Impact of Jewish Community on Homosexuality in the light of Jewish culture, beliefs, worldviews and way of life
Authors: Sakib S M Nazmuz 
Published: October 2021

“If a man also lies with men, as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” (LEVITICUS 20:13)Religious faith plays a significant role in the people's lives and sometimes provides vital support both socially and emotionally. However, beliefs can come into conflict with other aspects of the people's personal lives, such as sexual orientation. The main idea of queer theory which this study centres on is to scrutinize the difficulties of being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and Jewish religious background while living in London. A larger section of the Jewish community is an extremely traditional community that venerates religious education above all else and in which Yiddish acts as the main language. In fact, The Torah commands to the Jewish people to be fruitful and multiply, in fact, families of seven or eight children are common. Also, in several communities, there is a strict supervision on the relations between individuals, arranged marriages are the norm, and being Jewish is matriarchal in that one's mother has to be Jewish.As the individuals from closed religious communities choose to move into the "secular," mainstream world, they face a great deal of misunderstanding by people from other communities. This is due to the fact that strict normative and dogmatic values which they possess limit their relationship and understanding of outside world. Furthermore their understanding of the secular world as a contaminated world also determines their relationship with in and outside their community and inadvertently regulates issues connected to sexuality. So while stepping out of their community it becomes very difficult to grasp the idea of sexual identity and its multidimensionality and Jews become fearful of being contaminated by the other people from other communities. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, for example, grow up with very rigid gender roles and limited access to sexual education. The purpose of this study is to help further in the understanding of how LGBTQ mediate their identity with their Jewish upbringing and manage any conflicts that may arise between their sexual identities and religious principles. I aim to answer two research questions in this study: how do LGBTQ people mediate their sexual identities as part of the Jewish Community? And if conflicts arise how do they resolve it?From my own experience and some of my friends’, usually, people deal with this battle by either refusing their homosexual identity, refusing their religious identity, living with two identities or living with the conflict (Statement of the Principle NYA, 2010). Discovering your own identity is never an easy mission in people's life. When faced with a conflict between aspects of identity such as religion and sexual orientation, people respond in many ways. They face the conflict differently from one person to another. The conflicts may be a disorienting dilemma, propelling change, and it is through these conflicts that we can understand who we are and how we relate to the world around us (Bromberger, 2017). This qualitative study will include in-depth interviews with gay, lesbian and bisexual and it will also be connected to the photo project that I have been working on since 2016, which is with participants, from gay, lesbian communities, and queer-identified individuals with a Jewish background and this will be part of my degree requirements since I study photography in the School of Art. The fact that I am not from the Jewish community and neither involved in any religious beliefs will make it challenging as I assume the insider position as the member of LGBTQ+ community yet remain an outsider within that of Judaism. This may lead to series of obstacles including problems of reaching willing participants, participant’s biases in responses and my subjectivity in interpreting the data.