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Israel
Judaism, Civil Religion, and the "New Zionism"
All varieties of Judaism--ultra-Orthodoxy, neo-Orthodoxy, the
Reform and Conservative forms--together counted as their formal
adherents only a minority of Jewish Israelis. Yet religion was
a potent force, and increasingly so, in Israeli society. Traditional
Judaism has exerted its influence in Israel in three important
ways. First, traditional Judaism has influenced political and
judicial legislation and state institutions, which have been championed
by the various Orthodox political parties and enshrined in the
"preservation of the status quo" arrangements through the years.
Second, religion has exerted influence through the symbols and
practices of traditional Judaism that literally pervade everyday
life. Saturday is the sabbath (Shabbat--see Glossary), the official
day of rest for Jews (although the majority do not attend synagogue),
and most enterprises are closed. Jewish holidays also affect school
curricula, programming on radio and television, features in the
newspapers, and so on. Minority traditionalists, who extol halakah
even if they do not observe all rabbinic law, also observe many
folk customs. Through the years, much of the folk religion has
taken on an Oriental-Jewish flavor, reflecting in part the demographic
preponderance of Oriental Jews since the 1970s. Such customs include
ethnic festivals such as the Moroccan mimouna (an annual
festival of Moroccan Jews, originally a minor holiday in Morocco,
which has become in Israel a major celebration of Moroccan Jewish
ethnic identity) and family pilgrimages to the tombs of Jewish
holy men. The latter have become country-wide events. Traditional
Judaism has influenced Israeli society in yet a third way: Israel's
political elite has selectively co-opted symbols and practices
of traditional Judaism in an attempt to promote nationalism and
social integration. In this way traditional Judaism, or some aspects
of it, becomes part of the political culture of the Jewish state,
and aspects of traditional Judaism are then enlisted in what some
analysts have called the "civil religion" of Jewish society. Thus,
Judaism speaks to Israelis who may themselves be nonreligious,
indeed even secularist.
Of all the manifestations of religion in Israel, civil religion
has undergone the most profound changes through the years, specifically
becoming more religious--in the sense of incorporating more traditional,
Orthodox-like Judaism. In the prestate period, the civil religion
of Jewish society was generally socialist, that is, Labor Zionism.
Labor Zionists were hostile to much of traditional Jewish life,
to the concept of exile, and to what they viewed as the cultural
obscurantism of traditional Jews. They actively rejected Orthodoxy
in religion and considered it to be a key reason for the inertia
and lack of modernity of exiled Jews. Labor Zionists sought to
reconstitute a revolutionary new form of Jewish person in a radically
new kind of society.
After 1948, however, new problems faced Israeli society--not
only military and economic problems, but also the massive immigration
of Jews and their assimilation. First came the remnants of East
and Central European Jewry from the detention and displaced-persons
camps; then came Jews from Africa and Asia (see Ingathering of
the Exiles , ch. 1). Social integration and solidarity were essential
to successful assimilation, yet Labor Zionism neither appealed
to nor united many sectors of the new society. Throughout the
1950s and early 1960s--roughly the period of Ben-Gurion's preeminence--a
civil religion was fashioned by some factions of the political
elite (led by Ben-Gurion himself), which sought to stress the
new Israeli state as the object of ultimate value.
Israelis have called this the period of mamlakhtiyut
or statism. The Jewish Bible was the key text and symbol, and
secular youths studied parts of it as the Jewish nation's history
and cultural heritage. Religious holidays, such as Hanukkah and
Passover, or Pesach, were reinterpreted to emphasize nationalist
and liberation themes, and Independence Day was promoted as a
holiday of stature equal to the old religious holidays. The archaeology
of the Holy Land, particularly during the Israelite (post-Joshua)
period, became a national obsession, first because of the discovery
of the Dead Sea Scrolls and later because of Yigal Yadin's excavations
at Massada (a site of fierce Jewish resistance to the Romans after
the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.). At the same time, the two thousand
years of Jewish history that followed the Roman destruction of
Jerusalem, Jewish cultural life in the various diasporas (Ashkenazi
as well as Sephardi), and Jewish religion of the postbiblical
eras (rabbinic Judaism, exemplified in the Talmud--see Glossary)
were rejected or ignored.
For many reasons, the statist focus of Israeli civil religion
did not continue after the June 1967 War. These reasons ranged
from the greater traditionalism and piety of the Oriental immigrants,
who were never satisfactorily engaged by the more limited scope
of statism; to the exhaustion of the Labor Alignment, which, after
the October 1973 War, had sought to embody socialist Zionism and
Israeli modern statism as a manifestation of its own identity
and agenda; to the rise of Begin's Likud Bloc with its populist
appeals to ethnic traditionalism and an irredentist territorial
program as a challenge to Labor Zionism's fading hegemony. Begin
and his Likud championed a new civil religion to embody its
identity and agenda. This new right-wing civil religion affirmed
traditional Judaism and denigrated modernistic secularism--the
reverse of the earlier civil religion. Unlike the statist version
of Ben-Gurion's time, which focused on the Bible and pre-exilic
Jewish history, the new civil religion was permeated by symbols
from the whole of Jewish history. It gave special emphasis, however,
to the Holocaust as a sign of the ultimate isolation of the Jewish
people and the enduring hostility of the gentile world.
The new civil religion (which in its more political guise some
have called the New Zionism) has brought traditional Judaism back
to a position in the Jewish state very different from that which
it occupied twenty, forty, or eighty years ago. After the June
1967 War, the New Zionists linked up with the revitalized and
transformed neo-Orthodox--young, self-assured religious Jews who
have self-consciously connected retention and Jewish settlement
of the West Bank, the biblical Judea and Samaria, with the Messiah's
advent. The rise of messianic right-wing politics gave birth in
the mid-1970s to the irrendentist, extraparliamentary movement
Gush Emunim, which in turn led to the Jewish terrorist underground
of the 1980s (see Jewish Terrorist Organizations , ch. 5). When
the underground was uncovered and broken by Israeli security in
April 1984, it had already carried out several attacks on Arabs,
including, it was thought, Arab mayors, in the West Bank and was
planning to destroy the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem.
Even before the June 1967 War, however, Orthodox Judaism had been
able to exert influence on Israeli society simply because its
religious institutions were so historically entrenched in the
society.
Data as of December 1988
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