric first appeared in print in Moorcock's novella "The Dreaming City" ("Science Fantasy" No. 47, June 1961). Moorcock's doomed albino antihero is one of the better known characters in fantasy literature, having crossed over into a wide variety of media, such as role-playing games, comics, music, and film. The stories have been continuously in print since the 1970s.


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: Elric is the last emperor of the stagnating island civilization of Melniboné. Physically weak, the anemic Elric must use drugs (special herbs) to maintain his health and vitality. From childhood, he read freely in the immense royal library and learned of the world outside the Dreaming Isle. Perhaps due to this in-depth study, unlike other members of his race, Elric has a conscience. He witnesses the decadence of his culture, which once ruled the known world, and worries about the rise of the Young Kingdoms populated by humans (Melnibonéans consider themselves separate from humanity), along with the threat they pose to his empire. Because of Elric's introspective self-loathing and hatred of Melnibonéan traditions, his subjects find him odd and unfathomable. However, his cousin Yyrkoon (next in the line of succession, as Elric has no heirs) interprets this behaviour as weakness and plots Elric's death. Complicating matters is Yyrkoon's sister Cymoril, who is deeply in love with Elric; Yyrkoon covets her, and part of his plan for usurpation is to marry Cymoril himself.


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: In addition to his skill with herbs, Elric is an accomplished sorcerer and summoner. As emperor of Melniboné, Elric is able to call for aid upon the traditional patron of the Melniboné emperors, Arioch, a Lord of Chaos and Duke of Hell. From the first story, Elric uses ancient pacts and agreements with not only Arioch, but various other beings—some gods, some demons—to help him accomplish his tasks.


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: Elric's discovery of the sword Stormbringer serves as both his greatest asset and disadvantage. The sword confers upon Elric strength, health, and fighting prowess, allowing him to do away with his dependence on drugs, but it must be fed by the souls of intelligent beings. In the end, the blade takes everyone close to Elric and eventually Elric's own soul as well. Most of Moorcock's stories about Elric feature this relationship with Stormbringer, and how it—despite Elric's best intentions—brings doom to everything he holds dear.


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: Moorcock acknowledges the work of Bertolt Brecht, particularly "Threepenny Novel" and "The Threepenny Opera", as "one of the chief influences" on the initial Elric sequence; he dedicated 1972's "Elric of Melniboné" to Brecht. In the same dedication, he cited Poul Anderson's "Three Hearts and Three Lions" and Fletcher Pratt's "The Well of the Unicorn" as similarly influential texts. Moorcock has referred to Elric as a type of the "doomed hero", one of the oldest character-types in literature, akin to such hero-villains as Mervyn Peake's Steerpike in the "Titus Groan" trilogy, Poul Anderson's Scafloc in "The Broken Sword", T. H. White's Lancelot in "The Once and Future King", J. R. R. Tolkien's cursed hero Túrin Turambar, and Jane Gaskell's Zerd in "The Serpent".


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: The story of Kullervo from Finnish mythology contains elements similar to Elric's story, such as a talking magic sword and fatal alienation of the hero from his family. Besides Elric, Kullervo has been proposed as having influence on Poul Anderson's 1954 novel "The Broken Sword", and J.R.R. Tolkien's Túrin Turambar. Moorcock has stated that "Anderson's a definite influence [on Elric], as stated. But oddly, the Kalevala was read to us at my boarding school when I was about seven", and "from a very early age I was reading Norse legends and any books I could find about Norse stories". Moorcock in the same posting stated that "one thing I'm pretty sure of, I was not in any way directly influenced by Prof. T[olkien]".


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: Elric's albinism appears influenced by Monsieur Zenith, an albino Sexton Blake villain whom Moorcock appreciated enough to write into later multiverse stories. Moorcock read Zenith stories in his youth and has contributed to their later reprinting, remarking that it "took me forty years to find another copy of Zenith the Albino! In fact it was a friend who found it under lock and key and got a copy of it to Savoy who are, at last, about to reprint it! Why I have spent so much energy making public the evidence of my vast theft from Anthony Skene, I'm not entirely sure... ". Moorcock later said: "As I've said in my introduction to "Monsieur Zenith: The Albino", the Anthony Skenes character was a huge influence. For the rest of the character, his ambiguities in particular, I based him on myself at the age I was when I created Elric, which was 20". The influence of Zenith on Elric is often cited in discussions of Zenith.


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: After these initial Elric tales, Moorcock periodically published short tales throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, such as 1967's "The Singing Citadel" and 1973's "The Jade Man's Eyes". Meant to be placed in between the initial stories but before the conclusion of "Doomed Lord's Passing", these later stories would frequently be edited, retitled, and combined together with other material to form fix-ups as part of later republication campaigns.


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: The first original Elric novel, 1972's "Elric of Melniboné", is a prequel detailing Elric's origin and how he came to possess Stormbringer. In 1989 came the second original Elric novel, "The Fortress of the Pearl", followed in 1991 with "The Revenge of the Rose". A decade later Moorcock began an original Elric trilogy, beginning with "The Dreamthief's Daughter" (2001), followed by "The Skrayling Tree" (2003) and "The White Wolf's Son" (2005). In 2022, Moorcock published "The Citadel of Forgotten Myths", a new Elric novel set between "Kings in Darkness" and "The Flame Bringers".


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: The main sequence, according to the saga's internal chronology, comprises the following books. Bold roman numerals indicate the six-book sequence of the 1977 DAW paperbacks. The dates following each story refer to the date of original publication. In those cases where a book was assembled from several pre-existing stories, each story is given along with its original date; when an original novel is subdivided into parts, the parts are named but not given individual dates.


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: The first five novelettes were originally collected in "The Stealer of Souls" (1963) and the later four novellas were first published as a novel in an edited version called "Stormbringer" (1965). The 1965 novel had about a quarter of the text removed for reasons of length (mostly in the second and third novellas) and the remaining text rearranged with new bridging material added to make sense of the restructuring.


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: In 1977, DAW Books republished Elric's saga in six books that collected the tales according to their internal chronology. These paperbacks all featured cover art work by the same artist, Michael Whelan, and helped define the look of Elric and his sword Stormbringer. The DAW edition of "Stormbringer" restored some of the original structure and text compared to the 1965 release, but other revisions were performed and other material excised. A few oddments were collected in "Elric at the End of Time" (1984), which became the seventh book in the DAW line when DAW released it in the US in 1985. It includes two Elric-related tales: the title story and 1962's "The Last Enchantment", originally intended as the final Elric story but put aside in favour of those that eventually made up "Stormbringer"; it was not published until 1978. Both would appear in later collections (with "The Last Enchantment" occasionally retitled "Jesting with Chaos").


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: In the 1990s, Orion Publishing/Millennium released a two-book collection – "Elric of Melniboné" and "Stormbringer" – containing the Elric material then available. White Wolf Publishing released a similar two-volume compilation – "" (1998) and "Elric: The Stealer of Souls" (2001). These two-volume compilations are arranged according to the internal chronology of the saga. The White Wolf text has minor revisions when compared to the Millennium release.


title: Elric of Melniboné

text: The first nine short stories – with "The Flame Bringers" using the later title of "The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams" and the full text of "Stormbringer" as it appeared in "Science Fantasy" – were republished in a single volume as "Elric" (Orion/Gollancz 2001), volume 17 in the Fantasy Masterworks series.