You Juice? You no look Juice!

The current international longing for a life-like re-enactment of the Holocaust persuades me to clarify an important issue: Who are those Juice? Well, I have it on good authority that they are not O. J. Simpson fans (I did the survey myself). It is altogether fitting and proper for us to clarify this issue for all those anti-Semites who may be scrupulous about their hatred, and for all those people who may not qualify as bona fide targets of such hatred.

If you Google "who is a Jew" (to use the more traditional spelling) you will easily find the conventional wisdom that only the child of a Jewish mother is a Jew. Such a view, however, leads to the following conundrum: Who could qualify as the first Jew? Does "chicken or egg" ring a bell?

We know from Old Testament stories of the Patriarchs that Jacob the son of Isaac and the grandson of Abraham was the first Jew. Jacob's older twin-brother Esau, for example, was not a Jew. And it was Jacob's 12 sons (from two wives) who became the progenitors of the 12 tribes of Israel (13 tribes if you count Joseph's two sons' half-tribes).

Now, Jacob's mother, who was also Esau's mother, could not have been Jewish, if Jacob was the first Jew! Therein the conundrum, which the astute reader realizes was where I was headed in all this genealogy. Of course, I could have reached this point of my discussion by making the observation that since "first" is the first ordinal number (i.e., there is no zeroth ordinal) and since Mitochondrial Eve could not have been Jewish because by all accounts she predated the invention of Judaism, the first Jew could not have had a Jewish mother.

Furthermore, where the heck did the tribal progenitors get Jewish brides? I am not sure how many daughters Jacob had, but, in any case, Jewish law prohibits the marriage of siblings.

I am sure the Talmudic scholars have figured all this out, but I haven't had time to get to the bottom of all this. So I caution all you anti-Semites out there looking for Juice to murder — be careful; you may be one of those Juice yourself.