Brother Daniel: Majority Ruling on Who Counts as a Jew

Moshe Silberg (or Zilberg) was an Israeli legal scholar and Supreme Court justice. Silberg was born in Skaudvilė, in present-day Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. Heir to a prominent line of rabbis, he studied in several yeshivot, including the Novardok yeshiva, in present-day Belarus. In 1920, he moved to Germany to attend the University of Frankfurt for his general studies. He went on to study philosophy at the University of Marburg and law at the University of Frankfurt.

In 1920, Silberg emigrated to British Mandate Palestine, where he worked as a lawyer in private practice. With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Silberg was appointed to the Tel Aviv district court, and shortly thereafter to the Supreme Court, becoming a full member of the court in 1950. In 1965, he was appointed president of the Supreme Court, and he remained in that role until his retirement in 1970.
 

As one of Israel’s first justices, Silberg played a key role in the development of Israeli law, as it sought to integrate Ottoman law, Mandatory law, and Jewish law. Silberg maintained that while state law was distinct from religious law and had to adapt to different circumstances, it should draw on the Jewish law of the past. His 1961 book Talmudic Law and the Modern State argued that the Talmud presents a fully fledged legal system capable of informing and enriching Israeli state law.

Much of Silberg’s writing was devoted to the topic of personal status. His 1957 book Personal Status in Israel, for which he received both the Bialik Prize and the Israel Prize, argued that matters of personal status such as marriage and divorce should remain largely in the hands of religious courts, with the civil courts playing a limited oversight role. In 1970, when the court faced the question of how to determine eligibility for the Law of Return, Silberg presented the minority opinion, maintaining that the question of who is a Jew is a religious matter, not merely a procedural one. After his retirement, he continued to write on the controversies around personal status that plagued Israeli society.