A fascinating and fraught story has been unfolding in British courts.

It all began when a 12-year-old, known as M, was refused a place in Jews’ Free School in London because his mother isn’t Jewish according to an Orthodox definition of Judaism. She is a convert but she converted in a progressive, rather than an Orthodox synagogue.

M’s family sued the school and lost, but the ruling was overturned in a later Court of Appeal. This court decided that the school had been discriminatory.

The court, The New York Times reports, concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”

The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism.

The landmark legal decision “has divided communities, pitted religious leaders against one another and forced schools to introduce religious practice tests”, the Guardian reports.

The school has appealed to the Supreme Court and a ruling should be made before the end of the year.

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