Israeli Judaism

The Sociology of Religion in Israel

M.J. Kister, Shlomo Deshen, Shlomo Deshen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351293907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

This is an unusual and extremely timely collective effort. It appears at a moment in which Israelis not only must confront their Arab neighbors, but must deal with one another as Jews possessing radically different views on the present and future of the Jewish tradition. With this seventh volume of the series, the Israeli Sociological Society has turned its attention to religion, an area that for many years has been of high importance, but low profile in Israeli affairs and in the wider Middle Eastern context.

Chapters and contributors include: "Jewish Civilization: Approaches to Problems of Israeli Society" by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt; "Life Tradition and Book Tradition in the Development of Ultraorthodox Judaism" by Menachem Friedman; "Religious Kibbutzim: Judaism and Modernization" by Aryei Fishman; "The Religion of Elderly Oriental Jewish Women" by Susan Sered; and "Hanukkah and the Myth of the Maccabees in Ideology and in Society" by Eliezer Don-Yehiya. The increasing presence of religious activism in contemporary Israel, side by side with subtle changes in the religion of Israeli Sephardim, makes the topic of religion essential for an understanding of Israel—and much of the Middle East generally. Israeli Judaism is a significant work, and will be of interest to theologians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and political theorists.

Part I
Introduction

1

Editorial Introduction The Study of Religion in Israeli Social Science

Shlomo Deshen

Beginning in 1980, the Israel Sociological Society has regularly issued selected collections of its members’ research on Israeli topics. The topics covered have been important ones: Israeli politics, kibbutz life, ethnicity, education, the sociology of medicine, women’s studies. Still it is remarkable, that only with this, the seventh volume, has the association turned its attention to religion, a topic which for many years now has been highly salient in both Israeli affairs and in the wider Middle Eastern context. The ever-increasing presence of religious extremism and activism has made the relevance of the topic, for an understanding of contemporary Israel— and much of the world generally—inescapable.

The reason for the rather belated concern with religion is rooted in matters that lie at the heart of Israeli culture and society. Modem Israeli society was founded by European immigrant pioneers of the early decades of this century, who mostly had a marked secularist, even anti-religious bias. This disposition had ramifications in many areas of life, and even in Israeli social science. Consideration of the academic background of Israeli sociology and anthropology—the fact that no less a spiritual figure than Martin Buber (1878-1965) filled the chair of sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for the duration of a decade in the late 1930s and 40s—underlines the strength of the bias. Buber had distinguished students, and was instrumental in raising the first generation of professional sociologists in Israel. One of them in particular, the late Yonina Talmon-Garber (1923-1966), pioneered the teaching of sociology of religion at what was then Israel’s sole university. Yonina, as she was known by all, was an outstanding teacher, and it is in fond memory of her that we dedicate this volume. But remarkably, only a few of her numerous students and colleagues developed creatively in the field of sociology of religion. Despite the potential for the development of the field in Israel, nearly all Israeli sociologists of the next generation developed in other directions, along with the conceptions and values of Israelis of their time, of their background and social ambience (the main exception is Aryei Fishman).

Even more remarkable is the history of Israeli social anthropology. Ever since the late 1950s the latter developed vigorously, because the salience of the so-called “Oriental” immigrants fired the imagination of many scholars, who were disposed to delve into the seemingly exotic. Around a dozen anthropologists were active in Israel during the period of the late 1950s to the early 1970s and they produced books and numerous papers. Besides these scholars, many foreign graduate students conducted fieldwork in Israel during those years for their Ph.D. dissertations. Given the strong interest in anthropology generally in issues of culture one would have expected this research effort to lead to a major illumination of religious matters among Israeli Sephardim. But in fact nothing of the sort occurred. Most of the anthropologists of that period were as disinterested in religion as were the sociologists. The main exceptions at the time were the two anthropologists who now figure among the editors of this volume. Although during the 1960s and 1970s the salience of religious extremism, in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East, became glaring, Israeli social scientists confronted the new reality only rarely in their research and teaching. As late as the mid 1970s most introductory university courses in sociology and anthropology in Israel had highly positivist and functionalist orientations, and to this day they feature only little religio-cultural material. The social scientists of that time were probably uncomfortable personally with religious phenomena.

After the hiatus of the period during which most sociologists and anthropologists in Israel had little interest in religion came a development in Israeli social science that is reflected in the present collection. It is illustrated by Jeffrey Alexander (1992) in a fragment of intellectual biography of the senior Israeli sociologist, Shmuel Eisenstadt (who like Talmon studied with Buber). Most of the twenty-three scholars, creative in sociology of religion, whose papers compose this anthology, matured in the late 1960s and thereafter, eight of them within the past decade. Quite a few were trained outside Israel, in the United States and Britain, and emigrated to Israel as mature scholars. Our collection reflects elements of intellectual and social marginality. While our contributors evince awareness of the centrality of religion, along with the prevailing contemporary theories and intuitions of social scientists of late twentieth-century persuasions, it is notable that only three or four of them specialize in the sociological study of religion. For the majority of our authors the sociology of religion is not their predominant field of research.

The authors are notable on another count: about half of them are practicing orthodox Jews. That is a much higher proportion than the number of people ofthat category among Israeli social scientists generally. This datum parallels the very high representation of women among scholars in the study of women and gender (as evidenced by Volume Six in this series). It suggests that, like women’s studies, sociology of religion attracts scholars whose personal motivations and interests in the field are obvious; religious studies and women’s studies do not seem to be fields that attract primarily for rarefied scholarly reasons. The social profiles of sociologists in gender and in religious studies, might be taken as evidence that these fields are based on endeavors that are rooted foremost in personal existential problems of the scholars, that they are fields of scholarship that are highly relevant to ongoing life.

The authors of this collection are marked by heterogeneity in terms of academic subdisciplines. About a third are sociologists of a quantitative bent, another third are anthropologists who engage in observation and ethnography, and the remainder are sociologists and political scientists with a predilection for textual and historical analysis. Again, this heterogeneity can be viewed positively, as such lack of an institutionalized disciplinary center is sometimes the foundation for work of interest and originality. Finally, we note that only four women figure among our authors, underrepresenting the number of women in Israeli sociology and anthropology. While there are particular local factors that account for the marginality of the sociology of religion in Israel, the subdiscipline is in fact somewhat insulated in sociology in general (Beckford 1985).

The profile of scholars that has emerged in our presentation of Israeli sociology of religion is of course an artifact of editorial policy, and that requires explication. First, we were constrained by the general guidelines of the “Studies in Israeli Society” series, as determined by the editorial board of the series. The aim is to make accessible widely scattered material by Israeli sociologists and anthropologists on a particular major topic, and the volumes aim to be collective “state of the art” statements. As a matter of policy the volumes include only materials that have been previously published in English in journals and books issued under academic auspices, and that were peer-reviewed in one way or another for those publications. The series is thus an avenue of collation for work that has already passed a hurdle of academic scrutiny. The claim to originality of the series lies in the presentation of the material in a selective and systematic way. Each of the volumes is intended to serve as a baseline from which to contemplate the future of its particular field.

In this volume on religion, more than in previous ones, the editors felt limited by considerations of space. The volume is slimmer than others in the series, and we eliminated papers that we would have liked to include. For instance, there is a considerable amount of research in the field of Israeli Judaism by educational sociologists and social psychologists. That work seeks mostly to elucidate questions of education and of general behavior, which do not lie at the crux of our present concern with religious belief and practice. We have therefore not included it, but we do take note of it in the bibliography. Further, we aim in this collection to focus on recent material; therefore we only include papers that were published after 1983, a decade prior to the time of editing. The volume aims to represent the state of art in its field, but as the organ of the Israel Sociological Society it is also an outlet for suitable work of as many members of the Society as possible. Certain scholars are more prolific than others, and more of their work warranted inclusion. But in aiming to strike a happy medium between our various editorial guidelines we limited authors to one contribution only, and we have favored papers by multiple authors.

The main concerns of sociology of religion in Israel, are outlined in the detailed review by Stephen Sharot (chapter 2). The next introductory chapter by Peri Kedem (chapter 3) details the basic concepts that pertain to Israeli Judaism, and is aimed at forging methodologically appropriate instruments for its measurement, following previous attempts of this kind such as Aaron Antonovsky (1963), and Asher Arian (1973), and most recently Levy et al. (1993). Islam and other non-Jewish religions have hardly been studied by Israeli social scientists, despite the fact that Muslim fundamentalism has assumed a major role in the region ever since the late 1970s. Indeed, until very recently there were virtually no studies dealing with the religious behavior of Israeli Arabs (see now Rekhess 1993). We do have studies of some small and relatively unimportant denominations, on the Christian Armenians of Jerusalem who were studied by 0Victor Azarya (1984, 1988-9), and on the Bahai’s of Acre who were studied by Erik Cohen (1972). The avoidance by scholars of research fields where mainline activities can be observed is remarkable, and we notice it also below in our review of the study of Judaism.

The uneven overall research coverage of religions in Israel does have an advantage. Since die available sociology of religion research is primarily on Judaism it drove us, in the compilation of this collection, to focus onto the particular features of the Held as presented in extant research, namely its Jewishness and its Israeliness. This leads to conceptualizing the religious phenomena on hand in a way that highlights the particularity of Israeli Jewish phenomena, through the concept “Israeli Judaism.” The concept assumes that Judaism in Israel is different, in various nuanced ways, from Judaism elsewhere. This assumption is founded on a combination of existing information and of hypotheses, and it figures in a recent comparative study of American and Israeli Judaism (Liebman and Cohen 1990, chapters 6-7).

Our focus, Israeli Judaism, leads us away from a related, but distinct field of inquiry, that of the general sociology and anthropology of Judaism. That field has a distinguished history, going back to the late nineteenth century, stemming from dual sources in anthropology and in sociology. Anthropologists, starting with William Robertson-Smith (1889), James Frazer (1918), and later Raphael Patai (1964), Edmund Leach (1969), Mary Douglas (1966, 1993) and others, developed research focused mostly on biblical texts. These studies had strong cultural emphases to them, largely divorced from the social reality of the particular people who created and later related to the texts. The research tradition of anthropology of Judaism is carried on, in the contemporary work of Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (1990), Harvey Goldberg (1987, 1990a, 1990b), Nissan Rubin (1990, 1992, 1993), Joelle Bahloul (1983), Ruth Fredman (1981), Shlomo Deshen (1979b), and many others, whose research has now branched out, beyond biblical studies, to rabbinic texts and to medieval folk custom.

Similarly, sociologists have focused on ancient Judaism, starting with Max Weber (1952), continuing through the work of such scholars as Werner Sombart (1952), Shmuel Eisenstadt (1992), Aryei Fishman (1992), Stephen Sharot (1982), and others. The latter have branched out to later historical periods, but they have the common aim of making sociological statements about Judaism as a whole. The most elaborate and insightful research of the sociology of Judaism school is that of Jacob Katz (1961, 1989) and his numerous followers, whose prolific work, albeit, has strong affinity with that of social historians. Suffice it to state that social science study of both these genres—the anthropological and the sociological—is beyond the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Political Dimensions of Israeli Judaism
• Part IV: Nationalist Orthodoxy
• Part V: The Sephardic Pattern
• Part VI: Secularism and Reform
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Authors