Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self-Elimination 9780190680268, 0190680261

Table of contents :
Cover
Israel Has a Jewish Problem
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Terms
Introduction
1. Before the Law There Stands a Jew
2. On Goat Surveillance
3. The False Promises of Sovereignty
4. Self-​Elimination
5. Is Israel a Christian State?
6. The Jewish Question Again
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Israel Has a Jewish Problem

Israel Has a Jewish Problem Self-​Determination as Self-​Elimination J OYC E DA L SH E I M

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Dalsheim, Joyce, 1961-​author. Title: Israel has a Jewish problem : self-​determination as self-​elimination /​ Joyce Dalsheim. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019017903| ISBN 9780190680251 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190680268 (updf) | ISBN 9780190680275 (epub) | ISBN 9780190068943 (online) Subjects: LCSH: Jews—​Israel—​Identity. | Jewish nationalism. | Self-​determination, National—​Israel. | Jews—​Israel—​Politics and government. | National characteristics, Israeli. Classification: LCC DS143 .D25 2019 | DDC 956.9405—​dc23 LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2019017903 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

To the memory of my father, Stephen Dalsheim, a righteous man in his time, who taught me so much about what it means to be a mensch. I’m still trying.

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Terms

Introduction

ix xiii

1

1. Before the Law There Stands a Jew

19

2. On Goat Surveillance

42

3. The False Promises of Sovereignty

61

4. Self-​Elimination

90

5. Is Israel a Christian State?

130

6. The Jewish Question Again

161

Bibliography Index

197 215

Acknowledgements The Trees For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie sleekly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can’t be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance. —​Franz Kafka (1971: 382)

This is a book about Israel. But it isn’t. It is a book about what nationalism does, how it limits the possible ways of being because it needs a “people” who are sovereign. More than that, it needs its population to be legible, relatively easy to put to work and tax and conscript into the armed forces. So while there is room for certain kinds of differences, the state also requires a fundamental homogeneity among its population. James Scott (2017) would likely explain this as a form of domestication, like the domestication of grains and animals, or of forests and trees. This is a kind of self-​domestication, a limiting of general ways of being. But the limitations—​like tree trunks in the snow—​are not immediately obvious. It takes some digging, both historically and theoretically, to figure out what’s going on. Books, of course, are like that as well. Their many surfaces, smooth and sleek, hide multitudes of encounters, connections, and dependencies with people whose names may never appear in the stories they tell. This book deals with troublesome modern categories like “nation” and “religion” that may seem arbitrary but come to be taken for granted. They, like the roots beneath the soil and snow, work in ways that may confound us. Many people

x Acknowledgements have helped me along the way to uncover the roots of an understanding of how political self-​determination also involves forms of self-​elimination. It’s been a difficult process, because of the complexity of the issues and the counter-​intuitive nature of the analysis, and because the topic itself remains politically charged. So it is hard to get people to see what’s going on under the blanket of beautiful white snow. Some people agreed with the ideas I  share here, and many disagreed, but all made me think. For that I am grateful. I would like to thank my editor, Cynthia Read, the wonderful anonymous reviewers who provided such insightful comments, and Katherine Ulrich for her meticulous and thoughtful copyediting. For providing the time and space in which to think and write I am grateful to my Chair, Dale Smith, and to the Luce/​ACLS Fellowship in Religion, Journalism, and International Affairs, and to the Buffet Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University where Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Brannon Ingram hosted me. Thanks are due to Jean Clipperton for making me feel welcome and to Ben Schontal for being a great office mate. A special thanks to the Deering Library at Northwestern and its librarians, as well as to the wonderful librarians at UNC Charlotte’s Atkins Library. Many thanks to Sean, Sol, Sofia, Cecelia, Nora, and Gabriela, for providing a home away from home. For providing a forum in which to present the material and get feedback, I  would like to thank Rebecca Bryant for the conference on sovereignty she organized in Cyprus where I presented a very early version of some of this work. I am grateful to Jonathan Boyarin for many wonderful conversations and to the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University for sponsoring my talk there. I also am grateful to all the faculty and students at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame who shared their thoughts during my presentation. Special thanks to Asher Kaufman for his detailed comments on an early draft of one of the chapters. Thanks to Danny Postel and all the

Acknowledgements  xi scholars who engaged with my work at Northwestern. Many thanks to Rebecca Bryant, David Henig, and all the wonderful colleagues in Utrecht who provided feedback. For arranging a forum to present my work in Amsterdam and for her insightful comments, I would like to thank Yolande Jansen. For support and encouragement along the way—​whether or not they liked my ideas—​I would like to thank Gil Anidjar, Zvi Bekerman, Sam Brody, Peggy Cidor, Hillel Cohen, Assaf Harel, Martin Land, Abe Rubin, Amalia Sa’ar, Ben Schonthal, Gershon Shafir, Jackie Smith, Rebecca Stein, and Lorenzo Veracini. In particular, I  am grateful to Gregory Starrett for always listening, reading, and pushing me to think further, to follow my instincts and stand firmly behind my ideas. To all those who raised challenging questions—​like Jackie Feldman, who could ask a single question that would occupy me for months—​thank you. And, to all those who disagreed with the arguments presented here, I appreciate those challenges, which ultimately made the book stronger, I think, I hope. This book would not have been possible without all the people who remain unnamed, my interlocutors in the field who gave generously of their time, welcomed me into their homes, and shared their thoughts with me. Finally, I would like to thank Rafi for his endless support and patience, and Edan and Ziev for believing in me. And, of course, I am forever grateful to Ursula, for long walks and constant companionship.

Notes on Terms Israeli Ways of Being Jewish Israeli Jews are often thought of in terms of a number of distinct categories. What those categories are, precisely, depends on whom you ask. We could, for example, begin with the distinction between religious (dati) and secular (hiloni). Each of these two groups might then further be categorized by the type of religious observance, or by ethnic origin, or by the political positions that are thought to characterize them. Of course, all of these categorical determinations are overstated. No group is ever homogenous, and each contains all sorts of differences. And no group is ever static; they are all always changing, and they often overlap. In addition, distinctions that might once have been typical can shift and change over time, making what seem like distinct groups more similar. For these reasons, any list of the ways of being Jewish in Israel or elsewhere will at once seem obvious and reasonable and helpful, but at the same time would in reality be misleading, inadequate, and already outdated as soon as it is written. In many ways these “groups” are best understood as locations of political, theological, and cultural contestation. Any way of constructing such categories, in other words, seems arbitrary. But although arbitrary, they are the distinctions through which social and political groups are constituted. They define inclusions and exclusions, but may be misleading both for those involved in these contestations, and for analysts, scholars, and readers who seek to make sense of them from different points of perspective.

xiv  Notes on Terms That having been said, some readers may think it helpful to have a general sense of what is meant here by terms like “hilonim” or “Haredim” or “national-​religious.” For those unfamiliar with the social-​religious-​political scene in Israel, I offer the following as a place to begin to think about Israeli Jewishness. Secular (Hiloni, pl. Hilonim) The majority of Israeli Jews self-​ identify as “secular.” However, according to recent polls, 60 percent of the secular also say they believe in God, and similarly significant percentages observe particular religious practices. “Secular” might describe Israelis who observe fewer religious practices than more observant Jews. The secular are those for whom religion or religious practice does not define their Jewishness. Of course, within both the religious and the secular communities, there are debates about what the term “secular” means in the first place, and what it has to do with one’s sense of identity or with one’s cultural practices, or one’s sense of Israeliness. “Hiloni” can be a term that people apply to themselves, but which they might also find offensive under some conditions. It might be hurled as an accusation by those who consider themselves “religious,” with the connotation that hilonim are ignorant of Jewishness, or that they are lacking in ethics and only interested in material possessions and pleasures. Religious (Dati, pl. Dati’im, or Dosim, from Yiddish, which is generally used by the non-​religious in derogatory ways) The term “religious” is mostly used to refer to anyone who would not identify as hiloni. That, of course, includes a lot of different kinds of people! It includes religious Zionists, who are often called “national-​ religious.” Out of the religious Zionist population emerged an anti-​Zionist strain rebelling against their parents’ generation for not resisting the state. Sometimes called the “hilltop youth,” they don’t think that the state always works in the best interests of the Jewish people, and so work on their own to colonize “illegally” in the Israeli-​occupied territories of the West Bank. Thus, the term “religiously motivated settlers” (Dalsheim 2011) might be a more accurate description. But the term “religious” also might refer to

Notes on Terms  xv the Orthodox, the ultra-​Orthodox, and the modern Orthodox, not to mention the very minor strains of Reform and Conservative Jews, traditions imported from Germany and the United States, but not recognized by the Israeli state or its Rabbinate. And, among the Orthodox and ultra-​Orthodox are various theologies and practices as well as political affiliations. The term religious can also include the “traditional” Jews discussed below. Traditional (Masorati, pl. Masoratiim) is a term generally used in reference to Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (Mizrahim) who keep traditional Jewish practices, but whose observance of Halakha is considered more flexible than other observant Jews. What unites Moroccan Jews and Iranian Jews—​not to mention those from Azerbaijan or Iraq or Egypt or Yemen—​is simply that they are not of European origin. But this term doesn’t cover Ethiopians. They’re just “Ethiopians.” Obviously what we’re talking about here is different from what we generally think of as “religious” identity, because it has to do with “nationality” or “national origin” or language or “ethnicity” or skin tone or racialized categories rather than “religiousness.” Mizrahim can be proud atheists, as are/​were many Jewish immigrants from Iraq, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they get called “hilonim,” or secularists. That term is largely reserved for Ashkenazim, Jews of European origin. On the other hand, so many people are intermarried anyway, that who gets called what by whom for what purpose is, in technical social science terms, “highly contextual.” Haredi  (pl. Haredim) is generally translated as ultra-​Orthodox. Ultra? What does that mean, anyway? As Martin Land once said to me, “What, if the commandment is Thou Shalt Not Kill, so they ultra-​don’t kill?” The term only makes sense if one thinks of Jewishness as some kind of continuum in which some people are not very Jewish and others are extremely Jewish. But such an idea raises all sorts of problems. Those referred to as ultra-​Orthodox do not use that term to describe themselves and might even find that term offensive. While the word “Haredi” is broadly used to refer to the very

xvi  Notes on Terms strictly orthodox, it includes a range of theologies, and followers of different rabbinic leaders, who are associated with particular Jewish communities in different parts of the world. The term Haredi can be used as an adjective or a noun. In general, the term refers to those Jews who strictly follow Halakha. They aspire to absolute reverence for the Torah, including both the Written and Oral Law, as the central and determining factor in all aspects of life. Consequently, respect and status are often accorded in proportion to the greatness of one’s Torah scholarship, and leadership is ideally linked to learnedness. Foundationally, the Haredim are not supporters of political Zionism. Nonetheless, several Haredi groups have their own political parties in Israel. These groups are sometimes distinguished by ethnic origin. So, for example, the political party Sephardi Torah Guardians (Shas) represents observant Sephardi Jews (those of Spanish or Portuguese ancestry) and those from the Middle East and North Africa. It is distinguished from other Haredi political parties that represent Ashkenazi Jews (those of Western, Central, or Eastern European ancestry). Shas has been analyzed as gaining wide support among Mizrahim, regardless of their levels of observance, because it provided social welfare, including childcare. Thus, socioeconomic issues are also interspersed with religion and ethnicity. But these parties sometimes split from within for all sorts of reasons. Recently, Adina Bar Shalom, the daughter of the former chief rabbi of Shas, Ovadia Yosef, started her own party and she has supported other religious women political candidates from other streams of Judaism. Thus, gender also plays a role. In addition, Hasidic Jews (Hasidim) are usually distinguished from other Haredim. Hasidic communities were generally formed around a charismatic rabbinic leader and came to be known by the name of the town in Eastern Europe (e.g., the Gur Hasidim, the Lubavitch, or the Belz) in which they originated. In Israel today, there are all kinds of combinations of theology in which Hasidic thought combines with national-​religious thought, or Haredi ideas combine with the ideas and practices of religiously motivated settlers. In the occupied

Notes on Terms  xvii West Bank today, one can find yeshivas among religiously motivated settlers that take their inspiration from a particular Hasidic rabbinical tradition, or settlers whose theology has come to more closely resemble Haredi anti-​Zionist ideas. And, of course, among the Haredim are those who are more inclined toward Zionism and service to the state. But, according to The Jewish People Policy Institute, Haredim in Israel are best defined as “the population whose males generally do not serve in the Israeli military, because they receive a Torah study deferment. About half of the male Haredi population works. The other portion studies Torah full time.” They are defined here, in other words, in terms of their relationship to the state, or to Zionist ideologies of duty and responsibility.

Other Terms/​Translations Aliyah:  Literally, to “go up.” Refers to Jewish immigration to Israel. It can be used as a verb when a person is said to “make aliya.” But it also refers to specific waves of Jewish immigration to Israel/​ Palestine (e.g., the First Aliyah was a major wave of Zionist immigration to Palestine that occurred between 1882 and1903.) Halakha: Halakha can be translated in reference to its linguistic root in the word “to go,” signifying a path or direction, and designates the proper path or guide to life actions and decisions. The term Halakha sometimes refers to a particular law or ruling or to the entire system of law. It includes biblical commandments as well as interpretations of the great sages of rabbinical Judaism. Haskalah: Generally refers to an ideology of modernization in 19th-​century Europe. It is sometimes called the Jewish Enlightenment and is traced to the thinking of Moses Mendelsohn. Its central ideals included ways of combining traditional study with secular subjects that would help integrate Jews in European societies. Ketubah:  Marriage contract. Mikveh:  Ritual bath.

xviii  Notes on Terms Mitzvah (pl. mitzvot, mitzvoth):  The term used in reference to biblical or religious commandments. There are said to be 613 commandments. Although this number is disputed, its origin is traced to a 3rd-​century-​ce rabbi who explained that the 613 commandments included 365 negative commands (do not), which correspond to the number of solar days in a year, and 248 positive commands, corresponding to the number of human bones covered with flesh. This emphasizes that one should fulfill the mitzvot every day and with every bone in one’s body. Indeed, among observant Jews, mitzvot are part of everyday life, for example, eating only kosher food and resting on the seventh day (Shabbat). Keeping the mitzvot is a fundamental good; it involves doing the good that God has commanded of His people. As such, the mitzvot are not only good for the person who keeps them, but for the world. In some interpretations, living according to the mitzvot contributes to repairing the world and preparing for the messianic age, a time when it will be possible to perform all mitzvot in their ideal context. In order to live according to the mitzvot, one must study and learn them. Thus understanding and action, study and performance are intimately intertwined. The term mitzvah is used in common parlance to mean a good deed. Torah:  The physical Torah scroll, handwritten on parchment and prepared by a Torah scribe, that is opened and read aloud in synagogue. The content of the Torah refers to the five books of Moses, but may also include other Jewish sacred literature.

Israel Has a Jewish Problem

Introduction “Western thought works by thesis, antithesis, synthesis, while Judaism goes thesis, antithesis, antithesis, antithesis . . .” —​The Rabbi, in The Rabbi’s Cat (Sfar 2005: 25)

John Emmerich Edward Dalberg-​Acton, the 1st Baron Acton, lived from 1834 until 1902. He was perhaps most famous for the idea that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” one of those quotes we easily recognize, but can’t quite place. Acton’s book, Essays on Freedom and Power, appeared posthumously in 1948. I came across that book at the Hannah Arendt Library at Bard College, where I found Arendt’s underlining in her paperback copy. It was the 1955 edition, its pages yellowing with age. More than a century after his death, I found myself intrigued by Acton’s words and captivated by Arendt’s underlining and her small, precise handwritten notes in the margins. It was as though, more than four decades after her death, I  was thinking with the brilliant woman herself. Acton was writing about political systems and the history of freedom, beginning in antiquity. In a section about the position of citizens within the state, Arendt underlined a sentence that said, “The passengers existed for the sake of the ship.” That sentence struck me as encapsulating the essence of nationalist projects and the production of national communities, which I  had been Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self- Elimination. Joyce Dalsheim, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190680251.001.0001

2  Israel Has a Jewish Problem studying for some time.1 “That’s the whole story,” I  thought to myself—​“nationalism in a nutshell.” The passengers are there so that the ship can make its voyage, not the other way around. But the passengers can’t see things that way. That would ruin everything. They (we) have to purchase or somehow acquire their tickets and experience that purchase as their decision. It matters little whether those tickets were acquired with the ease of wealth and privilege or through enormous struggle; the passengers must experience the voyage as their choice and for their benefit. All such metaphors involve a level of oversimplification. We might continue the metaphor and think about whether everyone on such a ship counts as a “passenger,” especially people who are captives on that ship, people who did not choose to be there, or who want to mutiny or to escape. Issues such as these will be explored later in the book. Nonetheless this idea of the ship, I thought to myself, is an apt metaphor for the case of the modern state of Israel. Its passengers, “the people” of the nation, enable state projects, and despite ideas about social contracts and popular sovereignty, those projects seem to have a life of their own. Samuli Schielke (2018) recently suggested that scholars sometimes treat abstract concepts the way animists treat non-​humans, inanimate objects, or processes of nature. We attribute responsibility and intentionality to them. My theorizing in this book is surely implicated in that observation. I have been engaging with and thinking about Israel/​Palestine for nearly four decades, and count myself as among those scholars who have found the theoretical framework of settler colonialism most productive for thinking about this case.2 Much to the chagrin 1 For example, see Dalsheim (2003; 2007) on how conflict over the content of national history does not weaken national identity, as one might expect. Instead it strengthens a sense of national pride. See Dalsheim (2004) for a comparison of settler nationalism in Australia and Israel and how representing the past works to produce social and political identities for national projects. 2 Maxime Rodinson (1973) was probably the first scholar to write about Israel as a “colonial-​settler state,” a designation that has become increasingly popular among critical scholars and political activists who seek to decolonize Palestine. Later, critical Israeli sociologists and historians began to analyze Israel in terms of colonialism. Baruch

Introduction  3 of many Israelis I know, I continue to see its value. But I am also convinced that settler colonial theorizing requires some expansion and rethinking. Seeing social formations through a settler colonial frame provides clarity. Like any frame, it helps focus the eye on some things while also excluding other things from the picture. While we should take care not to ignore important details, such framing can be very helpful. It allows us to see patterns and recognize processes that repeat in other contexts. Unlike other forms of colonialism, “settler-​colonization is at base a winner-​take-​all project whose dominant feature is not exploitation but replacement. The logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct—​invasion is a structure not an event” (Wolfe 1999: 163). Contemplating that last, powerful phrase and its implications, it became clear to me that Wolfe was right. Settler colonialism is indeed a structure, and one that is discernable in the United States, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere, but it is also a process (Dalsheim 2004, 2005, 2011b) in much the same way that capitalism is a structure and also a process. Settler colonialism may shift and readjust its route, but the course remains set, unless somehow the entire ship is dismantled. I have written about the ways that settler colonialism can fool us by separating itself from itself through social, cultural, religious, and political categories that appear as binary oppositions (Dalsheim 2011b). In the case of Israel one of the ways this happens is when the term “settlers” is applied only to those who are ideologically driven to expand the size of the state and who live in Israeli

Kimmerling called Israel an “immigrant-​settler” state. Gershon Shafir (1989b) analyzed Israel as a “pure settlement” colony, where state policies have been based on attempts to control the land and labor markets. Shafir wrote that “what is unique about Israeli society emerged precisely in response to the conflict between the Jewish immigrant-​settlers and the Palestinian Arab inhabitants of the land” (1989b: 6). See Uri Ram (1995) for more details on the history of Israeli sociology and the emergence of this school of thought.

4  Israel Has a Jewish Problem Occupied Palestinian Territories. The term settlers is juxtaposed to other Jewish Israeli citizens, some of whom might oppose expanding settlement. It marks a part of the population as settlers rather than understanding the whole of the Zionist project as a settler colonial enterprise. Here, I continue thinking about those categories and oppositions in order to untangle some of the ways that the Israeli nation-​state produces the passengers for the sake of its ship, whose primary goal is the establishment and maintenance of a self-​proclaimed Jewish state in the space of Israel/​Palestine. Scholars like Rachel Busbridge (2017) have been critical of the settler colonial “turn” in Israel/​Palestine studies because the term itself can offend people and therefore close down debate or limit certain kinds of political processes. Much in the same way as the word “apartheid” in Israel or the word “socialism” in the United States have been decried as divisive, settler colonialism carries too much weight, too much meaning. It evokes too much affect, which only causes people to get angry and stop listening. If you are offended, dear reader, I  ask that you bear with me for just a little longer. It’s about to get worse. I do not disagree with Busbridge’s assessment, but suggesting that a form of theoretical analysis is not palatable for particular kinds of political activism is not the same as demonstrating that the analysis is wrong. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, abandoning theory for praxis has the potential to subvert the goals of those who do so (Dalsheim 2013c, 2014). My purpose here is not to undermine the conceptual framework of settler colonialism, but to explore and expand parts of its analysis in order to gain additional insight into some of the processes I am calling Israel’s Jewish problem. One of the ways I  am expanding on that conceptual framework is by putting it in conversation with a much earlier critique of Zionism that preceded settler colonial studies, but to which the latter rarely refers. Doing so is one way that I refuse the secular/​ religious divide, which is not only a predominant way of understanding the issues I raise about Israel’s Jewish problem, but also

Introduction  5 works to keep (secular) scholars from thinking with (religious) sages. This separation, I think, is part of what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro meant when he wrote about “the vicious dichotomies of modernity” (2014: 49). Like Viveiros de Castro, I too am convinced that most important anthropological theory can be understood as versions of knowledge practices of the people we study, “indigenous practices of knowledge” (Viveiros de Castro 2014: 42). Comparing two forms of criticism that are rarely considered in concert, I have been intrigued by an interesting convergence around the question of assimilation. Writing about Australia, Patrick Wolfe asserted that “assimilation completes the project of elimination” of the Indigenous population (1999: 176). When he wrote about Israel/​Palestine, Wolfe made very clear that the modern state of Israel is a settler colonial formation established by Jews who primarily came from Europe, and that Palestinian Arabs were the Indigenous at whom the project of elimination was aimed. He was not wrong. Given the ongoing suffering of the Palestinian population in the space of Israel/​ Palestine—​the constant precarity and endless forms of spacio-​cide (Hanafi 2012) aimed at them—​it might seem frivolous or irresponsible to shift the focus toward those positioned as settlers in the settler colonial structure. Patrick Wolfe and other scholars of settler colonialism have written about settler ideologies, erasures of the past, and the production of national narratives that glorify the settler project and make heroes of its protagonists. They have primarily focused on how settler imaginings work together with dispossession of native lands, and Wolfe in particular has shown how dispossession can also work through assimilation. But it seems to me that the processes of assimilation/​elimination are even broader than Wolfe has suggested. This book is concerned with processes of assimilation aimed at producing Jews as “the nation.” It looks at how Jewishness is constrained in the Israeli context through myriad struggles over meanings and practices of being Jewish. The book adds to the

6  Israel Has a Jewish Problem scholarship on nationalism by putting it in conversation with ideas generated through settler colonial scholarship and by continuing the analyses of those scholars who place both nationalism and colonialism within broader analyses of modernity. It continues the critique of modernity/​Enlightenment by refusing some of the categories through which modernity seeks to describe itself, primarily the binary distinction between religion and the secular. In this way, it adds to a growing interdisciplinary literature that closely examines what secularism means and how it works.3 At the same time, it uses fieldwork data—​ideas expressed by people directly involved—​to bring forward particular Jewish concerns about the dangers of assimilation associated with Zionist nationalism and sovereignty in a self-​proclaimed Jewish state. In order to think more productively about both assimilation and secularism, the book enters a conversation with a group of scholars who are primarily concerned with preserving Judaism and protecting Jewish identity from the dangers of Zionism. Drawing heavily from the perspectives of traditional Orthodox Judaism, Yaacov Rabkin (2016), for example, insists that the modern state of Israel is not a Jewish state. He recounts the history of Jewish opposition to Zionism, often quoting rabbinical sources and explaining how identification with the modern state tends to replace a “value system typical of Judaism” with nationalist ideals (2016:  50). Yaacov Yadgar (2011) employs what he calls a “traditionist” (masorti) Jewish perspective to suggest that “secular” Israeli Jews (hilonim) have no meaningful Jewish identity except that which is imparted to them by the state. While they complain about religious impositions on their lives, Yadgar (2017) argues that these statist Jews benefit from those impositions. It is what identifies them as Jews in Israel and allows them the privileged position of sovereign 3 Examples of this interdisciplinary literature include the work of anthropologists like Talal Asad and Webb Keane, political scientists William Connolly and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, and philosopher Charles Taylor. Chapter 1 deals with the extensive literature on the secular and secularism in much greater detail.

Introduction  7 citizens in an ethno-​national state. Amnon Raz-​Krakotzkin has been consistently critical of Zionist ideology and its notion that the establishment of the state of Israel represents a negation of Jewish exile. Raz-​Krakotzkin (1994) instead exposes Zionism as the negation of traditional Jewish understandings of the concepts of exile and redemption. These concepts have been re-​narrated through Zionist discourse to produce a unified national identity that also erases the rich historicity of diverse forms of Jewish life. In particular, by aligning itself with the West, Zionism identified itself in opposition to the East, marginalizing the rich cultures of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa so that being Jewish primarily came to mean not being Arab.4 Raz-​Krakotzkin also suggests that Jews of the Middle East and North Africa (Mizrahim) might be able to provide an alternative to this “crisis of Zionism” (2011: 73). Such critiques of Zionist nationalism that draw on traditional (or religious) values resonate with similar critiques of nationalism in other places, especially with the work of Ashis Nandy (e.g., 1995, 1988). These scholars are all interested in preserving collective identity rather than deconstructing it, as much social science might recommend. Like Hannah Arendt, who came to these questions not from traditional Judaism, but as a secular Jew who had herself experienced exile, these critics suggest there may yet be a way to preserve the Jewish nation without Zionist nationalism.5 Unlike these historians and political scientists, as an anthropologist I do not see my role as determining what is and what is not Jewish, nor as providing alternative models or content to Jewish or Israeli identity. Instead I present an argument based on years of ethnographic engagement that considers the multiple and conflicting 4 There is a growing literature on the positionality of Mizrahim, too extensive to cite in detail here. For some of the foundational texts dealing with the question of the Arab-​Jew see Ella Shohat (1988, 2017), Gil Anidjar (2003), and Yehouda Shenhav (2006). 5 Raz-​Krakotzkin (2011) is critical of Arendt’s Eurocentric Orientalism, but builds on her ideas in his work on bi-​nationalism. See also Raz-​Krakotzkin (1993) on being in exile as an ethical model of living. Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin (1993) have written about diaspora as a non-​territorial and preferable way of maintaining Jewishness.

8  Israel Has a Jewish Problem ways in which sovereign citizens of Israel struggle to be Jewish there, and I  offer a way of understanding what might otherwise seems like a bizarre situation. I build on Amnon Raz-​Krakotzkin’s idea of how Zionism tends to narrow definitions of Jewishness. However, I am convinced that this narrowing is not only aimed at Jews of the Middle East and North Africa. Indeed, the processes of producing the ethnos for the ethno-​national state affect all Jewish Israelis in one way or another. Such processes are not specific to the Jewish state. There are many cases in which state laws determine what will and will not count as a particular religion, “inventing and reinventing religious orthodoxy for a given community” (Sullivan et al. 2015: 7). For example, in the introduction to their book on the Politics of Religious Freedom, Sullivan and her colleagues discuss the case of Thailand. Historically, they explain, there were at least five different traditions of Buddhism in the place that is now Thailand. “At the end of the nineteenth century, in a modernizing move . . . the king decided to unify the sangha (the Buddhist monastic community). In deciding what counted as Buddhism . . . Buddhist teaching was repurposed” so that “the Thai state would have religion as the foundation of its national identity. This . . . resulted in, among other things, the repression of local Buddhisms” (2015: 7–​8). The state of Israel is likewise engaged in defining what will count at Jewishness. However, scholars like Yadgar suggest that “the state” relies on a narrow Orthodox interpretation of Jewish religion to maintain a Jewish majority, which like the notion of state repression, implies a top-​ down model of imposition. My research suggests that the processes underway in Israel are actually much more complicated. This is, first of all, because “the state” is not so easily separable from “the people.” While a fictional reality of unified, centralized state power retains its hold on our imaginations, in fact state and civil society are deeply intertwined (Aretxaga 2003; Gramsci 1971). State power works through the myriad struggles over Jewishness in Israel. It requires that people believe in their capacity to influence what

Introduction  9 Jewishness will mean in their state and in their capacity to thereby influence its character.

Producing the Nation Modern political theory teaches us about social contracts, in which citizens give up certain rights to the state in return for its protections, so that the state can serve our needs. Modern nation-​ states, particularly those imagined as democratic, are meant to liberate citizens because they are understood to be ruled by “the people” and for “the people.” But thinking with Acton and Arendt’s underlining, we also see an inversion of this story. If people exist as “a people” for the state and its projects, then there is nothing particularly liberating about the formula of sovereign citizenship. And yet, so many nationalisms, especially anti-​colonial or separatist movements, are premised precisely on a rhetoric, ideal, or belief in its liberating quality. Political Zionism, for example, promised collective self-​determination.6 The Jewish people would take charge of their own future. They would return to their ancient homeland and revolt against British colonial rule. They would be a free people and would flourish in their own county. Liberation, however, is not the way in which most scholars have analyzed nationalism. When Eugen Weber (1976) wrote about the processes through which peasants were transformed into members of the French nation, he was concerned more with modernization than liberation. Ernest Gellner (1981) wrote about processes of modernization too. 6 Political Zionism is one variation of Zionism, and the one that ultimately became dominant in the establishment of the state of Israel. Like other movements, Zionism was (and maybe still is) a plural movement that included multiple debates and different ways of imagining Jewishness, community, and the future. On the variety of Zionist thinkers see Hertzberg (1959). On the different sorts of territorial visions related to different versions of Zionism see Shelef (2010). On post-​Zionism see Nimni (2003) and Ram (2005).

10  Israel Has a Jewish Problem Gellner was convinced that nationalism was an inevitable corollary of modernizing societies. Both Weber and Gellner described how nationalism encourages cultural homogenization through adopting a single national language, standardized education, and other processes. Benedict Anderson (1983) expanded on the ways that specific modern innovations like the printing press enabled what he famously called the “imagined community” of nationalism. That sense of community as an extended family and that sense of belonging are part of the reason people experience emotional anguish for other members of their nation, and the reason that people are willing to fight and die for it.7 Nationalists themselves celebrate nationalism’s unifying powers. But another way of understanding national unity is to think not only of the people it brings together, and of those who are often brutally excluded, but also about what is lost to “the nation” itself in the process. The forces involved in producing national unity might be best understood as a form of assimilation. Eugen Weber understood this. The final section of his famous book, Peasants into Frenchmen, explains that regional languages and other elements of peasant culture “changed and assimilated” into a greater French culture (Weber 1976: 377–​484). “What happened,” he wrote, “was akin to colonization” (Weber 1976: 486). “In France, as in Algeria, the destruction of . . . local or regional culture, was systemically pursued” (Weber 1976: 491). Weber was not quick to mourn this loss or destruction. He argued that “traditional culture was itself a mass of assimilations, the traditional life a series of adjustments to 7 Partha Chatterjee (1986), publishing about a decade after Weber, likewise argues that thinking about nationalism as the opposite of colonialism is a mistake, but for different reasons. Chatterjee is concerned with the false promises of freedom specifically in anti-​colonial nationalism. He contends that nationalism allows many colonial patterns of thought to continue, but that they often go unrecognized. He writes about what he calls “the bi-​level nature” of nationalist thought. On one level, it “appears to oppose the dominating implications of post-​Enlightenment European thought,” but on another level, it “seems to accept that domination” (1986: 37). Like other scholars of subaltern studies, Chatterjee also argues that anti-​colonial nationalism primarily benefits the middle class elites, which is another continuation of domination.

Introduction  11 physical circumstances” (Weber 1976: 492). “Change” he explained, “is always awkward, but the changes modernity brought were often emancipations, and were frequently recognized as such” (Weber 1976: 492). Assimilation to a national culture, then, might be destructive and tantamount to colonization, but this destruction was liberating; it was “good” for the people it changed, and they knew it. Scholars of post-​colonialism, including those who study settler colonialism, however, are not likely to consider such processes as liberating. On the contrary, liberation entails de-​colonization, including decolonization of the mind, which might be the polar opposite of assimilation.8

Yes, But Is It Good for the Jews? The question posed in this subheading will be recognizable to many in the Jewish community as a common way of evaluating events, decisions, and policies of all sorts. People also laugh about it. It’s an insider joke, a cliché, a kind of punch line. But when we think of nationalism, assimilation, colonization, and cultural destruction, this question also reveals an irony embedded in the categories through which we navigate modernity. If we take seriously the scholarship I just laid out, we are left with a rather complicated conundrum. National sovereignty, according to Eugen Weber, is at once liberating and colonizing—​colonizing precisely those whom it presumes to liberate. It is a form of freedom that entails processes of cultural elimination through assimilation. Establishing the modern Jewish state was seen as an alternative to

8 Franz Fanon, in Black Skins, White Masks (1967), explored the psychology of colonialism, how it is internalized by the colonized from the point of view of the colonized subject. Ashis Nandy expanded on these ideas in his discussion of The Intimate Enemy (1983), where he writes about the idea of a dehumanized self and an objectified enemy, which he attributes to the psychological effects of colonization. Fanon’s ideas have also been taken up by Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Decolonising the Mind (1986).

12  Israel Has a Jewish Problem assimilation in other countries where assimilation would mean the destruction of Jewishness or of the Jewish people. And at the same time, political Zionism was (is) a movement that imagined cultural change as part of the process of liberation in much the same way as other nationalisms. But to think of such cultural changes as being akin to the forces of assimilation that Jews were (are) subjected to in Europe as positive and liberating should not only be surprising. One might consider it offensive, if not downright anti-​Semitic, as it aims to eliminate particular ways of being Jewish. And yet, objections to Zionism raised by devout Jews have been precisely concerned with its anti-​Jewish nature. So, is the modern state of Israel also anti-​ Semitic? Is it “good for the Jews”? What are “the Jews”? Political Zionism, like other modern nationalisms, was inspired by Enlightenment thought. That thought included ideals of progress and liberation not only through political self-​determination, but also by gaining freedom from religious constraints—​ not freedom of religion, but freedom from religion. Religious freedom, of course, requires a definition of “religion,” a common term whose meaning we tend to take for granted.9 We think of people who pray or belong to different denominational groups, people who attend church or worship at temples as practicing or having a religion. We can name religious groups and think of people as being Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and so forth. But this taken-​for-​ grantedness conceals the genealogy of the term religion and might prevent us from understanding what happens when we classify it as separate from other modern identity categories like nation, race, or ethnicity. I first began thinking systematically about how power can work through obvious categories and distinctions when I  read Michel Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge. Foucault warned against easily accepting apparent unities. In addition, he suggested that the appearance of disunity should also be a cause for skepticism (Foucault 9 See Sullivan et al., Politics of Religious Freedom (2015).

Introduction  13 1972:  22). Foucault is famous for interrogating categories like “madness” and “sanity.” But we might also think about “religion” as an identity marker that is meant to distinguish spiritual feelings, ritual practices, and philosophical positions from “demographic” characteristics, marking one element of identity as subject to choice or constraint in a way that others are not. Talking about “religion” as separate from other categories makes these elements of experience appear as a special part of the self that can be changed at will. In and through that change one could, at least theoretically, move from one social category to another. In fact, such a process of “conversion” was posited not only as a theoretical possibility, but as the moral core of a modern sense of political liberty: one could choose what to be in a way that one could not choose one’s ancestry, one’s gender, or one’s age. And if that was the case, then beyond the capacity to choose to alter these elements of experience and identity, there became a moral duty to treat them as always open to question, comparison, evaluation, and judgment. Individuals became responsible for their “religion” in a way perhaps parallel to the responsibility for personal assent to a mythical “social contract.”10 In the case of the modern state of Israel, the question of “Who are the Jews?” is both a religious question and foundational to nationalism, which means that nation and religion are at once separate and conflated. This kind of ambiguity makes even a Foucauldian analysis seem inadequate to the task. To put the problem as starkly as possible, we might say:  In order to be free, Jews should gain self-​determination as Jews (a national group). They could liberate themselves from political oppression and free themselves of religious constraint by claiming and enacting the right to national self-​determination. In this way, they could be free as Jews (national identity) and stop being Jewish (religious identity). But since these two categories—​religious and national—​have been conflated in the 10 I am indebted to Gregory Starrett for this explication of the modern (Western) understanding of the category “religion.”

14  Israel Has a Jewish Problem figure of the Jew, such freedom is impossible. While people might reject attending synagogue or keeping the Sabbath, in order to be “the people” who have sovereignty in the self-​proclaimed Jewish state, in one way or another they have to be Jewish and someone has to decide what that means. This case is instructive for the study of nationalisms more generally. It is also an ironic case and, I would argue, somehow self-​defeating. The modern state of Israel can be understood as an ethno-​ national state, an anti-​colonial nation-​state, and a settler colonial state, all of which entail systems, processes, or projects that seem to demonstrate a kind of intentionality. Part of the purpose of this book is to continue thinking about the ways such projects work and how they can confuse us by appearing to be something else, and how everyday life inside such systems inundates us with details that are so complicated and encompassing that we fail to see the forest for the trees. To remain with Acton’s metaphor, such projects can keep us so busy and distracted that we might not realize that as modern citizens we are on a voyage, heading in a particular direction, and that we are not necessarily steering the ship. Indeed, it is important that we imagine ourselves capable of influencing the direction that we sail, whether or not any of us is ever actually at the helm.

The Kafkaesque Multiple, seemingly endless ironic and contradictory situations arise from the problematic categories of nation and religion in the modern state of Israel and the territories it occupies. Encountering such situations throughout my fieldwork gave me a distinct sense of the Kafkaesque. Much of Kafka’s writing is allegorical in ways that express a predicament similar to Acton’s passengers who exist for the sake of the ship. The Kafkaesque is steeped with senses of simultaneous motion and immobility.

Introduction  15 There’s a saying in modern Hebrew about people who rush around but never get anywhere: ful gaz b’neutral; the gas pedal is pressed to the floor, but the vehicle is not in gear. It can’t move. It’s a way that Israelis make fun of people they think are foolish, expending so much energy and yet never making any progress. Kafka might have said that ful gaz b’neutral applies to all of us.11 In any case, it seems to be how he experienced life. His writing often depicts some kind of maze in which his characters are trapped, while they never seem to fully comprehend the contours of that which entraps them. No matter which way we turn—​and, as this book will illustrate, we do turn and twist and run and struggle—​there are forces that constrain us. Kafka’s protagonists seem to endlessly find themselves in impossible situations. His work often illustrates a deep sense that there is no way around broader, seemingly senseless and oppressive systems. Kafka’s characters try to act, make mistakes, realize their mistake, and move in a different direction only to find their new approach is blocked too. Rebecca Schuman (2015) describes this as the double twist that characterizes the Kafkaesque. The Kafkaesque is unsettling. His stories often evoke a feeling of unease. The social world seems unpredictable if not unjust, and Kafka’s protagonists seem incapable of ever coming to understand its laws (see Constantine 2002: 22). His work has also been noted for evoking a sense of exile (see Bruce 2002:151–​152), which seems poignant because Zionist nationalism suggests that the establishment of the Jewish state marks the end of exile, while scholars like Amnon Raz-​Krakotzkin strongly refute that idea. Finally, if Kafka’s characters seem like captives, Kafka’s writing is also captivating in itself. It draws us in in much the same way that life’s daily struggles

11 Who might be included in that “us” is up to readers to decide. Kafka was, of course, a modern Western author whose work reflects on the predicaments of Western modernity. The theories of nationalism outlined here refer primarily to modern European forms of nationalism on which Israel modeled itself.

16  Israel Has a Jewish Problem keep us occupied: so busy that we can’t even stop to think about how that very busyness is itself a form of subjugation.12 The everyday struggles over Jewishness in Israel involve that kind of busyness and take place within commonly accepted dichotomies like left-​wing versus right wing, religious versus secular, freedom versus constraint, liberal versus illiberal, and so forth. These dichotomies are the kinds of disunities that Foucault suggested should arouse our skepticism. The story of contemporary Israel tells of a people seeking freedom from oppressive regimes that marginalized, excluded, or tried to destroy them. And so, they ran in the other direction only to find themselves trapped again in a different variety of the same oppressive system. The nation-​state appeared as a means of liberation and a means of ensuring survival for a persecuted people running for their lives from extreme nationalism in Europe. But some of the processes that helped produce the chauvinistic nationalisms of the 19th century also underpinned the establishment by the broader international community of the state of Israel itself, which is now often derided in the international community for being precisely what it was set up to be: an ethno-​ national state proposed as the solution to the acute problem of ethno-​nationalism. And so, while this book focuses on problematic processes inside the Israeli nation-​state, that focus cannot be understood without the broader historical context that continues to haunt us. These days it seems quite clear that we are not done with nationalism and its attending xenophobic violences. Indeed, it seems that racist and intolerant forms of nationalism are ever more common. Much of the scholarly critique of nationalism has focused on those it excludes, such as stateless people, refugees, and internal Others within a polity. Certainly national sovereignty seems preferable to such precariousness. Sovereign citizenship appears to be a position 12 See my article on deconstructing national myths (Dalsheim 2007) that explains how busyness works as a form of hegemony.

Introduction  17 of strength. And so we continue to criticize the dangers of popular sovereignty in the form of ethno-​nationalism, while simultaneously recommending it as a means of achieving liberation.13 More of the Kafkaesque. I am not a literary scholar, nor an expert on Kafka. I claim no authority in understanding his work. But when I think of the struggles to be Jewish in Israel, Kafka’s work speaks to me. He made sense at the time he was writing and makes sense now. That “then and now” in itself is part of why his work is here. Like the frames available through social science, thinking with Kafka also allows us to see patterns and repetitions that might otherwise appear distinct, random, or disconnected. It provides a space in which to make unusual or unpopular comparisons, such as the central claim here that despite the promise of the term “self-​determination,” popular sovereignty in the nation-​state also necessarily entails self-​elimination.14 I do not pretend that pointing out these patterns will necessarily bring improvement. Very much like Kafka and his characters, we in the scholarly community are not immune to the processes we describe. We often try to convince ourselves that scholarly critique has a direct use-​value in chipping away at the problems of the world; that our work is slowly but surely opening up new ways of thinking that will help solve the problems we encounter; and that somehow this work is cumulative. But that’s just not the way things work. Nevertheless, if human existence is not inevitably predetermined, but destiny is “about doing one’s best in a relationship with greater powers” (Schielke 2018:  344), then understanding how those powers work on us is crucial. Such understanding requires ongoing, persistent thought. It requires thinking and rethinking even, or maybe especially, about things we thought we had already figured 13 I have written about this problem in greater detail elsewhere. See Dalsheim (2013a). 14 Unusual comparisons are foundational to anthropological thinking. Laura Nader’s work (e.g., 2001) provides one of the best examples of the power of putting familiar information together in unfamiliar ways to provoke fresh thoughts about fundamental elements of human society.

18  Israel Has a Jewish Problem out. As should be clear from the preceding pages, I am not the first to think about how nationalism works to produce its populations, about the relationship between nationalism and colonization, or about the problems of citizenship and sovereignty. Despite so many predictions of nationalism’s demise, these questions remain relevant, the problems still plague us, and good answers, it seems, “must be reinvented many times, from scratch” (Powers 2018: 3).15 This book is filled with stories of people’s lives. Some of them are amusing, absurd, or just counter-​intuitive. I hope that readers will find cause to laugh along the way. But the overall story is anything but funny. It is a tale of what is involved in squeezing people off the land into cramped spaces or open-​air prisons. It is a tale of what is involved in displacement and dispossession at a time of dwindling natural resources. Some people will not have water to sustain them. That is the story of Palestine. Increasingly it is also a global story about who will have comfortable lives, who will suffer, and who will survive. To participate in squeezing people off the land, this book argues, involves not only the destruction of other people’s lives. It also necessarily involves forms of self-​destruction in ways that may be far from obvious.

15 Post-​colonial and critical race scholars point not only to a rise in exclusionary forms of nationalism, but specifically to “a massive rise in virulently racist and intolerant forms of ethnoreligious nationalism, with Zionist nationalism in Israel being an extreme case of what is fast becoming the rule rather than the exception” (Ghassan Hage 2016: 124). This is not to say that Zionism is the worst of all nationalisms, but that it is worth studying as an example of broader patterns. Zionist nationalism, and its settler colonial structure, has been thought of as a model for much broader contemporary processes from policing and building walls to removing people from their land and livelihood as the planet heats up. For example, see Lentin (2008) and Collins (2011).

1 Before the Law There Stands a Jew Before the law stands a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” —​Franz Kafka, “Before the Law”1

Scene One One day, a middle-​aged woman working as an administrator in a public high school near the coast in Northern Israel received a call on her cell phone. Rina2 didn’t recognize the number but answered anyway. It was an official call from a government agency. The state-​ sponsored Rabbinate, the central authority on Jewish religious law,

1 Kafka’s “Before the Law” originally appeared as a scene in the novel, The Trial. The version quoted throughout this chapter was reproduced as part of an edited collection of Kafka’s stories (Kafka 1971a). 2 Like all the names in this book, Rina is a pseudonym. The names and certain identifying traits have been changed to protect people’s privacy. In addition, some of the characters in this book are composites of a number of people who were part of the research for this project. Some of the stories are likewise composites. Some ethnographic tales are combined or supported by stories reported in the news. In this case, Rina’s story includes information I gathered among a number of people, combined with Gershom Gorenberg’s (2016) reporting. Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self- Elimination. Joyce Dalsheim, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190680251.001.0001

20  Israel Has a Jewish Problem was calling her to come in for an interview.3 It seems something about her Jewishness had been called into question. The woman had been married twenty-​five years earlier in a ceremony conducted by the same Rabbinate, who would not have performed a Jewish wedding then if she wasn’t Jewish. And yet they were questioning her Jewishness now. “It must be a mistake,” she told the voice on the phone. “No. No mistake.” If her Jewishness was considered uncertain, then the Jewishness of her children would also be questioned. That could interfere with their ability to marry and raise children. One of her sons had recently decided to get married. Suddenly, the whole world seemed to be turning upside down. At first, Rina thought maybe if she just ignored the phone call they would forget about her. The whole thing would just go away. Anyway, she thought, “I am an Israeli. I  am a Jew. This is my country. I grew up here and served in the army here. How could anyone question me?” Rina’s loyalty to the state was not at issue. It was her pedigree, her ancestry, her genealogy. Who were her parents and grandparents? Grandmothers in particular were of interest, as Jewishness is generally determined matrilineally. Where did her great-​grandparents come from? Had their little village in the Ukraine maintained Jewish customs? Could she prove that both her paternal and maternal great-​grandparents were Jews who married Jews and had Jewish children? When the Rabbinate called again, she realized there would be no easy way out of this predicament. Perhaps it would be an annoyance, but certainly nothing more than a bureaucratic matter. 3 The Rabbinate in Israel refers to the state-​sponsored office with authority over religious law. The Rabbinate has jurisdiction over many aspects of life for Jews in Israel, including marriage and divorce, burials, conversion, kosher certification, and supervision of holy sites. The Israeli Rabbinate determines who is and who is not a Jew, which is central to gaining citizenship.

Before the Law There Stands a Jew  21 Israelis are used to the annoyances of bureaucracy. Reluctantly, but resigned to rectify whatever the problem was, she arranged an appointment. When she arrived at the offices of the Rabbinate, the questions came at her so fast she wasn’t at all sure she could answer. Did her great-​grandmother on her father’s side who came from Argentina speak Ladino? What proof could she offer? Was her great-​grandfather’s grave in the Ukraine marked with Hebrew lettering? Could she provide a photograph? A bill of sale for the headstone? Rina left the office of the Rabbinate confused and distraught. At dinner that evening she told the story to her husband, who laughed in disbelief. “Just consider our name,” he said. “What person named Goldberg could be anything but Jewish! This is just ridiculous.” It was neither amusing nor ridiculous, Rina thought. She began to have nightmares. Rina’s imagination was running away with her. Her anxious dreams became grossly exaggerated. But the rest of the story is not a dream. Indeed, the Rabbinate has recently been calling on Israeli citizens, sometimes in ways that seem quite random, asking for proof of their Jewishness (Gorenberg 2016). Here in the self-​defined Jewish state, the country that promised liberation for an oppressed and persecuted people, Jews are being questioned about their Jewishness. Often the phone call comes when people’s children are poised to marry. Some people laugh and others become infuriated. Still others, especially those who have converted to Judaism, are seriously concerned that problems could arise for their children or grandchildren.4 “Before the law there stands a gatekeeper,” Kafka wrote. What will it take to be let in?

4 The Israeli Rabbinate has recently made public a list of which rabbis in other parts of the world will be considered legitimate and which not, when it comes to proper conversions.

22  Israel Has a Jewish Problem

Scene Two At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.” —​Franz Kafka, “Before the Law”

It’s mid-​morning on Friday. An army officer decides this would be a good day to make a home visit to one of his soldiers. They are on leave for the weekend, and he wants to check up on one of his new recruits and offer some support. The officer, an observant Jew dressed in uniform with a kippah on his head, leaves home early to make sure he can return before sundown when the Sabbath begins. He travels to Jerusalem, to the ultra-​Orthodox (Haredi) neighborhood of Me’a She’arim. Here, one of his new recruits has recently returned home. He knows it is controversial for the strictly observant Haredi Jews to serve in the army, when in their own community it is far more highly valued to study Torah. Indeed, people in this community are opposed to service in the army. But this young man decided he should join the armed forces, and the officer wants to support that decision, to offer encouragement, and to make sure the young soldier has whatever he needs. The officer arrives and finds a place on the narrow street to park his car. He gets out and looks for the soldier’s apartment. The people in the neighborhood are not friendly. No one offers to help him locate the address, but in the end, he finds the place. He visits the soldier, who seems to be managing, but who also rather wished the

Before the Law There Stands a Jew  23 officer would not have visited him. The soldier did not want to draw attention to himself. When the soldier returned to the neighborhood on leave from the army, he never wore his uniform. He always changed into his civilian clothes, a dark suit and hat. The soldier tucked his army uniform into a bag and put his weapon away too. He walked into the neighborhood trying to appear inconspicuous, although he knew his neighbors knew he was no longer in yeshiva studying Torah like other young men his age. They knew he had joined the Zionist army. And some of his neighbors were vociferously opposed to Zionism itself. No worries. The officer must be on his way in any case. The officer must return home before sundown to observe the Sabbath. The visit was short and the officer was quickly on his way once again. But then, suddenly, as he made his way back to his car, the officer found himself surrounded by a sea of young men in black suits and hats. They were throwing stones at him and shouting. He rushed toward his car, never having imagined he would need his army training to avoid being attacked by a group of observant Jews in Jerusalem. This was no time for cognitive dissonance; he was under attack and had to make use of all his faculties to get out unharmed. The young men were furious because the Israeli government had recently passed a new law that would make conscription to the armed forces mandatory for members of their community. In the past the ultra-​Orthodox had an agreement with the government. They would not have to serve in the army. They could study the Torah, worshiping God as they saw fit, fulfilling God’s commandments, which would do much more to protect the Jewish people than any army ever could. But things had changed because of the new law. Soon they would have to join the army or go to jail. The law requiring service in the army interfered with their ability to serve the Lord. It was an outrage. Some said it was nothing less than anti-​Semitic.

24  Israel Has a Jewish Problem As he approached his car, the officer realized that the windshield had been cracked. He could still see enough to begin to pull away from the curb. He was frightened by the mob and by the possibility that he might run someone down. “Just imagine the headline,” he thought to himself. “Army officer runs down yeshiva student in Me’a She’arim.” He was sweating now, grasping the steering wheel and concentrating all his efforts on getting out of there without hurting anyone or getting hurt. Too late for that. He was already hurt. It was nothing serious, but there was a small wound on his upper arm where he had been struck while trying to reach his car. The following day, a secular Israeli man read this story in the newspaper. He cursed those ultra-​Orthodox men in Me’a She’arim. He called them “parasites” who only take from the government and give nothing in return. They collect welfare from the state but are not willing to serve in the army like he did, like every other Israeli Jew did. He hated them. His sympathy lies with the army officer. Then, he continued reading the newspaper article and found that the officer, who was also an observant Jew, is actually a religiously motivated settler, which means he adheres to a theology that promotes nationalism and territorial expansion. It is a theology that insists that Jews have a responsibility to dwell in the biblical Promised Land. This officer lives in the West Bank, in a place where Jewish settlers come into direct conflict with Palestinians, a place where this secular, left-​wing Israeli Zionist thinks Israelis should not live. Those are illegal settlements and those settlers are the cause of the never-​ending conflict with Palestinians. There could be two states if not for people like them. This conflict could have ended except for people like them! The secular man leaned back in his chair and pictured the army officer being attacked by a mob of young ultra-​Orthodox men. He smiled to himself and thought, “Hah! He deserves it!”

Before the Law There Stands a Jew  25

Scene Three The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. —​Franz Kafka, “Before the Law”

Having recently finished his compulsory service in the Israeli Defense Forces and an additional year of voluntary national service, a young man in his mid-​twenties is ready to go on a trip. He wants to travel the world, perhaps visit Europe or backpack in the mountains of South America like so many of his friends. He found a job and had been working very hard to save enough money to go away, and maybe even enough to pay for college once he’d returned. The young man, Uri, found a job in the agricultural sector. He had become quite good at milking cows and has been promoted to first milker at the dairy farm in a small community about an hour north of Tel Aviv. First milker meant that he is in charge and the other milkers would turn to him for instructions. But Uri recently realized that Mohammed, who lives in a nearby Palestinian village, was taking home a rather large paycheck. Mohammed seemed to be making more money than Uri. How could that be?

26  Israel Has a Jewish Problem It turned out that a worker could earn substantial overtime pay by working on Saturdays. Uri never had a chance to work on Saturdays. Now he asked his boss if he could, explaining that he doesn’t mind working overtime or double shifts or Saturdays. He’s just trying to earn more money. But Uri cannot work on Saturday. “Why not?” he asks the boss. “Why can Mohammed work, but not me?” Well, as it turns out, because Uri is Jewish he is prohibited from working on Saturdays. Such work would desecrate the Sabbath, and the Rabbinate has determined that if Jews desecrate the Sabbath their produce cannot be kosher. Milk that is not kosher cannot be sold in most Israeli supermarkets. “End of story,” Uri’s boss tells him. “You cannot work on Saturdays.” Uri is outraged. He doesn’t even believe in God. He never goes to synagogue, doesn’t keep kosher, and even takes great joy in eating “other” meat, the euphemism for pork in Israel. Why should he be prevented from working on Saturdays? Maybe he’d be better off if he were not Jewish, he thinks to himself. This idea is quite ironic, not only because of the history of Jews and the pressure to convert to Christianity in other parts of the world, but also given the second-​class status experienced by Palestinian citizens of Israel, to say nothing of those living under military occupation. But as it turns out, Uri has little say in the matter of his own Jewishness. We will hear more about his story later (see Chapter 2). For now, suffice it to say that the Israeli Ministry of the Interior works with the state sponsored Rabbinate to determine who is and who is not a Jew. Uri is born of a Jewish mother. He cannot work in the dairy on Saturdays.

The Gatekeeper and the Countryman The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable,

Before the Law There Stands a Jew  27 to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. —​Franz Kafka, “Before the Law”

The stories recounted above are not fictional. They are all very real and only a few of the myriad ways in which Jews struggle over Jewishness in the Jewish state. Fragments of these struggles, and their often Kafkaesque qualities, animate the pages of this book. I speak in terms of fragments here because to fully document all the ways people struggle over Jewishness in Israel would require countless volumes and involve an endless project. Some of those struggles are well known and well documented, like the case of recent immigrants or of minority groups of Jews in Israel (see Elias and Kemp 2010). We know, for example, that many recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union have had their Jewishness questioned and have been asked to undergo conversion processes to ensure their Jewishness (Egorova 2015; Neiterman and Rapoport 2009; Kravel-​Tovi 2012a, 2012b).5 We also know that immigrants from Ethiopia have not only had their Jewishness questioned and were 5 Some scholars suggest that the mass influx of non-​Jewish Russian immigrants under the law of return can be understood as part of broader processes to ensure that Israel is not an Arab country (Lustick 1999). Often, being Jewish in Israel has meant precisely not being Arab. This also accounts for the ongoing discrimination against Jews from Middle Eastern countries.

28  Israel Has a Jewish Problem asked to undergo conversion by Orthodox rabbis but have also faced widespread racist discrimination (Ashkenazi and Weingrod 1987; Kaplan and Salamon 2004; Wagaw 1993). Immigration from Ethiopia (aliya) began in the mid-​1970s, but it was only in 2018 that their religious leaders were finally officially recognized. The Hebrew Israelites (also known as Black Hebrews) have not been considered Jewish at all. Many came to Israel by smuggling themselves into the country and overstaying tourist visas. Seeing themselves as the true descendants of the ancient Israelites, they began arriving in Israel in the late 1960s from the United States, but have only recently begun to receive citizenship status. And we know that Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent (Mizrahim) have struggled against discrimination since the 1950s. But the focus of this book is not on minority or subaltern groups, or at least not on those people generally considered to be subaltern. Instead, it specifically deals with people considered to be at the center rather than the margins of sovereign citizenship.6 This book engages a larger question about human liberation and the promises of popular sovereignty. And at the same time, it interrogates what has been described as the contemporary secular age, and examines its outcomes for a variety of population groups. In so doing, it also raises a question about questions: the kinds of questions that scholars tend to ask and the difficulty of raising other sorts of questions. Let me begin by saying that I don’t know what it means to be a Jew. Or, at least, I do not purport to have the definitive meaning of that term, even if there is one. The point of this book is not to arrive at such a definition, nor to engage in a debate over this identifier.7 6 That does not mean, however, that all the people whose stories are told in the pages of this book are Ashkenazi Jews. Some are people whose families originated in the Middle East and North Africa and would be categorized as Mizrahim. Some are recent immigrants or their children, and others are intermarried. The general categories of difference are neither homogenous nor static. 7 Unlike Yaacov Rabkin (2016), for example, I will not begin from a particular definition of the term Jewish to determine, as he does, that modern Israel is not a Jewish state. However, I will engage with debates over this issue later in the book (see Chapter 5).

Before the Law There Stands a Jew  29 Rather, it involves an exploration of the struggles to be Jewish in the modern Jewish state of Israel with (at least) two interrelated approaches. I employ this case to engage in broader debates about popular sovereignty and secularism, and to consider what sort of liberation popular sovereignty in an ethno-​national state can offer, and for whom. The first approach includes politics and political struggles. This involves a consideration of some of the ways that the state becomes involved in definitions of Jewishness and in keeping “the people” Jewish, as well as decisions and policies that are seen to interfere with the ways different Jewish Israelis want to practice their Judaism or to be Jewish. The second approach, and perhaps the more important part of this project, is a consideration of the ways in which the very existence of the modern state, defined as Jewish, introduces a set of changes which, according to some Jews both inside and outside Israel, can make it difficult to be Jewish and may even endanger Jewishness.8 Or, in the very least, changes which encourage ways of being Jewish that coincide with state projects and discourage or punish others. While it is clear that having a state places Israeli Jews in a position of relative power, such power does not preclude the processes of producing, maintaining, and disciplining Jews to be sovereign citizens of the state. The modern Jewish state, according to such interpretations, may be dangerous to being Jewish, dangerous for Jews, or dangerous to the continuity of the Jewish people. Some analysts and activists contend that Israel’s politics and policies have led to increased anti-​ Semitism and thus pose a danger to Jews outside of Israel. Whether or not this is accurate, it is not a question I will take up in this book. My concern here has to do with Jews in Israel for whom the existence of the modern state has created new challenges. Yet I will suggest that these situations also mirror and mimic older problems

8 One might suggest that this idea of “danger” had already been foreshadowed in a letter written by Gershom Scholem in 1926. I will discuss Scholem’s letter and its ideas about the danger inherent in Zionism in Chapter 6.

30  Israel Has a Jewish Problem faced by Jewish populations in other times and places. The book thus considers the ways in which the historical “Jewish Question” in Europe has been transformed within the modern Jewish state itself, which raises broader questions about the possibilities and limits of political self-​determination.9 The two approaches outlined here cannot really be separated from each other. Indeed, the one seems to necessitate the other. These formulations will be explored in greater detail, unpacked, and examined later in the book. For now, I would like to remain with the ironic Kafkaesque quality of a Jewish state in which many people struggle to be Jewish according to their understanding of what that means. If the modern state of Israel was established precisely to protect the Jewish people and allow for its continuity and flourishing, what are we to make of this seemingly bizarre contradiction?

Gateway to the Law Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. —​Franz Kafka, “Before the Law” 9 The Jewish Question (also sometimes referred to as the Jewish Problem) asks about the place of “the Jew”—​the minority, the relic, the rootless stranger, the exiled, the displaced, the immigrant, the diasporic—​within the boundaries of the polis. See Chapter 2 for additional details.

Before the Law There Stands a Jew  31 At the borders of states there will always be gatekeepers, and at the boundaries of nations too. But who is the gatekeeper? Who is the man from the country? What is the law to which the man seeks entry? Kafka’s parable is ironic and sardonically hopeless. The man from the country—​a countryman or maybe a landsman—​seeks entry, but fearing the guard and the stories of other guards he must pass to gain entrance, the man waits and waits and waits. The Jews might be considered the ultimate outsiders, those obstinate others (Schechter 2003)  who refused to convert to Christianity, marking the limits of social inclusion and at the same time marking the outsides of “Europe” (Anidjar 2003; Baker 2017). At the border of the state of Israel, we know that it is difficult for non-​Jews to gain “entry,” that is, to fully become part of the polity. Much has been written about the problems of being a member of a minority group in the nation-​state, the problems of attaining citizenship, and with citizenship access to equal civil and human rights. In the case of Israel, these problems are most acute for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories who live under military rule, and for Palestinians inside the internationally recognized borders who are citizens but with second-​class status. The problems of those categorized as being outside the nation should not surprise us. Indeed, perhaps we should be more surprised by the idea that the problems of stateless and refugee populations might be solved by creating yet another exclusionary nation-​state to contain them. However, my question is not necessarily about the occupied or oppressed, the subaltern, or minority groups. I say not necessarily because such questions are already intertwined.10 My question has to do with those who have seemingly already gained political liberation through the establishment of their own nation-​state. How do sovereign citizens “gain entry,” if they do? And what precisely would such entry mean? 10 For example, see Dalsheim (2014) for more on meanings and limits of the term subaltern.

32  Israel Has a Jewish Problem Moses Mendelssohn was known as the Socrates of Berlin. Born in 1729, he was a key figure in the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), known for his great intellect. He was part of a broader movement attempting to make reforms in Jewish education in the 18th-​century German-​speaking lands, reforms that would coincide with broader German Enlightenment ideas. In addition to his traditional Jewish education, Mendelssohn also learned Latin, French, English, mathematics, and philosophy. He was such a talented philosopher that in 1763 he won first prize in a philosophy essay contest sponsored by the Berlin Academy, in which the second place went to Immanuel Kant (Batnitzky 2011). But although Mendelssohn might have been very well known and even respected in 18th-​century Prussia, nonetheless, like all Jews, he had no guarantee of civil rights (until they were bestowed on him personally by the Prussian king following the Berlin prize). He had come to Berlin from his small hometown and made a name for himself in the big city. But Berlin was a walled city at the time, and Mendelssohn would still have had to enter through a particular gate, the only gate through which Jews might enter. It was the same gate through which cattle passed. Before the law there stands a gatekeeper. At the entrance to the city of Enlightenment there stood a Jew. He was allowed to enter with the livestock. He was considered smart enough to win prizes for his thoughts, but was never fully admitted to the city on the same basis as other men. For according to many Christian thinkers of the time, if Mendelssohn was such a great intellect, if he was a true rational thinker, he should surely convert to Christianity. Jews were the test of the possibility of universal enlightenment. Moses Mendelssohn was exceptional, an exceptional Jew, and therefore accepted because of his difference. The same status was not, however, extended to his wife and family. One might say the doors of society were at once both opened and closed, paradoxically, like Kafka’s parable. Standing before the law, a man already submits to its authority. He is at once submitted to its authority and yet at the same time barred from entry.

Before the Law There Stands a Jew  33 This impossible situation and its extreme outcomes later in Europe provide much of the justification for the establishment of the modern state of Israel. Only sovereignty in one’s own state, many thought, could ensure the security and survival of the people. Only such sovereignty could provide the conditions in which the people can flourish. Hannah Arendt explained that the rights of man, human rights, had from the outset become inextricably entangled with “national emancipation,” such that only the “emancipated sovereignty of the people” seemed capable of achieving or ensuring human rights (Arendt 2003 [1948]). And yet, in this modern Jewish state, this place of national emancipation and supposed flourishing, the people can only grow and prosper at the expense of another people. They can only gain self-​determination by the exclusion and oppression of another nation. Paradoxically, they can only attain sovereign citizenship by reproducing for others the exclusionary conditions that had been visited upon them in Europe.11 This paradox is well known and documented in the scholarly critique of nationalism and in the scholarship on settler colonialism. But there is a deeper level of paradox we have yet to explore fully. That entails the quality and character of peoplehood, the related paradox of how people must be “the people” in order to attain sovereignty, and the intricate, intimate details of being made and maintained as such. Examining cases of people in positions of relative power has generally been of little interest to scholars concerned about human liberation and social justice. Anthropologists in particular have long been interested in studying the subaltern, the oppressed, and those whose stories have been marginalized or silenced. Paying too much attention to those in positions of power might be seen as siding with the oppressors. And yet I am convinced that what Laura Nader (1972) once called “studying up” is no less important than studying the oppressed. It is the other side of the same story. The specific case of Israeli peoplehood, in the ethno-​national sense, came about

11 See Michael Rothberg (2009) on multidirectional memory.

34  Israel Has a Jewish Problem with shifting categorizations of humanity that occurred in Western Europe. These categorizations, through which the contemporary world is understood, require unpacking to unsettle their apparent naturalness and to understand the work they do. Before the law there stands a gatekeeper. In the case of the modern state of Israel one might presume that the gatekeeper, whose first order of business is to keep out non-​Jews by determining Jewishness, would take the form of the state-​sponsored Orthodox Rabbinate, which holds the keys to citizenship. It is the Orthodox who determine who will be considered a Jew and who will thereby be offered entry to citizenship under the Israeli Law of Return. In that case, we might say the countryman who comes and begs admittance is not an Orthodox Jew. Perhaps he is a secular Jew, or someone who has only one Jewish parent. He begs admittance, but is never fully accepted. He can enter if he proves his Jewish heritage or converts by Orthodox standards. He can remain if his marriage is performed by an approved Orthodox Rabbi, and he can work and make a living as long as he does not break the Orthodox rules against desecrating the Sabbath. All this may be so. Jews in Israel cannot officially be married by Reform or Conservative rabbis. Such ceremonies are not recognized by the state. But as much as it might appear—​at least from the perspective of secular or liberal Jews—​that the gatekeeper is always an Orthodox Jew, the Orthodox, too, can be seen as the countryman begging entry. Indeed, in some sense, all Israeli Jews are struggling for entry and at any given time can be the countryman, who seeks entry to a space of liberation or self-​determination. But that space is never precisely the same one. In the state of Israel there seems always to be a struggle, dispute, or negotiation over Jewishness itself. Jewishness is the taken-​for-​granted unmarked category of the sovereign national group.12 But Jewishness is also an acute problem. 12 This unmarkedness in Israel is comparable to whiteness in other places. Studies of whiteness as an unmarked category began in the early 1990s with the work of scholars like Ruth Frankenberg (1993) and David Roediger (1991).

Before the Law There Stands a Jew  35 Understanding this Kafkaesque conundrum may help explain something of the elusiveness of power at work. In the following chapters I will explore some of the multiple and shifting forms of gatekeeping, the controversies over who will be considered Jewish and who will be able to make such decisions. I will describe some of the ways in which various Israeli Jews want to express their Jewishness and how they understand what it means to live a Jewish life. But first I will share with you one version of a well-​known story of how it is that these things came to be as they are.

Secular Zionism and the Status Quo The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” —​Franz Kafka, “Before the Law”

On June 19, 1947, the leaders of the ultra-​Orthodox union, Agudat Yisrael, received a letter from the man who would become the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion. That letter later became known as the “status quo” agreement between the secular Zionist movement and the Orthodox Jewish community. The Orthodox were worried about the state of Israel. They were not sure they would be able to continue their way of life if they lived there. The members of Agudat Yisrael, which was founded in Poland in 1912, were concerned that the establishment of a democratic Jewish state would deny the sovereignty of God and His law. The Orthodox establishment (Agudat Yisrael and Ha-​Mizrahi) worried that Zionism, in building a secular state, would be an extreme form of heresy (Friedman 1989: 178) and they worried about its consequences for the Jewish people. At the same time,

36  Israel Has a Jewish Problem however, the Orthodox community in Europe had also faced the threat of annihilation with the rise of Nazism, which forced even anti-​Zionist Orthodox Jews to seek refuge in Palestine (Friedman 1989: 172). For its part, the secular leadership of the Zionist movement was interested in making sure that religious Jews would join their movement and support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. At that point, it seemed that unifying the Jewish people toward the goal of establishing a state as a safe haven for Jews took precedence over the precise character of that state. The letter outlined a compromise aimed at appeasing observant Jews. It was a statement of intent, promising that the day of rest in the new state would be Saturday, that all food prepared in government kitchens would be kosher, and that the state would not interfere in religious education. Perhaps most significantly, the letter assured that the Rabbinate would retain authority over personal status issues such as marriage and divorce. Today many scholars cite the status quo agreement as the source of what is often called the secular/​religious divide in Israel.13 I am convinced that this conceptualization is inadequate. It is not only partial, as are all manner of explanation. More importantly, it is couched within a particularly powerful conceptual framework that it serves to reproduce. The questions we ask and the answers we seek matter beyond their ability to provide practical solutions. The questions we ask can disturb existing categories and resituate problems, or they can participate in reproducing existing power relations.

13 For example, see the recent award-​winning book on secularism in Israel by Guy Ben-​Porat (2013). See note 20 for additional details. Yaacov Yadgar, however, is among the scholars who reject the common interpretation of the status quo agreement. Yadgar concludes that the letter or the arrangement agreed upon in it do not serve the Orthodox community. Instead, he argues that the status quo serves the state’s need to identify as Jewish and to preserve a Jewish majority (2017: 221).

Before the Law There Stands a Jew  37 Thinking about the kinds of stories in this book as evidence of a secular/​religious divide in Israel, and tracing that divide to the status quo arrangement, risks reproducing the categorizations of humanity from which the Jews of Europe sought refuge.14 This conceptualization accepts, for example, that there is such a thing as a “secular Jew.” I am not suggesting that people do not identify as secular Jews or that they do not exist. I am asking the reader to think about the seemingly contradictory nature of this category. It means that a person remains a “Jew” regardless of religious observance and practice. It racializes the Jew and produces the Jews as a permanent category of people that neither their secularization nor even their conversion could undo. This conceptualization also participates in producing the Jew as not Arab, and in framing these two groups as necessarily enemy categories (Alcalay 1993; Shohat 2003; Shenhav 2006; Anidjar 2003). Thus, in accepting these categories and analyzing current problems through their application, the very social order that produced Jews as permanent outsiders in Europe is maintained. Instead of framing the issues in this book as part of a contemporary religious/​secular divide, I will suggest that the struggles to be Jewish in Israel have a longer, deeper history. These struggles can be traced to the Jewish Question in Europe and to the definition of Judaism as a religion, and to what Daniel Boyarin calls “the Christian invention of Judaism” (D. Boyarin 2004). Understanding the power effects of defining Judaism as a religion requires a careful consideration of the terms secularism, secularization, and what Talal Asad calls “the secular” (Asad 2003).

14 In her book on the keyword, “Jew,” Cynthia Baker (2017) writes about the now taken-​for-​granted distinctions between categories like ethnicity and religion and how such categorization functions in modern social and political relations.

38  Israel Has a Jewish Problem

Why the Jewish Question? Why in Israel? “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is it in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.” —​Franz Kafka, “Before the Law”

The Jewish Question is important again—​ or still—​ today because it is not only about the Jews. It never was. Perhaps in our contemporary context the issues raised by the Jewish Question in Europe are more often expressed regarding Muslims living in Europe, questions about Europe and its relationship to Muslims, or about immigrants and refugees more generally. This means that such questions may tell us more about the questioners than the questioned. That is, they may tell us about “Europe” and its identity as that which is somehow threatened by supposed outsiders in its midst (Buck-​Morss 2007; Anidjar 2003; J. Boyarin 2009). Considering questions of anti-​Semitism and Islamophobia in Europe, Matti Bunzl (2007, 2005) has suggested that Islamophobia is currently more pressing to the future of Europe.15 This prompted Susan Buck-​Morss to ask whether “such a thing as Europe exists 15 The title of Bunzl’s short book, which includes his essay and responses to it, reveals a curious temporality:  Anti-​Semitism and Islamophobia:  Hatreds Old and New in Europe. He seems to suggest that an “old” hatred, an earlier anti-​Semitism, was based on secular theories of race and racism that no longer plague Europe. There is a new anti-​Semitism, Bunzl argues, that has arisen as a result of Israel’s politics and the oppression of Palestinians. Contemporary Islamophobia, on the other hand, is “civilizational” in nature. It imagines a worldview that is incompatible with Western culture. There’s a problem here, of course, because the “past” hatreds to which Bunzl refers are not really past. They are part of the same historical processes that led to the near extermination of the Jews of Europe and to establishment of the state of Israel as an ethno-​national state to solve the problems of ethno-​nationalism in Europe. And it is that state whose policies now, according to Bunzl, are the cause of contemporary anti-​Semitism.

Before the Law There Stands a Jew  39 that is threatened by the future, or whether the future poses a threat to the concept of Europe itself ” (Buck-​Morss 2007: 95). The Jewish Question might now indeed be formulated as a Muslim Question in Europe, but it is and always has been primarily a European question.16 In her exploration of the role of French history in understanding the root of the problems Muslims face in France today, Mayanthi Fernando (2014) traces the processes of secularism to questions of emancipation and the Jews. Secularization was supposed to be liberating for all Europeans: by separating religion from politics, all citizens should be equal in the public sphere. Secularization was (and still is) tied to a belief that religion was “backward” and that rational thinking was the antithesis of religious belief, and such rationality was equated with modernity and progress. In Northern Europe secularism involved transformations that sought to decommunalize the Jews. In the early 1800s, Jewish law, which had been the basis of Jewishness, was abolished and turned into an optional source of tradition rather than an essential source of law and ethics (Fernando 2014; Batnitzky 2011). The process of secularization was meant to treat Judaism as a religion and to incorporate the Jews as full citizens by subjecting them to the laws of the state rather than Halakha, Jewish law.17 But the inherent link between race and religion (Bauman 1988) in the figure of the Jew made the separation of religion from political citizenship quite impossible (Anidjar 2006). Instead, the Jew remained “the Jew” and was faced with the impossible conditions of incorporation, assimilation, or elimination—​in one way or another—​in the name of

16 This question has largely been Gil Anidjar’s project, especially in The Jew, The Arab: A History of the Enemy (2003). 17 Halakha can be translated in reference to its linguistic root in the word “to go,” signifying a path or direction, and designates the proper path or guide to life actions and decisions. The term Halakha sometimes refers to a particular law or ruling or to the entire system of law (Seltzer 1980: 260–​262). It includes biblical commandments as well as interpretations of the great sages of rabbinical Judaism.

40  Israel Has a Jewish Problem progress.18 Along with the failed attempt at separating Jewish religion from political citizenship came the enduring racialization of the Jews as a people. For the Jew remained marked as Jewish whether or not he attended synagogue or kept kosher or covered his head. Thus modernity, or the secular age (Taylor 2007) did not, in fact, make Jews citizens like all others in France or in Germany. However, the Jewish Question in Europe arose from within a context in which “a people” seemingly connected by genealogy was imagined to be coterminous with a piece of territory. The Jewish Question, then, was formulated within the context of ethno-​ nationalism, which produced the Jews as the “outside” of Europe, causing their near elimination, while national sovereignty became the answer to their survival.19 But national sovereignty did not re-​communalize the Jews. Modern political Zionism was a secular movement. It too imagined secularization as a liberating form of progress, so that the Jews could be free of the ghettos of Europe and free to work the land of Israel or to work in any profession or trade.20 The socialist Zionist founders of the modern state were not interested in establishing 18 The word elimination appears here in reference to those scholars of settler colonialism who suggest that assimilation into settler society is another form of eliminating natives. I will say more about the idea of assimilation in Chapter 6. 19 The Jewish Question will be dealt with in greater detail later in Chapter 6. 20 In Israel, questions of secularism and secularization have largely been measured in terms of the relative freedom of non-​observant Jews. Recently, Guy Ben-​Porat (2013) has argued that although religious observance seems to be on the rise in Israel, non-​observant Israeli Jews have increasingly managed to find ways around Orthodox impositions, suggesting that contrary to popular belief, Israel is becoming more secular. My own work (Dalsheim 2011b) suggests that while secular Israelis worry about religious impositions on their everyday life, little has been written about the outcomes of the secular for observant Israeli Jews. Anthropologists of Jews and Judaism struggle with the conceptualization of Judaism as a “religion” (Brink-​Danan 2008) in what is often called the secular or “protestant” sense that defines religion as a private, internal matter of faith (Keane 2007, 2015; Asad 1993). This book builds on that concern by asking if that conceptualization interferes with being Jewish in the self-​defined Jewish state. In so doing, the book contributes to the growing scholarship that has been examining the powers of the secular modern condition, which understands modernity as a hegemonic secular age in which all religion is expected to conform to a particular Protestant model (Asad 2003; Raz-​Krakotzkin 2015; Keane 2007). See Chapter 5 for a more detailed discussion of these issues.

Before the Law There Stands a Jew  41 Jewish law as the foundation of Jewish life. In Israel, Jews would be citizens like citizens in any other state. They no longer lived in Europe, but still seemed to seek acceptance among Europeans. It is only because Judaism was now understood as a “religion” rather than as a set of laws, a cultural heritage, a community of practice, a literary tradition, or a civilization, that the status quo agreement emerged. Indeed, only if Judaism is a “religion” can the idea of a religious/​secular divide be imagined among the Jews of Israel. Muslims in France and elsewhere in Europe now struggle against Western conceptualizations of religion that marginalize and delegitimize their practices, relegating religion to the private sphere. But what of the Jews? What happens to the impossible predicament of being Jewish in a modern state when Jews become sovereign citizens in their own state? Are the explanations comparable to those found in liberal states elsewhere?

2 On Goat Surveillance “Alas,” said the mouse, “the world gets smaller every day. At first it was so wide that I ran along and I was happy to see walls appearing to my right and left, but these high walls converged so quickly that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run.” “But you’ve only got to run the other way,” said the cat, and ate it. —​Franz Kafka, The Little Fable1

Scene One: Surveillance In the summer of 2014, I spent some time at the home of an Israeli goat farmer. Early one Saturday morning, as I drank my coffee and checked my email, I realized with surprise that I was the only one awake in the household. Sometime later, Ezra, the farmer himself, emerged in clean, fresh clothes. He didn’t appear to be working. That was strange. The farmer was always up at the crack of dawn and worked until sunset. So, when I first saw him that morning, I began teasing: “What’s this? Did I actually wake up before you today? Did you oversleep?” 1 This version of “The Little Fable” appears in a volume of Kafka’s collected stories (Kafka 1971b). Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self- Elimination. Joyce Dalsheim, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190680251.001.0001

On Goat Surveillance  43 “Well,” he said, “since I can’t milk the goats on Shabbat, I might as well get a little sleep.” You can’t milk the goats on the Sabbath? I  wondered who would stop him. Knowing his wife was, or had been, an observant Jew, and knowing that she lamented his habit of working endlessly, I thought maybe she had asked him to take this one day off each week. I asked Ezra why he couldn’t milk the goats. “If I did,” he said, “the milk would not be kosher.” And, of course, if it wasn’t kosher, it would be very difficult to sell. But why wouldn’t it be kosher? The farmer explained that according to the Rabbinate, which controls certifying foods as kosher, if a Jew milks his goats or cows on the Sabbath that is a violation—​a desecration of the Sabbath—​and the milk will not be kosher. This struck me as rather strange, since there are also rules about caring for animals regardless of the Sabbath, and goats and cows must be milked daily lest they suffer in pain. And anyway, I used to work on a dairy farm in Israel myself (more than twenty years ago) where Jews had always milked the cows on Saturday and the milk was definitely certified kosher. Apparently, something had changed. What if a farm was too small to employ non-​Jewish laborers to do this work instead? What did they do when there were no Palestinians or foreign workers available? What? Then the milk would not be kosher, and thus not be marketable? “Don’t ask me [about Halakha],” the farmer said. Like many other Israelis, he seemed to think the rules were arbitrary and primarily aimed at creating jobs and generating money for the Rabbinate. I spoke later to a kibbutz dairy farmer who said it was not true that a Jew could not milk the cows or goats on Shabbat. A Jew was simply prohibited from turning on electricity, he noted sarcastically. “So,” he said of the absurd situation—​using a generic name to refer to Palestinian workers—​“a Jew could be there and put the machine on the cow, and then say ‘hey, Mohammed, come press the button!’ ” Halakha can be variously interpreted, of course. But never mind about why Jews were prohibited from milking their herds on the

44  Israel Has a Jewish Problem Sabbath. Never mind what the particular source of this ruling might be or whether there are rabbis who disagree. Never mind if one could produce a commandment that might suggest precisely the opposite—​that Jews must milk their goats or cows every day, including the Sabbath. Never mind all of that. My question was, how could the Rabbinate possibly know? Surely they would not send an inspector (mashgiakh) out on a Saturday to check. They could not possibly allow a member of their staff to travel or work on the Sabbath to determine whether or not a Jewish farmer was working on the Sabbath, because then they would be working. “Ah, hah!” the farmer laughed. “Now there are cameras!” “Cameras?” “Yes. There’s a video camera in the milking parlor.”

Ezra had a goat surveillance camera and he showed me a website where I too could watch the Saturday milking. Again, I was baffled. Why did Ezra know the password for the camera that surveilled him? Well, as it turns out, he was the one who had to purchase and install it. The farmer was required to provide the means for surveilling himself. If the farmer in this story is the metaphorical mouse in Kafka’s parable, then who or what is the cat? Is it the state-​sponsored Rabbinate? The camera that surveilles the farmer? Or maybe it’s the farmer himself, who participates in his own surveillance? I would like to suggest that it is none of these, but actually something more elusive. Before we get to that, allow me to contextualize the conundrum as I understand it.

Conundrum Israel is self-​consciously modeled after European nation-​states that have often been held up as exemplary democracies, states

On Goat Surveillance  45 that offer individual liberty to their citizens. The United States has also been considered as a model, in part because of what is seen as its successful separation of church and state.2 Secularism is often considered a foundational part of the liberties enshrined in the modern nation-​state. It is the basis for plurality, making room for multicultural differences. Most basically, freedom of religion and freedom from religion are considered foundational to the progress of modernity, and the Zionist movement that led to the establishment of the Israeli state understood itself as precisely such a liberation movement. Israel has no constitution, but its basic laws provide for freedom of religion. The state prides itself on guaranteeing religious freedom to all faiths and claims that in Israel each religious community “is free, by law and in practice, to exercise its faith, observe its holidays . . . and administer its internal affairs” (Israel 2017). This notion of protecting freedom of religion for members of all faiths points toward a secularized version of modern statehood. But is Israel a “secular” state? More to the point: is this strange situation of goat surveillance best understood in terms of a secular/​religious divide? Founded as a remedy to the precarious minority position of the Jews in Europe, Israel illuminates some of the problems of sovereign subjectivity. But because of the particular history of the Jews—​of Judaism becoming categorized as a “religion” (Batnitzky 2011) while Jewishness remained a racialized category—​it is also about modern forms of identity and the dilemmas of human 2 In some modern European nation-​states, of course, there is no separation of church and state, even in theory. Many still have established state churches. The United States, one might argue, is actually also a Christian state. Nonetheless, political Zionism understood itself as a secular movement, seeking freedom from religion. There continues to be a sector of the Israeli populace who contend that separating religion from state would solve many of its social and political problems. Hussein Agrama (2011), however, suggests that secularism is itself a “problem-​space” that does not solve problems of religion and state, but instead continuously raises the question of where to draw the line between these two categories. Below I explain the inadequacy of this theory for analyzing the case of Israel.

46  Israel Has a Jewish Problem liberation that result from them. The Zionist movement, which sought national emancipation and flourishing for the Jews, achieved self-​determination for its people. But what it could or should mean to be Jewish is never entirely clear. The elusive quality of the struggle to be Jewish—​both to be freely Jewish according to one’s idea of what that means, and to be Jewish according to shifting state policies and procedures—​is the unseen power of subjection. In the Israeli context, the question of emancipation leads in a number of directions. What do concepts such as “the freedom to be Jewish” entail? Which Jews are free, and who has the power to decide what will count as “Jewish” in the first place?3 We might think of ethnic differences, for example, and consider the issues related to Mizrahim, Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (Dalsheim 2008; Khazzoom 2005; Raz-​ Krakotzkin 2005; Shafir 1989a; Shenhav 2003a; Shohat 1988), and the structural racism at work in Israel. We might think about the subtle obstructions to living as a particular kind of ethical community. As some Iraqi immigrants express it, being Jewish can involve acting cordially, which might include stopping one’s car to allow people to cross the street, or other forms of everyday ethical behavior that some find difficult in the Israeli milieu.4 Or we might think of gendered inequalities

3 Asking the question of whether or not there is freedom of religion for Jews during fieldwork in the summer of 2014 was a very interesting process. At first, some people were confused by what seemed like a counter-​intuitive question. For others, it seemed to be a clarifying moment, a kind of disturbing clarification. It might have presented a new way to think about certain problems, but it also seemed to suggest something troubling, something that many people had already begun to consider. Israel is the Jewish state, established so that Jews could “be a free people in their homeland.” Scholars have raised questions about this “freedom” having to do with how many Jews in Israel have died defending the country or by looking at the moral corruption that comes with oppressing another people. Some have considered these issues from the perspective of anti-​Zionist Judaism, and others have investigated the identity issue in terms of being Arab and Jewish. Here, I am asking about the freedom to be Jewish, which struck a nerve with many interviewees from a variety of sectors of the Israeli Jewish community. 4 Aziza Khazzoom (personal communication) shared such stories from her research among Iraqi Jewish women in Israel. My own research reveals similar sentiments and frustrations among some Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent in particular.

On Goat Surveillance  47 where women are asked to sit at the back of the bus, or harassed for wanting to pray in particular ways in public places.5 Another part of this question revolves around the criteria for determining one’s Jewishness, which can be key to gaining citizenship in Israel—​and again we can think about racism in comparing cases of Ethiopian and Russian immigrants who have come to Israel (Smooha 2004).6 If the promise of universal rights is the premise of modern citizenship (Balibar 2004), then what are we to make of the “processes of cultural subject-​ification” (Ong 1996)  that citizenship entails? Certainly no one is outside of Foucauldian processes of self-​making and being made through relations of power, or outside the intimate processes of subjectification that occur through surveillance, discipline, control, and administration. But goat surveillance? Really?

Religious versus Secular? The liberal aspiration to separate religion and state implies that secularization is possible in a country that characterizes itself as Jewish.7 But the framework of secularization only provides partial explanations. It misses a bigger picture and a larger set of issues of relevance beyond the case of Jews and beyond the problem of Israel/​Palestine. Reframing what appears as a local problem of religion and state in its broader historical context helps clarify this case and raises 5 For example, Women of the Wall (http://​www.womenofthewall.org.il/​) is an organization that has been demonstrating for the rights of women to pray wearing a prayer shawl and carrying the Torah at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. 6 Of course, producing “the people” for the Jewish state is itself a racializing process. It is important to have to embody the racialized definition of the Jew, which means, of course, not being Arab. 7 The formulaic idea of a separation of “church and state” can refer to the aspiration to keep religious identity separate from political participation or to make religious practice a matter of private rather than public concern. In Israel, those seeking increased secularization are primarily interested in the latter idea. Liberal and secular Israelis speak about these aspirations in terms of this formulaic separation (religion and state) and they often point to the United States as a model for how such separation can be implemented.

48  Israel Has a Jewish Problem additional questions about human liberation, identity, and sovereign citizenship in the contemporary secular age (Taylor 2007). Modern ideas of human liberation are deeply intertwined with Enlightenment-​inspired values that include particular conceptions of rationality, progress, and individual will that became foundational to political organization in the nation-​state. The idea that each individual should be equal before the law challenged religious hierarchies and became the foundation of what we call civil and human rights today. However, conceptualizing people as individuals in this context also turned out to be problematic precisely for the purpose of guaranteeing equal rights.

Abstract Human Beings Questions about liberation and human and civil rights were raised by Hannah Arendt in her critique of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Arendt 2003 [1948]). She was concerned that precisely the political processes that were aimed at human liberation could have quite the opposite effect. She explained that imagining that human rights emerged from the very nature of humanity, given with birth to every single individual, was a problematic assumption. Twentieth-​century human rights declarations had failed to protect minorities and stateless people, who were deprived of membership in political communities that might grant them rights and protections. “The paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights,” she wrote, “was that it reckoned with an ‘abstract’ human being who seemed to exist nowhere” because people always live within some specific social order. In the contemporary order of nation-​states, “[t]‌he whole question of human rights was . . . quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one’s own people, seemed able to insure them” (Arendt 2003 [1948]:  32, emphasis added). Human

On Goat Surveillance  49 rights had become linked with nationalism, and no human beings could have their rights guaranteed unless they were sovereign citizens in their own state. This analysis emerged from considering the problem of Jews as stateless people and refugees between the two world wars. Indeed, it has been suggested that Arendt’s political analyses all stemmed from her grappling with the Jewish Question (Bernstein 1996). Arendt’s ideas about Jewishness and nationalism are complex. She firmly believed in the Jewish nation, but opposed territorial nationalism. Often “the Jewish Question” is used as shorthand for what became the genocidal near-​elimination of the Jewish people in Nazi Europe. But the “question,” at least since the 18th century, was really one of emancipation and assimilation. It was supposed to be concerned with the possibility of universal liberation, a question we still grapple with today. But in the 19th century, European thinkers wondered how Jews might become citizens like their countrymen. The Jews were a problem. They were obstinate in their adherence to Jewish law and tradition. It was a question of whether Jews in Germany could be German citizens, of whether European Jews could be European, and whether or not Jews would have to have stop being Jewish in order for European states to grant them emancipation (Nirenberg 2013). Such questions were part of the development of modern European political theory, in which emancipation and self-​determination were to be sought in one’s own nation-​state. European thinkers sought to make Jews European through assimilation, which at the time meant to “be a Jew in the synagogue and a man in the street.”8 Thus secularization—​the privatization of religion, or the definition of Jewishness as “religion”—​played an important role in the project of achieving universal rights.

8 This phrase is sometimes referred to as the motto of assimilationists. While its precise source is difficult to trace, it has come to be a commonly known shorthand for describing the bifurcated identity assimilation demanded.

50  Israel Has a Jewish Problem It has been suggested that “the Jews” have more generally been “good to think” (Schechter 2003) for European nationalists and political philosophers because they demonstrate the problems of presuming universal concepts, and thus the difficulty of achieving the kind of universal liberation imagined by many Enlightenment thinkers. For some, such liberation required converting to Christianity. For others—​ like Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx—​ emancipation meant leaving Judaism, and religion more generally, altogether. The Jewish Question, then, has been a catalyst for thinking about the exclusion of minority and subaltern cultural and religious groups (Mufti 2007) in modernity, including the contemporary case of Muslims in Europe (Fernando 2014). Palestinians often argue that they have borne the brunt of the Jewish Question since Jews settled en masse in Palestine to seek refuge from anti-​Semitism in Europe. Continuing the analysis that Arendt began, this chapter takes a different turn. Here we will see some of the outcomes of the transformation of the Jewish Question for “the people” who must be produced and maintained as sovereign citizens in their own state. Ethno-​national models of political liberation will always have to produce their “people,” and although such production always causes the most harm to those it excludes, the processes of producing inclusion also threaten the possibility of human liberation through political sovereignty in the nation-​state. Ella Shohat (1988) has argued that Zionism has not only had Palestinian victims, but Jewish victims too, focusing on the negative outcomes of Zionism for Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. However, while processes of inclusion will vary, they extend to all those who are produced, subject-​ified, as members of the nation (Ong 1996). In Israel/​Palestine, Jews must be produced and maintained as other than local Arabs in order to be the ruling national group that guarantees its own rights. “Nation” has also been conflated with “religion.” This issue of indeterminacy is central to the power of subjectification in this modern, presumably secular state. But its power works in ways that Agrama’s theory about indeterminacy and

On Goat Surveillance  51 secularism proves inadequate to explain. Agrama (2011) contends that the unfixed nature of the difference between the categories of religion and politics is the foundation of secular power. While it is true that indeterminacy is itself one way in which power works, it is certainly not a quality that is specific to secularism or even to modernity (see Starrett 2014). In Israel, the theory falls short because the problems I have outlined cannot be explained in terms of where to draw the line between religion and politics. Instead, they can be traced to how the modern idea of “religion” itself is alternately separated from and conflated with the identity categories—​tribe, nation, race, ethnicity, stranger, migrant, enclave, cosmopolitan, globalist—​that have historically converged in the figure of the Jew. While secularization in Europe has generally been understood as disentangling “nation” from “religion,” it worked in the opposite way for Jews, for whom the two were conflated, resulting in what they themselves recognize as Kafkaesque situations.9 The mouse keeps trying to avoid the cat. The mouse turns and runs the other direction. But no matter which way it turns, the true Israeli has to be Jewish, and what it means to be Jewish creates a seemingly endless maze.

Scene Two: Genealogy The goats are milked, but on this farm, it is the Palestinian laborers who do that work on Saturdays. (On other farms I’ve seen Eritrean refugees or other foreign laborers working on Saturdays.) This way the milk is kosher and the farmer (supposedly) keeps the Sabbath day of rest or, we might say, he is kept Jewish. I spoke to another young man, Uri, who had been working at a dairy farm, milking cows to save enough money to pay for college 9 This is not to suggest that all Israelis see all such situations as Kafkaesque. However, my fieldwork demonstrates that variously situated Israeli Jews find interference with their freedom to be Jewish as they see fit as bizarre or absurd, and they often report a deep sense of frustration. Kafkaesque is a commonly known word in Hebrew, not a scholarly imposition.

52  Israel Has a Jewish Problem (we met Uri briefly in Chapter 1). He was infuriated by this Sabbath rule. Working on Saturdays was worth extra pay, and he thought it was terribly unfair that just because someone decided he was a Jew he would not be able to earn that overtime pay. So, he told his employer, “OK, so I’m not Jewish” and he proceeded to pronounce the words of Muslim witness, “There is only one God and he is Allah and Mohammed is His prophet . . . ” but his employer just laughed. “You don’t get to decide! These issues are determined by the Ministry of the Interior and you are a Jew whether you like it or not!” The Ministry of the Interior makes its decisions based on Orthodox rules of genealogy, although those rules are also less stable than one might imagine. As with the issue of kosher produce, the rules for who is a Jew likewise seem to shift, or sometimes seem to be arbitrarily applied. Here we begin to see something of the ironies of secular modernity in which “religion” is at once imagined as an aspect of personal identity, or a matter of choice, but at the same time can be made essentially inseparable from the person or collective regardless of one’s practices. As we have seen, in Europe Jewishness became a “national” category (Batnitzky 2011)  that was imagined as not quite part of Europe (Anidjar 2003), and that constituted a “question” or a “problem.” This young man wants to employ the idea of Jewishness as a “religion” attributed to him. In the terms of freedom of religion that Charles Taylor (2007) describes as foundational to modernity, Uri wants to refuse his religion and choose another. He wants to be free from Judaism because it prevents him from earning overtime pay. But now he is told that his Jewishness (not Judaism) is not a matter of his choice, so the distinction between Jewishness and Judaism takes on added meaning. Judaism loses its power to provide the kind of liberty promised by a secular order, reproducing in the state of Israel precisely the kind of limits imposed upon the Jews of Europe: once a Jew, always a Jew. No one was checking to see if Uri attended synagogue, if he kept kosher or covered his head. So one might argue that this determination

On Goat Surveillance  53 of Jewishness is evidence that the Jewish state is a secular state that brackets religious practices, while the person nevertheless remains ethnicized, racialized, and categorized genealogically. What are the outcomes of these processes for the question of popular sovereignty and the possibility of being “free” to enact Jewishness, whether or not such liberty is considered “freedom of religion” (Hurd 2008; Keane 2015; Sullivan 2005; Sullivan et al. 2015)? While the Halakhic determination of who is a Jew is primarily based on whether or not one’s mother is a Jew,10 this process of determining Jewishness—​with or without Judaism as a set of cultural practices—​is one that in Europe was paradoxically thought to be a means of liberation. Instead it resulted in their near extermination, and also prompted their quest for self-​determination, for sovereignty in their own state as a means of collective survival. According to sociologists Gershon Shafir and Ilan Peled, this was supposed to be a “secular” enterprise:  “Zionism  .  .  . has always proclaimed itself a secular national movement in the tradition of the Enlightenment, intending, in Herzl’s famous words, to keep the rabbis in their synagogues and the soldiers in their barracks” (Shafir and Peled 2002: 137). Which brings us back to this young man, a Jew who by reasons of birth cannot decide not to be Jewish. You are a Jew if you are born of a Jewish mother. Mostly, anyway.11 10 There are different variations on the laws for determining Jewishness that include lineage, upbringing, and conversion. Reform Judaism recognizes the child of a Jewish father or mother as being Jewish, but Orthodox Judaism has generally only accepted those born of a Jewish mother. 11 Here the exclusionary nature of the state and its relationship to racism becomes apparent. Rather than think of Zionism only as a reaction to anti-​Semitism, it has been argued that these ideologies share a common set of conditions that allowed them to emerge (see Dalsheim 2010). The racist theories of the 19th century, which classified the Jews as a race (genealogically tied together as a people rather than as a group who could chose affiliation with a religious institution), and the conditions that created the need and the right of citizens to rule themselves, underlie the combination of nationalism and democracy in which self-​rule is a right granted to a people. These are the same conditions in which this people (the Jews as a nation) are constructed against another people (the Palestinians as a nation) vying for sovereignty over the same territory. The historical relationship between racism, anti-​Semitism, and nationalism is re-​inscribed in the categories of Arab and Jew as binary opposites.

54  Israel Has a Jewish Problem

Scene Three: Who Is a Jew? It turns out that some people who can clearly demonstrate their Jewish ancestry can also be denied Israeli citizenship. Indeed, such ancestry could prove an obstacle to citizenship. How could it be that one’s Jewish genealogy might hinder one’s ability to earn a living because you are Jewish whether you want to be or not, but at the same time such genealogy might prevent you from being considered a Jew at all? During the summer I stayed with the goat farmer, I met a couple who, upon retirement, had moved from the United States to Israel, purchased a home, and settled in. Jason and Judy presumed their Jewish genealogy would allow them to make aliyah, to be granted citizenship under the Law of Return, that promises Israeli citizenship to Jews anywhere in the world who seek it. The right of return has been codified into a foundational law aimed at fulfilling the promise of safety in what became defined in narrowly geographic terms as the Jewish homeland.12 But in some cases genealogy might not be enough, or maybe, too much. (While Jews are granted the right of return, if you’re just not Jewish at all you can also apply for citizenship by other means, similar to such applications in other countries.) This couple explained that being in Israel made them feel they were “finally home.” And yet that homecoming was indefinitely deferred because it turned out that they seemed to be Jewish in a way that was unacceptable and threatening, perhaps more threatening than not being Jewish at all. Judy, her husband, and members of their community celebrate all the Jewish holidays. They study the Torah and pray on Saturdays. A glass case in their house prominently displays their menorah, Shabbat candlesticks, and even a shofar, a ram’s horn to sound for the High Holidays. Judy and Jason have a ketubah, a Jewish marriage contract, as did their parents and grandparents. 12 As part of his study of diaspora Daniel Boyarin (2005) writes about the Talmud as a traveling homeland, a different way of conceptualizing the relationships between people, space, and culture.

On Goat Surveillance  55 Genealogy is the grounds on which Jewishness is determined by the state-​sponsored Orthodox Rabbinate, which sets the standards for making such determinations about citizenship. Judy’s and her husband’s Jewish genealogy were not in question. Other issues that might interfere with gaining citizenship in Israel did not hold true in this case. These two were fine, upstanding citizens in the United States, with no criminal record. They were not trying to “take advantage” of the state or its welfare programs by “pretending” to be Jewish. Nor were they criminals seeking to hide from prosecution. They came to live in Israel with generous retirement benefits from their jobs in the United States. And yet, there seemed to be some problem. When they brought their documents to the Ministry of Interior to apply for citizenship, the clerk in the office looked over everything and welcomed them to the country. It seemed clear that their family history proved their eligibility to apply for citizenship under the Law of Return. But several weeks later, they received a letter explaining that they had been denied citizenship. Soon they found themselves traveling back and forth across the border between Israel and Egypt or Jordan, just to renew their visas. As time passed it became clear that if they left the country they might be denied re-​entry. So, when I met them, they were living in Israel but were not quite legal residents, trapped in the place that had finally made them feel at home. What made these two middle-​class retirees so problematic? How could they be Jewish, but denied citizenship? They told me that they believe that Jesus was the Jewish messiah. They belong to a group known as Messianic Jews, or Jews for Jesus.13 When I visited their home, Judy spent more than an hour explaining to me how biblical texts prove that Jesus was in fact the Jewish messiah. Expressing her frustration with their struggle for citizenship, she said it seemed ridiculous that someone who was completely secular, an atheist, or even a Jew who practiced Buddhism could gain 13 Similar questions relating to citizenship, Jewishness, and genealogy, arose in the case of Brother Daniel, a Jew who converted to Christianity, became a monk, and then sought Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return (see Galanter 1963).

56  Israel Has a Jewish Problem citizenship more easily than she. “Jews have freedom of religion everywhere but in Israel!” Judy said. With a certain outrage, she spoke to me about the Lubavitcher Hasidim (a sect of Haredi/​ ultra-​Orthodox Jews), who had no trouble becoming Israeli citizens. Some Lubavitchers believed that their rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, was the messiah. “Nowhere is it written that the messiah will come from Brooklyn!” she said. And I nearly laughed out loud, but she was neither amused nor joking. She was quite angry about this injustice. Why should they be permitted citizenship under the Law of Return and she and her husband be denied, when obviously Lubavitch belief was completely unsubstantiated and hers was clearly the true Judaism? This was a remarkable contrapuntal moment. In the current socio-​political context, it is nearly impossible to imagine that ultra-​Orthodox observant Jews are not Jewish. Or that those who accept Jesus as the messiah are more Jewish than the ultra-​Orthodox. While it is clear than many non-​Orthodox or non-​observant Israeli Jews find themselves socially and politically opposed to the Orthodox and ultra-​Orthodox, I  know of no proclamations in the public sphere that the members of these communities are not really Jews. Like the issue of how inspectors could know whether or not a Jew was working on the Sabbath, the question of how anyone would know about their beliefs arose in our conversation. This time, I was told, surveillance took the form of clandestine Orthodox and ultra-​Orthodox informers. (Judy provided me with a link to a you-​tube video that revealed these clandestine processes.)

Race, Nation, Religion, Emancipation The establishment of Israel has not ended Jewish struggles for liberation. Jews in Israel struggle to be or not to be Jewish. They rush

On Goat Surveillance  57 around through a maze that shifts and rearranges its path. Some of them would like to express their freedom of religion by choosing not to be Jewish, but they are trapped by the racialized category of their genealogy. Others want to claim that genealogy, but are trapped by their religious beliefs and practices that are designated not really Jewish or not Jewish enough. Others still, like the ultra-​ Orthodox we will meet in Chapters 3 and 4, want to live a strictly observant life, but are deemed too Jewish. Some of the examples in this chapter may seem trivial, even amusing. There are, of course, other examples, like adult immigrant males who undergo a surgical procedure of circumcision to complete a process of conversion and be considered Jewish by the Orthodox Rabbinate, but are perhaps still not quite Jewish enough to marry the daughters of Orthodox Jews. There are more spectacular examples as well, like when members of the organization Women of the Wall, who want to carry a Torah scroll and pray at the Western Wall, are pelted with rocks by angry young Orthodox women who have come to demonstrate against them (Lahav 2013). The Israeli state employs rabbis who are charged with, among other things, performing marriages and other life ceremonies. However, only Orthodox rabbis are paid by the state, and only Orthodox ceremonies are officially recognized. This has meant that self-​defined secular Jews who do not want to undergo the processes of an Orthodox ceremony have had to find alternative arrangements, which sometimes means leaving the country to be married in a civil ceremony abroad. Indeed, nearby Cyprus is such a popular destination for this task that there is a local industry catering to Israeli wedding tourists. Liberal or Reform Jews in Israel find themselves in a similar predicament, as do Conservative Jews. Today there are a small number of Reform and Conservative congregations in Israel, but unlike the Orthodox, they receive no state funding and the ceremonies they perform have no legal

58  Israel Has a Jewish Problem standing.14 Recently, in fact, a Conservative rabbi in the city of Haifa was detained by police for performing Jewish weddings.15 This chapter opened with Kafka’s Little Fable in which a mouse is running hopelessly through a maze as the walls close in on him and finally, he faces a mousetrap. Switching directions, the mouse turns, only to run directly into the mouth of the cat who swallows him up. Kafka’s genius in embedding so much meaning in just a few sentences is remarkable. The original German consisted of a mere 76 words (Geller 2018: 81). Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the variation of interpretations it has elicited. The parable might refer to “the stages of an individual life, the nature of human fate, or a situation of societal crisis” or maybe the “historical power relations between Gentiles and Jews,” in which the mouse would signify the Jew (Geller 2018: 81–​82).16 In particular, it might allegorize Jewish struggles for civil rights in Europe—​those rights being extended and taken away. Or, it might have been an allegory illustrating the demand for Jewish assimilation in Europe and the impossibility of achieving it to the satisfaction of those making the demand (Geller 2018: 84). Or, the irony of political and racial anti-​Semitism that followed the period of Jewish Emancipation, particularly for Jews in Germany (Elon 2003). Enduring literature can always be about more than the specific context in which it was written. Our poor mouse’s predicament, 14 Note that in part because of the actual diasporic status of Jews, the contrast between diasporic and nationalist models of being Jewish has international dimensions. Some of the most energetic supporters of the idea of “Israel”—​e.g., American Jews of various sorts—​would be specifically discriminated against if they lived there in ways they are not discriminated against abroad. 15 In July 2018, Rabbi Dov Haiyun was detained by police after a complaint filed against him by the Rabbinical Court in Haifa. He was accused of performing marriage ceremonies for people who are not considered eligible by the state Rabbinate to be married (see Rabinowitz, Breiner, and Shpigel 2018). 16 Jay Geller (2018) focuses on Jewish authors’ use of animals in their prose in contrast to the use of animal metaphors as forms of racism and degradation. Iris Bruce (Bruce 2002: 151–​152) writes that the animals that appear in much of Kafka’s work (though she does not refer to the Little Fable) can be considered indicative of forms of exile. I will return to notion of exile in Chapters 5 and 6.

On Goat Surveillance  59 his racing about and shifts in direction, illustrates the various and complicated ways in which Israelis struggle over their Jewishness. The cat, then, is not merely the European Gentiles whose subordination of Jews erected ever-​shifting walls of law and exclusion, exploitation and privilege, of racialization, decommunalization, and the promise of liberty, of imperialism and the active or passive collaboration in genocidal violence that eventually resulted in the formation of the Jewish state itself. One might suggest, at first, that the cat is the Israeli legal and bureaucratic framework regarding what it means to be Jewish. We know that state policy shifts over time. We might trace the shifts in requirements for being Jewish since the establishment of the state and discover precisely how people have been accepted or rejected as citizens. Indeed the policies and the political struggles to influence policies keep the mice running. One might alternatively suggest that the cat represents ethno-​nationalism or settler-​nationalism, the reasons that this state needs “Jews” in the first place, and the reason it needs them not to be Arab. Both of those elements are in play. But it seems to me that the metaphorical cat here is actually the elusive quality of the struggles over Jewishness themselves, the shifting rules and debates that keep people running, and the belief in the ability to influence what will count as Jewishness in Israel. As Foucault (1972) taught, surely power is at work in the modern categories through which we make sense of our lives, including Talal Asad’s writing about “the secular” as a sense of self defined by politics, or Charles Taylor’s understanding of secularism as an “immanent frame” underlying modern experience. Perceiving their own struggles in terms of a battle between religious versus secular ways of life, many secular Israelis might suggest that the cat in this parable is the Orthodox Rabbinate that seems forever to change its rules and trap them. But this is an oversimplification of the ways that nationalism works, how it requires its nation, and how, in the case of Zionist nationalism, it requires its Jews while at the same time creating a

60  Israel Has a Jewish Problem certain sense of freedom to influence the content of that category, the promise, or perhaps the illusion, of self-​determination. People then become so busy with the struggle over Jewishness that—​to shift back to an earlier metaphor—​they lose sight of how they are passengers for the sake of the ship, and how none of them really seem to be steering.

3 The False Promises of Sovereignty At first all the arrangements for building the Tower of Babel were characterized by fairly good order; indeed the order was perhaps too perfect, too much thought was given to guides, interpreters, accommodations for the workmen, and roads of communication, as if there were centuries before one to do the work in. In fact, the general opinion at the time was that one simply could not build too slowly; a very little insistence on this would have sufficed to make one hesitate to lay the foundations at all. —​Franz Kafka, “The City Coat of Arms”

Scene One: Prepare to Leave! In February 2014 the spiritual leader of a group of strictly observant (Haredi)1 Jews, the Belzer Rebbe, called on his followers to prepare to leave Israel and seek political asylum as refugees in the United States. The headline in the Belz newspaper read: “Initial preparation for mass emigration from Israel.” It was reported that 1 Often referred to as the “ultra-​Orthodox,” the Haredim include a range of theologically strict adherents to the Torah. See the Note on Terms. While the term “ultra” in ultra-​Orthodox seems strange, it has been used to distinguish among a variety of observant Jews. The ultra-​Orthodox generally use the term Haredi to refer to their community when communicating with outsiders. One Haredi woman told me “Haredi is a counter-​culture.” It arose as something definable in resistance to tendencies toward assimilation in post-​Enlightenment Europe. Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self- Elimination. Joyce Dalsheim, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190680251.001.0001

62  Israel Has a Jewish Problem American senators had already “promised assistance in obtaining refugee status for every Haredi family that wishes to leave Israel.”2 The Belzer Hasidim are one of many strictly observant Jewish groups who together make up a small but growing percentage of the total population of Jews in Israel. They struggle to hold on to their traditions wherever they live (Goldshmidt 2006; Fader 2009), and often reside in segregated neighborhoods and towns. The Belzer Hasidim follow the descendants of a spiritual leader from the town of Belz in the Ukraine. Their community in Ukraine was nearly completely destroyed when the Nazis invaded, but they reestablished themselves in Israel and New York, and later in other places, and have grown in numbers. Now the rebbe was worried about the future for Jews in Israel. He was worried that life in Israel was becoming too dangerous. But perhaps not exactly in the ways one might expect. The rebbe was not talking about problems of violence or the threat of war. He was worried about the possibility of living as Jews in the state of Israel and leading life according to the Torah. He was concerned that the conditions for living the Torah life were worsening in Israel and that such conditions might be better in New York. This might seem strange or even contradictory. How could Jews be worried about their freedom to be Jewish in the Jewish state? In this case, the Belzer Rebbe was reacting to a proposed law that would make conscription into the Israeli armed forces mandatory for members of his community. If it passed, that law would pose serious problems. First and foremost, it would interfere with their responsibility to study the Torah. It should be noted, however, that this is only the most recent or most visible problem for Torah Jews. Thousands of members of the Haredi community have come out on numerous occasions to protest the draft, sometimes literally shutting down the city of Jerusalem. In October 2017, for example, the ultra-​Orthodox declared a “Day of Rage” and held protests against 2 This was reported in the Israeli daily newspaper HaAretz on February 28, 2014.

False Promises of Sovereignty  63 the draft all over the city, including lying down in the middle of busy roads to stop traffic. However, over the years, the Israeli state has also tried to dismantle their informal economy, change their education system, and incorporate them into the national labor force. Strictly observant Jews have historically been opposed to Zionism. There is a long history of all sorts of Jewish opposition to Zionism, from socialists to Reform Jews (Rabkin 2016). But the strictly observant, in particular, have remained adamant in their opposition to its human intervention in what they believe should be God’s work. They worried about whether or not they could live their lives according to their beliefs before the state was established, and worried that the secular state would have dire outcomes for the Jewish people. Now, the issue of a citizen’s responsibility to serve in the armed forces might interfere with a Jew’s responsibility to live according to the Torah, which requires intensive studying of the text and its interpretations. Such study also requires shielding young men from external distractions and influences. Living the Torah life has often involved sheltering the community, especially young people, from what are seen as the “corrupting” ways of secular society. Members of the strictly observant Orthodox community often feel their way of life may be threatened because they live in a state they see as far from Jewish. Indeed, some would suggest that secular Zionists are more Gentile than Gentiles themselves, and dangerous to Jews and Judaism. American novelist Chaim Potok captured this sense in his famous novel The Chosen, in the character of Hasidic Rebbe Isaac Saunders. Published in 1967 but set shortly following the end of the Second World War, the mention of the Zionist movement by a friend of his son ignites the rebbe’s anger: “Who are these people? Who are these people?” He shouted in Yiddish . . . “Goyim! [Gentiles!] Ben Gurion and his goyim will build Eretz Yisroel? They will build for us a Jewish land? They will bring Torah into this land? Goyishkeit they will bring into

64  Israel Has a Jewish Problem the land, not Torah! God will build the land, not Ben Gurion and his goyim! When the Messiah comes, we will have Eretz Yisroel, a Holy Land, not a land contaminated by Jewish goyim! (Potok 1967: 182)

If studying the sacred texts is an integral part of being Jewish, a commandment, a requirement, a duty; if it is more than a way of life, but the means for protecting life itself, then clearly such study should take priority. One rabbi reportedly commented to the press that the very purpose of the state of Israel is to support Torah study. And surely state policies should not impede such study. Indeed, for many years, yeshiva students, strictly observant Jews who studied the Torah, were exempt from compulsory military service in Israel.3 But that protection was beginning to erode, and members of the Haredi community found themselves struggling against state policy in the Jewish state in order to protect their right to be Jewish. What does it mean to be part of a sovereign people if basic group norms, traditions, and values are violated by the “self-​ determination” promised by the state? Scholars have often noted that the sovereignty of one group usually precludes the sovereignty of others, turning them into subaltern, minority, or marginalized populations. But we have yet to adequately examine what such self-​determination means for national majorities. If the possibility of freedom in one’s own country is precarious even for members of the national majority group, and even when that group constitutes a formal ethnocracy (Yiftachel 2006), then what might we learn by shifting the focus of critical theories of subjectification—​the processes by which individuals are made subjects of the state—​from subaltern groups to those who appear to be at the center of the sovereign nation? Louis Althusser

3 Strictly observant Jews had been exempt from military conscription since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. This was part of the “Status Quo Agreement” explored in Chapter 1.

False Promises of Sovereignty  65 was probably the first scholar to consider how such processes of subjectification work in his examination of the state and its ideological processes. Althusser (1971) demonstrated how people subconsciously internalized their subjection. But such processes are also contested by people struggling to hold on to their beliefs, traditions, and way of life, which might be threatened by a state that purports to promote their flourishing. In the last chapter, I suggested that the myriad ways Jews struggle to be Jewish in Israel seems like a narrowing maze with no exit. But what kind of maze is it? “The state of Israel was established in 1948 as a Jewish democracy,” reads the publisher’s description of sociologist Nahman Ben Yehuda’s 2010 book, Theocratic Democracy, “without a legal separation between religion and the state. Ever since, the tension between the two has been a central political, social, and moral issue in Israel, resulting in a cultural conflict between secular Jews and the fundamentalist, ultra-​orthodox Haredi community.”4 Although many Israelis experience their everyday lives as consisting of precisely such a struggle between secular and religious forces, that conceptualization is deceptive. It disguises broader sets of processes—​including conflicts between different varieties of religious Jews in Israel—​that have more to do with producing national subjects for state projects than with protecting freedom of religion. These processes cannot be reduced to a conflict between “secular” and “religious” Jews, out of which one or the other might emerge victorious. This chapter focuses on two cases of observant Jewish Israelis who come into conflict with the state over what it means to live according to their understandings of Jewishness. The conflicts each of these groups has with the state are nearly mirror opposites: one challenging the state to increase its sovereign power over territory and religious sites, the other rejecting such sovereignty. For 4 See the Oxford University Press website, (https://​global.oup.com/​academic/​ product/​theocratic-​democracy-​9780199734863?cc=us&lang=en&#).

66  Israel Has a Jewish Problem the purpose of clarity, I maintain a sharp distinction between these groups in this chapter, but in fact these distinctions are shifting, blurry, and complex. They are, however, among the categories through which Israelis generally understand themselves, their social and political conflicts, and their efforts to affect the character of Jewishness and of the state.5 The struggles over Jewishness in Israel can lead people in opposing communities to undermine their own convictions, or those espoused by community leaders. On one hand, strictly observant Haredi Jews might unwittingly support the human intervention in God’s work that they purport to oppose. On the other hand, self-​described secular, left-​wing, and liberal Israeli Jews become involved in the struggles between different religious groups and may unwittingly take sides with a politics they claim to despise, one that may ultimately support settler expansion.

A Secular Revolution? People argued in this way: The essential thing in the whole business is the idea of building a tower that will reach to heaven. In comparison with that idea everything else is secondary. The idea, once seized in its magnitude, can

5 In some cases, national-​religious Jews have come to reject state sovereignty and Haredi Jews have become more accepting of the state. There are numerous ways in which theologies become intertwined, as do people and politics. Indeed, a new category, “hardalnikim” has recently emerged to describe the convergence of national-​ religiousness with Haredi theology. See Dalsheim (2011b) and Harel (2017) for additional details. See Persico (2014) on the new ways that Hasidism is being incorporated in the theology of some religiously motivated settlers. Among Haredim are those who reject isolationism and want to become more integrated into Israeli society. Within the national-​religious community are those who have come to reject both secular and religious Zionism in favor of an expansionist vision. See Harel (2017) for the different forms of messianism found amongst religiously motivated settlers and how some reject the national-​religious ethos of previous generations. See also Inbari (2012) on these changes. In addition to the more established streams of Jewishness there are also alternative forms of spirituality gaining in popularity in Israel (Feraro and Lewis 2016).

False Promises of Sovereignty  67 never vanish again; so long as there are men on the earth there will be also the irresistible desire to complete the building. —​Franz Kafka, “The City Coat of Arms”

Modern political Zionism narrates its rise as a response to anti-​ Semitism in Europe. It was foundationally a secular political movement with the goal of allowing the Jews to become “a nation like all others.”6 Political Zionism held the hope of a better future; the hope of liberation, including liberation from the constraints of religion. During a visit to Israel in the summer of 2015, secular Israelis talked to me with some urgency and despair about the trend of more and more young people who seemed to be seeking answers to life’s big questions by turning to religion (chozrim b’tshuva), often to the form of Judaism that is known in Hebrew as national-​religious (dati-​ leumi).7 “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” one man lamented. “All these young people becoming newly observant Jews—​it’s a nightmare for Zionism!” Having spent decades studying Israel, I understood his position very well. But, taking a step back for a moment, there seems to be something odd about lamenting a generational return to practicing Judaism in the self-​proclaimed Jewish state. Like most of his friends, Gideon is a proud secular Zionist. He is well versed in Jewish history, tradition, and religion. But he raised his children to be secular citizens of the modern state. Gideon can claim a long family history in this region. He is the descendant of Jews who lived in the Jerusalem area long before the modern state of Israel was established. He expresses both a deep sense of connection to the place and a profound sense of entitlement. He belongs here, his family has always been here, and 6 This phrase, taken from the Israeli Declaration of Independence, expresses an idea that exists in tension with the notion of also being a light unto the nations, a unique state. 7 National-​ religious might better be called “nationalist-​ religious,” but is often translated as religious Zionist. Throughout this text, I have maintained the direct translation “national-​religious” in reference to this group.

68  Israel Has a Jewish Problem he should be able to influence the politics and character of his country. Gideon is interested in the rights of all citizens, but has no patience for the religious and their restrictions on the kinds of freedoms he covets. When one of Gideon’s own children became newly observant, like other parents in similar situations, he and his wife were horrified. They tried to be open and accepting, but under his breath, Gideon muttered and complained. It seemed to him that his daughter, now in her early 20s, was behaving irrationally. He told me about some of her newly acquired behaviors, like the seemingly endless preparations for the Sabbath each week. According to Gideon and his wife, these preparations could be so onerous they seemed to completely negate the point of observing the Sabbath, which, they thought, was all about taking a day to rest. To prepare for the Sabbath one has to make sure all the food for Friday night and Saturday is ready in advance. The house should be cleaned and all meals ready before sunset on Friday. Cooking is not permitted on the Sabbath. Gideon understood how that made sense. Cooking is work, he thought, and the Sabbath should be a time of rest. But in addition to all the cleaning and cooking and baking and setting up a hot water heater in advance so as not to turn on electricity during the Sabbath, his daughter, Aliza, had also been tearing toilet paper. Tearing toilet paper into neat little squares to make sure there were plenty of pre-​torn squares of toilet tissue available so that she would not have to tear the perforated sheets on the Sabbath. This, he thought, is bordering on insanity. Why on earth would anyone think that tearing toilet paper was work? Wasn’t this just creating more work? Didn’t it just make the Sabbath more difficult, to say nothing of more annoying? Aliza never explained to her father that avoiding tearing paper on the Sabbath had a deeper symbolic meaning to members of her new community. On the Sabbath, the world is complete. One recognizes the wholeness of God’s creation and does not take something that exists in one form and make it into something new. Thus, if paper

False Promises of Sovereignty  69 must be torn into a new form, that tearing should be done prior to the Sabbath. Beyond their scorn at the rites and rituals practiced by Orthodox Jews, Gideon and his wife were especially concerned because they thought their daughter might take on what they saw as extremist positions. Joining the community of national-​religious Jews meant being part of the religiously motivated settler movement. And that—​in the minds of these left-​wing, secular Jewish Israelis—​was dangerous. Their daughter might move to a dangerous place like one of the settlements in the West Bank. She might drive along roads, like route 60, where Jews had been ambushed by Palestinians, shot dead on that road (Harel 2011). Or she might take part in confrontational demonstrations or be among the “hilltop youth” who establish illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories. She might even become involved with those religiously motivated settlers who have been carrying out “price tag” acts of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.8 These parents, and many others like them, worried that becoming an observant Jew meant their daughter could become part of a politics they oppose, a political movement they see as undermining the state itself. In other words, this Judaism was dangerous to the Jewish state. But it could have been worse, Aliza’s parents thought. At least the national-​religious did not segregate themselves from secular Israel; they took full part in the broader society. The national-​religious had become prominent soldiers and officers. They studied and worked among the secular. They were not only fully integrated into Israeli society, they had become some of its leading figures. These parents were relieved, at least, that their daughter had not become Haredi or joined a Hasidic sect like the Belz, because that might mean their 8 A new wave of violence against Palestinians called “price tag” retaliations began following the 2005 disengagement from Gaza. Being angered by the actions of their government, particularly about removing settlers from their communities in the Gaza Strip and destroying their homes, some settlers had begun exacting punishment on Palestinians every time the Israeli government made a decision they opposed.

70  Israel Has a Jewish Problem relationship would suffer even more than it did now. If she became Haredi it might be even more difficult for her to visit her parents’ home. Maybe she would shelter herself, and one day her children, from the vices of secular life. In spite of their fears for their daughter as a newly observant national-​religious Jew, they were also sometimes thankful that she had not—​or not yet—​become Haredi. Aliza was attending post-​secondary school. She wanted to learn about medicine, perhaps become a nurse or a midwife. She was interested in healing. Although she had been accepted to one of the most prestigious universities in the country, Aliza decided she would prefer to study at a religious seminary. She wanted a place where she could study biology and learn about medicine, but also be surrounded by other observant national-​religious Jews who shared her piety. National-​religious Israelis do not necessarily live in segregated enclaves like the ultra-​Orthodox (Sivan 1995). But, one might argue, they often live in “exclaves” beyond the internationally recognized boundaries of the state. Seeking to fulfill their belief that God promised the Land of Israel to His people, the national-​ religious establish settlements beyond the Green Line, in post-​1967 Israeli Occupied Territories (Aran 1991; Dalsheim 2011b; Feige 2009; Lustick 1988; Zertal and Eldar 2007). Sometimes they come into conflict with the state over illegal outposts. And sometimes they come into conflict with the state for praying at holy sites in ways that defy the law (Inbari 2009).

The Lawmaker and the Law That being so, however, one need have no anxiety about the future; on the contrary, human knowledge is increasing, the art of building has made progress and will make further progress, a piece of work which takes us a year may perhaps be done in half the time in another hundred years, and better done, too, more enduringly. So why

False Promises of Sovereignty  71 exert oneself to the extreme limit of one’s present powers? There would be some sense in doing that only if it were likely that the tower could be completed in one generation. —​Franz Kafka, “The City Coat of Arms”

In September 2016, a relatively new member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, posted an emotional video on his Facebook page. Yehuda Glick, like many other national-​ religious Jews, promotes Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.9 On numerous occasions he has made his way to the area above the Western Wall plaza in the ancient walled city to pray. Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount is currently prohibited by Israeli law. But this lawmaker considers such prohibition an infringement of his freedom to worship. To pray on the Temple Mount, he explains, is a deeply spiritual experience. The location is a very holy Jewish site. But Jewish prayer there is contentious for several reasons, among which is that it is also a very holy site for Muslims. So Glick was, once again, prevented from going up to the site to pray. He posted a video of himself attempting to make his way to the Temple Mount and being stopped by Israeli police. The video shows him standing in a corner, near some steps blocked by policemen, as he engages in deep, heartfelt prayer. Some Jewish religious leaders, including the country’s chief rabbis, forbid prayer there because the site is so holy that only the high priests of Judaism (Kohanim) should ever be allowed to approach it, and then only after ritual purification. Other religious leaders disagree and believe Jews should be permitted to pray there. But the place known as the Temple Mount to Jews is also known as al-​Haram al-​Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. It is the location of two ancient mosques, one of which marks the place from which the Prophet Mohammed is said to have ascended to Heaven. The Dome 9 See Inbari (2007) on the debates within the national-​religious community and the shifting positions on allowing prayer on the Temple Mount.

72  Israel Has a Jewish Problem of the Rock and Al-​Aqsa Mosques are more than a thousand years old and al-​Haram al-​Sharif/​the Temple Mount has become a site of intense political contention.10 In September 2000, then-​Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made a highly publicized and controversial visit to the Temple Mount. This visit was seen as a direct provocation by many Palestinians, and it is often considered the spark that began the Second Intifada (uprising), also known as the Al-​Aqsa Intifada. But Glick, representing the Likud party and also a founder of the Temple Institute, does not think that Jews should be prevented from praying at this holy site. In fact, he sees no reason why Jews and Muslims should not share the spiritual experience of prayer there. The Temple Institute is an organization that anticipates the rebuilding of the ancient Jewish Temple on the site of its ruins.11 Its goal it to “fulfill the biblical commandment of ‘and they shall build for me a sanctuary and I shall dwell among them’ (Exodus 25:8).” The organization runs a museum and visitor’s center where they tell the story of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem and raise funds to rebuild and restore the glory of the Temple to Jerusalem. But the place where that structure would be built is also the place where the Dome of the Rock and the Al-​Aqsa Mosque are currently located. The Temple Institute describes itself as a research institute, devoted to accurately depicting and reproducing the Temple and its artefacts. When I last visited the Institute, they were so busy that I had to wait over an hour to get in. As I waited, I saw a group of kindergarten children from the town of Kiryat Ono on their way into the exhibits. They did not seem to be a particularly religious group, so I wondered why they would have chosen this destination for a field trip. Their teachers and parents were too busy to talk to

10 See Hillel Cohen (2017) on the history of the meanings of this space in Zionist and Palestinian national discourse. 11 See Rachel Z. Feldman (2018) for additional background on Temple activism.

False Promises of Sovereignty  73 me. But as I waited and watched the variety of people who arrived, it seemed clear that the Temple Institute, which began as a small fringe organization housed in a storefront on a small alleyway, had been steadily moving from the fringes to the mainstream. Even before I  arrived, I  was making my way through the Old City, not entirely sure which path to take. A friendly young couple stopped and asked if I needed help. They seemed like newlyweds, excited about their visit to Jerusalem. They lived in a city in the north, they told me. Judging by their appearance, the man in a black suit, white shirt, beard and black hat, they seemed to be Haredi Jews. It had been my impression that the Haredim, who are essentially opposed to the state because of the hubris of human intervention in God’s plan, were also opposed to the Temple Institute for the same reason.12 But, I had also seen promotional videos by the Temple Institute featuring Haredi men as experts. So, I was a little uncertain about telling this young couple where I was headed. Still, they were so kind and wanted to be helpful, and this was fieldwork, so it would be interesting to see how they reacted. I told them where I was going and they smiled. “Oh,” the young man said, “I know where that is. We were just there yesterday.” The young man and his wife went on to tell me what an amazing place it was. They were certain I would enjoy my visit and made sure to walk me right to its door. The Temple Institute is not only engaged in research. They also actively preparing to build the next Temple and doing everything they can to hasten this. For many Israelis, the idea of trying to build the Third Temple in the place where two major Muslim holy sites now stand is sheer lunacy. Secular, liberal, and left-​leaning Israelis not only think such an idea is ludicrous, they also see the Temple 12 Motti Inbari (2009) writes about a small movement with the Haredi community that promotes human intervention in rebuilding the Temple. This movement again illustrates the complex ways that theologies become transformed and the difficulty of maintaining strictly separated categories of observant Jews. Inbari explains that this movement reflects some of the more recent transformations within the Orthodox world.

74  Israel Has a Jewish Problem Institute’s aims as provocative and dangerous. Nonetheless, the Institute has clearly managed to reach out to a great number of Israelis and to Jews in the international community. In addition, the mild mannered, red-​bearded politician, Yehuda Glick, seems to be gaining in popularity among those secular and liberal Israeli Jews. When I was doing my fieldwork in Israel, Glick seemed to have taken on a kind of mythical status. Many of the left-​wing, liberal secularists I spoke to appeared to regard him as a political version of a rock star. They became dewy eyed when talking about him, and many wanted to prove to me that they knew him. A number of liberal, left-​wing Israelis told me they could introduce me to Glick, and they took pride in saying they had connections to him. At least two claimed to have his phone number. Never mind his Temple Mount politics that most would consider crazy and dangerous; they had become enamored of him. Glick had become a parliamentarian for the ruling right-​wing Likud party. But his admirers were impressed because he did not always support the party line. He seemed to make decisions based on a set of ethical standards that people found impressive. Americans might liken him to a kind of John McCain, a politician whose policies people might disagree with, but who seems to promote an appealing political ethic of honesty, integrity, and independence. And so Yehuda Glick has a popular following. People wish more politicians would act as he does, following a set of moral values and voting according to his own ideals. For me, Glick took on something of a mythical quality because although so many people told me they knew him and could introduce me, he never appeared! It struck me as a brilliant move to appeal to such a broad sector of the electorate, all the while promoting an idea that most people find crazy, abhorrent, and dangerous. Yehuda Glick is a talented politician, but the manner in which he works his way into the hearts of Israelis who oppose his politics is common to the national-​religious community more generally. Left-​wing and secular Israelis may

False Promises of Sovereignty  75 oppose the political positions of the national-​religious community, but they know these people, have served in the army with them, work with them, and see them in the supermarket. They know them as good people who are hard-​working, family-​oriented, often kind, and warm-​hearted. Many members of the national-​religious community who engage with secular Israelis are known as welcoming, people who will invite you into their homes and help you when you need a hand (Dalsheim 2013b). Yehuda Glick is just a prominent version of a broader phenomenon, a way of entering the hearts of those who despise your politics.13 I am not suggesting that this is a cynical manipulation. Indeed there is no reason to believe that Glick is not sincere. Secular and left-​wing Israelis see his attempts to pray on the Temple Mount as potentially inciting violence and preventing the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-​ Palestinian conflict.14 But at the same time, they respect the man, and might end up inadvertently supporting him.

Nurturing the Seed But that is beyond all hope. It is far more likely that the next generation with their perfect knowledge will find the work of their predecessors bad, and tear down what has been built so as to begin anew. —​Franz Kafka, “The City Coat of Arms”

Strictly observant (ultra-​Orthodox/​Haredi) Jews might see the state and its secular foundations as threatening to Jewish ways of life, to Jewishness itself. National-​religious Jews, on the other hand, 13 Rachel Feldman argues that “religious piety and liberal secular ideologies conjoin” in supporting the state’s settlement project (2018: 539). 14 There are also, of course, secular and left-​wing Israeli Jews who think Jews should have the right to visit and pray on the Temple Mount. Often, their concern about provoking violence takes precedence over their concern for the right to pray.

76  Israel Has a Jewish Problem view the secular foundations of the state as temporary. Secular Zionism is seen as the metaphorical shell that will disintegrate and nourish the religious seed that is its true core, its destiny. Based on the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, national-​religious Jews have a vision of a messianic future which includes the re-​ establishment of the Temple in the place “that the Lord has chosen for all eternity” (Rabbi Kook quoted in Inbari 2007: 33). Thus, when national-​religious beliefs and practices come into conflict with the state, this is all part of a process. While many left-​wing and secular Israeli Jews see the national-​religious as threatening to peace and therefore to the very existence of the state of Israel, religious nationalists themselves may view certain government decisions as interfering with the fulfillment of God’s promise to His people to live on all the Land of Israel and to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem (Dalsheim 2011b).15 But they are certain that His promise will ultimately be fulfilled.

Impossibilities Such thoughts paralyzed people’s powers, and so they troubled less about the tower than the construction of a city for the workmen. Every nationality wanted the finest quarter for itself, and this gave rise to disputes, which developed into bloody conflicts. These conflicts never came to an end; to the leaders they were a new proof that, in the 15 Among religiously motivated settlers are also those who reject the national-​ religious stance of those who are seen as having become too complacent, too comfortable, and too cooperative with the state. The “hilltop youth” are a group who emerged from within the religious settler movement, but who view the comparatively moderate religiously motivated settlers as also posing a threat to Judaism (Harel 2017). This group maintains that religious Zionism is not willing to confront the state, which became clear with the disengagement that removed settlements in the Gaza Strip. This refusal of outright confrontation, they claim, endangers Jewish life in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Thus, they claim religious Zionism poses a danger to Judaism, but from a different perspective than that expressed by Haredi Jews.

False Promises of Sovereignty  77 absence of the necessary unity, the building of the tower must be done very slowly, or indeed preferably postponed until universal peace was declared. —​Franz Kafka, “The City Coat of Arms”

Some analysts have argued that what appear as conflicts between members of the national-​religious community and the state are not really conflicts at all. Instead, the state actually tolerates and even encourages religiously motivated settlers to break the law (Mendelsohn 2014). Religiously motivated settlers set up illegal outposts in post-​ 1967 Israeli-​ occupied territories, which are sometimes dismantled, but also often become permanent, state-​sanctioned communities (Zertal and Eldar 2007). Thus, one might make the argument that this sector of the Israeli population is currently sovereign in Schmitt’s (1985 [1922]) sense—​they make the law and its exception. Some of the ultra-​Orthodox, on the other hand, have control over decisions regarding who is a Jew, and who will be granted citizenship under Israel’s Law of Return. They have control over marriage and family law for Jewish citizens and its exceptions. Perhaps, then, the ultra-​Orthodox should be considered sovereign. But what about the secular Zionist founders of the state and their descendants? Aliza, the newly observant Jewish woman, has a cousin who is planning his wedding. Ari and his fiancée have never cared much for religious observance, but they are proud Israeli Jews. Ari and Anna were born in Israel and grew up there. They both served in elite combat units in the army and continue to get called to the army reserves. Now, they are ready to get married and have been trying to plan their wedding. But secular Jews in Israel, those who make up the majority, can be made to feel like strangers in their own country when they want to marry. The Rabbinate has control over marriage and family law. Only Orthodox wedding ceremonies are recognized by the state. So any couple that marries must visit the Rabbinate and follow Orthodox

78  Israel Has a Jewish Problem rules and procedures. This young couple is more interested in having plenty of good food and drink at their wedding than anything else. They found a caterer and booked a venue. But the food apparently has not been officially certified as kosher. This means that the Rabbinate will not perform the wedding because they will not conduct ceremonies in a place where non-​kosher food is being served. The happy couple is not so happy anymore. They have begun to seek alternatives. Maybe they can get married at the offices of the Rabbinate and have their party another day. But they really were hoping their family and friends could be there with them and that the marriage and the party could coincide. “Is that too much to ask?” Anna wonders. And Ari finds the whole situation completely absurd. “I’m not inviting the rabbi for dinner,” he says. “I’m just asking that he perform the ceremony. Why should he care if the food is kosher?” Ari and Anna are annoyed, but they are not surprised. Many of their friends have run into complications with the Rabbinate for all sorts of reasons. Women are required to undergo ritual purification prior to the ceremony. They must visit a mikveh, a ritual bath, and have their bodies visually inspected for cleanliness by an Orthodox woman whose job it is to oversee the bath. Many women refuse to partake in this ritual, and some try to find ways around it. Sometimes a woman will send her sister or friend in her place to avoid the unpleasantness and circumvent the rules, which some women consider highly offensive. The Rabbinate also determines who is considered Jewish based on family genealogy, and Jews are only permitted to marry other Jews. Sometimes people have difficulty demonstrating their family history. Some people might have converted to Judaism or be descendants of converts. Only Orthodox conversions are recognized by the Rabbinate. These are only some of the obstacles secular Israelis encounter. Secular Israeli Jews sometimes have so much trouble getting married that many choose to travel abroad to do so. One does not have the freedom

False Promises of Sovereignty  79 in Israel to marry as a secular Jew, and so, as I noted in Chapter 2, nearby Cyprus has developed a vibrant wedding-​tourism industry catering to them.

Alternatives But the time was spent not only in conflict; the town was embellished in the intervals, and this unfortunately enough evoked fresh envy and fresh conflict. In this fashion the age of the first generation went past, but none of the succeeding ones showed any difference; except that technical skill increased and with it occasion for conflict. To this must be added that the second or third generation had already recognized the senselessness of building a heaven-​reaching tower; but by that time everybody was too deeply involved to leave the city. —​Franz Kafka, “The City Coat of Arms”

The national-​religious have been providing an alternative to the services of the state-​sponsored Rabbinate. An organization called Tzohar offers a different way to convert to Judaism, different certifications of kosher standards, and alternative ways of having a Jewish wedding in Israel. The rabbis of Tzohar explain that they follow Jewish law, just as the official Rabbinate does. But they have found ways to appeal to less observant or non-​observant Jews who reject the Chief Rabbinate and are sometimes repulsed by their interactions with its rabbis and its bureaucracy. Tzohar, I  was told by a rabbi and former resident of the settlements in the Gaza Strip, was established by a group of national-​religious rabbis. They were worried, Rabbi Shimon said, that the ultra-​Orthodox were driving secular Israeli Jews away from Judaism. They decided they would offer free services in contrast to

80  Israel Has a Jewish Problem the reputation of the Rabbinate as being corrupt, interested only in money and power. These rabbis would volunteer their time and their services to young couples seeking a Jewish wedding. They would gladly take as much time as needed to explain the meanings and purposes of rituals that secular couples might not know. In short, they would provide rabbinical services tailored specifically to the needs and sensibilities of secular Israel Jews. They would be welcoming and encouraging, offering an experience that would be more appealing than interactions with the official Rabbinate have been. This method of winning more people with honey than vinegar parallels the paradoxical popularity of Yehuda Glick among secular and liberal Israelis. The national-​religious are welcoming and accepting and hope to win support and bring more Jews back to religious observance by opening their doors and leading by example. Such alternatives to the official Rabbinate have proven quite successful. In addition to officiating at weddings, there are also more restaurants and other businesses that have begun seeking alternative certificates verifying that their food is kosher. When secular Israeli Jews turn to the national-​religious for alternatives to the ultra-​ Orthodox Rabbinate, they are, perhaps inadvertently, supporting their larger project. That project is a religiously motived form of nationalism that encourages territorial expansion, accelerating the removal of Palestinians from their land in the Israeli-​occupied territories, and promoting a more extreme form of ethno-​nationalism. Left-​wing and secular Zionists like Aliza’s parents are politically, socially, and ideologically opposed to the religious settler movement. But the left-​wing and liberal also feel alienated, if not repelled, by the ultra-​Orthodox. So couples like Ari and Anna sometimes turn to more comfortable ways of getting married or getting their businesses certified as kosher. In this way, the secular form an alliance with the national-​religious in opposition to the ultra-​Orthodox. Everyday decisions that seem to make life a

False Promises of Sovereignty  81 little easier become part of the process of producing the national majority and defining what it will mean to be a Jew in Israel. The secular left, perhaps unwittingly, may end up supporting a politics they oppose.

The True Third Temple All the legends and songs that came to birth in that city are filled with longing for a prophesied day when the city would be destroyed by five successive blows from a gigantic fist. It is for that reason too that the city has a closed fist on its coat of arms. —​Franz Kafka, “The City Coat of Arms”

It was a Sunday evening, July 22, 2018, in Rabin Square, Tel Aviv. The square was named after the former Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated at a Peace Now rally in that place on November 4, 1995. It’s a place where many demonstrations have been held. This time, the rally was in support of the LGBTQ community. And it was no mistake that the rally took place in Tel Aviv, Israeli’s secular Mecca. It’s a city where people who keep kosher might find it difficult to even find a cup of coffee in a kosher coffee shop. It’s where the secular, cosmopolitan, restaurant/​night club/​coffee shop–​frequenting people feel most at home. It is not like Jerusalem either symbolically or in fact.16 That evening Yael Dayan was among the speakers. She is a politician and public figure, the daughter of Moshe Dayan, the famous one-​eyed general, and the niece of Ezer Weizman, former president of the state of Israel, who was also the commander of the Israeli Air

16 See Vered Vinitzky-​Seroussi (1998) on how these two cities reflect two different forms of national identity.

82  Israel Has a Jewish Problem Force and served as minister of defense. Yael Dayan is a descendant of the Dayan-​Weizman dynasty, the now-​fading Israeli royalty. It was not just any Sunday evening, it was motza’ei Tisha B’Av, the end of the ninth day of the Hebrew month, Av. It was the date on which the destruction of the Temple—​the ancient First and Second Temples in Jerusalem—​is commemorated. It is a day of mourning. This year on the ninth of Av, protests took place throughout Israel. People were demonstrating against the government and in favor of equal rights for LGBTQ people. Specifically, the protests broke out because of laws about the right to become a father through surrogacy. Yael Dayan took the stage in a wheelchair, an oxygen canister attached to its side. But her voice was loud and clear: Today, on motza’ei Tisha B’Av, the destruction of the First Temple, the destruction of the Second Temple. And I am here to call for the prevention of the destruction of the Third Temple! The Third Temple is not in the messianic future, it is not on the Temple Mount, it is not at the Kotel [Western Wall] . . . The Third Temple is the Declaration of Independence of the state of Israel! [pause for cheers] It was established 70 years ago by the declaration of the state of Israel. The Third Temple speaks about equality, justice, about prohibiting (esur) discrimination. And it was established through blood, ashes, struggle and by law (din) and not by grace. Not by the grace of God and not by the grace others—​also here, in this square [reference to Rabin’s assassination by a national-​religious zealot]. The Third Temple, that the government wants to destroy, is human rights in the community, advancement (ha-​kidmah), rationality (ha-​shfiut), fairness (ha-​haginut), education, and health care for everyone, the courts, and the education system. The Third Temple is the nation of the Declaration of Independence and not the nation-​state law! [pause for cheers]

False Promises of Sovereignty  83 The nation-​state law to which Dayan refers had just been passed by the legislature as a “basic law,” which means it is comparable to a constitutional amendment. The new law codified the Jewish ethno-​ national character of the state and was criticized as racist, exclusionary, and inherently discriminatory against minority groups in Israel.17 Early Zionist aspirations for self-​determination were based in the Enlightenment ideals recalled by Dayan: liberation and equal rights founded on post–​French Revolution modern, secular notions. But what kinds of “liberation” could these ideals promise? Secularism is generally understood as the modern project of separating religion and politics, or religion from the state. In modern states this separation should protect freedom of religion by protecting religion from state interventions and by protecting citizens against religious impositions. But more recent theorizations of the secular have shown how secularism can also prevent such freedoms; that, in fact, the secular is a space in which the state determines what counts as legitimate religion in the first place (Asad 2012; Keane 2015; Sullivan et al. 2015; Hurd 2012). When secular Israelis favor the national-​religious over the ultra-​Orthodox, they are participating in the determination of what will count as legitimate religion or legitimate ways of being Jewish in the Jewish state. In the case of Israel the inherent contradictions embedded in secular modernism come into dramatic relief. Zionism was, at its inception, a marginal movement. As Yacov Rabkin reminds us, there has always been social, political, and religious opposition to the Zionist project. “Most practicing Jews,” he writes, referring to 19th-​ century Europe, “both Orthodox and Reform, rejected Zionism . . . as a project . . . that conflicted with the values of Judaism” (Rabkin 2016: 122).

17 The full text of the law is available in English at the Jerusalem Post online: (https://​ www.jpost.com/​Israel-​News/​Read-​the-​full-​Jewish-​Nation-​State-​Law-​562923).

84  Israel Has a Jewish Problem Scholarly literature about secularism suggest that all “secular” states, in fact, regulate religion in many ways, and that the supposed separation of religion and state does not end religious conflict. Instead it exacerbates it (Mahmood 2016). But, I  would argue, Israel is also a special case because Jewishness is at once conceived of as a “religion” (Batnitzky 2011)  within the framework of the secular imaginary, and as a “nationality.” Because the state of Israel was established as a “Jewish” state, being Jewish is an integral part of citizenship. The state determines who is a Jew and intervenes in what Jewishness means in countless ways, including control over practices (Lahav 2013) and over bodies (Weiss 2002). Some struggles to be Jewish are marginalized or ignored, others are primarily conceived as details to be worked out as part of a narrative of progressive freedom, and yet others are seen as crucial to determining the character of the state. But approaching these issues by gauging who is winning or losing the presumed religious/​secular struggle misses a far more fundamental set of issues (Goodman and Fischer 2004; Raz-​Krakotzkin 1996; Shenhav 2003b; Dalsheim 2011b; Anidjar 2006; Derrida 2008; Land and J. Boyarin 2012): racialization, the separation of “Jew” from “Arab,” what counts as “religion” and freedom of conscience, and what it means to be an ethical community. To understand why this is so requires a reconsideration of the historical trajectory that led to political Zionism and the establishment of the modern state of Israel. Nineteenth-​ century European discourses of anti-​ Semitism and political discourses of nationalism and Zionism are related in more complex ways than conventional histories suggest (Halevi 1987: 155–​157). Rather than thinking of Zionism only as a reaction to anti-​Semitism, it has been argued that these ideologies shared a common set of conditions that allowed them to emerge (Dalsheim 2010). The racist theories of the 19th century that categorized the Jews as a race, and the conditions that created the need and right of citizens to rule themselves, underlie the combination of nationalism and democracy in which self-​rule is granted to “a people,”

False Promises of Sovereignty  85 in this case “the Jewish people.” My point is not to question the motivations or intentions of those early Zionists who sought refuge from European anti-​Semitism, but rather to point out the ways in which this broader contextualization clarifies current conflicts that might otherwise seem absurd. The historical trajectory of the contemporary secular age resulted in the definition of Judaism as “religion” while also maintaining “the Jew” as a racialized category (Bauman 1992). Modern European processes of secularization and assimilation did not liberate Jews. Instead it led both to their near elimination and to their quest for sovereignty in their own state to ensure collective survival. The desire of Western European Jews to be accepted as fellow citizens and countrymen in places like Germany, Hannah Arendt argued, required a kind of assimilation that included internalizing anti-​Semitism (Arendt 1974, 2007 [1943]). Such assimilation could hardly be considered emancipation, which would instead mean full acceptance of the Jews as Jews. But if strictly observant Jews are worried that the conditions for living the Torah life might be better in New York than in Israel, and if state policy interferes with Jewish prayer at holy sites, and if secular Jews have to leave the country in order to get married in ways that accord with their way of life, can we say that the establishment of the modern state of Israel has created conditions in which Jews are finally free to be Jewish? Conflicts between Jewish Israelis and the state of Israel can teach us about the false promises of popular sovereignty. The dream of popular sovereignty, with its attending aspirations to be a “free people in one’s own homeland” (from the Israeli national anthem, HaTikvah) seems to be undermined by the very establishment of the state. The modern state of Israel was an idealistic endeavor aimed at allowing Jews to be a free people in a country of their own, to have democratic rule, stable borders, and equal rights for all citizens. But the establishment of the state might have made those aspirations impossible for the very ethnos for whom it was established.

86  Israel Has a Jewish Problem

Building and Rebuilding This chapter is framed with Kafka’s parable “The City Coat of Arms,” a retelling of the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel. This parable speaks specifically about building and tearing down. It talks about generational differences, and how younger generations are likely to think they know better, denigrate the work of their predecessors, and tear down what older generations have built. The idea that future generations will have more perfect tools slows down the work and shifts the builders’ attention to other issues. They begin to fight over all sorts of things and lose sight of the original project. The conflicts never seem to end. Kafka is known for taking metaphorical devices and making them literal. In his famous story, “The Metamorphosis,” the main character is not likened to a bug, but actually becomes one. The man from the country in “Before the Law” does not lose sight of his purpose; instead his eyesight actually begins to dwindle (Gray et al. 2005: 357). Taking this technique one step further, we can see both metaphorical and literal connections between this parable and the stories in this chapter. Most directly, we can see that successive generations seem intent on undermining or destroying what their predecessors have built. Of course this presumes a direct line of Jewish genealogy from disparate communities around the world, which is part of the Zionist, if not Jewish, imaginary (El-​Haj 2012). Secular Jewish Zionists might be accused of tearing down traditional Jewish ways of life to erect a national project and become sovereign citizens. Establishing the state was their “tower,” which they imagined would be a light unto the nations. It would be a democratic state and provide civil liberties for all. It would free the Jews from subjugation by foreign powers, and free them from religious constraints. Although the state has been established, its promises of liberation and liberty have not—​or not yet?—​come to fruition. One might say its foundations were weak: it began without a constitution, and its

False Promises of Sovereignty  87 socialist Zionist builders are confounded by what they see as its problem of religion and state. They and their descendants would like to continue working on their tower, but now find their project undermined, this time by observant Jews. From the perspective of many secular and liberal Zionists, the national-​religious are metaphorically tearing down the secular vision of the national project by building:  first, literally by building expansive settlements in the Occupied Territories. But also by potentially building the Third Temple in place of Jerusalem’s two ancient and highly sacred mosques. Visitors to the Temple Institute are often inspired by a vision of the future they encounter there. In the very last room of the guided tour, visitors are shown a brief film. It begins with a virtual tour of the Temple, as if you were walking through it, room by room, as biblical passages flash across the bottom of the screen. We see the architectural plans, the sanctuary, and the 71 seats for the Sanhedrin judges, as the words of prophecy appear on the screen: “And I will restore your judges and your counselors as at first. Thereafter you shall be called the city of righteousness . . . ” (Isaiah 1:26) After viewers have visited all the rooms of the Temple virtually, another short film is shown. This one seems to take place in the present. We see young boys dressed in contemporary casual clothing playing with a soccer ball. There is another scene of young adults sitting in a circle listening to one who is playing the guitar. An elderly man is sitting alone on a bench, reading what appears to be the Talmud. Then we see that the young people, first one group then the other, are distracted by something off in the distance. They stop what they’re doing, eyes widening, and walk toward what has caught their attention. The young boys approach the old man and offer him a hand. They walk together and we see them look up. Then we see what they see. The Temple is being built. Just above what is now the Western Wall plaza, just steps away from where the Temple Institute is located, a bright light washes over the scene. The construction of the Temple is underway. A big modern crane is lifting heavy stones,

88  Israel Has a Jewish Problem men in hardhats are working, and in the background, we see a fast train, more modern than anything currently operating in Jerusalem. The people in the film look toward the Temple Mount and smile, blinking a little as if the sun was in their eyes. It is not the sun, but the glory of the Temple that causes them to squint. Then these words appear on the screen: “This is the generation. The children are ready.” In Kafka’s parable, all these notions of surpassing what has come before, making improvements and building more efficiently, faster and stronger, come to naught. The parable thus calls into question the notion that human history follows a progressive development of increasing improvement through rationality. It undermines the ideal of a continually advancing temporality that was part of the foundation of political Zionism. In the parable, people lose sight of their goal of building a tower that will reach to the heavens. They become enmeshed in conflict, bound together more by their mutual animosities than by any shared vision or project (Gray et al. 2005: 257). In this chapter we have seen groups of Jewish Israelis bound by their antagonisms, struggling with and against each other. And in so doing, some of them are so busy with these conflicts that they may fail to see how those conflicts distract and work against them. The national-​religious sometimes see the state as interfering with their project to build and expand territorial sovereignty. So, they protest against or defy the state, which they supposedly support so strongly. Some left-​wing and secular Jews support a more liberal alternative to the state-​sponsored Rabbinate, which actually promotes the position of the national-​religious whom they oppose, and which also continues to tear down the traditional Jewishness of the Haredim, ultimately supporting the settler project in Palestine. But Haredi Jews also sometimes visit and support the Temple Institute, participating in a project they, or at least their religious leaders, purportedly oppose.18 18 See Dana Rubin (2015) on the growing phenomena of Haredi settlers in the West Bank.

False Promises of Sovereignty  89 As we saw in the previous chapter, Hannah Arendt taught us that modern forms of political emancipation meant that human rights could only be protected by sovereign citizenship, which left minorities and stateless people vulnerable to extreme forms of violence. We know that the modern state of Israel has resulted in the imposition of exclusionary conditions on others (Said 1992 [1979]). The problem of statelessness cannot be resolved by establishing yet another state. We also know that this form of political liberation involved new forms of identity that separated Jew from Arab (Shohat 1988)  creating enemy categories (Anidjar 2003)  and making the Arab-​Jew a seemingly impossible subject position (Shenhav 2006). This chapter illustrates another other side of those processes, demonstrating that what appears as a religious/​secular divide is far more complex. It is sometimes actually a religious/​religious divide, and is always part of a process of producing a national majority of sovereign citizens through disaggregation and conflation of modern categories of identity—​religion and nation. It shows how alliances of convenience can undermine political positions, in this case strengthening nationalism and territorial expansion at the expense of traditional Judaism. Precisely how these processes will continue to build or undermine the construction of the modern state of Israel is an open question.19

19 Gershon Shafir (2017b) suggests that Israeli colonization of post-​1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) is a hollow and fragile enterprise, built through complex and sometimes contradictory policies. The future of those colonies, he says, “is yet to be written” (2017b: 83).

4 Self-​Elimination Honored Members of the Academy! You have done me the honor of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I formerly led as an ape. I regret that I cannot comply with your request to the extent you desire. It is now nearly five years since I was an ape, a short space of time, perhaps, according to the calendar, but an infinitely long time to gallop through at full speed, as I have done, more or less accompanied by excellent mentors, good advice, applause, and orchestral music, and yet essentially alone. . . . —​Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy”1

The Essence of Being Jewish Is Asking Questions “Judaism and nationalism just don’t work together,” Simona said. Then she added, “Don’t get me wrong. I am a Zionist.” In spite of 1 Kafka’s parable, “A Report to an Academy” (2016 [1917]), which is reproduced throughout this chapter, is an allegorical tale. It tells a story from the point of view of an ape who describes his own desire to be free. He has been taught to imitate human beings, which might be a metaphor for Jewish attempts at assimilation in Europe. Ultimately, as we shall see, the ape concludes that being human and being free are contradictory positions. It should be clear that this allegory is not intended as an insult to a particular group by calling them “apes”—​quite the opposite. In this allegory, the ape can only be free as long as he remains an ape. Such freedom is something that humans can only hope for, but never quite achieve. The suggestion here seems to be that attempts at imitating Europeans—​particularly on the part of Jews in Europe—​would not bring freedom, only other forms of constraint. Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self- Elimination. Joyce Dalsheim, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190680251.001.0001

Self-Elimination  91 her strong devotion to Israel and her deep belief in the right of the Jewish people to political self-​determination there, she insists that in fact Judaism and nationalism are incompatible. Being Jewish and being in charge of a modern nation-​state somehow just don’t go together:  “The essence of being Jewish is to ask questions. What is the Talmud? Questions! The debate is the essence! But nationalism, sovereignty, statehood is about answers. That’s not being Jewish.” This problem was, according to Simona, one of the dangers to being Jewish in Israel. These systems—​the one of asking questions and engaging in debate, and the one of finding answers, making decisions, and determining policy—​seem to contradict each other. And yet she was not willing to give up on either. We met on a weekday afternoon at a café in a residential neighborhood in Jerusalem, where homemade kosher food is served. Simona chose the location. She tells me that she is an observant Jew whose family came to Israel from North Africa and recalls the struggles she and her family faced in their early years in the country. Simona does research for documentary films, mostly about the Jewish communities in Israel, their backgrounds and histories. She has also studied the Jewish texts with learned rabbis, which might seem unusual for a woman. But, Simona tells me, she is committed to following Halakha. So when she speaks about Judaism as being more about asking questions and debate than about being in charge of a country, she is speaking from a position of experience and knowledge. Analyses such as Simona’s were echoed by others—​both more and less observant Jews, particularly people with left-​leaning political views whose families had come to Israel from Europe, the United States, or the Middle East and North Africa. They spoke about a tradition of Jewish ways of knowing how to live as a minority group, about a collective past in which getting along involved working both through and around the governing rules and finding

92  Israel Has a Jewish Problem ways to support the members of one’s own community through informal channels and networks. In much of Kafka’s writing a character he calls K. tries endlessly, hopelessly, to get along by following the rules. It never works out. Following the rules is useless. The rules keep changing, or they never make sense in the first place.2 In any case, his attempts to gain acceptance by playing by the rules are forever frustrated. This seems to be an apt metaphor for the lives of those diasporic Jews in pre–​World War II Europe who thought assimilation would ultimately gain them acceptance. Perhaps it was precisely such situations that encouraged the development of ways around, circumventing the rules, or navigating by other paths that might ensure collective survival. Some Israeli Jews want to hold on to these ways of getting along. I  often heard people talking about the collective as a group that has developed ways of dealing with discrimination or oppression through the long experience of diaspora. And others relished the Israeli aphorism about laws simply being “suggestions,” which makes people laugh about everyday occurrences like how traffic laws are often ignored. But there were some people who spoke about ways of surviving or thriving by working around governmental authority as being integral to what it means to be Jewish. Being Jewish could mean a particular ethics of everyday life that involves ways of living together with Others among whom God has placed us —​whether in diaspora or in the Holy Land (Boyarin and Boyarin 2003 [1993]; Butler 2012; Rabinowitz 2000). The idea of diaspora as a more ethical model of living together suggests that, for example, if a community is primarily concerned with the needs

2 See Jonathan Boyarin (1997a) on Kafka’s comment that “It is an extremely painful thing to be ruled by laws one does not know.” Writing of the problem inherent in the modern European ideal of autonomy, he remarks, “the command from outside to be rulers of ourselves” is “perhaps the most imperious and terrible such command we know. Nevertheless that ideal has taken hold to such an extent that it often seems a veritable given of natural law” (1997a: 346).

Self-Elimination  93 of its own members, such privileging should not be especially problematic when that same community is one minority group among others. It only becomes acutely problematic if that group becomes hegemonic and continues to privilege its members over others. Discussion of this model of living together has generally been concerned with undoing the hierarchical relationship between different ethnic, religious, or national groups, and with imagining a social formation beyond the nation. Some people I spoke with were concerned that these diasporic ethics and mechanisms were actively endangered by the advent of political sovereignty. Now, Simona told me, many people thought “the state” should look after its citizens, which seemed to absolve members of the community from looking after each other because the state becomes some kind of abstract entity that takes the place of community. If, for example, the elderly were not receiving the care they needed and deserved, people directed their anger at the state, the government, its policies and programs. This very dependence on state institutions was a danger. Others were worried that such norms and practices are not suited to sovereign citizens at all. Zionist ideology, in general, arose in negation of diaspora and the cultural forms it produced. Now the Jews have their own state. Shouldn’t sovereignty mean that they no longer have to work around the state? Or that they no longer should? The ways of getting along learned over generations in diaspora could undermine the state. “Now it is yours,” a middle-​aged man living near Tel Aviv said, “you should not want to work around it or ignore its laws. They are now your laws.” Some scholars have argued that as a historically diasporic people, Jews have not yet come to understand themselves fully as sovereign. They have not learned how to behave as those in charge. Some people thought it was a matter of timing—​that sovereignty had been thrust upon the Jewish people when they were not yet ready for it. Princeton professor Michael Walzer (2009), for example, seems to have promoted this understanding. In a similar

94  Israel Has a Jewish Problem vein, Suzanne Stone explains that, regarding Israel, “historic events have far preceded rabbinic legal development” (Stone 2009:  13). Because the rabbinic process is one of arriving at general consensus to problems as they arise, one might expect that it will take some time to arrive at consensus on how to be sovereign. So from one point of view, the establishment of the state was a danger to being Jewish. It meant people might lose the sense of mutual caring and responsibility, and the creative resistance to unjust power structures that had developed in diaspora. But from another point of view, those very ways of being Jewish, and many others as well, are sometimes perceived as potentially dangerous to the state. Of course, there are communities of Jews in Israel who maintain these kinds of traditions. Observant Jews, for example, generally have well-​established internal mechanisms for looking after other members of their own community. But when members of the Haredi community look after each other their actions can sometimes be criminal or criminalized.3 Historically, small communities of socialist Jews also had well-​established internal mechanisms for caring for their members. Sometimes the state attempts to dismantle such mechanisms; sometimes, it seems, the forces of capitalism do this work. That, for example, is what happened to many kibbutz communities that declined once the state stopped supporting and subsidizing them (Sherman 2009; Simons and Ingram 2003; Lapidot, Applebaum, and Yehudai 2000), which suggests that the state and the forces of capitalism work hand in hand. When it comes to the Haredi community, mainstream news sources have tended to focus their attention on the controversy over participating in the army (see Chapters 3 and5). But this is part of a larger set of concerns about their participation in Israeli society, which for many analysts has primarily to do with economic 3 See Laura Nader (2001) on the idea of crime as a particular kind of category that changes over time and place, supports social systems, and protects the more powerful.

Self-Elimination  95 questions (Stadler, Lomsky-​Feder, and Ben-​Ari 2008). The argument against the Haredim is that they do not contribute to the larger economy of the state. This means they do not pay taxes—​or not enough taxes—​to support state projects such as the military. Perhaps people in the Haredi community did not contribute to the state economy in the ways other Israelis expected because they were not employed in salaried positions.4 There has been a great deal of criticism of the Haredi education system, which is said not to prepare its students for ordinary jobs. They don’t study enough math and never learn English, which makes it difficult to be employable in the current job market. Instead, they pool their resources, share hand-​me-​down clothing, and provide food for those in need. From within the community there are some who want to see things change. Rachel is an ultra-​Orthodox woman who did study math and had a strong command of the English language. Her family came to Israel from Britain, so she grew up in an English-​speaking household. Her family valued education for all their children, but her brother studied in traditional Haredi schools and never got beyond the fourth-​grade level in math. Rachel describes herself as a feminist and finds no contradiction between social or political activism and living the Torah life. Like Simona, Rachel also studies Talmud. She has organized a women’s study group whose members meet every week for instruction and discussion of the texts. For Rachel, changing the Haredi education system would be an important step toward improving the lives of members of her community. She spoke to me about the hardships of poverty she has witnessed among Haredim and says that people are paying a steep price for

4 This is not to say that they do not “work.” There are all different sorts of labor, many of which are not rewarded with wages. Feminists have long argued that what is traditionally understood as “women’s work,” the crucial labor of caring for children and managing households, has generally been undervalued and is often unpaid labor. One might suggest that there are also different sorts of activities that are considered valuable in difficult cultural communities.

96  Israel Has a Jewish Problem decisions their leaders made in the previous generation. She would like to see this change. Simona and Rachel, like many other Israelis I  spoke to, were convinced that within a generation the Haredi community will be transformed. They will be working for wages, they will go to college and university, and their lives will be different. But, Simona said, “they are doing it [making those changes] for the wrong reasons.” Simona thought that Haredim had begun to covet material possessions. She would have been happier if the changes underway were spurred by a desire to become more integrated into Israeli society because she cares deeply about the unity of the Jewish people.

Dangerous Jews I could never have achieved what I  have done had I  been stubbornly set on clinging to my origins, to the remembrances of my youth. In fact, to give up being stubborn was the supreme commandment I laid upon myself; free ape as I was, I submitted myself to that yoke. In revenge, however, my memory of the past has closed the door against me more and more. —​Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy”

However, individual Israelis explain this change among the Haredim, it seems clear that the state has an interest in their economic productivity. Indeed, a recent report suggests that the ultra-​Orthodox community is dangerous to the country. Experts reportedly warned that “the ultra-​Orthodox could bring down Israel’s economy. Failure to integrate Haredim into the workforce could eventually threaten the country’s very existence” (Reuters 2017). According to this report, these Jews present an existential threat to the state of Israel.

Self-Elimination  97 Of course, the state of Israel has long been interested in Jewish productivization. Gershon Shafir (1989b) writes that we should not confuse pressures to join the salaried workforce in Europe with those in Palestine. In Europe, Jews sought to be included, to be permitted to work in all professions to support themselves and their families. When the Zionist movement brought Jews to Palestine, on the other hand, the idea was to replace local Palestinian labor with Jewish workers, which was part of the broader settler colonial project. Shafir writes about the idea of “Hebrew labor” in the early Zionist movement and argues against the idea that Jewish productivization in Palestine/​ Israel was an outgrowth of Jewish Enlightenment during the second half of the 19th century in Europe. According to Shafir, the drive for productivization of Jews in Eastern Europe was “a struggle against the exclusion and displacement of Jews from various industrial occupations in modernizing Eastern Europe” (1989b:  81). In Europe, then, the struggle was part of Jewish efforts at integration into European society, to be fully accepted, have full citizenship rights, and be considered European in every way. However, according to Shafir, the Zionist struggle for Hebrew labor in Palestine “was born of Palestinian circumstances, and advocated a struggle against Palestinian Arab workers” (1989b: 81). But perhaps the struggle for “Hebrew labor” in Palestine is better understood in fact as born of the same set of efforts against exclusion and displacement. That is, perhaps the distinction Shafir draws is too stark and the reasons behind this move more complex. The outcomes in Palestine, of course, were ultimately quite different. Rather than establishing equal rights for all people to work in all sectors, liberating Jews meant excluding Palestinians. But if Zionism is an extension of an attempt to be accepted into the community of nations, to be a nation like all others, then Jews engaging in all manner of labor in Palestine might also have been part of that broader attempt. Because Zionism is a settler colonial project, early Zionists were less interested in exploiting local labor than they were with

98  Israel Has a Jewish Problem replacing it. If Palestine was to become the Jewish state, Jews should be active in all sectors. They should build their own country and not rely on the labor of others, even if those others could be paid lower wages. Shafir quotes Walter Preuss, a historian of the Jewish labor movement, who writes: “the Arab question . . . became the focal point on which depended the whole existence of the Jewish working community. If they accepted matters as they were, they would not be able to stay in the country” (Shafir 1989b: 82). Thus, Jewish workers in Palestine became militant nationalists, determined to “conquer labor” and make sure Jews employed Jewish workers. This is one of the ways that settler colonialism differs from other forms of colonization where extracting labor and resources were the main goal. Settlers come to stay. Their goal is to make the country theirs (Veracini 2010; Wolfe 2001, 2006, 2013). Given this broader context, how should we understand the current pressures to be “productive” placed on the ultra-​Orthodox Jewish community in Israel? Although some Israelis, like Simona, claim to be seeing signs of growing materialism among the ultra-​Orthodox, their value system nevertheless holds that productivity for the sake of accumulation is wrong and dangerous. “Even Moses, the first leader of the nation,” wrote Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, in a book given to me by a member of the ultra-​Orthodox community, “foretold that, once upon God’s soil, the children of Israel would forget God. Led astray by the example of other nations, they would esteem only wealth and pleasures as desirable, and would become oblivious to their mission” (Hirsch 1969 [5729]: 62). Current pressures to promote productivity among the ultra-​ Orthodox are not exactly the same as earlier moves to Judaize labor. The current move might be described as laborizing Jews—​getting more Jews to enter the labor force and work for wages. Nonetheless, both the presence of the Haredim in Israel and the pressure to more fully incorporate them into the national economy are also necessarily part of the ongoing settler colonial project in Palestine, and

Self-Elimination  99 part of Israel’s demonstration of its own status as a thoroughly modern state competing in the global capitalist economy. Recently, Haredim have also become part of its territorial expansion. The Israeli Ministry of Construction and Housing (Misrad Habinu’i ve Hashikun) has been providing affordable housing for Haredi communities across the green line in the Occupied Territories.5 According to Israeli experts, a population uniformly participating in the national economy is essential to maintaining a “First World army,” which in turn is vital to the continued existence of the state. Survival itself means having a state and an army. This also means people having to sacrifice themselves—​paying from their wealth, contributing of their time, and potentially exposing their very lives to the death and destruction of military service—​to ensure survival. And having a state and an army means laborizing all Jews, moving Haredim away from their homes and places of study, even if those moves also mean eroding a way of life they have constructed as specifically and prototypically Jewish. Jewish survival, according to this logic, is dependent upon the forced or willing elimination not only of those who die in the service of their country, but also of particular forms of Jewish life. Like Simona, members of the ultra-​Orthodox community are concerned about Jewish unity. Some of them explain the work of studying Torah as being a means to ensure the survival of the Jewish people because the Torah is what binds the Jewish people. Nothing else does. This view of survival emphasizes the continuation of the tradition rather than the mobilization or militarization of the people. Others in the ultra-​Orthodox community describe the work of the state-​sponsored Rabbinate in terms of Jewish unity and continuity. The Haredim provide a service to those outside their community to ensure, for example, that non-​observant Jews do not mistakenly marry Gentiles. Inside their community, Rachel explained to me, such issues are not of concern. They already know 5 See the report by Linda Gradstein (2007) on National Public Radio.

100  Israel Has a Jewish Problem the genealogy of Haredim, and they are certain that among themselves Jews only marry other Jews. Indeed they have their own body that certifies food as kosher and their own rabbis who perform weddings. They do not need the state-​sponsored Rabbinate. Yaacov Yadgar (2017) contends that the secular benefit from the “religious impositions” they deplore. The secular need the state-​ sponsored Rabbinate, Yadgar argues, because it is what identifies them as Jewish and allows them the privileged position of sovereign citizenship. Nevertheless, secular Israeli Jews find all sorts of ways to get around the Rabbinate’s rules. They entertain each other with stories of such triumphs—​“the Rabbinate performed our wedding ceremony, but my bride did not go to the mikveh. Her sister went instead!” Such stories make listeners laugh. They take pleasure in making fools of the ultra-​Orthodox, who anyway seem so foolish in their strict adherence to outdated norms, like the laws of family purity—​“Don’t they know we’ve been sleeping together for years?” These ways of getting around the Rabbinate’s requirements are celebrated by secular Jews, but for the ultra-​Orthodox these are not just random rules. They are integral to what it means to be Jewish and part of the work of protecting the survival and continuity of the Jewish people.

The Language of King David I could have returned [to apehood] at first, had human beings allowed it, through an archway as wide as the span of heaven over the earth, but as I spurred myself on in my forced career, the opening narrowed and shrank behind me; I felt more comfortable in the world of men and fitted in better; the strong wind that blew after me out of my past began to slacken; today it is only a gentle puff of air that plays around my heels; and the opening in the distance, through which it comes and through which I once came

Self-Elimination  101 myself, has grown so small that, even if my strength and my will power sufficed to get me back to it, I should have to scrape the very skin from my body to crawl through. To put it plainly, much as I  like expressing myself in images, to put it plainly: your life as apes, gentlemen, insofar as something of that kind lies behind you, cannot be farther removed from you than mine is from me. Yet everyone on earth feels a tickling at the heels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike. —​Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy”

Once again we are taken back to the problem of what it means for the Jews to survive, and how this survival may or may not depend upon the proper enactment of ritual or religious requirements. Religion as a modern category divides human existence in ways that fail to adequately describe lived reality. But it is a category which also, in the case of “the Jews,” means both the disarticulation and at the same time conflation of race, belief, practice, and national identity in ways that produced the conditions in which Jews could seek survival by attaining self-​determination in their own state. During years of fieldwork, some of those I’ve talked to have suggested that religion is dangerous when mixed with nationalism. In that case people were referencing the religious nationalism of a particular sector of observant Jews—​religiously motivated settlers, the national-​religious—​and not Zionism itself. From the perspective of most Israelis, Zionism was always a secular movement. It might seem counterintuitive to outsiders, but for many Israelis only the national-​religious segment of the population combine nationalism and religion (Aran 1991; Gordon 2004; Lustick 1988; Silberstein 1993; Feige 2009). This is what they see as dangerous. A different question arose for me during recent fieldwork in Israel. It is a question directly related to language. Recent debates in Israel have returned to the question of Arabic as one of the country’s two officially recognized languages. Hebrew is the official language

102  Israel Has a Jewish Problem of the state of Israel—​the language of its government and courts, the language taught in schools and spoken in everyday interactions in stores and restaurants, gas stations and banks by both Jews and Arabs. But Arabic was also recognized as an official language. Differential opportunities to learn and use Hebrew in the Arabic-​ language schools established for some of the country’s Palestinian citizens are obviously one of the mechanisms through which ethnic differences and inequalities are cultivated. Israel has traditionally used its recognition of Arabic as one of the country’s official languages as moral and cultural leverage in asserting its status as a modern and multicultural country that respects the heritage and rights of its minority populations. About 20 percent of the population within the internationally recognized borders of Israel identify or are identified as Arab, Palestinian citizens of the state. But a recent bill proposed in the Israeli Knesset would make only Hebrew the official language, meaning that Arabic would no longer be a recognized language of the state (Moore 2017; Lis 2017). In the meantime, the nation-​state law, which names Hebrew as the only officially recognized language, has been passed by the Knesset. What this will mean for native speakers of Arabic and those whose first language of study is Arabic in school has yet to be seen. The problem of Arabic is important, however, not only to Palestinian Muslim and Christian Arabs. Arabic, after all, is the traditional language of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (Mizrahim), including the community of Jews in Palestine prior to the establishment of the modern state. Being Jewish in Israel has come to mean not being Arab (Anidjar 2003; Derrida 2008; Lavie 1990; Shenhav 2006; Shohat 2003). But sometimes we forget that being Jewish in Israel has also come to mean not being diasporic Jews, and therefore not speaking languages associated with life in diaspora, even the three-​millennia-​old “diaspora” in the Nile valley, the northern Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and Mesopotamia. The Jewish state is purportedly a safe haven and homeland for the Jewish people, a place where Jewish people can live, come

Self-Elimination  103 home, and flourish. In the Jewish state, then, one might expect an abundance of Jewish culture and tradition. Indeed, one might expect a multitude of Jewish languages—​the languages that Jews have spoken among themselves in their everyday interactions in communities around the world—​to become official languages of the modern state. Obviously the decision to do away with Arabic as an official language appears as just one more layer of discrimination against minority citizens—​Israeli Arabs, who are not categorized as members of “the people” of this nation-​state. But what about all those who are categorized as such? What about all the Jews whose native language is Arabic? And what about other Jewish languages? Why, for example, is there no outrage that Yiddish or Ladino or Persian are not recognized as official languages of the state? I asked this question of a number of different Israeli Jews. Some people just looked at me, puzzled. They hadn’t thought of this before. Or, they knew that now there is a revival of Yiddish and you can take classes to learn it. But Hagar, a national-​religious woman, who had lived in the settlements in the Gaza Strip before she and her family were forcibly removed, was very clear on this issue.6 She told me she thought it was good and right that the national language should be Hebrew. After all, she said, “Hebrew was the language of King David.” It was the language of that ancient Kingdom of Israel, so it makes sense of that “we should revive Hebrew as our national language now.” Nation-​states generally choose a language with the intent of unifying the national group. But, according to Uzzi Ornan (1985), this is one of the reasons why, from a sociolinguistic perspective, Hebrew is in fact not a “Jewish” language at all. Ornan contends 6 In August 2015, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip as part of what is called the “disengagement” (hitnatkut). Along with its armed forces, Israel also removed about 9,000 Israeli residents from their homes and dismantled their communities. For more on the Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip and the disengagement, see my book, Unsettling Gaza (Dalsheim 2011b).

104  Israel Has a Jewish Problem that a Jewish language is best defined as one that Jews use only among themselves. Jews around the world were often diglottal: they spoke one language at home or in their neighborhoods and another one outside. One language—​the language of home and neighborhood—​was their “Jewish language.” The other would be the language of the country, a “gentile language” (Ornan 1985:22). He goes on to describe other characteristics of Jewish language and ultimately concludes that Hebrew is a “state language” which he equates with “gentile language” (Ornan 1985: 23). Whether or not one agrees with this analysis, the question of Jewish languages and cultures in the modern Jewish state persists.

Exile at Home, and Other Forms of Elimination For the story of my capture I must depend on the evidence of others.  .  .  . [M]‌y own memories gradually begin between decks in [in a steamship] inside a cage. For the first time in my life I could see no way out; at least no direct way out. . . . Of course what I felt then as an ape I can represent now only in human terms, and therefore I misrepresent it, but although I cannot reach back to the truth of the old ape life, there is no doubt that it lies somewhere in the direction I have indicated. Until then I had had so many ways out of everything, and now I had none. I was pinned down. Had I been nailed down, my right to free movement would not have been lessened. Why so? Scratch your flesh raw between your toes, but you won’t find the answer. Press yourself against the bar behind you till it nearly cuts you in two, you won’t find the answer. I had no way out but I had to devise one, for without it I could not live. —​Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy”

Self-Elimination  105 If classic Zionism was, or still is, a “revolt against the way of life of generations of Jews” (Ornan 1985: 23) that sought to “end . . . diaspora existence by gathering all Jews in  .  .  . Israel” (Zonszein 2017), then perhaps the tendency toward elimination of Jewish culture should not come as a surprise. This raises an additional question: How should such cultural elimination be understood? Is it a simple matter of change over time, a common process among all cultures? Or can the forces that assimilate Jews from around the world to Israeli ways of being be thought of as forms of elimination so fundamental that they may be compared to colonization, cultural elimination, or thought about as tantamount to genocide by other means? Aziza Khazzoom (2003) writes that the forces that assimilated Jews to the path of Enlightenment ideals in the 18th and 19th centuries nevertheless failed to reconcile Europe to them. Those forces have ongoing repercussions in Israel. She and others have shown how Orientalism has shaped ethnic inequality among Jews in Israel (Raz-​Krakotzkin 2005). Here, I would like to build on that analysis to consider how differences in religious observance affect what it means to be Jewish, and who feels at home in, or is made to feel at home in, the Jewish state.7 One summer I arranged an interview in a neighborhood near Jerusalem where ultra-​Orthodox Jews live. I left the house much earlier than necessary, wanting to make sure I had plenty of time in case I lost my way. I’ve done fieldwork in the Gaza Strip, in the West Bank, and all throughout Israel. In Bosnia, I traveled to places where Bosnian Muslims are fearful of Bosnian Serbs, too afraid to ask for directions. I’ve been in conflict zones where the danger seems palpable, where bombs explode and shots are fired. This time, I presumed I was traveling to a place that would be safe for

7 Yehouda Shenhav (2003b) has written about how Middle Eastern Jews (Mizrahim) had to be considered “religious” in order to fit into the social categorizations of the Zionist imaginary. Here being “religious” seems to interfere with such categorizations.

106  Israel Has a Jewish Problem me, a Jewish neighborhood inside Israel proper. There would be no border crossings, no checkpoints, no armed soldiers. But before I left the house that morning, I told my hosts where I was headed and one of them began shouting out warnings at me. “What?!? You’re driving to that neighborhood? Seriously? You know you’d better be careful. You know they throw rocks at women drivers there!” I knew tensions had been reported. Different sectors of observant Jews had come into conflict with each other and things had gotten violent. A modesty patrol harassed girls whose skirts were not quite long enough. Signs posted on a main street ordered men and women to walk on different sides of the street, and prohibited women from gathering near the exit of the synagogue, lest men encounter them on their way out. Progressive feminists had come to the town to demonstrate for women’s rights, drawn by the idea that ultra-​Orthodox women needed “saving” (Abu-​Lughod  2002). But I  was not part of the controversy. I  don’t live there, and I  wasn’t worried. Instead, I  was pleased to be meeting someone who identifies as an anti-​Zionist Haredi, an ultra-​Orthodox Jew who lives in Israel yet is opposed to the existence of the modern state. I did my best to be respectful of his community, choosing my clothing carefully so as not to offend. The rabbi I had met the day before approved of my outfit. He assured me I was “kosher,” dressed appropriately according to Halakha: elbows covered, high neckline, skirt below the ankles. Arriving early for the interview, and gazing up and down that sundrenched street, it didn’t take long to realize there were only men outside, all dressed in long dark overcoats, their heads covered. There were older men whose long beards blew in the gentle breeze, and little boys wearing the same dark suits, white shirts, and big black hats. There was nowhere in this neighborhood to go while I waited, no coffee shop or internet café. And, anyway, I was a

Self-Elimination  107 woman, alone, driving a car and feeling very, very uncomfortable. I was out of place, trying to be inconspicuous. But mine was the only car parked on the street. Nothing was behind me and nothing in front, except for the garbage dumpster. I left the car running, the windows closed, the air conditioning working. I watched a stray cat pull a bag with an uneaten schnitzel sandwich out of the overflowing trash. Then I decided it would be best to look down and avoid eye contact. I should not appear to be staring at people. But at the same time, I felt like the child who covers her own eyes and says “you can’t see me!” I remembered, years ago, walking the streets of Cairo on my own and wishing the sidewalk would open up and swallow me as local men formed circles around the clearly foreign young woman in their midst. I recalled riding a bus to a Palestinian village in 1988 and realizing I was the only woman there, just as the driver pulled away from the curb and it was too late to get off. That was during the first Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. I was on my way to do peacebuilding work in the Palestinian village, which was inside the internationally recognized borders of Israel. How could I do peacebuilding work if I  was afraid? Was it racist to feel fearful on a bus filled with men, Palestinian day laborers on their way back home? All I knew was that I needed to get off that bus at “the new mosque.” The Jewish Israeli bus driver who regularly drove this route from the Jewish town through the Palestinian-​Israeli town on the way to another Israeli Jewish town partially in the Occupied Territories, said he didn’t know where the new mosque was. He didn’t know where anything was in that town. It was as though the entire town was invisible. He was not going to help me find my way. Now, I  found myself in an ultra-​Orthodox Jewish neighborhood near Jerusalem. And, once again, like in Cairo or on that bus, I was out of place and afraid. “I have recently learned to be afraid

108  Israel Has a Jewish Problem of the fear that others have of me,” Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2012) wrote, referring to being considered a suspicious person at airports. But nobody is afraid of aging, silver-​haired women, right? Even though I was dressed “kosher,” I had not covered my hair, not wanting to mimic local women and appear to be someone I am not. But no outfit could possibly have allowed me to blend in. People in the neighborhood know who belongs there and who is a stranger. Theoretically, there should be no “strangers” among Jews in Israel. All Jews should feel at home. The Zionist dream was (is) for the Jews to be a free people in their own homeland. Sometimes Jews in other parts of the world say that Israel is a place of potential refuge. They consider it “home” in the sense that Robert Frost wrote about: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there /​They have to take you in.”8 So, there I was in the tiny white rental car, pretending I wasn’t there, waiting for the time to pass. At some point, I raised my eyes from what I had been reading and looked out again. There, right in front of me, the huge, green, overflowing dumpster was being hoisted by heavy wires. Two men were standing out there. They were clearly not members of this community. They worked for the department of sanitation and had come to pick up the trash. The dumpster was rising slowly before me, swinging back and forth on thick wires, so close to my tiny car! I looked at the trash collector in disbelief. Why didn’t he ask me to move the car? He simply gestured at me, indicating the situation was my fault. What did I think I was doing, anyway? Why would I park so near the trash? I tried to back up, but now there was a bus behind me and off to my left the huge garbage truck was just about to crush me! “Why didn’t you ask me to move?” I shouted up at the driver. He shrugged and told me it was my fault. “Lady,” he said, in the tone of an adult speaking to a 8 “The Death of the Hired Man,” 1914 (1906), (http://​www.poetryfoundation.org/​ poems-​and-​poets/​poems/​detail/​44261#).

Self-Elimination  109 child, “never park your car near the dumpsters. Your car might get damaged.” Having survived the dumpster incident, it was finally time for my meeting. I checked the address once more, but I only had the building number, not the apartment number. The mailboxes were unmarked. Surely the mail carrier knew who lived there and the residents knew, too. (In the Palestinian town there had been no street names or house numbers. The town was arranged by extended families. One just had to know where people live.) There was no public sign of who lived where. Either you knew, or you weren’t supposed to know. I tried calling the man on my cell phone. No answer. Now, I am a strange woman in a place where I don’t belong and I can’t find the apartment. I move to the shade, under some overgrown bushes, and look out across the street where large dark letters are graffiti-​sprayed onto a wall. “Modest Dress Required for Passage Here” (hama’avar belavush tzanua). A few moments pass. Then two women appear on the street with a baby carriage. They are headed into the building. I am saved! I can ask the women if they know where this family lives. Women can talk to women, right? I turn toward them and say, “hello” (shalom). Nothing. No reply. “Hello.” Still nothing. “Excuse me . . . ?” But it’s too late. They walk right by, their faces turned away. They will not even look at me. I am not kosher after all. When I eventually found the apartment, I had a wonderfully rich conversation with the man I was supposed to meet. At some point I asked him about the women who wouldn’t talk to or even look at me. “They were probably in shock,” he said. “Shock?” “Well, you know, we live here in a ghetto,” and he smiles. “They are not used to seeing outsiders. You probably just took them by surprise. They probably just didn’t know what to do, so they kept walking.”

110  Israel Has a Jewish Problem

Stereotypes [W]‌ell then, I had to stop being an ape. A fine, clear train of thought, which I must have constructed somehow with my belly, since apes think with their bellies. I fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what I mean by “way out.” I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense—​I deliberately do not use the word “freedom.” I do not mean the spacious feeling of freedom on all sides. As an ape, perhaps, I  knew that, and I  have met men who yearn for it. But for my part I desired such freedom neither then nor now. —​Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy”

Mordechai greeted me very warmly and invited me into his modest apartment on the third floor of an ordinary high-​rise. We sat at his table and talked about all sorts of things, until I finally felt comfortable enough to ask him about those women who looked right past me, as if I wasn’t there. I was surprised that he referred to himself and members of his community as living in a ghetto. He was being sincere, but also teasing just a little. The ultra-​Orthodox in Israel generally live in segregated neighborhoods that remind some people of the ghettos of Europe. Secular Jews in Israel speak disparagingly of these neighborhoods and of the people who live there. They say these people are backward. Their women are not treated equally. They have huge families and can’t support themselves. They are parasites. Such characterizations are remarkably similar to anti-​Semitic or anti-​Jewish expressions. Here I suggest an additional link in what Aziza Khazzoom calls the “chain of Orientalism.” When late 18th-​ century Christian elites in Western Europe began to advocate for granting Jews social and political rights, they “were expected to ‘prove their fitness for equal rights’ by shedding their ‘backward’

Self-Elimination  111 traditions, dismantling their separate communal infrastructures, and moving forward into ‘modernity’ ” (Khazzoom 2003: 489). Members of the ultra-​Orthodox community, Haredim, have not been denied “equal rights” in Israel. In fact, many secular Israeli Jews complain that Haredim are given too much by the government, that they collect too much welfare and are a drain on public coffers. They are accused of not contributing to society, but benefitting from its resources and services, like having their roads maintained, mail delivered, and trash collected. This is one justification for attempts to integrate them, to require that they teach “secular” subjects in their community schools so that their children can become productive members of society. “Christians,” writes Khazzoom, “demanded that Jews . . . reform their lifestyle, values, and social and economic and educational structures. . . . Friends and foes alike were disgusted by Jewish poverty, by their dark disorderly ghettos with the ‘narrow streets, dirt, throngs of people. . . . Jewish appearance, particularly the beards and sidelocks were attacked” (Khazzoom 2003: 490–​491, emphasis added). And just as in Europe, where “Christians attacked Jews for their ‘state within a state’ ” (Khazzoom 2003: 491), the government of Israel has recently begun attempts to dismantle what they call the Haredi “shadow economy” (Arlosoroff 2016). A little later in our conversation, Mordechai offered a little bit more insight on why the women would not look at me. “We also have some stereotypes about the secular,” he said. “Stereotypes? Like what?” “Like, well, you know. Like that they are criminals. They are immoral. The women are all, uh, ‘open,’ you know?”

Criminals and whores. I get it. I had been perceived as a Jew and negatively essentialized as “secular.” And I thought to myself that white people in the United States are afraid of Black people, and in Israel Jews are afraid of Arabs, Americans are afraid of immigrants,

112  Israel Has a Jewish Problem and rich people are afraid of the poor. And all those outsiders are criminals and untrustworthy. And now, I  too am threatening. Should I, too, be afraid of those who fear me? Or maybe I should think more carefully about the threat that Israel’s “secular modernity” poses to this community, a threat so powerful they must avert their eyes.

Assimilation In passing: may I say that all too often men are betrayed by the word freedom. And as freedom is counted among the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding disillusionment can be also sublime. In variety theaters I have often watched, before my turn came on, a couple of acrobats performing on trapezes high in the roof. They swung themselves, they rocked to and fro, they sprang into the air, they floated into each other’s arms, one hung by the hair from the teeth of the other. “And that too is human freedom,” I thought, “self-​controlled movement.” What a mockery of holy Mother Nature! Were the apes to see such a spectacle, no theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter. —​Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy”

Theodor Herzl, often considered the founding father of modern political Zionism, was credited with (or accused of) believing “that only by leaving Germany and settling in the Jewish state could the Jew finally become a real German.”9 The project of modern political Zionism was an attempt to finally fit into the world. Hannah

9 This quote is attributed to Ahad HaAm, considered a founder of what is known as “cultural” Zionism, in Khazzoom (2003: 500). Chapter 6 will deal in greater detail with different forms of Zionism.

Self-Elimination  113 Arendt ultimately decided that Jewish ethno-​nationalism was ill-​ conceived precisely because it would inherit all the problems of ethno-​nationalism in Europe. One might argue that Zionism is the ultimate Kafkaesque attempt at assimilation, an attempt to gain acceptance as oneself by mimicking those by whom one has been restricted and confined, like the ape in Kafka’s parable.10 The modern state was supposed to create the conditions in which Jews could flourish “as Jews.” But it is far from clear what “as Jews” would, could, or should mean.11 Now, in 2017, in the Jewish state, there are Jews who live in a ghetto they have devised to protect themselves from the dangerous secularized Jews—​ the hilonim—​ who surround them. Another Haredi man, who lived in a remote ultra-​Orthodox community near the holy city of Safed, told me how difficult it is to be a Jew in Israel. It is difficult in general and requires all kinds of special efforts, like wearing long sleeves in the middle of a scorching summer, he said. But it is difficult to be Jewish in Israel specifically, in part, because of the threat of particular behaviors he associated with the secular. As a father, he was concerned for his eleven-​year-​ old son. Yossi worried about exposing his son to things a young boy should not see. “If I take him to Tel Aviv,” he said, referring to the most secular major city in Israel, “I can tell him to look down [at the ground] all the time.” This way his son would avert his eyes from things he shouldn’t see, just as the women had looked away from me. “But if I tell him to look down all the time, he may still see things, like the tags from clothing that have fallen to the ground, with pictures of . . . ” “Well, yes,” I interrupted. “But if you take your son to Tel Aviv and tell him to look down all the time, he might not see where 10 “There was an irreparable contradiction,” Zygmunt Bauman (1988: 51) wrote, “between the conditions that had to be met to obtain exit visas from the ghetto, and those which had to be observed to purchase entry tickets to universal humanity.” 11 Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the concept of creating the “new Jew” through the establishment of the modern state of Israel.

114  Israel Has a Jewish Problem he’s going. He might trip and fall,” I say, with a parental sense of practicality. “I would rather have my son trip and fall,” he replied; “I would even rather that he fall and break a limb, than that his soul should be broken.” So, who is “at home” in the Jewish state? Who can finally be a free people? Does assimilation end when one becomes a sovereign citizen in the nation-​state? Are Jews in Israel, including the ultra-​ Orthodox, some of whom do not accept the existence of the state, admitted to society as Jews? The ultra-​Orthodox are a growing community, but still a small minority. An even tinier minority are those who describe themselves as anti-​Zionists.12 They explain that they are in exile, even in Israel, and note that most Israelis do not like to hear this. How can Jews be in exile in a Jewish state? Many other Jewish Israelis would tell them that if they feel exiled in Israel, they should not bother staying. Get out! The ultra-​Orthodox say that all of the Jewish people are in exile regardless of where they live. “G-​d has turned away from His people ever since the sin of the Golden Calf,” some argue. And now “we are repenting for our sins and we hope He will have mercy on us” Mordechai said to me. This expression of theological exile differs from the exile described by Edward Said (2001) and others, the forced removal or the conundrum of being in one’s geographic home without political self-​determination, like the Palestinians. It differs too from the forced removal and near destruction of the Jews there. And yet is related to that removal in complex ways. Israel has always represented itself as a modern, democratic nation, a state like those in Europe. “Zionism was in many ways a move directed toward Europe, a final bid for acceptance as equals 12 According to surveys carried out by the Jewish People Policy Institute, Haredim make up about 12 percent of the Jewish population of Israel. Although most Haredim are not considered “radically” anti-​Zionist, of those who answered the survey, only about 9 percent said that the term “Zionist” accurately described them. (http://​jppi.org.il/​new/​ en/​article/​aa2018/​part2/​identity/​israeljudaism70/​newidentity/​#.W_​1-​KpNKgWo).

Self-Elimination  115 in the European family” (Khazzoom 2003: 499). Part of trying to be accepted by Europe included internalizing the stigmas that had been attached to Jews in Europe. It involved efforts to get rid of particular ways of living that were considered backward and uncivilized. In other words, it involved internalizing Orientalist views of Jews as Europe’s Other. Their “assimilation always meant assimilation into the Enlightenment” (Arendt 2007 [1933]: 22), including both the internalization of Orientalism and the stigma of “Jewish modernity” that was the curse leveled against them by the Nazis. Khazzoom writes that the Jews of Eastern Europe were stigmatized by German Jews who had been stigmatized by European Gentiles, and German Jews then transferred those stigmas onto Jews from the Middle East. Some of those same stigmas are directed toward the ultra-​Orthodox community in Israel (J. Boyarin 1994). They are backward, live in ghettos, and have too many children. They speak Yiddish rather than the national language of Hebrew. They don’t work for a living and can’t support themselves. Most recently, the state has been trying to change the ultra-​Orthodox; to assimilate them into Israeli society by enlisting them in the armed forces, changing their education system, and dismantling their communal economic arrangements. Is it any wonder that members of the ultra-​Orthodox community see “the secular” as a threat?

Elimination No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out; right or left, or in any direction; I made no other demand; even should the way out prove to be an illusion; the demand was a small one, the disappointment could be no bigger. To get out somewhere, to get out! Today I can see it clearly; without the most profound inward calm I could never have found my way out. And

116  Israel Has a Jewish Problem indeed perhaps I owe all that I have become to the calm that settled within me after my first few days in the ship. And again for that calmness it was the ship’s crew I had to thank.13 —​Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy”

Patrick Wolfe (2006) has suggested that assimilation might be considered comparable to or have effects similar to genocide.14 He was thinking about the case of indigenous people in settler colonial societies and the trade-​offs indigenous peoples make, exchanging political rights for their way of life, which immediately calls into question the meaning of “rights” in the first place. We might formulate it this way: If (as in the case of Australia) you stop being Aboriginal (which you cannot, because such determinations are racialized and have little to do with individual choice) or if you stop behaving so much like an Aborigine, you can be a member of Australian society. But this formulation is filled with impossibilities.15 While the case of Israeli Jews is quite different, it too seems to be filled with impossibilities. We know that assimilation does not end for Jews when they come to Israel.16 In fact, it doesn’t necessarily end for those who have been there for generations. One could argue that the Jews were indigenous to Europe. After all, how long does “a people” have to live in a 13 This idea of being thankful only to the ship’s crew relates to Lord Acton’s ship metaphor as well. See Chapter 6, where this idea is explored in greater detail. 14 In Israel and elsewhere, Jews often express concern over assimilation in connection with intermarriage. Jews marrying non-​Jews is considered a threat to Jewish continuity. In Israel in particular such marriage is relatively uncommon. Jews marrying Palestinian Arabs, however, causes a great deal of controversy. Lehava is a right-​wing organization in Israel aimed at preventing such marriages, in part by exaggerating their frequency and misrepresenting their character as resulting from widespread Arab kidnapping of Jewish women. But Gershon Shafir (personal communication) contends that such inter-​ethnic marriages need not be considered assimilation at all. Clearly there are different understanding of the concept “assimilation” at play here. 15 See Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) on “cunning recognition” for how this impossible subject position works in the Australian case. 16 For an example of Jewish assimilation to the state see Shamgar-​Handelman and Handelman (1989).

Self-Elimination  117 place in order be native?17 And yet they were created as outsiders, strangers, distanced and segregated, marked and expelled, converted and then made to confess under torture that they remained unconverted. Eventually, with the advent of the Enlightenment, they were told that they needed to transform themselves again in a new way, assimilating without “converting,” without becoming something else, without changing categorical membership, but by adjusting their Jewishness through a new and additional sense of being (that of citizen) which would allegedly place them on an equal moral/​political footing with their Christian—​ that is, “European”—​compatriots. So what can be said of the requirement for Jews again to “assimilate”18 when they are sovereign citizens in their own nation-​state?19 Looking away from visitors in one’s neighborhood might seem rude, and living in self-​devised ghettos seems to contradict core values of modern life in a liberal, democratic state. But such behavior can also be understood precisely as a form of resistance to the forces of assimilation. According to Charles Taylor (2007) we live in an age characterized by tolerance for differences. Differences are valued and considered integral to dialogue and debate in the public sphere, an important component of modern democracy. But the ultra-​Orthodox community is considered intolerant. They often 17 Jonathan Boyarin has written about the ways in which Jews and Native Americans have symbolized the outsides of Europe, “Jews by their stubborn indifference to the spiritual transformation wrought by the coming of Jesus” (2009: 68). So too Indians, although it was thought that they might still be brought to appreciate the Gospels. 18 A number of scholars have pointed to how Jewish rule over another people—​or how rule by any such group over others—​creates a situation of moral deterioration, and have called for a diasporic model of living as minorities among minorities in which there is no single dominant or ruling group. See, for example Boyarin and Boyarin (1993) and Butler (2012). However, little attention has been given to analyzing how such an arrangement might address the problem of “assimilation.” How would such an arrangement affect the constitution of subjects? 19 Amnon Raz-​Krakotzkin (1993, 1994)  has suggested that, contrary to the hegemonic Zionist narrative, “exile” in fact does not end with the establishment of the Jewish state because this is a misinterpretation of the Jewish meaning of exile. I would like to suggest that exile does not end with the establishment of the nation-​state because “exile” is a structure, and is not easily undone.

118  Israel Has a Jewish Problem separate themselves and will not integrate with secular Israelis. They separate themselves to maintain their traditions, just as they did in Europe. It might seem counter-​intuitive for observant Jews to want to keep their distance from other Jews. But those other Jews are nationalists. Their “intolerance” might be better understood as a form of self-​preservation against the forces of assimilation, secularization, or conversion to nationalist unity over religious tradition in much the same way that colonized peoples elsewhere have mistrusted local nationalists. Post-​colonial theorists have been critical of local nationalists who aimed to replace colonial rule. Local nationalists tended to mimic the colonizers, looking down on the peasantry and on indigenous social organization (Fanon 1963 [1961]; Memmi 1967; Nandy 1983). In the Israeli context, the Zionists are considered colonizers vis-​à-​vis Palestinians. But they are also the anti-​colonial nationalists who wanted to replace British and Ottoman rule in Palestine with Jewish rule. In Israel/​Palestine, the term indigenous generally refers to Palestinian Arabs, whether they were farmers, peasants, wage laborers, or members of the elite and intelligentsia. But the term “indigenous” need not be confined to geographical identities. Indigenous might also refer to local forms of non-​state social and economic organization. Observant Jews were indigenous to Europe. They were organized in ways to care for members of their own community. They are also a diasporic community, one that values genealogical ties to identity more than geographic ties to a territorial state (J. Boyarin 1997b). I would suggest that being in diaspora and being indigenous are not necessarily opposing positions. It is possible to be in diaspora and be indigenous at the same time. For example, one might ask if the Navajo and Seminole are not still considered “indigenous” if they live in New York rather than Arizona or Florida. Often when we think of indigenous peoples, we imagine a people who live off the land, hunting and gathering or engaged in agriculture. Indeed scholars have often defined the indigenous in

Self-Elimination  119 place-​based terms: “The communities, clans, nations and tribes we call Indigenous peoples are just that: Indigenous to the lands they inhabit, in contrast to and in contention with the colonial societies and states that have spread out from Europe and other centres of empire” (Alfred and Corntassel 2005:  597). Does this imply that people who have moved should no longer be considered indigenous or that city dwellers cannot be indigenous? Specifically, in the case of the Jews, how should we think about people who were prevented from making a living in particular professions and not allowed to own land? Does their cosmopolitan nature mean that the proverbial wandering Jew cannot be considered indigenous anywhere? Most of the recent theorizing about indigenous populations opposes the natives to the invader, the local people to the outsiders, the indigenous to the settlers. The case of Israel suggests something more complicated since some of the people who would be characterized as “settlers” because of their cultural identity are also subaltern populations fighting for an indigenous way of life, in opposition to a modern state that is doing its best to free them of it.

The Bars of the Cage And so I learned things, gentlemen. Ah, one learns when one has to; one learns when one needs a way out; one learns at all costs. One stands over oneself with a whip; one flays oneself at the slightest opposition. My ape nature fled out of me, head over heels and away, so that my first teacher was almost himself turned into an ape by it. . . . But I used up many teachers, indeed, several teachers at once. As I  became more confident of my abilities, as the public took an interest in my progress and my future began to look bright, I  engaged teachers for myself, established them in five communicating rooms, and took

120  Israel Has a Jewish Problem lessons from them all at once by dint of leaping from one room to the other. That progress of mine! How the rays of knowledge penetrated from all sides into my awakening brain! I do not deny it: I found it exhilarating. But I must also confess: I did not overestimate it, not even then, much less now. With an effort which up till now has never been repeated I managed to reach the cultural level of an average European. In itself that might be nothing to speak of, but it is something insofar as it has helped me out of my cage and opened a special way out for me, the way of humanity. There is an excellent idiom: to fight one’s way through the thick of things; that is what I  have done, I  have fought through the thick of things. There was nothing else for me to do, provided always that freedom was not to be my choice. —​Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy”

In one case that recently made the headlines, a man was arrested for not having an Israeli identification card. He had never applied for one. Then when the government compelled him to apply, his application was denied, because there was no record of this man. He seemed never to have been issued a birth certificate, or to have compiled a school record, or to have served in the military. How could he be issued an identification card? But the story is more complicated. It involves a kosher slaughterhouse, failure to report revenue, 16 children, a two-​room apartment, and the fundamental importance of observing the Sabbath. The man without an official identity—​who claimed in any case that his name was Yoel (“Yoelish”) Kraus—​became known in the Israeli press as the man who organized mass demonstrations or riots to protest all sorts of decisions that Haredim see as threatening to their way of life (Selig 2009). The secular complain that

Self-Elimination  121 Haredim have forced them out of certain neighborhoods, that the Haredim throw stones at their cars when they drive on the Sabbath, and that the Haredim are taking over the city. “I know secular people feel under attack in Jerusalem,” Kraus told reporters at the Jerusalem Post, “but our way of life is being attacked, and we will defend ourselves and the Torah to the fullest measure” (Selig 2009). Reporters have written about the details of Kraus’s home life. He and his wife have 16 children, but because they are ideologically opposed to the state, they refuse the child allowances they could collect from National Insurance. The family lives in poverty, but they are committed to their beliefs, which means rejection of the Zionist state. They will not take assistance from the government. A member of the anti-​Zionist Toldot Aharon Hasidic sect, Kraus reportedly refuses to buy government-​subsidized bread and has never set foot on a public bus. He insists he only gives to the state, but takes nothing. This group of Haredim is adamant about avoiding all connections with the state, living in the country but not exactly playing by its rules. Kraus explains that “when it comes to preserving the sanctity of Jerusalem, and especially with regards to the holy Shabbat, we will fight the state when it endorses its desecration” (Selig 2009). The story of Yoelish Kraus has been intriguing Israelis for some time, but his name became even more well-​known after he was arrested recently. Despite his participation in organizing Haredi protests that sometimes become violent and other times close down the entire city of Jerusalem, Kraus was not arrested for disturbing the peace. He has taken part in protests against all sorts of municipal and state decisions, including the Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem, building a parking lot that would be open on the Sabbath, and mandatory conscription for Haredim. None of this landed him in jail. Instead, Kraus was convicted of failing to report the revenues from his slaughterhouse. In addition to being ordered

122  Israel Has a Jewish Problem to pay 250,000 shekels (about $70,000) in arrears, he was sentenced to a short prison term. This was the point at which he was also convicted of not having an Israeli ID card (Littman 2017). According to news reports, the government closed down the poultry slaughterhouse he managed because it did not have the necessary permits and owed growing fines. According to Kraus, the slaughterhouse had existed for a century. As for the permits: “I tried to get the permits, and in the meantime slaughtering went on once or twice a week for the community,” he explained (Littman 2017). Under the rules of kashrut (kosher standard) as set forth in the Shulchan Arukh, the 16th-​century code of Jewish law, a fowl slated for slaughter must be capable of walking about two meters, as proof that it is healthy and fit for human consumption. Sticklers about Jewish law are concerned that the big plants, where hundreds of birds are slaughtered hourly, have no time to ensure that the birds meet this requirement. Thus, the community needs its own slaughterhouse. The newspaper article reporting its closure seemed to mock some of its standards—​referring to its means of measuring health as the “athletic criteria” required of the birds. But some readers were sympathetic to the plight of Yoelish Kraus. Despite the disdain many secular and left-​wing Israeli Jews feel for the ultra-​Orthodox in general, this entire episode seemed unjust. The slaughterhouse had been operating for decades, if not a century, in an ultra-​Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem. It was a landmark and a place that provided an important service to the local community. For 100  years, if not more, a small poultry slaughterhouse operated peacefully in Mea She’arim in Jerusalem. Now that its operator since 2006 is being sent to prison, it may well be shut down for good. With its demise, one of the most prominent symbols of this ancient ultra-​Orthodox neighborhood, established in 1874, could be erased. (Goldman 2016)

Self-Elimination  123 In 2011, the police were sent into the neighborhood to close the place down even though it provided for local people, many of whom did not have the money to pay for their food. “Yisrael Galis, the Jerusalemite storyteller and semiofficial historian of Mea She’arim” said the small slaughterhouse had been serving the local residents until big supermarket chains began opening in Israel in the 1990s. Then, like many others across the country, it was forced to close. “At that point, Kraus entered the picture,” recounted Galis. “He saw in the rehabilitation of the slaughterhouse an ideological cause—​envisioning a slaughterhouse operating independently, without the involvement of the state. Driven by his romantic vision, Kraus sought to set up an independent enterprise, free of official intervention, the way it used to be in the good old pre-​ state days. He bought poultry from agricultural communities in the country and carried out the [ritual] slaughtering and feather plucking inside the Mea She’arim neighborhood. He then sold the chickens at cost, primarily to his numerous family members and the neighborhood residents, for whom the slaughterhouse was the butchery of choice, in terms of both adherence to the strict dietary and slaughtering laws of Judaism and ideological affiliation.” (Goldman 2016)

The slaughterhouse was not there to make a profit, Kraus said. It was there to make sure people had food to eat. Sometimes they gave away poultry to the needy; at other times prices were adjusted to make the food affordable. The slaughterhouse was fined for not having the proper permits. The reports never specify exactly what permits had been required, but this closure would surely force local people to find alternative sources of food. But more than that, this closure ended a long tradition, a communal means for feeding local people and a traditional form of ensuring standards for kosher food.

124  Israel Has a Jewish Problem If assimilation into settler nations is considered a form of elimination of indigenous people and their ways of life that is tantamount to genocide (Wolfe 2006), then the forces of assimilation aimed at Haredi Jews in Israel should be thought of as potentially having the same effect. Assimilation into the nation-​state is certainly not the same as mass murder. It does not require physical destruction. Instead it might involve re-​education, forcible integration into national institutions like the armed forces, and minimizing collective forms of social organization, all of which is underway in Israel today. Taken together, these changes would undermine the very foundations of what it means to be Haredi. Thus, integrating the Haredim in Israel might be similar to forms of eradication aimed at other indigenous peoples. Contemporary settlers often do not eradicate “the physical signs of Indigenous peoples as human bodies, but by trying to eradicate their existence as peoples through the erasure of the histories and geographies that provide the foundation for Indigenous cultural identities and sense of self ” (Alfred and Corntassel 2005: 598). Assimilation into a homogenizing form of Israeli national identity undermines the Haredim as a collective, attempting to break the moral and physical borders of their communities and force them into standardized kinds of interaction with other Israelis. As Patrick Wolfe wrote of the assimilation of the Native Americans of the Great Plains in the United States, Here, in essence, is assimilation’s Faustian bargain—​have our settler world, but lose your Indigenous soul. Beyond any doubt, this is a kind of death. Assimilationists recognized this very clearly. On the face of it, one might not expect there to be much in common between Captain Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle boarding school for Indian youth and leading light of the philanthropic “Friends of the Indian” group, and General Phil Sheridan, scourge of the Plains and author of the deathless maxim, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Given the training in

Self-Elimination  125 individualism that Pratt provided at his school, however, the tribe could disappear while its members stayed behind . . . In a paper for the 1892 Charities and Correction Conference held in Denver, Pratt explicitly endorsed Sheridan’s maxim, “but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.” (Wolfe 2006: 397).

The members of the tribe could stay behind to become “homesteaders and American citizens,” to become individuals (Wolfe 2006: 397). Wolfe explains that the key difference between genocide and other forms of destruction is the group. “ ‘Group’ is more than a purely numerical designation,” he writes. It has to do with a “membership that persists through time” (Wolfe 2006: 397). If such collective destruction is the definition of genocide, and if such destructive forces directed at traditional Jews are inherent to Zionism, can political self-​determination in the modern nation-​ state also be understood as collective self-​elimination? Does the state of Israel continue the anti-​Semitic tendencies that took an extreme form in Europe? And if so, is Israel really a Jewish state?

Cages and Chains This chapter considers a group of people who live in what are considered to be self-​contained communities, who are stereotyped as primitive, pressured to serve in the military, and told that they have to work with others and pay taxes properly—​all part of a nationalist/​modernist project. There is a broader idea, here expressed by Simona, that inclusion in this project will turn them into people like all the rest of the people in the nation. And, in the end, because they will become such people they will actually be better off—​it will be good for them. Recall that Eugen Weber pointed out the similarities between nationalism and colonialism (see the Introduction to this volume).

126  Israel Has a Jewish Problem He suggested that the forces of modernization in both cases are ultimately good for those who are transformed by them. But such transformation seems primarily to be good for those who govern. It makes the people governable, passengers for the sake of the ship. This set of ideas is the metaphorical story of Red Peter, the former ape in Kafka’s parable. The ape has realized his own need to become something else, something new, something different in order to escape the cage that humans have constructed for him. (Jews thought they must become something other than themselves to escape the cage that Europeans constructed for them.) The only way out of that cage is through it, to become something that is defined as not eligible to be caged. So Red Peter begins to mimic his captors. He begins with small gestures that please his captors, and gradually improves. This mimicry might be considered a strategy not unlike the ways that colonized peoples have sometimes mimicked their colonizers. Critical theorists like Partha Chatterjee (1986) and Ashis Nandy (1983) have long suggested that anti-​colonial nationalism involved a form of imitation of colonialism, that it was primarily based on the culture of the colonizers and that it tended to consolidate power among the elites, rather than empowering the colonized. Anti-​colonial nationalism sought liberation for the colonized, but also contained forms of self-​destruction, undermining traditional ways of being, believing, and living in favor of the culture of the colonizers.20 Returning to the metaphor that opened this book, we might suggest that Jews who were seeking a way out of their predicament in Europe likewise boarded a ship. I am going to suggest a metaphorical understanding of the ship, but of course, many Jews literally 20 See Homi Bhabha (1994) on mimicry as a tool of colonial power. Bhabha explains the civilizing mission of colonial mimicry as “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (86). Franz Fanon (1967) writes about the psychology of colonialism, how the colonized internalize the colonial power’s negative perceptions of them.

Self-Elimination  127 boarded ships trying to escape their fate in Europe. In many cases those ships were turned away from their destinations. In other cases the ships sank, foreclosing the possibility of escape. In the contemporary United States and in numerous European countries where governments have been actively limiting immigration of refugees from war-​torn countries, stories about the Jewish refugees who were turned away reveal the continuing relevance of the historical Jewish Question for our times. The St. Louis, for example, left Nazi Germany in 1939. It crossed the Atlantic carrying almost a thousand Jewish refugees, only be turned away and sent back to Germany (Murphy 2017). We also know of ships carrying Holocaust survivors who were turned away, including the SS Exodus that was denied entry by the British to Mandatory Palestine in 1947, sending its passengers back to the refugee camps in Europe. These and countless other attempts to escape the horrors of Nazi Europe and its aftermath cannot be disentangled from the metaphorical ship that ultimately became the ethno-​nation-​state of Israel. Much in the same way that colonized peoples sought liberation through nationalism, so too Zionism ultimately became a statist movement. There were other approaches to Zionism, though, and many controversies and debates among early Zionists over the direction the movement should take (Avineri 1981). But unable to successfully assimilate in Europe and facing destruction, we might say that Jews, too, ultimately mimicked their European captors and became nationalists like them, yet not entirely accepted by them. Having been expelled from Europe, they became passengers on a European-​settler-​nationalist ship, establishing yet another ethno-​ national state in an attempt to liberate themselves from the ethno-​ nationalisms that endangered them. This move might be likened to separatist forms of nationalism, when a people breaks away either by choice or as a result of being forced out, as in the partition of India. According to Aamir Mufti, such political separatism “is often the most complete form assimilation can take” (2007: 9). If Mufti is correct, and if assimilation is

128  Israel Has a Jewish Problem also a form of cultural elimination, what Hannah Arendt called “a permit to ape the gentiles” (2007 [1933]: 274), we can see how Red Peter stands as a metaphor for the self-​destruction of certain forms of Jewishness. The Haredim along with other traditionally observant Jews are to Israel what the historical figure of the Jew was to Europe: “The appearance of a crisis around the particularism of the Jews was intrinsic to the successful realization of liberal state and society, for the figure of the Jew . . . continually and paradoxically undermined the universalist claims of the emerging liberal order” (Mufti 2007:38). The appearance of a crisis around the particularism of the Haredim—​who do not want to join the army and are not interested in learning secular subjects to participate in the state economy—​continuously and paradoxically undermine the state claims of Jewish liberation. There is a difference, of course, because now although Jewish lives were saved by being removed from the European continent, Jewishness itself faces new assimilationist forces. Gershom Scholem was among the early Zionist intellectuals who favored a different version of Zionism, which promoted cultural renewal but opposed the establishment of a Jewish state. In 1915, decades before the state was established, a young Scholem wrote in his personal diary: “We as Jews know more than enough about the hideous idol called the state to bow down and offer up our prayers to it . . . nor will we deliver up our progeny to be willing sacrifices to its insatiable greed for power and possession. We Jews are not the people of the state” (Scholem 2007: 48). Here, Simona’s comments about the contradiction between Jewishness and sovereignty are reflected back by pre-​state Jewish thinkers. Scholem goes on to say: “We do not want to go to Palestine to found a state, thereby forging new chains out of the old . . . We want to go to Palestine out of thirst for freedom and a longing for the future” (Scholem 2007: 48).

Self-Elimination  129 In Kafka’s parable, Red Peter had already realized when he was still a caged ape, that getting out was not the same as being free. Thus he is very specific in his discussion of a “way out” that might be an escape but is not liberation. Being unfree in this way is very much like putting oneself in the invisible cage with which every social scientist is familiar: Max Weber’s (1958) iron cage. It is both invisible and real. Gershom Scholem thought that establishing a state could not amount to the kind of free society he and other thinkers imagined. Instead it would mean exchanging one set of chains for another. And yet, Scholem eventually came to accept the political Zionism he had once railed against (Engel 2017: 191), and Simona retains her Zionist convictions in spite of its contradictions. In the end, it becomes clear that “freedom” may be beside the point, and that the only choice we truly have is about which kind of cage or chains represents “getting out” of the ones that already entrap us.

5 Is Israel a Christian State? The Messiah will come as soon as the most unbridled individualism of faith becomes possible—​when there is no one to destroy this possibility and no one to suffer its destruction; hence the graves will open themselves. This, perhaps, is Christian doctrine too, applying as much to the actual presentation of the example to be emulated, which is an individualistic example, as to the symbolic presentation of the resurrection of the Mediator in the single individual. The messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last. —​Franz Kafka, “The Coming of the Messiah”1

I drove up a steep winding road in the hills surrounding the holy city of Safed, turning and climbing, until I finally arrived at a small, secluded Haredi community that felt like it was at the end of the world. There were some modest houses and some bigger ones still under construction. The community seemed to be growing. The directions Yossi had given were easy to follow, and I  found him standing out in front of his house waiting for me to arrive. It was mid-​morning, and his wife Miriam and their four small children 1 This version of Kafka’s parable was published in Franz Kafka: the Complete Stories and Parables, edited by Nahum Glazer (1971e). Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self- Elimination. Joyce Dalsheim, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190680251.001.0001

Is Israel a Christian State?  131 were out at work and school. Yossi greeted me and invited me inside. We sat at his long dining room table, drinking herbal tea. Yossi, a young Haredi man, was a ba’al tshuva, which means he had not been raised in a Haredi family, but rather became strictly observant later in life. He was not only strictly observant, but also very enthusiastic about his Jewish faith and observance and happy to share his knowledge. I explained that I was interested in the ways people struggle to be Jewish and asked if there was something about being in Israel that made it difficult. Sometimes, when I asked that question, people would look at me funny. It was presumed that being Jewish was easy in Israel. It should be easier than being Jewish elsewhere. Many people are convinced that in fact it is easier, but most had never really thought about it very much. But for Yossi the difficulty of being Jewish in Israel was perfectly clear. First of all, “to be Jewish takes work,” he said, “it is always difficult. And just because Israel is called the Jewish state, that does not make things easier. There are negative influences everywhere, distractions and enticements.” It was no mistake that Yossi and his family lived in this secluded community on a distant hilltop, far away from the bustle of life in secular Israeli cities and towns. It is difficult to be Jewish, to live according to the precepts of the Torah. For young children, this kind of separation from evil influences is preferable. This secluded community provided shelter from billboards with photos of scantily clad women, and from modern technology that is unfiltered, and from the sight of men and women dancing together, or holding hands walking down a street. Yossi was glad his children would be raised here, surrounded by others who share their values and way of life. But there are still difficulties and still dangers. In Israel now, Yossi told me, “Jewishness itself is being eroded, erased. And the trouble is that people do not even realize this is happening.” He opened his wallet and took out some bills. He also took out his Israeli identity card. Both on the national currency and on the identity cards, one could find evidence of the gradual, hidden erasure of

132  Israel Has a Jewish Problem Jewishness. The older bills, he told me, once had inscriptions that were spiritual in nature, reflecting the values of the Jewish people. Those inscriptions are now gone. I had never noticed the tiny text on the shekel bills; it was barely visible. Yossi found an older 200-​shekel bill and brought out a magnifying glass and read out loud what sounded like poetry. It was a quotation by the third president of Israel, Zalman Shachar.2 The text was not biblical, but it was spirituality moving to Yossi, who expressed its relationship to ancient Jewish sages, with its emphasis on the importance of studying Torah. In part it read: And despite the darkness of the dispersions, each community had to engage teachers of children at the expense of all its inhabitants. The wealthy and indigent, those with many children and those without, single and married people—​all had to bear the burden of Torah study.

Yossi then showed me a 100-​shekel note with a quotation from a speech written by Yitzhak Ben-​Zvi, the second president of Israel, whose picture appeared on the note. On the back of the bill was a photograph of an ancient synagogue in the northern town of Peki’in. It is said that there is a Jewish family that has lived in that town for centuries, since the time of the Second Temple. The text printed on the front of the bill spoke about the tribes of Israel and about the ingathering. Ben-​Zvi was known for his modest way of life and his commitment to higher principles. He is quoted as having refused a raise in his own salary, saying: “In my opinion, as long as we are required to fulfill two important commandments—​ bringing in our brethren and absorbing them here, and increasing our security independence given the external threats we face—​ we dare not get dragged into raising our standard of living. I have therefore opposed, on principle, a rise in my salary, in the hope that 2 Translations of the text found on these bills are from Salman Masalha (2011).

Is Israel a Christian State?  133 I would serve as an example to others” (Aderet 2013). (Kafka might have recognized this concern about standards of living in terms of “the most unbridled individualism.”) The quotation on the 100-​ shekel bill also speaks to fulfilling the commandment of “bringing in our brethren”: Our goal is to cultivate, as much as we can, the process of uniting hearts among all tribes of Israel that are returning to the homeland. . . . I believe that only a single, consolidated, united force will be able to fulfill this people’s exalted historic destiny; only such a force will be able to defeat any assailant and enemy.

On the older version of the 50-​shekel bill, these words by the novelist S. Y. Agnon appear: All the time I felt as though I had been born in Jerusalem. In my dreams I  saw myself standing with the Levites at the Temple, singing hymns to King David—​harmony that has not soothed any ear since our city was destroyed and its people dispersed.

On all the newer versions of the same denominations, those words were gone. One might suggest that these texts represented a cynical appropriation of religion in the name of nationalism. Or one might point out that those bills themselves had replaced other older versions with different faces and different quotes. But for Yossi, the disappearance of these texts on the newer bills was one sign that Jewishness is being gradually erased from the state. People in Israel take Jewishness for granted. “But that,” he insisted, “is a mistake.” Another sign of the erasure of Jewishness, he told me, is the new Israeli identity cards. His old identity card used to have the word “Jewish” on it. Indeed, the older documents had a place for marking national identity, which was generally designated either “Jewish” or “Arab.” But now those words had been removed. Instead there

134  Israel Has a Jewish Problem are asterisks, the number of which, I’ve been told, encode one’s designated identity. “Jewish identity is definitely endangered,” he told me. “Jewish symbols are being erased. Here, look at my identity card. The word ‘Jew’ used to be written here and now the word is gone. I am a Jew. It should be written here.” A Jew is born of a Jewish mother, he explained, and “you are a Jew whether you like it or not. Unfortunately, we had to have a man named Hitler teach this to us . . . that it is not a choice.” Yossi described the challenge of being Jewish in Israel: “It is a miracle that we [Jews] are here. Eretz Yisrael was given to us, but we have not yet accepted it.” There is a difference between being given something and truly accepting it, and that is the challenge. “What is the difference between being given something and accepting it?” he asked rhetorically as he began to teach me a brief lesson: “For example, at the end of the Shavuot holiday, Jews celebrate the giving of the Torah (matan Torah). It is not a holiday of having received the Torah (kabbalat ha-​Torah). This is because actually receiving such a gift requires work and this,” he explained, “is up to us. Like if I give you a gift and you toss it in your closet and never use it, then it was given to you but you have not really received it. The same is true of the state. It is very difficult to accept the state, to receive the state that we were given. The state should work [be run] according to Halakha.” Yossi told me that none of this should be especially surprising, though he was pleased by my questions that seemed to indicate I had come to realize its truth. We should not be surprised that it is difficult to be Jewish in Israel. It is a struggle because the Jews have been given a state—​a miracle like that comes only from God. But they have not yet understood what that gift requires of them. I remembered that Mordechai, the Haredi man we met in Chapter 4, had told me something similar, expressed in a slightly different way. He said, as if speaking to all the Jewish world: “You’ve made it this far! Don’t give up now! Don’t stop being Jewish now!” For Mordechai it was about nearly arriving at redemption, and the

Is Israel a Christian State?  135 miracle was that the Haredi population had grown so much larger than the founders of the state had ever imagined. Yossi explained that so many Israeli Jews continue to act as though they were not Jewish because they do not understand what is required of them to accept the gift. But Haredim understand. They are not Zionists, he said. How could they be when the early Zionists were Marxists? They put Marxist ideology above God! Haredim do not believe in the state, he said. “I wish all the Zionists would not believe in the state the way the Haredim do not believe in the state.”3 He wished that Israeli Jews would learn how to accept the gift that God had given them, not by idolizing the state, but by living according to Halakha. “When you put Marxism at the top, above all else [above all other beliefs] as the kibbutzim did, it falls apart.” If you put being Jewish according to Jewish law at the top of your sets of beliefs, things will not fall apart. While Haredim may not “believe” in the Zionist state, they are a growing proportion of its citizens, more of whom are now living in segregated communities located in the Occupied West Bank (Rubin 2015). “Haredim cannot be Zionists,” Yossi exclaimed. How could they be when the founding father of political Zionism, “Theodor Herzl himself, actually wanted to convert all the Jews to Christianity. His own children were Christians.” “His own children were Christian? He wanted Jews to be Christian?” I asked. I had never heard this before. This is certainly not what is ordinarily taught to Israeli school children. Herzl is revered as a visionary who dreamed of a Jewish state decades before it came into existence. “If you will it, it is not just a dream (im tirztu, ayn zu agada),” is the quotation most often attributed to him. Herzl is the inspirational founding father of political Zionism, whose words suggest that anything is possible, that you can make it happen. You can realize the dream of having a Jewish state. And, 3 For more on Haredim and their relationship to Zionism see Menahem Friedman (1991).

136  Israel Has a Jewish Problem now, Yossi told me that Herzl actually wanted Jews to be Christian, including his own children. “Herzl?” I asked, “wanted to convert the Jews to Christianity?” “Yes,” Yossi said. “Go check and see.”

Foundationally Christian? I was caught off guard by what Yossi was telling me. I knew that in general the Haredim do not accept the state and are fundamentally not Zionists.4 I had been told that Zionism pushes Jews toward secularization: “The state wants to make the Jews secular,” Mordechai had told me. “Ben Gurion wanted to secularize the Jewish people. He was interested in creating a single type—​one Israeli type that would result from the ‘melting pot.’ ” And, Ben Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, “was anti-​Haredi.” It seems entirely clear that the dominant form of modern political Zionism was a secular movement seeking political liberation for a people whose lives had been precarious as long as they lived under foreign rule. The socialist Zionist founders of the state imagined a just society based on principals of equality, sharing the burden, and a fair distribution of the goods produced in society. The kibbutz communities were indeed modeled on such socialist ideals. But now Yossi was suggesting that, in fact, the modern state of Israel was not only secular, it was foundationally Christian. According to historian Yaacov Rabkin, Yossi was correct. Theodore Herzl did, in fact, entertain the idea that mass conversion of the Jews to Christianity might bring an end to anti-​Semitism (Rabkin 4 Although fundamentally they do not accept the Zionist state, Haredim do participate in politics. They have their own political parties and elected members of government. The explanation for this has to do with looking out for the interests of their communities. They would do the same no matter where they lived.

Is Israel a Christian State?  137 2016: 42). Rabkin adds that Herzl’s ultimate decision to “gather the Jews in the Promised Land” was “primarily of Protestant inspiration” (Rabkin 2016:  42). He discusses a particular acquaintance who influenced Herzl’s thinking, a man named William Hechler, a Protestant visionary who encouraged Herzl’s Zionist project. Hechler is sometimes called the father of Christian Zionism, a Protestant theology that favors the ingathering of the Jews in Palestine as a step toward the second coming of Christ. Sociologist Gershon Shafir has likewise argued that British Christian Zionism predated practical Jewish Zionism: Long before vague Jewish messianic aspirations became a concrete Zionist project, and long before Jewish voices proclaimed Jews to be a nation rather than a religious group, Zionism was a Christian venture. Zionism avant la lettre, i.e. British proto-​Zionism, emerged in the form of Christian Evangelical Restorationism, a movement calling for, and willing to sponsor, the emigration of Jews to Palestine as a precondition for the Second Coming of Christ (while simultaneously seeking to convert them to Christianity). (Shafir 2017a)

Shafir writes that “British imperial interests were woven into a narrative of Jewish return, creating ‘the political category into which Jews fitted themselves,’ ” suggesting the Christian roots of modern political Zionism. What would it mean to suggest that Israel is foundationally a Christian state? Would it mean that most of its citizens regularly attended church? Would it mean that the leaders of the state had accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior? Is it important to establish whether or not Herzl wanted his own children to be Christians? What is the difference between suggesting that the state was foundationally secular and suggesting that it was foundationally Christian?

138  Israel Has a Jewish Problem According to some scholars, the meanings of “Christian” are far more subtle than accepting Christ’s salvation. Christianity is not just about celebrating Easter and Christmas. It entails a worldview that is also foundational to modern Western ways of being in the world more generally. For Charles Taylor, for example, modernity itself can be described as a “secular age” (Taylor 2007) and that secular age is often understood as being rooted in Protestant theology (Keane 2007). According to Keane, modernity does not refer to a specific period of time. Instead, it is a normative view of history that expects a better future and can be tied to Protestant religious sources. “In the moral narrative of modernity,” he writes, “progress is not only a matter of technological mastery, economic organization, scientific knowledge, environmental disaster, or certain forms of governance. It is a story about human emancipation and self-​mastery” (Keane 2009). According to this moral narrative, modernity is a story of human liberation from a set of false beliefs that undermine freedom. Keane argues that modernity promotes a particularly Protestant approach to agency—​achieving freedom through seeking truth by rational means. Modernity, or the contemporary secular age, is based on Protestant ideals of human thought and action as opposed to understanding the world as dominated and determined by rules, rituals, and traditions (Keane 2007). This would mean that modernity, or at least Western modernity, is itself essentially a product of the Protestant Reformation, and thus essentially Christian. But does that also mean the modern state of Israel is fundamentally a Christian state? Scholars sometimes distinguish between secularism and “the secular.” The secular, according to Talal Asad (2003), is best understood as a set of powerful modern projects that relies on fundamental principles and values of human agency and individual autonomy. A  firm belief in the human capacity to make free choices about our own lives, and the belief that such choices can be profoundly transformative is, according to Webb Keane, a foundationally Protestant idea. Such belief is also essential to the

Is Israel a Christian State?  139 workings of modern democracy and to capitalist economy. These beliefs contradict those expressed by Haredi Jews, for whom “individualism is not a value,” as Rachel, whom we met in Chapter 4, told me. Haredim, then, often find themselves at odds with some values underlying Zionist nationalism, just as secular Zionists often find themselves at odds with Haredim. One recent example of this is the controversy over making accommodations for Haredi students to attend Israeli universities.

Parasites Secular Israelis complain that Haredim are parasitim “parasites.” As we saw in Chapter 4, people grumble about the Haredim not working, serving in the army, or paying taxes, and only taking advantage of the state by accepting its welfare. Every year, the Israeli press covers events in anti-​Zionist Haredi neighborhoods where effigies of Israeli soldiers are burned to the sounds of loud clapping and singing by crowds of boys and men. Not only do they refuse to serve in the armed forces, they openly despise those who do, as we saw in Chapter 1. Secular Israelis are disgusted by this behavior. So are many other observant Jews who do serve in the army.5 As we have seen, the Haredim are also derided for living in poverty. Many of the men devote their lives to studying Torah.6 Their wives often work for wages, but their families are large and a single, often meager salary is rarely enough. The cost of living in Israel is high. Many non-​Haredi Israelis complain that the Haredim do not pull their own weight. They should stop being a burden on 5 There are also some Haredim who do serve in the armed forces. A special unit, the Nahal ha Haredi, has been created especially for them. It is an army unit that makes allowances for their observant way of life. 6 See Menahem Friedman (1991) on Haredi “scholar society” and how organizing their society around Torah study has helped them to survive and flourish.

140  Israel Has a Jewish Problem Israeli taxpayers and start contributing to the state.7 As we saw in Chapter 4, some economists have gone so far as to suggest that the Haredim pose an existential threat to the Israeli economy. If they are not integrated into the work force soon, they say, the country’s very existence could be at stake (Cohen and Scheer 2017). One major impediment to earning wages for many Haredim is their lack of necessary skills and knowledge. Or at least this is what is commonly said. Surely people in Haredi communities, as in any human community, have had “job skills” long before formal “schooling” ever existed. This push, then, becomes another way of thinking about institutionalized education as the only way to make people fit for modern life. Schooling for boys in the Haredi community is intensive. Formal education begins at a young age—​often at three years old. Boys typically study for long hours, especially in the upper grades (yeshiva). Much of their time is devoted to studying sacred texts and the voluminous commentaries upon them that have been composed over centuries by the sages of the tradition. Secular Israelis complain that the insistence that all young men study Torah is a specifically Israeli fabrication. It could not possibly have been that way in the Jewish communities of Europe where people had to support themselves.8 In any case, studying Torah is highly valued among the Haredim, while the secular are convinced it is nothing more than a means for rabbis to retain control over people. Haredim suggest that keeping as many young people as possible in yeshiva is a way of protecting the community, and its continuity is really more important than anything else. But the

7 Israelis use the term medina “state” in reference to the entity to which the Haredim do not contribute. They do not say “society” or “Israel” or “the country,” or “the Jewish people.” Grammatically, use of the word country, haAretz, generally refers to the place—​ as in “are you in the country?” 8 Friedman (1991) explains that the Western welfare state helped allow the development of the Haredi “scholar society” beginning after World War II. The scholar society, in which all young men study in what Friedman terms the “total institution” of the yeshiva, did not develop in Eastern Europe. This social arrangement, he argues, is what has allowed Haredi society to succeed and grow.

Is Israel a Christian State?  141 devotion to studying Torah also means there is little time for much else, and students are not exposed to what other Israeli students are required to study. Haredi boys will not have studied civics and never formally study English. They will only have been taught basic skills in math. Recently there have been moves to change the education system, and a number of programs have begun to assist those seeking higher education. In 2001 the first Haredi College was established in Jerusalem, but it has since lost its funding and has been closed.9 Other programs have been established as special branches of universities designed for Haredi students.10 The purpose of education and the content of curricula are widely debated in communities everywhere. We might think of national education to promote patriotism, to increase productivity, or to enhance solidarity through a common language, literature, and a shared historical narrative (Brow 1990; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Weber 1976). Indeed, mandatory public education developed as an integral part of modern nationalism (Gellner 1983). It is one of the most important ways of creating “good” citizens who know their national history and understand why they should take pride in their country and want to serve and protect it (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983). National curricula teach about national leaders. Haredi curricula teach about Haredi leaders, great rabbis whose teachings should be studied and revered. Some of the Haredim favor expanding “secular” educational opportunities for members of their community. This would afford them additional skills and knowledge that could make them more 9 The college was founded by Adina Bar Shalom who was awarded the Israeli Prize in 2014 for her groundbreaking work in establishing this institution of higher learning. The school was specially tailored for the Haredi population, offering separate classes for men and women and a curriculum adapted to their religious beliefs. 10 Such concerns are not limited to the case of Israel. We see similar developments in the contemporary Middle East more broadly—​particularly in states like Turkey that have self-​identified as “secular” for a while, but which also administer religious institutions and must therefore ensure that there are qualified prayer leaders in mosques and teachers for mandated religious education in public schools. See Ozgur (2012), or the earlier work of Soon-​Yong Pak (2004a, 2004b).

142  Israel Has a Jewish Problem competitive in the job market. While avoiding excessive materialist indulgences is worthy of praise, living in poverty is not in and of itself a value to uphold. The question, for people who are interested in this sort of change, has become how to increase their educational opportunities. Members of the community who seek to study at the university have to catch up on math and learn English, so a number of programs were established specifically to prepare Haredi men for university studies. Some universities also began offering courses in Haredi neighborhoods. These outreach projects were designed to fulfill the specific needs of this population. They were offered close to home and provided conditions that would respect the norms of observant Jewish life. This includes gender-​segregated classrooms. Recently there has been talk of expanding these programs, making special accommodations so studying at secular Israeli universities will be more accessible to members of the Haredi community. This would include classrooms for men only.

Men in the Street, Jews at Home Recently, a liberal feminist Israeli politician spoke out against the educational program that would make such allowances for Haredi students at Israeli universities. Member of Knesset Merav Michaeli (2017) posted a video on her Facebook page in which she explained her opposition. Michaeli insisted that her position should not be understood as opposition to Haredi men and women. In fact, she argued, she is opposed to this program because she is on their side. Such statements represent a broader underlying set of assumptions about freedom, tolerance, and pluralism. In particular, they emphasize how concepts of individual autonomy and personal choice have become integral to modern democratic rule, reflecting a broader set of modern ideals (“A Jew at home and a man on the street.”) that are also foundational to Zionist ideals of democracy, freedom of conscience, and civil rights.

Is Israel a Christian State?  143 “Hello friends,” Michaeli’s weekly message begins. Then she tells her audience “we lost” (hifsadnu): After a long and difficult struggle (ma’avak), they are turning our universities into synagogues. The Council for Higher Education (MALAG) made a decision . . . to expand the failed and dangerous program of segregation in higher education. Before you jump [get upset] this is not about opposing Haredi women and men. The opposite! You and they KNOW that I am only on their side. Therefore, I  am opposed to programs that censor content that is not suited to what their rabbis want them to hear.

Michaeli’s self-​presentation of siding with the Haredim is expressed as her opposition to their leaders—​their social and spiritual leaders, the people to whom they go for guidance. While the term “Haredi” refers to a range of strictly observant Jews, in general, it includes a number of communities, each of which follows the teachings and leadership of a particular rabbi. Rabbinical leadership may make decisions ranging from how to prepare and consume food, and where members of the community should live, to what boys and girls should be taught, and who should be sent abroad to help teach Torah in distant Jewish communities (see J. Boyarin 1997b; El-​Or 1994; Friedman 1993; Stadler, Lomsky-​Feder, and Ben-​Ari 2008). The rabbis must interpret sacred texts, especially the Talmud, which consists of generations of explications of the commandments set forth in the Torah. It is their job to figure out how to live the Torah life by applying its commandments to everyday life. The role of rabbis far exceeds giving weekly sermons in synagogue, just as being Jewish far exceeds attending synagogue and engaging in prayer. Rabbis are central to Haredi communities. But Michaeli’s support for Haredi men and women seems to mean “helping” them undermine rabbinic authority. The rabbis, she says, “censor

144  Israel Has a Jewish Problem anatomy, evolution, Freud, and humanism.” And, in her opinion, each student should be able to decide for herself what she wants to study. I am opposed to programs that give them (Haredim) reductions in their degrees [that reduce the required courses for their degrees]. They receive the same degree, but do not study what you study—​because it is too difficult without having studied core subjects (limuday liba).

In the Haredi education system, boys and girls go to different schools. Boys generally do not study the core subjects required in Israeli public schools—​social studies, civics, English, and higher levels of math. I am opposed to programs where women study with male and female lecturers/​instructors, but men study only with men. Women lecturers are not permitted to teach men—​no matter how good or important they are!

Women faculty at Israeli universities have also expressed dismay at this idea. They see this as a form of discrimination against them, as a move backward in women’s struggles for equal rights. I am opposed to programs that offer women’s subjects to women and men’s subjects to men and people cannot choose from everything offered. Or, programs in which women are punished for (avirot tzniut) breaking modesty rules, like if they come in sandals without socks. (Emphasis in original.)

This comment recalls recent events at the Knesset when the dress code was suddenly more strictly imposed on women working there. Some women were stopped and refused entry by the Knesset security guards because their skirts were deemed too short, which

Is Israel a Christian State?  145 seemed to some more like a religious modesty patrol than like a formal dress code. The particular offense mentioned by Michaeli—​ sandals without socks—​sounds completely arbitrary and absurd to the secular. It seems to presume that Haredi women would likewise consider it absurd. But most important in these comments is the issue of choice—​freedom to choose a path, to determine what to study, and especially for women to be free to choose to study what were traditionally considered male professions. According to this interpretation, the program that aims to provide ways for members of the Haredi community to more comfortably study at the university is not liberating or empowering. Instead, it is a means of imposing limits on personal choice, especially for women. Providing freedoms for one group of people (Haredi men) would take away freedoms from another group of people (non-​Haredi women). This is always the question of the limits of freedom in democratic societies: When do my freedoms interfere with yours? But the case could be made that, as it is today, women’s freedoms come at the cost of Haredi freedoms. Michaeli goes on to say that she is opposed to: programs that have certain days for men only when women are not permitted on campus or in the library. And, on those days, they hold elections for student council and then it just so happens that no female students are elected—​imagine that! (eze keta) . . . This way, instead of the academy being for women and men—​ the academy, a place of expanding ideas, that promotes critical thinking and research and new discoveries, that has a great diversity of people, they [The Council for Higher Education] are turning the academy into a dark ghetto, in which their rabbis want the Haredi community to remain.

This liberal version of inclusion is premised on prior exclusions. Some differences must be excluded so that other differences can appear as “diversity,” which is lauded and celebrated like enjoying

146  Israel Has a Jewish Problem added spice, or allowing three different flavors of icing on a cake, just so long as the basic cake remains the same.11 Offering gender-​ segregated classes as a means of accommodating what might be understood as “cultural difference” in Michaeli’s version sounds more like a dangerous contagion. It will infect the universities and destroy the academy, which, unlike the synagogue, is a place of liberal freedom, openness, critical thought, and new ideas. The academy is founded on ideas of liberal tolerance and respect for diversity, but some differences are more welcome than others. And, it seems, in the universities of the liberal Jewish state, some Jews are more welcome than others. Michaeli says that “their rabbis” want Haredim to remain in the darkness of ignorance, to pull them back into the cramped and stultifying past of the European ghetto. As a feature of the colonizing impulse, this kind of accusation has been leveled against rabbis and other religious leaders in other times and places (see Starrett 1998, 2006). This time, it is a reformist politician’s offer of warning and salvation:  It’s not you; you are not the problem, it’s your leaders. If only you would follow me and not those who want to leave you in darkness and ignorance. We will enlighten you! We will civilize you!

Catastrophe Members of this observant Jewish community came to Palestine to ensure their survival, but the Haredim, even as they joined other Jewish communities already in Palestine, maintained their cultural norms and did not become nationalists. Indeed, according to anthropologist Tamar El-​Or, for Haredim, the establishment of the 11 Hans Lindahl (personal communication) suggests that all social systems involve some form of exclusion. This liberal society employs the ideological rhetoric of celebrating “diversity,” providing a thin veneer of tolerance and acceptance. See Lindahl’s recent book (2018). See also Yolande Jansen (2013) on multiculturalism in Europe.

Is Israel a Christian State?  147 modern state of Israel was tantamount to a “political holocaust,” one of a series of catastrophes or trials the community has faced (El-​Or 1994: 66–​67). Michaeli is a progressive nationalist who seems to be passing the “same pejorative judgment” (Fanon 1963 [1961]) on the Haredim as were passed on Jews by Christian Europe in ways that echo colonial judgments of peasants among local nationalists in other post-​ colonial situations (Memmi 1967; Nandy 1983). Michaeli aims her liberationist discourse at undermining rabbinical authority, by claiming her own authoritative judgement on the subject of religious laws: Make no mistake, this is OUR fault. The secular policy makers are liberal egalitarians . . . who have succumbed to demands that have no basis in Halakha.

One might think for a moment that if gender segregation was founded in Halakha, then Merav Michaeli would not be opposed. Or, one might wonder how it is that this secular Israeli politician became an expert on Jewish law. But, in any case, her argument here is a common rhetorical move. We see similar disclaimers elsewhere justifying particular arguments or decisions. In France, for example, one argument in favor of a government decision to ban Muslim women and girls from wearing headscarves in public places claimed that veiling has no basis in Islamic law. It is a matter of tradition, but not of theology (see Scott 2007). Therefore, according to some secularists, banning the headscarf is not anti-​ Muslim. It has nothing at all to do with true Islam. Fernando (2014) has shown, likewise, that secularist arguments can be deployed from both directions at once in a precise pincer movement that cuts off other avenues of argument. Because, of course, if the headscarf is not a legitimate part of Islamic theology, it doesn’t count as a religious principle whose protection is guaranteed by secular systems of law; but if it is a legitimate part of the Islamic tradition, then it

148  Israel Has a Jewish Problem represents a patriarchal imposition central to the religion itself, and is as such an automatic violation of a woman’s right to free choice. Some choices cannot, by definition, count as legitimate. Michaeli’s opposition to gender segregation is based on her claim that it has no foundation in Jewish law, suggesting that such behavior is not authentically Jewish. Or, in the very least, not Jewish in the proper ways. The Haredim are backward, unenlightened, and living in ignorance that is imposed by their leaders. They are prevented from achieving autonomous self-​ fulfillment. They cannot, for example, choose which courses they want to study or what career they would like to pursue. Their rabbis “censor” curricular content and keep them from learning about anatomy, evolution, and humanism. And this progressive Israeli feminist politician wants to help them. She wants to lift them out of the darkness and bring them into the light. Christian leaders in Europe have long wanted to do the same. One glaring example came as early as the mid-​1200s under Pope Innocent IV, who extended the legal authority of the papacy to include not only the moral welfare of Christians, but the Jewish community as well. Like other church leaders before him, this pope was suspicious of rabbinic authority. To undermine that authority, he insisted that Jews follow the law of Moses directly and called for the systematic collection and burning of the Talmud. This pope took it upon himself to ensure “the purity of Jewish doctrine and its conformity to the teachings of the Old Testament” (Muldoon 1979: 30), “protecting” the Jews from “heresies” within their own tradition and becoming, in effect, “the overseer of the rabbinate” (Kedar 1979; see Starrett 2006). Michaeli, unlike the Church, has not suggested such a top-​down strategy.12 Instead, she would oversee the rabbinate indirectly and from below, by recognizing each member of the Haredi community as responsible for his or her decisions about how to proceed

12 See Judah Rosenthal (1956) and Chazan, Friedman, and Hoff (2012).

Is Israel a Christian State?  149 in life.13 Such a recognition of individual Haredi “agency” might be understood as appreciating their full humanity. One might suggest that the idea of recognizing individual agency here is a way of treating Haredim with respect. So much of anthropological debate once centered around whether or not anthropologists treat others as though they had agency rather than as passive subjects or victims of exploitative or unjust social, economic, or political systems. And yet such recognition here seems ironically paternalistic:  I recognize your agency and therefore tell you not to follow your leaders, whom you follow blindly without thinking. This kind of recognition is reminiscent of Western feminists who want to “save” women in other parts of the world by telling them which issues should concern them and how they are not free (see Abu-​Lughod 2002). Strictly observant Jewish women do not necessarily share the feminist concerns of outsiders like Michaeli. As Sue Fishkoff (2003) reminds us, Western secular feminists have pointed out what women in traditional Jewish families have long known: modern, Western, secular, capitalist culture has elevated life in the public sphere. Western feminists talk about how women’s work in the home and child-​rearing has been devalued because they do not receive wages for this work and status is often established by work outside the home. Strictly observant Jewish women, like some women in the global south, are likely to say that Western feminists do not share their concerns. Observant Jews may say that women bring new life into the world. They care for and educate the next generation. There is no work more valuable than this (Fishkoff 2003: 247). Beyond the question of which issues may be of special relevance to members of a given community, there is a deeper epistemological issue at stake. The idea of choice expressed by Michaeli signifies a particular kind of freedom that is highly valued in modern, secular, democratic society. It is founded on an epistemology that presumes 13 This is similar to the way colonial governments thought about transforming local cultures, sometimes through educating women. For example, see Starrett (1998: 54–​57).

150  Israel Has a Jewish Problem the universal equality of human subjects, which Talal Asad suggests is specific to secular modernity: individual autonomy is the necessary basis of free choice (2003: 123). Asad notes that modern ideas of human agency are understood to be driven by individual beliefs and desires. That is, by individual choice based on seeking pleasure and fulfilling desires. And seeking such pleasure—​the pursuit of individual happiness—​is considered morally valuable. But individual freedom means that one’s “actions must be the consequence of one’s ‘own will,’ rather than of custom, tradition, or social concern” (Mahmood 2005: 11). Choice is central to modernity. What is specific to this “secular age” is not that religion has faded away, an idea once proposed by secularization theorists. It is, rather, that religion becomes a matter of choice; both which religion one might practice and whether or not to practice, to believe, or be a member of a particular faith group. The idea of choice, then, is not only important to modern ideals of freedom and justice, it is also foundational to the secular itself. But this foundation relies on a specific definition that constitutes “religion” as the sort of thing that one can choose. That definition is clearly at odds with traditional Jewish self-​understandings and it also proved impossible for Jews in Europe who tried to convert—​ choose a different religion—​and yet, as Yossi reminded me, were still persecuted as eternally Jewish. Such a definition also involves understanding religion as only one aspect of a person’s identity, one that can be changed or exchanged. It involves understanding religion as a personal matter, something private, a set of practices one undertakes at home or in church on Sundays. Religion in a secular age should not interfere with a person’s ability to hold a job, to engage in civic activities, or to participate in politics. Religion, understood in this way, can exist in a private sphere outside of economics and politics. The question of whether or not Jewish ways of life could be described by such a category was integral to European debates over the possibility of integrating them into Europe. If Jews could be considered

Is Israel a Christian State?  151 a confessional group, a particular denomination among many, then it might be possible to integrate them into European society. Or at least, that was an issue debated among German intellectuals in the1780s (Raz-​Krakotzkin 2005). But if they lived according to their own law (Mosaic law/​Halakha) then they would always be kept apart, their values necessarily alien to those of European nations, and thus their integration impossible. If being Jewish can be reduced to practicing a particular religion, then by this definition, it too should be a matter of choice. Conversion, then, should always be an option, whether it is conversion to Christianity or to secular nationalism. Scholars often trace these ideas about the moral value of human agency and individual choice to Protestant theology. A central aspect of this theology is the importance attached to conversion. If modern (Western) humanist ideals are premised on the notion that individuals have the capacity to act on themselves and that self-​transformation is a universal good, this idea can be seen as echoing the high value placed on such transformation in Protestant conversion (Keane 2007). Judaism/​Jewishness is fundamentally different in this respect. Jewishness is determined genealogically and conversion is generally discouraged.14 Being Jewish is not usually considered a matter of choice. In that sense, Jewishness should not be considered a “religion” in the terms set out by the history of modern Europe.15 The opposition Michaeli expresses to educational programs aimed at providing accommodations for Haredi students in the academy seems to have slipped from integrating people into the national economy and making them more productive, to ensuring 14 Genealogy, however, does not necessarily mean a “blood” relationship. Think, for example, of how we see ourselves as connected to a particular scholarly, political, or philosophical tradition that is part of our identity. Jonathan Boyarin describes Jewish genealogy in such a manner. “[E]‌verything that defines us,” he writes, “is compounded of all the questions of our ancestors” (in Boyarin and Boyarin 2002: 4). 15 See Daniel Boyarin (2004) on “the Christian invention of Judaism,” which he dates to the 4th century.

152  Israel Has a Jewish Problem individual choice and the ability to seek personal pleasure. Individualism not only connotes a particular kind of liberty that defies some forms of local authority, it also connotes a “dynamic capitalist economic rationality,” which is thought of as “inimical to the supposed torpor of feudal and tribal mentality alike” (Meer 2011: 1). And, of course, individualism has also come to stand for “the modern liberal sense of politico-​juridical right and entitlement” (Meer 2011: 1). If Rachel is correct, then “individualism is not a value” for members of the Haredi community, and community as a whole takes precedence. This idea of community before the individual is also important to nationalist ideologies. But contemporary nationalist ideologies contain a striking contradiction. Individual citizens and families are expected to be willing to contribute funds and fight and die for the nation, and membership in the national community is of primary importance for the allocation of some rights and goods. However, at the same time, individuals are also expected to “fend for themselves.” Amalia Sa’ar has written about economic citizenship in Israel and the idea that civic entitlement is based on individual economic productivity. She points out that this seems strangely contradictory in a locale dominated by collective ethno-​ national sentiments (Sa’ar 2016). The idea of being “Haredi” as opposed to being another kind of Jew is a relatively new phenomenon, and it seems odd within the Haredi world. They are, quite simply, Jews. Rachel, the young Haredi feminist we met in Chapter  4, explained that “Haredim only came about because of secularism. Before that there were just Jews. There were more learned Jews and ordinary peasants. But then after the Enlightenment, the Haredi community developed to protect the Jewish community, to ensure its continuity.” And now, in the modern self-​proclaimed Jewish state, those protectors are seen as a threat to the national economy, a threat that could destroy the country. This is because “[c]‌reating wealth is vital for funding strong armed forces” (Cohen and Scheer 2017).

Is Israel a Christian State?  153 Haredim are also seen to pose a threat to the basic value of individual freedoms, which are also valued separately from economic productivity. Indeed one might argue that individual autonomy must be experienced or understood as separate from contributions to the state economy, otherwise it would be difficult to think of it as a form of freedom at all. According to Keane (2009), modernity is characterized by a certain way of conceptualizing human progress over time. This conceptualization is a story of progress about emancipation and self-​mastery.16 Modernity is not only about technological advances or shifts in governing practices or economic systems. It is, more fundamentally, a story of liberation in which human beings realize their agency and are freed from rigid traditions and false beliefs. According to Keane this is a Protestant story. Whether or not he is correct, that moral narrative of modernity is clearly expressed by Michaeli as her desire to “free” the Haredim from their rabbis, their illegitimate rulers, who prevent them from exercising their true human capacity to transform themselves.

A Christian State: The Time of the Nation-​State The clear distinction that Michaeli makes between the university and the synagogue—​our universities and their synagogues—​is striking. The university is set up here as the ultimate space of innovation, critical thinking, and the development of new and presumably better ideas. The synagogue, on the other hand, is “their” space, part of “their” dark ghetto. This distinction is easily recognizable in its modern, linear temporality (Dalsheim 2011a). The synagogue 16 This idea of modernity as characterized by self-​mastery is the subject of Michel Foucault’s (1988 [1982]) lectures, The Technologies of the Self. Foucault explains how modern power works by shifting responsibility to the individual, such that each person becomes responsible for “governing,” policing and disciplining herself in ways that serve the state and the economy.

154  Israel Has a Jewish Problem stands for religion and tradition, including traditional roles for women, gender segregation, and patriarchal norms. The university stands for enlightened thought and progress, including the progress achieved for women’s rights by the feminist movement. And, it would be good for the nation—​for “us”—​to bring the Haredim out of their dark ghetto and into the university. But in order to incorporate them, the Haredim must abide by our rules for how to behave in such places, otherwise their integration will be a move backward for everyone. “Our” norms include a liberal/​secular form of tolerance for cultural differences. But for Haredim, being Jewish is more than a cultural identity that should be recognized by the liberal state. The foundational episteme of the modern, secular, liberal state on which the Zionist state was premised has room for particular kinds of cultural/​religious difference and room for autonomous individuals. For example, the state of Israel prides itself on guaranteeing religious freedom to all faiths. It claims that in Israel each religious community “is free, by law and in practice, to exercise its faith, observe its holidays . . . and administer its internal affairs” (Lapidot 1998; Israel, Ministry of Foreign Affairs). In a speech to the European Union in 2017, Israeli president Rivlin told his audience that “Liberty, equality, justice, pluralism and religious tolerance, democracy; these are the basic tenets inscribed in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.”17 And yet it seems the state is hard pressed to accommodate those people who would live as “autonomous individuals in a collective life,” including a collective life that is neither limited to national boundaries (Asad 2003: 180) nor synonymous with the national collective. Implicit in this argument is a specific way of understanding time. It is a progressivism that conforms to the “empty homogenous time of a secularized nationalist version of Christian 17 http://​ m fa.gov.il/ ​ M FA/ ​ PressRoom/ ​ 2 016/ ​ Pages/ ​ President- ​ R ivlin- ​ a ddresses-​ European-​Parliament-​22-​June-​2016.aspx.

Is Israel a Christian State?  155 supersessionist temporality” (J. Boyarin 1996:167); that is, the idea among late antique theologians that a new age had dawned in the world, in which a true “spiritual Israel” in the form of Christianity had replaced the “carnal Israel” of the outdated Jews. Zionism takes part in a much broader Western modernist idea that human subjects create history and that human beings are empowered to move continuously forward toward a better future. With the advent of the nation-​state, events were given a place as part of a process that entailed “a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning” (Anderson 1983: 11). Nationalism in general and Zionism in particular were conceived as part of a new era that attests to the achievements of humans taking control of their own lives, whether in the form of wresting their actions from the bonds of tradition, or of consciously choosing to improve themselves by conforming to the expectations and desires of God. The order of nation-​states marks a shift in sovereign power. Rather than being divinely ordained, modern nation-​states attest to the power of human agency. If Christian supersessionism is founded on the idea that the old covenant between God and the Jewish people was superseded by a new covenant, nationalist ideology also conceived itself as a new era of salvation replacing older ideas with a new truth and new freedom. Now, members of the nation could make their own future, their own destiny. With popular sovereignty, the people were empowered to create a new and improved society. Zionism is just one iteration of this new form of salvation. Like similar utopian social expressions of the 19th century, Zionism was based on faith in and admiration of human progress. It was founded on the idea that advances in technology, industry, and science would enable human beings to control their own destiny (Kornberg 1987: vii), end age-​old forms of oppression, and bring satisfaction and self-​ fulfillment (White 2014 [1973]:  286). Theodore Herzl dreamed of a model society, the outlines of which he described in his utopian novel Altneuland

156  Israel Has a Jewish Problem (Old New Land) (Kornberg 1987: viii). The book imagines a technocratic utopia, a socialist dream with all the advantages of capitalism. Upon visiting the Jewish state, Herzl’s characters exclaim: “There’s been a miracle here.” Palestine, which during their first visit was nothing but “a forsaken country . . . empty and deserted, . . . a wasteland,” had since flourished and been transformed into a modern, technologically advanced “magnificent city” (Kornberg 1987: viii). It is no mistake that Zionist ideology imagined that the new state would be a “light unto the nations.” Although Herzl claimed the state he envisioned was not a utopia, because it could and would be realized, his vision did involve all sorts of social and economic transformations. The Jewish nation would allow for a “new Jew” to emerge, freed from the confines of European ghettos and freed of foreign rule. The new Jew would rule himself, solving the Jewish Question of Europe through national emancipation, freedom, and democracy. But this entire understanding of the new, the different, and the transformational that is foundational to Zionist thinking is deeply embedded in a Christian conceptualization of temporality. In addition to its historical and philosophical foundation in Christian ideas about supercession, moral choice, and liberation, Amnon Raz-​Krakotzkin (1994) explains that Zionism is also based on a Christian idea of the end of exile. “Zionism essentially emerged as a reaction against Exile,” seeking a “solution to the Jewish problem” that would counter exilic Judaism. Zionism constructs exile as a long, dark period of suffering and oppression to which the establishment of the modern state would bring an end. The Zionist idea of negation of exile also looks down on Jews in diaspora and, in some cases, conceives of diaspora as a period of atrophy and decline (Zerubavel 1995:18).18 But this conception of exile and its 18 Yitzhak Conforti (2011) points to the variety of conceptions of the “new Jew” among different streams of Zionism. I will take this up in greater detail in Chapter 6.

Is Israel a Christian State?  157 negation through the establishment of the state, according to Raz-​ Krakotzkin, is fundamentally different from traditional Jewish understandings of the term. Exile in traditional Judaism is not primarily geographical or even political. Instead, in traditional Jewish thought, exile is understood as a spiritual sensibility. It is about God having turned away. “In Jewish tradition,” Raz-​Krakotzkin writes, “the concept of exile does not simply refer to the destruction of the Temple or the lack of political sovereignty.” The concept of exile refers to “the very notion that history has ended through God having exiled himself from the world” (Raz-​Krakotzkin 2015:  281). This is why Mordechai, whom we met in Chapter 4, explained to me that Haredim think of themselves as living in exile in Israel. It is an idea, he said, that infuriates most Israelis, but theological exile is not equivalent to being removed from a particular geographic location. Nor is it the same as being denied political rule over a territory. For Haredim, political sovereignty in the modern state of Israel does not amount to the end of exile. This conception of exile not only undermines the Zionist version about return to the Land and to political sovereignty; it suggests a very different way of conceptualizing time itself. If Christian theology understands time as progressive, in which a new truth replaces older beliefs, traditional Jewish understandings of time are quite different. Jews certainly do not accept the New Testament as having replaced what Christians call the Old Testament. They do not share this sense of progress. Indeed, according to Raz-​ Krakotzkin, traditional Judaism denies this sense of linear progressive time. Traditional Jewish temporality is often explained as cyclical rather than linear. Max Weinreich (1980) explains a more complex version of Jewish ways of thinking about history. Traditional Jewish temporality, he writes, is best understood as panchronism, in which Jewish history is conceived as one indivisible whole and exact periodization is not attempted. Events in the

158  Israel Has a Jewish Problem ancient past can be understood through the lens of the present, just as the present can be understood as motivated by the ancient past. What might be taken by progressive thought to be problematic or anachronistic is, in fact, a different form of temporality (Weinreich 1980: 208). According to this analysis, traditional Jewish temporality not only denies the idea of linear progressive time, it also insists that exile continues and that such exile is an existential state that requires specific forms of permanent activity (Raz-​Krakotzkin 2015: 281). It requires the Jews to follow the precepts of the Torah as explicated in the Talmud, the work of repairing the world so that it can be a dwelling place for the Lord. The Zionist idea of the end of exile, therefore, is an internalization or acceptance of a fundamentally Christian temporality. Zionism brought forth a supersessionist “new Jew” to replace the old Jew of the ghettos. “Zionism . . . aspired to create a new man who differed from the traditional one, a Jew who would know the Jewish past but stride forward toward the desired future. The new Jew had to be autonomous and rational, free of the ‘diseases’ of the Diaspora” (Conforti 2011, citing Almog 1992). Christian doctrine constitutes itself by reading the Jews into history as part of the past: backward, primitive, and incapable of understanding their own scripture. But it also as imagines the Jews as a link in the chain that leads toward the Christian scriptures and toward Christian salvation. This is the model of progress on which modernity itself is based (Asad 2003; Keane 2009), superseding previous eras and improving upon them. The Zionist idea is founded on that same moral narrative of human liberation based in self-​transformation, and intending specifically to “educate” a “new Jew.” Merav Michaeli emphasizes this in her argument for continuing this process of replacing the traditional Jew with a new, improved version, an essential part of the process of producing a national majority, “the People” who are sovereign in, and liberated by, their nation-​state.

Is Israel a Christian State?  159

Redemption The irony of Kafka’s short parable that opened this chapter is that the Messiah will only come when it’s too late, once he is no longer needed. This would mean, of course, that he or she is not the Messiah, or that there is no Messiah. Part of the irony is that there will be no Messiah because “unbridled individualism” will make it seem as though we are no longer in need, or that we do not believe in forces greater than ourselves. Our trust in human agency and intentionality will have blinded us. And at that point, on the very last day (or the impossible day after), we will surely be in need of something like a Messiah, but by then it will be too late. This irony also reflects another tension in this chapter that runs throughout the book. It is a tension similar to that described by Saba Mahmood (2005) in The Politics of Piety, concerning a set of underlying values with which most readers will identify. In this chapter, as in Mahmood’s work, that tension revolves around ideas of freedom. Freedom is normative to feminism and liberalism, and feminists are concerned with protecting and promoting women’s freedom. In mainstream versions of (Western) feminism and liberalism, “freedom” has often come to mean self-​realization and individual autonomy:  you can be whatever you want to be! But Mahmood argued that women’s agency, and agency more generally, should not be limited to this Western liberal definition. As anthropologists have always understood, normative terms such as freedom or agency should not be understood as having a universal definition. But living with that insight is complicated. All sorts of problems arise when the freedom of one group interferes with the freedom of another. Such is the case of bringing Haredi students to the university if it means setting up all-​male classrooms, interfering with women’s freedom. More to the point, such is the case of the secular state that understands freedom in a way that does not coincide with

160  Israel Has a Jewish Problem the understanding of those it intends to make free. If Theodor Herzl aimed to free Jews by converting them to Christianity, and if the Zionist state continues to be “Christian” in more subtle and complicated ways, then indeed there might be no one left, no Jew to be redeemed, when the Messiah finally comes.

6 The Jewish Question Again Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross over to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter. Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid yourself of all your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost. —​Franz Kafka, “On Parables”1

1 This translation of “On Parables” was published in an edited collection of Kafka’s work (Kafka 1971c). Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self- Elimination. Joyce Dalsheim, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190680251.001.0001

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Getting Around, Getting By “Joyce, people don’t understand that here every day is the same. We do the same things. There is no weekend here.” I had returned to visit Ezra the goat farmer two years later. He had just gotten off the phone arranging for someone to make a delivery. “What day?” he said to the person on the phone, as if the question made no sense. “Any day, they are all the same.” On the farm there really never is a day off; someone always has to look after the animals. “But wait,” I say. “Do you milk your goats on Saturdays? I thought you can’t milk on Saturdays because then your milk won’t be kosher.” He teases me. “I’ve converted. I’m a Buddhist now. I can milk on Saturdays. It makes no difference.” His little joke reminds me of Judy, the Messianic Jew, who complained that even Jews who practice Buddhism can become citizens under the Israeli Law of Return. But her acceptance of Jesus Christ as the Jewish Messiah makes her ineligible. I say nothing to Ezra about Judy’s complaints. “Come on,” I say. “Really. What about the cameras in the milking parlor and the inspector from the Rabbinate?” “The cameras don’t work,” he says with a mischievous grin. “That’s what I  tell him. People take vacations? Cameras take vacations too! I tell them that the cameras aren’t working and that I have to do this and go there and get this and do that . . . And that’s the way it goes.” “So, they’re looking the other way and letting you get away with this?” I ask. “Everyone knows that it’s all bullshit. There’s nothing Halakhti about any of this. But we have a good rabbi now. He’s a good man. He’s not corrupt. He doesn’t ask for bribes.” Ezra had found a way around the impositions of the Rabbinate, at least in the case of the cameras. But there were other troubles. He had never said anything to me about bribes in the past.

The Jewish Question Again  163 “And before that?” I ask. “Before that? Don’t even ask! They sent the boss. The big rabbi, and I mean BIG. If there was a tenth month [in pregnancy], he’d be in his tenth month! Big, fat, disgusting man. It’s a good thing I wasn’t at home on the day they sent him to check up on things. I  might have grabbed him by the beard the way I  did with the other one.” “The other one? You grabbed a rabbi by the beard?” “Yes.” And, now he’s laughing out loud at the thought of it. It didn’t do him any good. Only caused more problems for him. But he took great pleasure, he says, in grabbing this rabbi by the hair on his chin and twisting. Twisting hard. They come to the farm from the Rabbinate, he explained, and they ask for things. “They say ‘just make a contribution to the rabbi. Take pity on him. He works for the state but his salary is small and he has many children. And his children need things, and he needs to put gas in his car and it’s all very expensive. Take pity on him. It’s a mitzvah.’ That’s what they say.” Ezra tells me the rabbi’s assistants have asked him to “donate” animals to the rabbi. “They ask for goats and for chickens?” “Yes, I give them the livestock.” “What!” I say. “They take goats and bring them to the slaughterhouse and eat them?” “Yes.” “I’m very surprised.” “Why are you surprised? Don’t be surprised. That’s what life is like here.” “I’m not surprised that they take bribes or ask for money. Things like that happen everywhere. But, if they say your farm is not kosher, how can they eat animals that come from here?” With that, he and his wife both burst into laughter. How ridiculous! How foolish I am. How naïve! But I am thinking about all the religious people I know and how they count on these inspections, how they check

164  Israel Has a Jewish Problem and double check to make sure the food they bring into their homes has been certified as kosher. “Everyone knows that none of this has anything to do with keeping kosher. They don’t even look at the milking parlor. I tell them to come in. Come in and look around, check out the place. ‘No, no, it’s fine,’ they say, ‘it’s not important. Now, how about seven goats?’ And I get furious. So then they tell me, ‘no you can’t send your milk.’ And I grab this guy, this one rabbi by the beard . . . They say, ‘ok, fine, send your milk.’ But then they go over my head. They tell the man who does the pasteurizing not to take my milk, otherwise they will shut him down. So, they’ve got me. “Then they send me the rabbi’s helper. He coaxes me. He says ‘come on, take pity on the rabbi, give him something. So, he asked for seven goats? Ok. Give him four.’ ” Stories like this lead many Israelis to suggest getting rid of the official Rabbinate, suggesting the entire system is corrupt and has nothing to do with Judaism. In February 2017 someone on Facebook circulated a set of headlines from an online Israeli newspaper: “The story of the State of Israel in 4 Numbers: 140 inspectors of healthy food (like the FDA) 180 inspectors of insurance and pension funds 17 building inspectors and . . . . 18,000 Kashrut inspectors . . . thank G-​D!”

Then someone commented on the post, writing: “At least Haredim are finally working!” You get the joke, as well as the general senses of both humor and exasperation with which many secular Israelis greet the system. Some of them are convinced that more fully secularizing the state will help complete the liberatory promise of Zionism. The Zionist movement was supposed to save the Jews from persecution, liberate them from oppressive rule, and allow

The Jewish Question Again  165 them to flourish in their own state. The most prominent form of Zionism was also supposed to free the Jews from religious impositions. It was a project that sought freedom from religious persecution and from religion itself. This book has explored the trouble, struggles, and frustrations of being Jewish in the self-​described Jewish state. It has recounted a number of stories demonstrating some of those struggles and illustrated the frustrations and fights among and between Israeli Jews. These struggles and bizarre situations seem to be everywhere; all are subject to them in one way or another. The goat farmer manipulates the system, and it manipulates him in return. Secular Jews try to outsmart the Rabbinate and get around some of the restrictions and rules. At the same time some of the rabbis look the other way, or bend the rules to make things work, or to make a little pocket money on the side. It seems such manipulations or ways of working around the system are not uncommon. One young woman, a high school student I met in a city north of Tel Aviv, told me a story about getting around traditional Jewish laws in order to do a school project. She had grown up with disdain for observant Jews. She finds them impossible, rude, and ridiculous. In the burning heat of Israeli summers, they walk around covered from head to toe, the men in black suits, the women in long, dark skirts. But Noa would have nothing to do with all of that. When it’s hot outside she wears short shorts and a tank top and feels insulted by the ultra-​Orthodox men who cover their eyes or avert their gaze in order to avoid seeing her. “It’s like they think I’m contagious or something,” she says. One time, her history teacher organized a class trip. They took a bus to one of the oldest Jewish cities in Israel and stopped at the cemetery to learn something about the history of the place. Before entering the cemetery they were given instructions by the keeper. There are certain situations that prohibit one from entering a cemetery, they were told. First of all, if your family is descended from the priestly line of Kohanim (that is, if your last name is Cohen or

166  Israel Has a Jewish Problem a variation of it), then you are prohibited from entering the cemetery. The Kohanim are expected to remain pure for their priestly duties—​even though there is no more priesthood, and thus no longer any priestly duties—​and the cemetery is an impure place.2 One of Noa’s classmates was in a bad mood and didn’t feel like participating. Noa said that “even though everyone knew the girl’s family name, and knew she wasn’t a Cohen, she insisted that she was and stayed outside the gates of the cemetery.” Noa rolled her eyes as she spoke about this classmate, who just seemed to be taking advantage of the situation. Another prohibition against entering the cemetery seems quite the opposite of the restriction on members of the priestly class. This one is directed at women who are considered unclean when they are menstruating. Noa said that the keeper at the cemetery explained that if any of the girls were having their periods, they should stay outside the gates. Well, Noa said, this all seemed quite ridiculous and also a little embarrassing. After all, who wants to tell all their classmates such intimate, personal information? As it turned out, Noa did have her period on the day of the class trip. But she was determined to take part and had no intention of telling anyone. So, she walked into the cemetery with two boys from her class who were her partners for the project they had been assigned. Then, another girl called out to Noa, saying, “hey, I thought you had your period!” The boys were embarrassed and said “eww” and “too much information!” But Noa was furious. She told that other girl 2 As has been the case so many times in doing this research, Jewish scholars to whom I have presented these stories often take issue with the facts my informants presented to me. “It’s more complicated than that” they say. “In reality, the rules say this, that, or the other. Your informants are wrong. Halakha says that of course you can milk on Saturday: look, it’s right here in this Google search I just did!” In this case, I was told, these particular rules on Kohanim don’t apply to daughters. Although these scholars may be entirely right and correct in any given case, I would argue that what these reactions really do is to implicate them in the system itself; scholars believe they are commenting upon it, while in fact making these authoritative claims cements their part in it and their subject position with respect to it.

The Jewish Question Again  167 to be quiet. Luckily, no one in charge heard the comment, and Noa was not asked to leave. Here in the Jewish state, people continue to rely on diasporic methods of getting along by getting around the rules. We might have expected that achieving self-​determination would end these kinds of practices. The rules should no longer be foreign. For sovereign citizens in their own nation-​state, the rules should be theirs, core elements of their collective identity and their intimate sense of self. Jews should be able to be Jewish not only in the privacy of the home and in the sacred forum of the synagogue, but in the street as well. But, as it turns out, being Jewish continues to be difficult in part because the “people” imagined in the modern ideal of citizenship are primarily requirements of the state, which must produce them as such (Yadgar 2017). In Israel, the sovereign people are not “Israelis,” they are “Jews.” This conflation of nation and religion in the definition of the people reproduces a racial understanding of belonging at the same time that it requires particular religious rules and rituals whose implementation are made to characterize the national group. People struggle for liberation in many ways. Sometimes by joining groups that promise to free them from materialism and ignorance, sometimes by claiming a place in a dominant ethnic power structure or joining a movement that promises to become one. But sometimes also by bending or avoiding the rules in ways that mimic diasporic techniques of getting along.3 This is not uncommon. People run red lights or drive above the speed limit. They find loopholes in the tax codes to avoid paying taxes. They may go hiking on private property or make their own whiskey at home. 3 Diasporic ways of living are, of course, far more complex than just getting around foreign rules. Indeed living in diaspora also means absolutely playing by those rules. The idea of diasporic living involves mutual care and assistance, a sense of continuity with earlier generations, and in the case of the Jews, engagement with ancient scripture. See Daniel Boyarin’s (2005) description of the Talmud as a “travelling homeland.”

168  Israel Has a Jewish Problem But in this case, the rules in question are not just any rule or law. They are precisely those rules aimed at keeping people Jewish—​producing and maintaining “the people” who are sovereign citizens in this Jewish state.4 In diaspora, Jews might have tried to get by without being marked as Jewish. Or they might have tried to avoid rules specifically aimed at them, even if this involved conforming in public but quietly resisting the moral pressure to assimilate by strengthening an inner sense of identity and solidarity within their own community.5 Perhaps they would have tried to enter the city through a gate not designated specifically for second-​class citizens. But here, in this Jewish state, Jews continue trying to circumvent the rules for being Jewish in the ways that are required of them. It seems ironic that now people rush about trying to be Jewish (which they might desire but is also required of them) and avoid being Jewish (in the ways that are unpalatable to them, but also might be required of them) all at the same time.

The Jewish Question Again The Zionist movement proposed an answer for Jews whose very existence seemed to pose a problem for Christian Europe. It proposed 4 There is a growing literature that deals with the social pressure to have babies in Israel. Susan Kahn (2000) writes about the social pressure on Israeli Jews to have babies, and the use of assisted reproduction technologies there. Rhoda Kanaaneh (2002) writes about how Palestinian women citizens of Israel think about reproduction in relation to pressure to “reproduce the nation.” Meira Weiss (2002) writes about reproduction, body politics and the pressure to give birth to boys and physically-​able-​bodied babies for state projects in Israel. Ellie Teman (2010) writes about surrogate motherhood. These are three examples of the emphasis on reproduction in the nation-​state that build on earlier work, such as Nira Yuval-​Davis (1989) on how women have been constituted in nationalist competitions over demography. 5 Some of these ways of getting by while also resisting are similar to what James Scott (1985) described as “weapons of the weak.” But getting by while breaking the rules can also be interpreted as a sign of strength. It is precisely the more privileged, those who feel a sense of ownership, who break the rules with impunity.

The Jewish Question Again  169 an answer to “The Jewish Question,” which seemed impossible to answer in Europe. While anti-​Jewish sentiment has a very long history, here I  am concerned with its “secular” Enlightenment versions rather than its earlier Christian versions. That “question” consisted of a wide-​ranging European debate from the 18th to the 20th centuries about the status of the Jews. What political and social rights should they be given? What should be expected of them? The Jewish Question did not end with the establishment of the modern state of Israel; instead it has been transformed there. It might seem counter-​intuitive at first to suggest that the Jewish Question or Problem still exists in the state that aimed to liberate the Jews. But if the same values produced both the contours of the modern European Jewish Question and the idea of national self-​ determination as a form of liberation, then we should not be surprised to find it transformed in the modern state of Israel. The Jewish Question in its modern form was a debate about how or whether to include Jews in the polities and societies of Europe. It involved debates over the nature of political rights and duties, the shape of national culture, the grounds for citizenship, the place of religion in the public sphere, and the possibility of modernizing Jews so that they could be assimilated. In one way or another, some aspects of these debates linger inside the Jewish state. The Jews were the test case for the possibility of universal Enlightenment (Arendt 2000 [1948], 2007 [1933]; Bernstein 1996; Raz-​Krakotzkin 2005; Schechter 2003; Suchoff 1997). Haskalah intellectuals, like Moses Mendelsohn, whom we encountered in Chapter 1, hoped to preserve Jewish identity while also integrating the Jews into surrounding society. But others were more concerned with the project of improving human life through universal reason. The existence of the Jew and of particularistic Jewish life posed a problem for the project of liberty. The capacity for human reason was expected to replace all other forms of authority, including religious authority. Human beings would think for themselves and their reasoning would be a liberatory force for

170  Israel Has a Jewish Problem the good of all humankind. But the Jews held fast to their tradition and to rabbinical authority. They posed a problem for the project of Enlightenment, a problem that continues to reverberate today as we struggle with questions of equal rights and justice while also arguing about whether these are compatible with the diversity and cultural difference that result from the liberty to choose one’s values and build one’s community. “[T]‌o a Jew,” Ben Halpern has said, “the problem essentially is this: how can the Jewish people survive in the face of hostility which threatens to destroy us, and, on the other hand, in the face of a friendliness which threatens to dissolve our group ties and submerge us as a whole by absorbing us individually?” (quoted in Lahav 1992: 555). What this means is that beyond the confines of Israel, today’s Jewish problem might also find itself transformed into European anxiety in the face of a growing population of immigrants and refugees who seek liberation from oppressive regimes without foregoing their own religious practices, their collective identity, and their sense of allegiance to that collective self. The “problem” is not only technical or economic, but also a challenge to the very meaning of Europe. Halpern’s “friendliness which threatens us” was directed at individuals, and it represents a further twist in the discussion of assimilation presented in Chapter  4. Modern politics both in Europe and now in Israel assumes the existence of single, atomized individuals on the one hand, and of national collectives, on the other. But such modern national politics has little room for individuals who identify with a collective that is outside that claimed by the state, or, as in the case of Haredim, appear to be potentially anti-​state and anti-​social. If part of assimilation is the assimilation to Enlightenment ideals, then this includes assimilation to the kind of individualism that is suited to the nation-​state. And this individualism, the sense that people can use their own reason in order to make the best choices to further their own interests, has unexpected effects.

The Jewish Question Again  171

Let’s Make it Quick I recently met a colleague at a conference and told him I was going to meet my son’s girlfriend. “Is she Jewish?” he asked. “Well, yes, as a matter of fact she is,” I said. “Then what’s the point of living in diaspora?” he said, with a naughty glimmer in his eye. “The whole point of living outside of Israel is so that you can marry anyone you want!” He was being facetious, of course. But jokes are funny precisely because of the element of truth they contain. In Israel, Jews—​at least officially—​can only marry Jews. End of story. And one of the most important roles of the Rabbinate is to ensure that. There are additional rules as well, like the one that prevented this Israeli colleague from marrying his current wife in Israel. His last name marks him as a member of the priestly caste of Kohanim. She had been married before. A Kohen is forbidden to marry a divorced woman. So he had gotten married in New York. In the Jewish state, Jews are not able to marry non-​Jews or someone whose genealogy is in question. As we’ve seen before, they are also not free to marry as they choose, since marriages performed by Reform or Conservative rabbis are not recognized by the state. Recently, a number of Israeli couples traveled to New York to have Jewish weddings. One couple was same sex, which would never be permissible by the Israeli Rabbinate. Another couple had trouble proving the wife’s maternal Jewish lineage. Her family was from the former Soviet Union, and her grandmother had been given to a Christian family during Stalin’s rule. The bride to be, who had been raised Jewish, also voluntarily underwent Jewish conversion to ensure her Jewish status. But she had chosen a Reform Jewish conversion, and that is not recognized by the official Rabbinate, either (Rohrlich 2017). It is a mitzvah to perform a wedding ceremony, and for Haredim, this involves ensuring the continuity of the Jewish people by preventing “mistakes” from being made. One might argue that this attention to genealogy is a typically diasporic trait. Diasporic

172  Israel Has a Jewish Problem communities maintain control over marriage and kinship to ensure maintenance and reproduction of the community, a practice that is especially important outside the territorial homeland (J. Boyarin 2015). In their own communities, the Haredim are sure about the continuity of Jewishness. The families are well known, as is each family’s lineage. But outside the ultra-​Orthodox community, things become more complicated. Ari and Anna, whom we met in Chapter  3, had been having trouble organizing their wedding. They didn’t care much about Jewish tradition, but wanted to get married in Israel so all their friends and family to could join them, and they wanted their marriage to be officially recognized. That meant they would have to work with the Rabbinate, but things were getting complicated because the food being served wasn’t certified as kosher. So, Ari and Anna started asking around. Their friends told them the name of a particular rabbi who was certified by the Rabbinate to perform weddings. He was an ultra-​Orthodox Jew, but he had grown up in a secular household and understood the “secular mindset.” He found all sorts of ways of bending the rules to make things easier on secular couples. He told Ari and Anna that if they held the wedding ceremony outside the fence of the wedding hall, it wouldn’t matter if the food wasn’t kosher. He didn’t seem concerned about whether or not Anna wore a veil, and things in general seemed to be quite easy going. The couple was pleased. On the day of their wedding, they set up a space between the chicken coops of the petting zoo just outside the gates of the venue. They didn’t mind. It was a little dusty, but there were trees that provided some shade. Anyway, everyone had already begun drinking at the reception before the ceremony and people were all in a very good mood. When the rabbi arrived, though, he seemed to be in a terrible hurry. He rushed the couple through the process of signing the marriage contract with the proper witnesses. Then he paced back and forth, looking at his watch, until the bride and groom were ready. He told a couple of jokes, performed the ceremony as quickly

The Jewish Question Again  173 and briefly as possible, got paid and was on his way. It seems he still had two other weddings to perform on this Friday afternoon, and it all had to be done before sundown when the Sabbath begins. The rabbi made things easier for the young couple and they were glad. Like the rabbis of Tzohar, the alternative rabbinate of the national-​orthodox, he thought it was more important that they have a Jewish wedding than insisting on kosher food being served. And anyway, this rabbi made his living by providing this service, or at least supplemented his income. He did his best to serve his customers, who always paid in cash. The rabbi had pursued his own reasonable interests by providing his services to a secular couple serving non-​kosher food. He has, arguably, violated Halakha in order to keep them Jewish, securing for them an acceptable genealogy for their future children. The couple had pursued their own interests by hiring an ultra-​ Orthodox service provider who was willing to accommodate their wishes, but with whom they would otherwise want nothing at all to do, whose way of life they utterly reject. But ultimately, they aided him in pursuing that way of life. The individualistic rationality of this “modern” cultural-​nationalist system implicates each of the transacting parties in furthering social structures and behaviors they abhor, and which consistently threaten to erode their own ways of life. The reluctance of the ultra-​Orthodox to be productive citizens, contributing to the economy and serving in the military, is not the only reason that secular Israelis generally dislike them. They are considered backward in many other ways. The secular often accuse them of discriminating against women in ways that are not acceptable in modern democracies. Men and women have distinctly different roles, which is considered a thing of the past. And men and women are kept separated, including in synagogue where women are hidden from view behind a partition that also prevents them from fully participating in the service. The ultra-​Orthodox consider homosexuality an abomination, another idea that is

174  Israel Has a Jewish Problem considered backward by many people. They are anachronisms (Dalsheim 2014). So, if they are being pressured to conform, and if such conformity means giving up some of those problematic ideas, the secular in Israel would say this not a problem. On the contrary, it would be a welcome change, a step forward. It would be progress. “Within a generation,” a journalist in Jerusalem told me, “the ultra-​Orthodox community will have changed dramatically.” I heard this over and over again from Israelis across the social and religious spectrum. Everyone expected that the ultra-​Orthodox community will finally “assimilate” to Israeli culture.6 They will become productive citizens, working in all professions. They will interact more with their secular neighbors. They will attend university and they will serve in the armed forces. They will become “new Jews” in line with the Zionist project. In the rest of the world, when such “progress” is achieved in ways that undermine local indigenous cultural groups, it is not uncommon for anthropologists to express either outrage or nostalgic sorrow. Indeed, many people who see themselves as liberal or progressive might mourn the loss of indigenous culture through forces of colonization or modernization, an imperialist nostalgia which forgets or minimizes the fact that it has been their own expansionist, missionizing, capitalist societies that are the cause of such loss (Rosaldo 1989). Anthropologists record local languages and support museums that will protect indigenous cultures, saving them from complete extinction. In these cases, indigenous ideas or practices that might seem abhorrent in modern democratic societies are rarely mentioned. We prefer the pristine yet romanticized versions of tribal peoples. We like to suggest that we moderns could learn from their ways of life. We could learn about mutual support, we could learn not to be wasteful and to respect 6 See Stadler and Ben-​Ari (2003) on changing attitudes toward serving in the military among ultra-​Orthodox Jews in Israel.

The Jewish Question Again  175 and protect the environment. We could learn alternative forms of social arrangements that would be less competitive and less focused on consumerism, accumulation, and on dominating the natural world. We could learn about unspoiled and authentic spirituality. But what about those elements of indigenous cultures that remain politely unmentioned? What about rituals marking puberty in which boys undergo circumcision and the incision of scars on their chest, shoulders, arms, and buttocks? The wounds are filled with sand in order to produce larger scars. Or the case of a young girl whose initiation ceremony happens at the onset of the first menstruation, when scars are incised on her buttocks? She is then “deflowered” by members of her own marriage class. We prefer not to mention that for young Aboriginal men circumcision was often followed by subincision (Basedow 1927). The young man is seated on rock while his penis is split open with a stone knife along its full length on the underside. The penis, once split open, is pressed flat against the rock on which the young man is sitting (Ashley-​ Montagu 1937). So, for example, when Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) wrote about the problems of recognition faced by contemporary Aboriginals in Australia and how these problems interfered with their rights to ancestral land, she very carefully avoided mentioning any such unappealing aspects of Aboriginal tradition. We may ask whether or not we should be concerned about the loss of such practices or of such cultural groups. But at the same time, we should also consider the conditions under which we have expressed these concerns and the circumstances in which we have not. Anthropology has been criticized for avoiding research on those they consider morally repugnant (Harding 1991). In the case of Australian Aborigines and other indigenous communities, it seems that anthropologists have tried to maintain a romantic, exotic representation while hiding, minimizing, excusing away, or ignoring those aspects of their cultures that might be considered repugnant by contemporary liberal standards. But in the case of ultra-​Orthodox Jews, the approach seems quite different. They are not considered

176  Israel Has a Jewish Problem indigenous—​either in Palestine or in Europe or elsewhere—​and the loss of their culture has yet to be lamented by anthropologists. Instead, in the case of Israel in particular, they are seen only as a part of the hegemon, and thus in opposition to Palestinian Arabs who are the indigenous under threat of elimination. I have suggested that the definition of indigeneity be expanded beyond geographical location to include forms of social organization and ways of life that might be threatened. In that case, both Palestinian Arabs and Haredi Jews might be considered indigenous—​one facing elimination through Zionist territorial expulsion, the other through the ongoing forces of Zionist assimilation.

The Abyss Mordechai, whom we met in Chapter 4, spoke about the danger inherent in symbols. He was concerned about the Zionist use of Jewish symbols and the power of those symbols. He spoke to me about the danger of Zionism. “Just like the Enlightenment and Haskalah,” he said, “Zionism is another new invention.” When he uses the word “new” it does not have a positive connotation. Mordechai holds fast to a more traditional Jewish lifeworld. “Like Mendelssohn in Berlin,” he explains, “Zionism is another new invention, another form of assimilation. The point of Zionism was to secularize the Jews. It’s just like Mendelssohn and attempts to assimilate in Europe, but the Zionists are more dangerous because they use symbols that speak to every Jew, that touch every Jewish heart. Like Jerusalem . . . ” They are, then, like another false messiah, who tempt the Jews with ancient symbols that recall centuries of Jewish meaning and prayer. Unlike Mordechai, Gershom Scholem was not an ultra-​Orthodox Jew, but he did know something about false messianism.7 Scholem 7 Scholem was well known for his work on Shabbtai Zvi, considered a false messiah, and more generally for his scholarship on messianism (Scholem 1971).

The Jewish Question Again  177 was a young man when he emigrated to Palestine in 1923, changing his name from Gerhard and rejecting his Berliner parents’ assimilationist background in favor of a version of Zionism that envisioned a binational Jewish-​Arab state. He was a contemporary of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, and as a member of the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, later became one of the world’s most prominent scholars of Jewish messianic thought and mysticism. One of his many correspondents was the Jewish philosopher and mystic Franz Rosenzweig. The two men maintained a tense intellectual friendship, and Scholem admired much of Rosenzweig’s work despite sharply rejecting his confidence in the ability of Jews to flourish in Germany and his understanding of the theological value of diaspora (Shahar 2008: 303). Rosenzweig wrote about Zionism’s plan to revive Hebrew as a living national language. He believed that such a move threatened to rob Hebrew of its depth of tradition and its universal significance. Hebrew’s return to Palestine as a national rather than a sacred language, he wrote in 1926, threatened to transform it into a narrow territorial instrument of “Blood and Soil” (Shahar 2008:  304). Hebrew, Rosenzweig warned, should not be deprived of the diasporic history that had deepened its meaning and demonstrated its universal significance as the language of creation, and turned into a mere means of secular communication. Its very essence as a means of communication about the sacred derived from its having been for so many centuries unheimlich, homeless, strange, and uncanny, a foreign language wherever it was spoken (Shahar 2008: 305). By the end of 1926, Rosenzweig lay incapacitated by a degenerative disease. He was partially paralyzed and unable to speak when he received a letter from Gershom Scholem, who was then living in Jerusalem. The letter was at once a confession and a prophecy. Scholem, who had dismissed Rosenzweig’s suspicions of Zionism, had come to realize after living in Palestine that some of his friend’s warnings about the language of the Zionist project were true.

178  Israel Has a Jewish Problem Transforming sacred language into daily speech could not pass quietly. Some scholars have suggested that Scholem’s letter was a warning about mixing religion and nationalism, that it foretold the dangers of religious Zionism and the militant religious settler movement. But it was more than that. “This country is a volcano,” Scholem wrote. “One speaks of many things that could make us fail. One speaks more than ever today about the Arabs. But more uncanny (unheimlich) than the Arab people another threat confronts us that is a necessary consequence of the Zionist undertaking:  What about the actualization of Hebrew?” Decades later, of course, Israel continues to see “the Arabs” as its mortal enemy. This enemy is uncanny in many respects. It is, in one sense, a mirror image of the Jewish experience in Europe, insofar as the immigration of several hundred thousand European Jews into Palestine and its accompanying expulsion of several hundred thousand Palestinians “introduced the ‘Jewish Question’, hitherto essentially a European question, into the heart of the tragedy of the Arab people of Palestine” where there then “arose the ‘Palestinian Question’ ” (Halevi 1987: 1). In another sense, in terms of the “actualization” of Hebrew (Aktualisierung, its becoming-​current and implementation), Rosenzweig himself had warned that because of Hebrew’s linguistic similarity to Arabic, it might lose its coherence in Palestine, surrounded by the indigenous spoken language (Shahar 2008: 304). But Scholem was struck by another threat, perhaps more hazardous. The mixing of the sacred tongue with everyday nationalism was indeed inherently dangerous. He warned against believing that Hebrew had been secularized, which might fool people into thinking that it could become the neutral basis of identity and debate in a modern polity. “One believes that language has been secularized, that its apocalyptic thorn has been pulled out. But this is surely not true.” The idea that the sacred language could be secularized and made to work like any other national language might be appealing,

The Jewish Question Again  179 but it was also false, because “It is absolutely impossible to empty out words filled to bursting.” The language, its history, its sacred meanings, and its traditional usage would not just disappear. This powerful language, he wrote, threatens to “break out against those who speak it.” We do live inside this language, above an abyss, almost all of us with the certainty of the blind. But when our sight is restored, we or those who come after us, must we not fall to the bottom of this abyss? And no one knows whether the sacrifice of individuals who will be annihilated in this abyss will suffice to close it. The creators of this new linguistic movement believed blindly, and stubbornly, in the miraculous power of the language, and this was their good fortune. For no one clear-​sighted would have mustered the demonic courage to revive a language there where only an Esperanto could emerge. They walk, and walk still today, spellbound [gebannt] above the abyss. The abyss was silent and they have delivered the ancient names and seals over to the youth. We sometimes shudder when, out of the thoughtless conversation, a word from the religious sphere terrifies us, just there where it was perhaps intended to comfort. Hebrew is pregnant with catastrophes. It cannot and will not remain in its current state. Our children no longer have another language, and it is only too true to say that they, and they alone, will pay for the encounter which we have initiated without asking, without even asking ourselves. If and when the language turns against its speakers—​it already does so for certain moments in our lifetime, and these are difficult to forget, stigmatizing moments in which the daring lack of measure of our undertaking reveals itself to us—​will we then have a youth capable of withstanding the uprising of a sacred language? . . . The moment the power stored at the bottom of the language deploys itself, the moment the “said” [das Gesprochene],

180  Israel Has a Jewish Problem the content of language, assumes its form anew, then the sacred tradition will again confront our people as a decisive sign of the only available choice:  to submit or to go under. In a language where he is invoked back a thousandfold into our life, God will not stay silent. But this inescapable revolution of the language [diese unausbleibliche Revolution der Sprache], in which the voice will be heard again, is the sole object of which nothing is said in this country. Those who called the Hebrew language back to life did not believe in the judgment that was thus conjured upon us. May the carelessness, which has led us to this apocalyptic path, not bring about our ruin. —​Scholem 2002 (1926) (reproduced in Derrida 2002: 226–​227)

The letter is astonishing and heartbreaking when read today. Its warnings seem to have come to fruition. It was a warning about the instrumentalization of a sacred language, a process of secularization in much the sense the word bore in the 16th century when King Henry VIII seized the properties of the Catholic Church in the name of the Crown. Galili Shahar (2008: 310) argues that for Scholem, the practical and materialist use of Hebrew is “demonic” in that “the ancient names and seals” carry the plan and the codes of creation itself. In this case, it posed a danger because sacred texts are infinitely open to interpretation. That is their beauty and their purpose. Such texts are meant to be studied, each word and every phrase discussed, interpreted, and reinterpreted. A devoutly religious woman once explained to me that “biblical literalism is in fact another form of blasphemy.” Such literalism, she said, “suggests that the human mind is capable of fully and accurately understanding the meanings or intentions of G-​d. But human beings are finite creatures, and limited in comparison to the divine.” Divine language cannot be profaned, communicating the kinds of limited meanings

The Jewish Question Again  181 conveyed in everyday human interaction. It is like playing with fire to try. Like the image on the coat of arms of the city that rose around Kafka’s endlessly deferred tower of Babel, a closed fist is suspended, awaiting a prophesied day of destruction. Modern theories of language hold that the sounds of words and the forms of letters are nothing more than empty signifiers, and we have the ability to decide or to change what they signify. Scholem’s letter suggests that this is not so simple. Even though Eliezer Ben Yehudah wrote a new dictionary for modern Hebrew, and even though there is now an Academy of the Hebrew Language that comes up with new Hebrew words to suit modern lives, the ancient sacred meanings attached to these symbols do not just disappear. We cannot just will them away. The idea that humans could rationalize the sacred, tame it, control it, and thus bring about a better future was mistaken (Derrida 2002: 211). It is part of a deeply held faith in human agency, in our power to dominate and domesticate the world, to control nature, or even to pretend that we can engage in the act of creation itself.8 Jewish folklore and tradition tell of such dangerous acts of creation and demonstrate the power of the sacred language through stories of the Golem. Learned and pious men, it is said, have used the secret names of God generated by arranging and rearranging the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, “the signatures of all creation . . . the structural elements, the stones from which the edifice of Creation was built,” (Scholem 1965: 168) in order to animate a crudely formed clay facsimile of a man, the Golem. Just as Adam, formed of earth, was brought to life by the breath of God, this creature was brought to life by the repetition of His names in ritual, by 8 Ghassan Hage (2017) writes about domestication as one way of making ourselves feel at home in the world. Hage contends that our propensity toward domestication is evident not only in our relationships with the non-​human world, but also in human forms of dominating each other. James C. Scott (2017) writes about how human domestication of animals and plants—​in particular of grains—​in turn domesticated us.

182  Israel Has a Jewish Problem the word Emet (Truth) emblazoned upon its forehead, or by the Holy Name, written on a slip of paper, placed on its tongue. But such acts of creation were inherently dangerous both spiritually and physically (Scholem 1965: 191). Although tremendously strong, the Golem lacked the power of speech. In medieval tales, it acted as a household servant, and on the eve of Shabbat, its creator would allow it a day of rest by removing the Name from its mouth, or erasing the first letter from its forehead, upon which it would revert to lifeless clay. But one week, the stories go, the rabbi who had created him forgot to set the Golem to rest. When Shabbat came, it went wild, destroying his house, running wild in the streets, or in some versions causing havoc in the synagogue. In some tales the Golem grew and grew to gigantic proportions, causing his maker to fear “that he might destroy the world” (Scholem 1965:  201). Although brought to life by human use of the sacred language, this creature of earth “becomes the repository of enormous tellurian forces which can, on occasion, erupt” (Scholem 1965:  193, 202). Erupt, perhaps, like a volcano. Kafka also wrote about the Golem; just once, in a fragment in his diaries of 1916. In Kafka’s version, though, the danger of creation—​using the Holy Names to animate a crude lump of clay—​ was transformed. The creator himself is rendered mute, incapable of uttering the life-​giving words. He labors ceaselessly on the fine details into which he tries to mold his clay, rather than understanding the true power of the language he should have had at his command (Dekel and Gurley 2017: 541). “For here,” Scholem wrote about a far earlier version of the story, “the man himself returns to his element; if he makes a mistake in applying the instructions, he is sucked in by the earth” (Scholem 1965: 191). Sucked in, perhaps, by the false promises of human interventions and manipulations in attempts to control our own fate. There seems to be no way to engage in this second creation without either bitter frustration or apocalyptic terror. Scholem’s warning, then, the prophetic aspect

The Jewish Question Again  183 of his letter to Rozensweig, can be understood as pointing to the inherent danger in human acts that attempt to intervene in God’s work, the work of creation. In Chapter 5, I raised the question of why a Jewish state would not adopt existing spoken Jewish languages like Yiddish or Ladino or other languages Jews have long spoken in diaspora, and instead would opt for secularizing the sacred language of scripture. Some have suggested that Yiddish was the language of the ghetto, representing the weakness and femininity that Zionism sought to transform in the New Jew who could proclaim sovereignty in the new Jewish state (D. Boyarin 1997; Seidman 1997). Such decisions—​transforming a people, creating a “new” model to replace the traditional Jew—​are not without consequences. Scholem suggested that the consequences should have been foreseen in the very messianic nature of the sacred language of scripture. The tension between political and religious speech could be unfurled in the conflation of worldly aspirations with mystical fervor (Suchoff 1997). This tension, this conflation, was inherent in Zionism itself. The twin ideas of a land promised by God to the Jews and the human desire for political sovereignty and self-​ determination contained an inherent contradiction. Scholem had, at first, favored a different Zionism, one that would involve a cultural revival of the Jewish people but that did not involve Jewish sovereignty. For Scholem, language was an essential element of Jewishness. His concern that “our children no longer have another language” is telling. The secularization of the sacred language includes an erasure of multiple Jewish heritages, the languages of diaspora. The sacred language is and should be open to endless interpretation. That is central to rabbinic Judaism and key to an understanding of the core of Jewishness as debate and interpretation—​as Simona suggested in Chapter  5. If generations of debate and interpretation live inside sacred language, then attempting to bring forth a

184  Israel Has a Jewish Problem messianic future by rationalizing the sacred would be inherently dangerous. Its danger lies in the attempted erasure, which cannot succeed. This, I  think, is what Scholem warned against when he expressed his concern over the false perception that Hebrew could be emptied of its sacred meaning and power and made a language of the street, a language of the bureaucrat, a language of the merchant and the propagandist (see Derrida 2002). Modern political Zionism, the attempted secularization and human actualization of messianic scripture, unfurls a power contained in the sacred language itself, and like a golem, takes on an unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable life of its own. The unleashing of the golem of Zionism—​the human endeavor to protect the people by using the sacred language as a tool for bringing about a secularized but still messianic future—​has serious outcomes. One might extend Scholem’s work even further as a broader warning against believing that rationality necessarily leads toward human liberation (Scott 1998) or a warning against fetishizing the new. While Scholem might have understood such secularization as impossible or dangerous, warnings about the worship of rationalization are also found in the work of his colleagues in the Frankfurt School. Walter Benjamin warned against following the “automaton of history” that seemed to be pulling human beings ever forward under the guise of progress. It is a mistake, Benjamin warned us, to accept the idea that history necessarily moves always toward a better, more enlightened, more just, and liberated future, for theology sits, hidden, beneath the secular figure of progress. It has to be kept out of sight, forgotten, in order to maintain our faith in our own ability to change the world. Modern nationalism is a secularization of traditional ideas of salvation. It is a form of civic religion—​a new messianism. Scholem wanted to remind of us that such messianism is always “pregnant with catastrophes,” always on the verge of chaos. Which brings us back, again, to one of the major themes of Kafka’s writing.

The Jewish Question Again  185

Chaos Israel’s chaotic struggles over Jewishness result in seemingly endless Kafkaesque situations. We find Jewish Israelis who are prevented from earning overtime wages because Jews are forbidden to work on the Sabbath. We’ve seen surveillance cameras spying on goat-​ milking to make sure the milk can be certified kosher. We find women who want to pray with the Torah at the Western Wall but are prohibited from doing so because the rabbi in charge decided that such behavior contradicts Jewish tradition. And Israel might be the only country in the world where couples cannot get married by a Reform rabbi. At the same time, we find observant Jews struggling to hold on to their practices and way of life and devote themselves to studying the Torah, while new laws press them to serve in the military instead. We find Jewish communities in Israel who have made local economic arrangements to care for people, while an ever-​encroaching state tries to undo what they call the “shadow” economy. But all this is not just chaos. This apparent unruliness does two things. First, it keeps people busy with immediate problems, a process I have elsewhere described as “busyness as a form of hegemony” (Dalsheim 2007). Second, it has the tendency to disguise a set of powerful processes that seem to clearly be moving in a particular direction. When I wrote about busyness previously, it was to describe a way of being among a particular group of middle-​ class Israelis for whom being busy was itself a value. Being busy marked people as important, having goals, working hard, and living life to its fullest. Even though people complained about being too busy, it was clear that busyness was an admirable characteristic. Beyond this, however, busyness also worked to keep people from thinking too deeply or from having the time to engage critically with issues of concern to them. Even those individuals who develop a critical consciousness may be so burdened with life

186  Israel Has a Jewish Problem requirements that they become incapacitated to struggle against that which they oppose. Busyness sometimes seems nearly invisible, so taken for granted that it is hardly recognized. People always seem to be busy with something else, some immediate concern, some problem or issue, or everyday activity, all the while they are also busily trying to be what they have to be—​whether or not they choose it—​in this case, Jewish for the Jewish state. Part of the power of this busyness has to do with the indeterminate quality of Jewishness.9 The rules seemed to change haphazardly, and people find themselves having to catch up with new and changing requirements or to protest against them. For the secular, the rules for being Jewish, for producing kosher produce, for proving eligibility to marry seem to get more complicated, more demanding, or maybe just different from what people had already become accustomed to. The indeterminacy keeps them rushing about, either to comply or to find ways around the rules. For the Haredim, the rules that had been agreed upon prior to the establishment of the state began to shift and erode. They now found themselves rushing to the streets, organizing and protesting, all in addition to studying Torah and dealing with the mundane issues of everyday life. Within the context of busyness and the indeterminacy of ever-​ changing or unreliable rules, most people focus on or address one problem at a time. But when we do this, we fail to take notice of the bigger picture in which the problem takes place. We locate “the problem” at the immediate site of irritation. We might say we’re in love and want to get married without leaving the country. We are not observant Jews and are irritated by the Rabbinate’s rules. Maybe, in the meantime, the rule that accepts foreign marriage certificates 9 The complex nature of contemporary Jewishness more generally might also be considered a kind of indeterminacy. For example, people might ask if “Jewish” refers to a religion or to an ethnic group. The answer would be, yes and yes. But here I am focusing on Jewishness as central to sovereign citizenship and the ways its indeterminacy is compounded by state rules and requirements.

The Jewish Question Again  187 will have changed and getting married in Cyprus or New York will no longer be an option. So we seek a rabbi who will bend the rules, or one from a group such as Tzohar. And maybe we end up running directly into the arms of a politics we abhor. One that seems more palatable at first, enticing, simpler. Or maybe we are just not interested in politics as much as we are interested in getting married! Maybe we’re a young married couple and we need a place to live. We live the Torah life and plan on having a big family, lots of children. We belong to a community which, at base, has always opposed the Zionist project. So, what difference does it make to us if we live inside Israel proper or in the Occupied Territories? We need affordable housing. That is the problem at hand. Or maybe our local government has suffered from corruption. That is the charge that has been levelled against the former mayor of a town south of Jerusalem, a man who represented the Mizrahi ultra-​Orthodox party, Shas. A woman from the national-​religious community runs against him and wins. Feminists of all stripes—​ from the left to the right wing of politics—​support her candidacy. She runs on a platform of transparency, and she is an educator who wants to help transform the schooling of Haredim. She wins the election, and feminists rejoice. They support women in politics in general; that was the issue at hand. Never mind her national-​ religious affiliation. One problem at a time. She wins the election because a majority of Haredim also voted for her. Never mind that she wants to change their education system and laborize their men. The former mayor might have been Haredi, but he was corrupt! That was the problem at hand. Responding to such situations as immediate annoyances and as a set of separate issues rather than conceiving of all these struggles as part of a larger set of processes, is part of how power works by separating one thing from another. Dealing with each isolated incident may prevent people from seeing the larger picture or realizing that some of their decisions may actually support forces they oppose. Unleashing religious messianism through

188  Israel Has a Jewish Problem a translation into political action ultimately works toward the production of a particular Jew for the Jewish state at the peril of others. That is precisely the power of the appearance of disorder and unruliness.10 Scholem did not believe that the assimilationist route of his parents was the best option for the Jews, and instead supported Zionism despite its danger from the hubris that comes with believing in the absolute power of human beings to transform the world. Yet he hoped that “the carelessness which has led us to this apocalyptic path, [would] not bring about our ruin.” Can ruling over another people, visiting on them the violences one’s own people has endured, and at the same time promoting a militant nationalist Jewishness at the expense of the traditional forms of Jewishness of the diaspora, be understood as tantamount to what Scholem warned against as the Jews’ “own ruin”? How can we make sense of what appears, at first glance, to be nothing but chaos? Very often scholars try to tame that chaos by describing it in terms of a religious/​secular divide, or as a struggle between the left and right wings of politics, or maybe both. Such descriptions may not be inaccurate, but they miss something much more fundamental about the way in which power works through people’s everyday struggles. When these struggles are understood as religious versus secular or right versus left, people become preoccupied with promoting one side or the other. In Israel such moves are not uncommon. For example, in 1974 a political party called Shinui (Change) was established on a specifically anti-​ religious platform. Today, the centrist political party Yesh Atid runs on a platform that opposes “religious coercion,” which has recently

10 This kind of disorder and unruliness is in some ways comparable to how totalitarianism can work by keeping people distracted, busy, and upset. In the case of totalitarianism it is an intentional strategy. See Masha Gessen (2018) for a concise explanation of this point. In the case presented in this book the disorder is the result of the political structure rather than an intentional program, a structure that works in concert with broader global political and economic structures.

The Jewish Question Again  189 gained a great deal of attention due to a recent law enforcing the closing of places of business on Shabbat. Looking at the history of Israel, people often say the country was founded as a left-​wing socialist movement, but later took a turn to the right. In 1977, Menahem Begin became prime minister of Israel, ending the era of Labor Party dominance. For the left wing of Zionism, that “turn to the right” combined with what they see as the increasing influence of religious parties is the major problem their country faces. Thus, problems like religious impositions on secular life or the political power of the religiously motivated settlers could be solved if only the Labor Party could regain control. Some Israelis try to get around the religious impositions by trying to elect leaders from more left-​leaning parties. But all these moves take place within the chessboard of an Israeli nationalism that has tried, in vain, to secularize Hebrew without removing its apocalyptic thorn, without undoing the underlying relationship between “religion” and “nation” that is inherent in the Jewish state. The issue is not that either the secular or the religious are winning or losing, as Ben-​Porat (2013) suggests. The issue is, instead, the triumph of Zionism and the kinds of “new Jews” it promotes. Yitzhak Conforti (2011) writes that while all streams of Zionism rejected the diaspora and saw a need to create a new Jew, each imagined a different type that reflected its ideology. The political stream of Theodor Herzl imagined an independent and politically sovereign Jew. The new Jew would establish new institutions, premised on Enlightenment ideals and Western culture. A more radical stream of Zionism imagined a “new Hebrew” who would be “[d]‌aring to the point of chutzpah, courageous to the point of risking his life, defending his opinion to the point of fanaticism, fanatic to the point of cruelty—​these are the characteristics that are praiseworthy and sacred to the revolution. (Yaacov Cohen 1912 in Conforti 2011: 95) Such descriptions seem to focus on power—​the power to decide for others and the strength to enforce those decisions. This description seems suited to the new

190  Israel Has a Jewish Problem nationalist, but what would make this new Jew specifically Jewish is not clear. The socialist stream of Zionism spoke out against diaspora as a dark time of spiritual atrophy. The Judaism of the Talmud that developed over generations in diaspora was derided as lacking in creativity or progress (Conforti 2011: 96). The new nationalist Jew would aspire to live according to universal values. Again, it seems the new nationalist would be Jewish in name only, but would seek to mimic European nationalists. But there were also more moderate versions of socialist Zionism that did not promote the “hatred and degradation” of diaspora religious traditions (Conforti 2011:98). While there were multiple Zionist visions, the religious Zionist stream now seems strongest. Religious Zionism did not disconnect from the Jewish past but sought to transform Judaism. Religious Zionism accepted or tolerated the secular, whom they saw as playing a role in bringing about the redemption. But one of the foremost leaders of the religious Zionist movement in Israel, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, understood Jewish nationalism (Zionism) as a religious movement. The new Jew would be revolutionary, but would also be religious in character (Aran 1997; Bokser 1978; Lustick 1988; Conforti 2011). This is the New Jew of the national-​ religious today, the pious, armed, religious nationalist. It is the New Jew for whom Israeli Independence Day is a religious holiday, celebrated in synagogue with special prayers, and for whom service in the armed forces is a mitzvah (Feige 2009: 56).11 Religious Zionism transforms Jewish theology as it produces this New Jew who actively intervenes in God’s plan against the warnings of traditionally observant Jews. This version of the New Jew provides the religious 11 In a recent dispute with the Israeli military, an influential rabbi of the nationalist-​ religious sector, Shlomo Aviner, warned pious nationalists against serving in mixed-​ gender army units. Although serving in the army is a mitzvah, serving together with women in the same unit is a transgression. Other rabbis disagree with this interpretation and promote all service in the military. See Ben-​Kimon (2018).

The Jewish Question Again  191 ideology for the Zionist colonization of Palestine and for the geographical expansion of the state. The right-​wing revisionist version of Zionism emphasized the strength and power of the New Jew, modeled after the character Samson in the Bible, but also emphasizing liberalism and individualism (Naor 2011). This powerful New Jew was to be a soldier who could take the land and rule over it. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a leader of the revisionist stream of Zionism, believed that “the formation of the new Jew was intricately related to the activist military approach” (Conforti 2011: 102). This idea was sparked by the pogroms against Jewish communities in Russia where Jabotinsky was born and raised. In Russia, he established Jewish defense organizations to protect against these attacks. The idea of a strong Jew who could defend himself remained. It continued with the pre-​state paramilitary group, the Irgun, which formed the basis of the Likud Party of Menachem Begin. Today, the Likud Party led by Benjamin Netanyahu remains in power at the center of a right-​wing ruling coalition made up of secular and religious parties. Ultimately neither secularism nor religion triumphs.

Passengers This book opened with a line from a book of essays by Lord Acton that Hannah Arendt had underlined: “The passengers existed for the sake of the ship.” The state requires citizens, and the nation-​ state requires “the people” who will have popular sovereignty. The passengers exist in their particular form for the sake of the ship and its voyage. This is what I mean when I say that Zionism wins and Jewishness loses. Jewishness in all its varieties, the essence of being Jewish, asking questions and finding endless interpretations of the language of sacred texts, becomes limited by the contours of nationalism, by the needs of the state and its projects.12 Jewishness

12 See Starrett (1998) on “putting Islam to work” for the state in Egypt.

192  Israel Has a Jewish Problem is put to work for the Zionist project and is chiseled—​through numerous and ongoing processes—​into a suitable form. The ultra-​Orthodox perform the task of upholding the ideal of the Jew defined by genealogy, the racialized Jew who fills the designation “the people” for the nation-​state. At the same time those ultra-​Orthodox Jews, who see themselves as the guardians of Jewish tradition, are despised by the secular and more liberal Jews for what are seen as their backward ways, for their exemption from Zionist modernity, and for their exemption from primary allegiance to the state. And so, secular and liberal Jewish Zionists also participate in disciplining the Haredim. In the meantime, the national-​religious have managed to recombine “religion” and “nation” in ways that suit state purposes. But their way of being Jewish ignores the purported universal values (e.g., human rights, Palestinian civil and national rights, etc.) of the secular leftists, at the same time as it ignores the “purely” religious but narrowly drawn ritual obligations of the Haredim, and their disdain for the idea of human sovereignty. The national-​religious settlers are “modern” despite being illiberal and are “religious” despite embracing the human role in bringing an end to history and planning the details of rebuilding the Temple. But they also serve state purposes. They risk life and limb for territorial expansion. While this seems to be their choice, their particular theology only exists because of the nation-​state. It might seem as though there is a religious vs. secular divide in Israel, but religious people are also in conflict with other religious groups. And sometimes it seems like a chaotic struggle of all against all for the character of the state. But in the end the multiple kinds of conflicts act to divide and distract people into their own arguments and alliances, focusing their attention in ways that benefit settler colonial processes. Zionism, as the political project at the heart of the Israeli state, acts as a catalyst that creates proper Israeli subjects indirectly, elusively, and almost by accident. It does this through having drawn together the world’s Jews into a tiny, embattled state with the

The Jewish Question Again  193 promise of liberating them, only to present to each new immigrant and to each new generation the appearance that it is other kinds of Jews who are the obstacle to that liberation. Other kinds of Jews are the cause of disunity, of immorality, of oppression, of economic danger, of military unpreparedness, of demographic collapse, of spiritual catastrophe. In trying to remain Jewish in their own ways, each busily adapting to and working to avoid changing regulations, requirements, inquiries, inspections, conscription, mobilization, and expectations, Israelis each come to view those others as the sources of their troubles. But at the same time, each contributes in some way to the worst elements of the opponents they abhor, merging in a long, slow arc, in the direction of the national-​ religious movement. The end result, this “new Jew,” is a kippah-​ wearing, militaristic religious nationalist, a peculiar culmination of Jewish history combining the racial consciousness of 1920s Europe, the armed territorial messianism of Zionism’s socialist founders, the piety of the orthodox, and the skill at recognizing, avoiding, ignoring, or manipulating formal systems of power that characterizes the Israeli ethos. In the end, Jewishness loses because the multiple ways of being Jewish are diminished through creating these ideal passengers for the ship.

Before the Law, Again and Still Just south of Jerusalem is a small town called Beit Shemesh, where many ultra-​Orthodox Jews live. Some people describe this place as “extremist.” It is primarily a Haredi community, a place where the honor and freedom of men and women is understood to be best served through following the precepts of the Torah and by maintaining modesty in dress and through gender segregation. There are signs on the street designating where women should walk and where men should walk and signs that warn against immodest dress.

194  Israel Has a Jewish Problem In December of 2017, the Israeli police came to this town and, in a show of force—​sometimes raised two stories in the air on hydraulic boom lifts to reach the huge printed banners that had been hung from the roofs of apartment buildings—​tore down those signs. Hundreds of local residents came out to protest a police action that might be described as a nationalist move toward suppressing local community values in the name of creating a homogenous nation. This is not to suggest that all members of the community were in agreement. Indeed, there was a great deal of local controversy. A court case had been filed by a number of women from the same town against the municipality of Beit Shemesh. Nathan, a Haredi resident of Beit Shemesh, explained the problem to me this way: “Feminism is good,” he said. “We should give women honor and power. We should allow them more space in the synagogue. But if it comes from a desire to change the family, the genders, kodesh, purity, then that is not alright.”

“The Reform Jews come and protest here,” he tells me. “There’s a synagogue across the street, and when the men come out they don’t want to see women gathered there. So, there’s a sign that asks women not to gather there. And the Reform movement took the mayor of the town to court. “He’s Haredi,” he says, referring to the former mayor, “and he’s also not very smart . . . So, the mayor tried to please those who were protesting, and he took down the signs. That just upset people more! So they put up bigger signs!!!” Nathan sighs and hopes I will understand that “feminism is fine. But provocation is not the way.” The town has long been the site of struggles between different groups of observant Jews, some more strict than others. The municipality lost the court case, but for years the mayor had ignored the ruling and allowed the signs to remain (Yahav and Friedson 2017). He explained that if the signs were taken down, people might protest. Based on what Nathan told me, the mayor might have been

The Jewish Question Again  195 right. There could be rioting in the streets. But the court decided, and finally the police were sent in. Whether or not one agrees with gender segregation in public, these signs were an expression of how some residents understood the norms and ethics of being Jewish. But other citizens objected, and the state took their side. Alternative interpretations of what it means to be free—​free to be Jewish—​were unacceptable. There could be only one law and only one interpretation. Unlike the opposition to gender-​segregated classrooms in Israeli universities, here it seems, the law was being imposed on the local community in negation of local norms and traditions. Such imposition might be the final gate “before the law,” like standing at the entrance of the old gated city of Berlin and being expected only to enter through the entrance designated for livestock. These observant Jews can be Israeli only if they can contain their traditions to private spaces and be Jews in the synagogue and men and women in the public sphere. They are allowed to practice their gendered prejudices themselves but advertising them as written cautions in public space was too much, an encroachment on the right of the state to legislate social values. The issue here is not so much about gender segregation as it is about who gets to decide, and how such decisions can be understood in light of the promises of religious freedom and self-​determination, of liberation and the end of oppression by others. The local community was deeply divided over the signs, but ultimately the decision was not theirs. Zionism is a modern national movement and a settler form of ethno-​nationalism that favors Jews over Arabs, promotes settlement and territorial expansion, and strives to create a “new Jew” who advances its economic interests which supports its powerful military. Valuing instead modesty and humility, and continuing to live the Torah life rather than one suited to modern democracy and capitalist expansion, seems an unwelcome way of being. In a recent article in the Israeli newspaper HaAretz, a national-​religious man speaks about the secular Jew, the hiloni, and says: “By what right

196  Israel Has a Jewish Problem does he reside in this country? What’s he looking for here? He is a total goy, nothing but an ‘occupier,’ as they call it in HaAretz. We are offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the ones who observe Shabbat and fast on [Yom] Kippur, who have come to redeem the land” (Glazer 2017). “Religion” triumphs when it serves nationalist purposes, not because religion wins over secularism, but because state projects are triumphant. The man quoted above is railing against particular secular Jews, the ones known for reading the politically progressive newspaper, HaAretz. There are also right-​wing secular Jews who support the expansion of settlements. But his anger is directed at those secular Jews who oppose the military occupation in the territories Israel conquered after 1967. The man turns the word “occupier” against those who use it in reference to religious settlers in the Occupied Territories. What now becomes clear is that Zionism wins in its militaristic, expansionist version. It triumphs over both traditional Judaism and against its own socialist varieties. This should come as no surprise to analysts who have understood Zionism as a settler colonial project from the beginning. If Patrick Wolfe (1999) was right, then settler colonialism is an invasion that is best understood as a structure, not an event. That structure, once firmly in place, continues to fortify itself, displacing local indigenous populations and attempting to transform other indigenous cultural groups through processes of assimilation. And if assimilation is best understood as another form of the elimination of a people, then Zionism is inherently self-​ destructive. It destroys the people for whom it was established by conflating sacred practice with national identity, reproducing the political structures of exclusion that led to the near destruction of the Jewish people in Europe and the conditions in which that people could claim the need for sovereign self-​determination as a means for survival.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.   agency, 138, 148–​52, 159. See also and intermarriage, 116n14 emancipation; freedom; and the Jewish Question, 49–​50 liberation; religious freedom of Jews in Europe, 110–​11, 112–​ Agnon, S. Y., 133 13, 114–​15, 116–​17,  150–​51 Agrama, Hussein Ali, 45n2, 50–​51 into national culture, 10–​11 Agudat Yisrael, 35–​36 resistance to forces of, 117–​18 Ahad HaAm, 113n10 of ultra-​Orthodox Jews, 110–​11, aliyah, xvii 115, 120–​25, 128, 174–​76 Althusser, Louis, 64–​65 Zionism and, 113 Anderson, Benedict, 9–​10 autonomy, individual, Anidjar, Gil, 7n4, 31, 37–​39, 39n16 149–​50,  151–​52 anti-​colonial nationalism, Aviner, Shlomo, 190n11 10n7,  125–​26   anti-​Semitism, 37n14, 67, Baker, Cynthia, 36n13 84–​85,  136–​37 Bar Shalom, Adina, xv–​xvii anti-​Zionists, xiv–​xv, 6–​7,  114 Bauman, Zygmunt, 112n9 Arabic,  101–​3 Begin, Menahem, 189, 191 Arab-​Jew, 7n4, 89 Beit Shemesh, 193–​95 Arabs Belzer Hasidim, 61–​62 Jewishness defined by, 27n5 Belzer Rebbe, 61–​62 viewed as Israel’s enemy, 178 Ben Gurion, David, 35–​36, 136 Arendt, Hannah, 1–​2, 6–​7, 33, 48–​ Benjamin, Walter, 177, 184 49, 89, 112–​13 Ben-​Porat, Guy, 36n13, 40n20, 189 Asad, Talal, 6n3, 37, 59–​60, Ben-​Zvi, Yitzhak,  132–​33 138–​39,  149–​50 Bhabha, Homi, 126 assimilation,  4–​7 Binational,  176–​77 acceptance through, 92 Boyarin, Daniel, 7n5, 37, 54n12, as comparable to genocide, 116 117n18, 151n15 and cultural elimination, Boyarin, Jonathan, 7n5, 38, 84, 92n2 105,  127–​28 117n17, 118, 151n14 exile and, 113–​14 Buck-​Morss, Susan,  38–​39 impact on European Jews, 85 Buddhism,  8–​9 to individualism, 170 Bunzl, Matti, 38​

216 Index Busbridge, Rachel, 4 busyness,  185–​87   cemetery, restrictions on entering,  165–​67 chaos,  185–​91 Chatterjee, Partha, 10n7, 126 children pressure to have, 168n4 protecting, from secularism,  113–​14 Chosen, The (Potok), 63–​64 Christian Zionism, 136–​37 Christianity Israel as Christian state, 136–​39 and temporality of nation-​state,  153–​58 collective identity, 6–​7, 167, 170 colonialism, 118, 125–​26. See also settler colonialism Conforti, Yitzhak, 189 conscription, 62–​63, 99 conversion, 151 creation, acts of, 181–​83 cultural elimination, 105, 127–​28 currency,  131–​33   Dalberg-​Acton, John Emmerich Edward,  1–​2 Dati /​ Dat’im /​ Dosim,  xiv–​xv Dayan, Yael, 81–​83 decolonization, 11 Derrida, Jacques, 179–​80, 181,  183–​84 diaspora, 92–​94, 102, 105, 118, 156–​ 58, 167n3, 176-177, 183, 188–190 disengagement, 103n6 domestication, 9, 181n8 draft, military (conscription), 62–​63,  99   education, 95–​96, 140–​46, 148,  151–​52

elimination, 175–​76, 196 self-​elimination,  124–​25 El-​Or, Tamar,  146–​47 emancipation. See also agency; freedom; liberation; religious freedom and human rights, 89 and the Jewish Question, 49–​50 questions regarding, 46–​47 through assimilation, 112–​13 Enlightenment, 12, 83, 97, 105 Essays on Freedom and Power (Dalberg-​Acton),  1–​2 Ethiopia, Jewish immigrants from,  27–​28 Europe assimilation of Jews in, 110–​11, 112–​13, 114–​15, 116–​17,  150–​51 the Jewish Question in, 38–​41,  49–​50 Jews as indigenous to, 116–​17, 118 productivization of Jews in, 97 secularization and assimilation of Jews in, 85 exile, 7, 15, 113–​14, 117n19, 156–​58   Fanon, Franz, 126, 11n8 feminism, 148–​49, 159–​60, 194 Fernando, Mayanthi, 39, 50, 147 Fishkoff, Sue, 149 Foucault, Michel, 12–​13, 153n16 France, banning of headscarves in,  147–​48 freedom, 159–​60. See also agency; emancipation; liberation; religious freedom Friedman, Menahem, 139n6, 140n8 ful gaz b’neutral,  14–​15   Galis, Yisrael, 123 Gaza Strip, 103n6 Gellner, Ernest, 9–​10

Index  217 genealogy and determination of Jewishness, 54–​55,  151 and "questions of our ancestors" (J.Boyarin), 149n13 and rules governing marriage, 171 genocide, 105, 116, 124–125 Glick, Yehuda, 71–​72, 73–​75 goats. See also kosher food in exchange for kosher certification,  163–​64 goat surveillance, 42–​44 goat surveillance and Halakha, 43, 162 milking, and Sabbath restrictions, 42–​44,  162 Golem,  181–​83   Hage, Ghassan, 18n15, 181n8 Haiyun, Rabbi Dov, 57–​58 Halakha. See also laws; rules defined, xvii and secularism in Northern Europe,  39–​40 and working on Sabbath, 25–​26, 42–​44, 51–​53,  162–​64 Halpern, Ben, 169–​70 hardalnikim, 66n5 Haredi /​Haredim, xv–​xvii. See also ultra-​Orthodox agency of, 148–​52 assimilation of, 110–​11, 115, 120–​ 25, 128, 174–​75 Belzer Hasidim, 61–​63 education of, 94–​96, 140–​46, 148,  151–​52 and exile of Jews, 114, 157 feelings of alienation caused by, 77–​80,  165 history of, 146–​47 as intolerant, 117–​18 opposition to Zionism, 62–​64 as “parasites,” 139–​42

political involvement of, 135n3 power of, 77 productivization of, 96, 98–​99 refuse military service, 22–​24, 62–​63,  139 rights for, 110–​11 secular Jews’ views on, 173–​74 seen as threat to Israel, 152–​53 Status Quo Agreement with, 35–​36 stereotypes concerning, 110–​12 struggles of, 131–​32 and survival of Jewish people, 99–​ 100, 171–​72, 192 as threatened by secular Jews/​ Zionists/​nationalists, 63–​65, 75–​76, 111–​12, 113–​14, 115, 120–​21, 147, 173, 175–​76 views on state, 75–​76, 135, 136 as Zionist, 114n12 Hasidim, xv–​xvii Haskalah, xvii headscarf, banning of, 147–​48 Hebrew Israelites (Black Jews), 27–​28 Hebrew labor, 97–​98 Hebrew language, 101–​4, 177, 178–​ 82, 183–​84, 189 as not a Jewish language, 103–​4 Hechler, William, 136–​37 Herzl, Theodor, 113, 135–​37, 155–​56 hilltop youth, xiv–​xv, 69, 76n15 Hiloni /​ Hilonim, xiv Hirsch, Rabbi Samson Raphael, 98 human rights, 33, 48–​49, 89   identity collective, 6–​7, 167, 170 of Jews, 45–​46, 51–​53 national, 2n1 nationalism and Jewish, 13–​14 religion as marker of, 12–​13, 52,  150–​51 and separation of church and state,  47–​48

218 Index identity cards, 131–​32, 133–​34 Inbari, Motti, 73n12 indeterminacy, 50–​51,  186–​87 indigeneity, definition of, 175–​76 indigenous peoples, 118–​19, 124–​25,  175–​76 individualism, 149–​50, 151–​52, 170 Innocent IV, Pope, 148 intermarriage, 116n14 Islamophobia,  38–​39 Israel as “colonial-​settler state” (Maxime Rodinson),  2–​6 conflicts between national-​ religious Jews and, 77 contrasting views on state of, 75–​76 as danger to being Jewish, 28–​30 and defining Jewishness, 8–​9 entry of non-​Jews into, 31 erasure of Jewishness in, 131–​34 establishment of state of, 33, 85–​ 87, 94, 189 exile of Jews in, 113–​14 as foundationally Christian,  136–​39 as given by God, 134–​35 Haredim as threat to, 152–​53 historical trajectory leading to state of, 84–​85 the Jewish Question in, 168–​70 Jewishness as limited by state of,  191–​92 Jews denied citizenship in, 54–​56 languages of, 101–​4, 183 outsiders in, 105–​9 political organization of, 44–​45 pressure to have children in, 168n4 religious freedom in, 154 secularization of, 136 separation of church and state in, 47n7 as settler colonial state, 2–​6, 14, 18n15,  97–​99

struggle of Jews in, 131–​32, 134–​35,  165 struggle over Jewishness in, 16–​1 7, 27–​2 8, 34–​3 5, 56–​5 7, 59–​6 0, 65–​6 6, 185–​8 8,  193–​9 5 Torah study as purpose of state of, 64 Israeli Jews categories of, xiii national sovereignty for, 11–​14 as not Arab, 37, 102 religious,  xiv–​xv secular, xiv terms regarding, xiv–​xviii   Jabotinsky, Ze’ev, 191 the Jewish Question, 38–​41, 49–​50,  168–​70 Jewish refugees, 126–​27 Jewish Temple, reconstruction of, 72–​74,  87–​88 Jewishness as conflation of religion and nationality, 89, 101, 167 defining, 8–​9, 27n5, 28–​29 determination of, 26, 51–​55, 151 erasure of, in Israel, 131–​34 language as element of, 183–​84 as limited by state, 191–​92 modern Jewish state as danger to,  28–​30 and problems of sovereign subjectivity,  45–​47 proving,  19–​21 struggle over, in Israel, 16–​17, 27–​ 28, 34–​35, 56–​57, 59–​60, 65–​66, 185–​88,  193–​95 Jews. See also Haredi /​Haredim; Israeli Jews; national-​religious Jews; secular Jews assimilation and acceptance of diasporic, 92

Index  219 assimilation in Europe, 110–​11, 112–​13, 114–​15, 116–​17,  150–​51 community and care among,  91–​96 denied Israeli citizenship, 54–​56 discrimination against, from Middle Eastern countries, 27n5 disunity among, 192–​93 exclusion of, in Israel, 105–​9 as exiled, 113–​14 identity of, 13–​14, 45–​46, 51–​53 as indigenous to Europe, 116–​17,  118 as indigenous to Palestine, 175–​76 Messianic,  55–​56 Mizrahim, xv, 6–​7, 28n6, 28, 46–​ 47, 102, 105n7 “new,” 174, 183, 189–​91, 192–​93 as not Arabs, 37, 102 as outsiders, 31–​32 productivization of, 97–​99 prohibited from working on Saturdays, 25–​26, 42–​44, 51–​53,  162–​64 racialization of, 39–​40 religious freedom for, 46n3 secularization’s impact on, 51, 85 sovereignty of, 93–​94 struggle of, in Israel, 131–​32, 134–​35,  165 survival of, 99–​100, 101, 171–​72, 192 traditional, xv Judaism defining, as “religion,” 37 incompatibility of nationalism and,  90–​91 national-​religious,  67–​70 questions in, 90–​91   Kafka, Franz “Before the Law,” 19, 22, 25, 26–​27, 30, 35, 38, 86

“The City Coat of Arms,” 61, 66–​67, 70–​71, 75, 76–​77, 79, 81, 86, 88 “The Coming of the Messiah,” 130 on Golem, 182–​83 and Kafkaesque, 14–​16 “The Little Fable,” 42, 58–​60 “The Metamorphosis,” 86 “On Parables,” 161 “A Report to an Academy,” 90, 96, 100–​1, 104, 110, 112, 115–​16,  119–​20 and struggle to be Jewish in Israel, 17 Kafkaesque, 14–​18, 51n9 Keane, Webb, 138, 153 Ketubah, xvii Khazzoom, Aziza, 105, 110–​11, 115 Kimmerling, Baruch, 2–​3n2 Kohanim, 165–​66, 171 Kook, Rabbi Abraham Isaac, 75–​76,  190–​91 kosher food labor laws and, 26, 42–​44, 51–​53,  162–​64 and marriage approvals, 77–​78, 80,  172–​73 Kraus, Yoelish, 120–​23   labor laws, 25–​26, 42–​44, 51–​53,  162–​64 Labor Party, 189 Ladino, 183 Land, Martin, xv–​xvii languages. See also Hebrew language as element of Jewishness, 183–​84 national, 101–​4, 183 Law of Return, 54–​56 laws. See also Halakha; rules and community among Jews, 91–​93 concerning religion, 8–​9 labor laws, 25–​26, 42–​44, 51–​53,  162–​64

220 Index LGBTQ rights, 82–​83 liberalism,  159–​60 liberation. See also agency; emancipation; freedom; religious freedom Arendt on, 48–​49 and the Jewish Question, 49–​50 and separation of church and state,  47–​48 Likud party, 191 Lindahl, Hans, 141n10 Lubavitcher Hasidim, 55–​56   Mahmood, Saba, 159​ majority, subjectification of, 64–​65 marriage, 34–​35, 57–​58, 77–​79, 171–​ 73. See also intermarriage Marxism, 135 Masorati /​ Masoratiim, xv Me’a She’arim, 22–​24 Mendelssohn, Moses, 32, 176 Messiah, 159 Jesus as Jewish, 55–​56 Menachem Schneerson as,  55–​56 Messianic Jews, 55–​56 messianism, 176–​77, 184, 187–​88 Michaeli, Merav, 142–​46, 147–​49,  158 mikveh, xvii, 78–​79 military service, 22–​24, 62–​63, 99, 139 milk. See kosher food mimicry, 126, 127 Ministry of the Interior, 26, 51–​52 mitzvah /​mitzvot, xviii Mizrahim, xv, 6–​7, 28n6, 28, 46–​47, 102, 105n7 modernity and modernization, 9–​1 0, 138, 149–​5 0, 153,  154–​5 6 Mufti, Aamir, 127–​28 Nader, Laura, 17n14, 33–​34

Nandy, Ashis, 6–​7, 11n8, 126 nation, the /​“the people,” 2, 5–​6,  9–​11 national culture, history, and identity,  10–​11 national sovereignty for Israeli Jews, 11–​14 as liberating and colonizing, 11–​12 in modern political theory, 9–​11 national unity, 10–​11 nationalism. See also Zionism anti-​colonial, 10n7,  125–​26 exclusionary forms of, 16–​17, 18n15,  33–​34 homogenization and, 9–​11 human rights linked with, 48–​49 and identity of Jews, 13–​14 imagined community of, 9–​10 incompatibility of Judaism and,  90–​91 and “new Jew,” 189–​91 passenger /​ship metaphor of, 1–​2,  191–​93 and religion, 101 Scholem on Hebrew and, 178–​79 and temporality, 154–​55 as threatening to Jewishness, 63,  75–​76 Zionist, 18n15 national-​religious  Jews conflicts between state and, 77 as “religious” and “modern,” xiv–​xv,  192 secular Israelis’ views on, 67–​70 and secular vision of national project,  86–​87 and Tzohar, 79–​80 views on secularism, 75–​76,  195–​96 nation-​state law, 82 Native Americans, 124–​25 “new Jews,” 174, 183, 189–​91, 192–​93 Ong, Aihwa, 47, 50

Index  221 Ornan, Uzzi, 103–​4 outsiders,  105–​9   Palestinian conflict, 24, 75 Palestinians as outsiders, 31 price tag retaliations against, 69 passenger /​ship metaphor of nationalism, 1–​2,  191–​93 Peled, Ilan, 53 political parties, 188–​89 political Zionism, 9n6, 9, 11–​12,  84–​85 popular sovereignty, 2, 16–​17, 85 post-​colonialism, 11, 18n15, 118 Potok, Chaim, 63–​64 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 175 Preuss, Walter, 97–​98 price tag retaliations, 69 Protestant conversion, 151   questions, in Judaism, 90–​91   Rabbinate asks for proof of Jewishness, 19–​21 defined, 20n3 as gatekeeper, 34–​35 need for, 99–​100 prohibits Jews working on Saturdays, 26, 42–​44, 51–​53,  162–​64 and recognition of marriages,  77–​79 Tzohar as alternative to, 79–​80 rabbis bribing,  162–​64 legitimacy of ceremonies performed by, 34–​35, 57–​58,  172–​73 role in Haredi communities,  143–​44

suspicion and undermining of authority of, 148–​49 rabbi's beard, pulling of, 163 Rabin, Yitzhak, 81 Rabin Square, 81–​82 Rabkin, Yaacov, 6–​7, 28n7, 83,  136–​37 Raz-​Krakotzkin, Amnon, 7–​8, 15–​ 16, 117n19, 156–​57, 158 redemption,  159–​60 refugees,  126–​27 religion. See also Christianity; Judaism as aspect of personal identity, 52 as category, 101 conflation of nation and, 167 as identity marker, 12–​13, 150–​51 and nationalism, 101 and separation of church and state, 47 state laws determining, 8–​9 “religious,”  xiv–​xv religious freedom, 12, 44–​45, 46n3, 47, 154 Religious Zionism, 76n15, 190–​91 Revisionist Zionism, 191 rites of passage, 175 Rivlin, Reuven, 154 Rodinson, Maxime, 2–​3n2 Rosenzweig, Franz, 176–​78 rules, 91–​93, 165–​68, 171–​73. See also Halakha; laws   Sa’ar, Amalia, 151–​52 Sabbath law prohibiting Jews from working on, 25–​26, 42–​44, 51–​53,  162–​64 preparations for, 68–​69 Schielke, Samuli, 2 Schneerson, Menachem, 55–​56 Scholem, Gershom, 128–​29, 176–​81, 183–​84,  188

222 Index Schuman, Rebecca, 14–​15 “secular, the” (Talal Asad), 138–​39 secular Jews contradictory nature of category, 37 disagreements between Haredim and,  120–​21 national-​religious views on,  195–​96 and Rabbinate laws, 100 as threatening to Jewishness/​ Judaism, 115 views of, 24, 67–​70, 173–​74,  175–​76 secular modernity, 149–​50 secular Zionism, 35–​37, 67–​70, 75–​76 secularism /​secularization, 5–​7 and Haredim, 152 of Hebrew language, 178–​81, 183–​84,  189 historical trajectory of contemporary,  84–​85 impact on Jews, 51 of Israel, 136 and the Jewish Question, 39–​41 in modern nation-​state, 44–​45 modernity and, 138, 149–​50 in Northern Europe, 39–​40 and prevention of freedoms,  83–​85 protecting children from, 113–​14 and separation of church and state, 47, 84 versus “the secular,” 138–​39 and universal rights, 49 self-​elimination,  124–​25 Sephardi Torah Guardians (Shas), xv–​xvii settler colonialism, 2–​3n2, 2–​6, 97–​98,  196 Shafir, Gershon, 2–​3n2, 53, 97–​98,  136–​37 Shahar, Galili, 180–​81

Sharon, Ariel, 71–​72 Shenhav, Yehouda, 105n7 Shinui,  188–​89 Shohat, Ella, 50 slaughterhouse,  122–​23 social contracts, 9 Soviet Union, Jewish immigrants from,  27–​28 St. Louis,  126–​27 Starrett, Gregory, 13n10, 191n12 Status Quo Agreement, 35–​37, 64n3 stereotypes,  110–​12 Stone, Suzanne, 93–​94 subincision, 175 subjectification, 47, 50–​51, 64–​65 “subject-​ification” (Aihwa Ong), 47 Sullivan, Winnifred, 8–​9 surveillance cameras, 44, 162–​64 symbols, danger inherent in, 176   Taylor, Charles, 52, 59–​60, 117–​18,  138 Temple Institute, 72–​74, 87–​88 Temple Mount, 71–​74, 87–​88 temporality,  153–​58 Thailand,  8–​9 time,  153–​58 tolerance,  117–​18 Torah defined, xviii study of, 64, 140–​41 and survival of Jewish people,  99–​100 Tzohar,  79–​80   ultra-​Orthodox. See Haredi /​ Haredim   Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 4–​5,  107–​8   Walzer, Michael, 93–​94 Weber, Eugen, 9–​12, 125–​26

Index  223 Weinreich, Max, 157–​58 West Bank, 24, 69 Western feminism, 148–​49, 159–​60 Westphalian era, 155–​56 Wolfe, Patrick, 5, 116, 124–​25   Yadgar, Yaacov, 6–​7, 8–​9, 34n12, 100 Yesh Atid, 188–​89 Yiddish, 183   Zionism. See also nationalism; national-​religious  Jews as anti-​colonial movement, 9, 14, 118 anti-​Semitism and, 67, 84–​85 anti-​Zionists, xiv–​xv, 6–​7,  114 assimilation and, 113, 196 and bi-​nationalism, 7n5 Christian,  136–​37 and colonialism, 118 creation of Israeli subjects through,  192–​93 cultural, 113n10 dangers of, 176, 183–​84 and exile, 156–​58 forms of, 161

and freedom from religion and religious impositions, 164–​65 Haredim and, 135, 136 and Hebrew labor, 97–​98 and the Jewish Question, 168–​69 as marginal movement, 83 and the “new Jew,” 189–​91 political, 9n6, 9, 11–​12, 84–​85 purpose of, 164–​65 religious, 76n15, 190–​91 Revisionist, 191 Rosenzweig and Scholem on,  177–​78 secular, 35–​37, 67–​70,  75–​76 as secular movement, 40–​41, 53, 101, 136 as self-​destructive, 196 as settler-​colonial project, 2–6, 196 as statist movement, 127 and studying broader patterns of exclusionary nationalism, 18n15 and temporality, 88, 153–​58, 158 triumph of, 191–​92, 195–​96 ultra-​Orthodox opposition to,  62–​64 victims of, 50