Boundaries, Identity and belonging in Modern Judaism

Maria Diemling, Larry Ray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317662976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

The drawing of boundaries has always been a key part of the Jewish tradition and has served to maintain a distinctive Jewish identity. At the same time, these boundaries have consistently been subject to negotiation, transgression and contestation. The increasing fragmentation of Judaism into competing claims to membership, from Orthodox adherence to secular identities, has brought striking new dimensions to this complex interplay of boundaries and modes of identity and belonging in contemporary Judaism.

Boundaries, Identity and Belonging in Modern Judaism addresses these new dimensions, bringing together experts in the field to explore the various and fluid modes of expressing and defining Jewish identity in the modern world. Its interdisciplinary scholarship opens new perspectives on the prominent questions challenging scholars in Jewish Studies. Beyond simply being born Jewish, observance of Judaism has become a lifestyle choice and active assertion. Addressing the demographic changes brought by population mobility and 'marrying out, ' as well as the complex relationships between Israel and the Diaspora, this book reveals how these shifting boundaries play out in a global context, where Orthodoxy meets innovative ways of defining and acquiring Jewish identity.

This book is essential reading for students and scholars of Jewish Studies, as well as general Religious Studies and those interested in the sociology of belonging and identities.

1 Introduction

Belonging and identity in modern Judaism

Larry Ray and Maria Diemling

Boundaries are at the heart of Judaism. The ritual of Havdalah (literally ‘distinction’, ‘separation’) is a religious ritual that marks the end of Shabbat and the beginning of a new week. The final blessing, the Havdalah, is recited over wine and blesses the separation of distinct matters: ‘Blessed are you, Lord, our God, sovereign of the universe, Who separates between sacred and secular, between light and darkness, between Israel and the nations, between the seventh day and the six days of work, Blessed are you, Lord, who separates between sacred and secular.’ The drawing of boundaries between the sacred and the profane and between Jews and non-Jews has been a key part of the Jewish tradition and maintained a distinctive Jewish identity throughout the course of Jewish history. The drawing of boundaries, however, has frequently been fluid and the product of sometimes very pragmatic and, arguably, consumerist choices.

This volume brings together scholars in Jewish Studies and related fields to address the complex interplay of boundaries and modes of identity and belonging in contemporary Judaism. Boundaries are not only core to religious life but also to social life generally and indeed to the ordering of our experience of the world. Niklas Luhmann, whose social theory is built around the formation of bounded systems that reduce complexity and enable communication, points out that ‘advanced theology . . . contains the proposition that . . . creation is nothing but the injunction: ‘Draw a distinction!’ Heaven and earth are thereby distinguished, then man and finally Eve. Creation is thus the imposition of a mode of distinguishing’ (Luhmann 2006). Boundaries lend reality and meaning that enables us to make selections from an otherwise unmanageable complexity of reality. While world-openness is intrinsic to human biological make-up, it is always pre-empted by social order and is transformed into a relative world-closedness (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 51–55). This is because without referring to available types and patterns, meaning would remain under-defined, incomprehensible and uncommunicative, while familiar patters and relationships allow stabilisation, communication and ordering of experience. Boundaries take multiple forms and operate on many intersecting planes. These may be symbolic, such as dividing the sacred and profane or kosher and treif; representational as between the sign and signified; embodied, in particular gendered divisions, inclusive/exclusive, defining membership categories; temporal, enabling diurnal and life-course transitions as well as marking the beginning and end of ritual time; and spatial, such as between Israel and the Diaspora and separating and defining the public and private. Not only are there many different modalities of boundaries but they also become objects of contestation, transgression and redefinition. Boundaries serve multiple purposes – they may offer protection but are also potentially threatening, while the crossing of boundaries promises excitement and challenge. It is these processes of transgression and redefinition in the process of emerging Jewish identities that are addressed by the chapters in this collection.

Not only are boundaries subject to contestation but the nature of boundaries of identity change in the modern world. Ever-increasing differentiation leads to a structural ‘heretical imperative’ (Berger 1979) where the individual can no longer fall back on set traditions because their judgement will necessarily be challenged by the fact that others make different choices. Accordingly the performance of identity will always be uncertain and, to an extent, open-ended although this condition can provoke a reactive return to the putative former certainties of orthodoxy (see for example Hartman 2008). Examining Jewish practice in the early twenty-first century then, we face a complex patchwork of innovative and often contested modes of being ‘Jewish’ (not only but especially in the postcommunist world and Israel) along with returns to the certainties of Orthodoxy and hardening of the boundaries of belonging and practice. One should perhaps not exaggerate the extent to which this is a ‘modern’ phenomenon since ambiguities and redefinitions of boundaries and identities have occurred throughout the history of Judaism as Shaye Cohen has shown in his seminal study on Jewish identity in Antiquity, bearing the programmatic subtitle ‘Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties’ (Cohen 1999).

Nonetheless, while in the past Jews were often subject to enforced separation Jews today are no longer marked in a way that enforces their segregation from others. Since they are neither forced to be Jewish nor have to escape from being Jewish they are all ‘Jews by choice’ (Horowitz 2002). This in turn means that observance or other performances of identity become choices about lifestyle and active assertion over and above simply being born Jewish. This collection explores how these choices play out in a global context in which some traditional authorities wish to both preserve Orthodoxy while many feel able to define and indeed acquire Jewish identity in innovative ways.

Past decades have seen a great deal of scholarship conceptualising the nature particularly of ethnic boundaries. The comparative study of ethnicity has developed the ground established by the axial work of Fredrik Barth in 1969 (Barth 1998a) in his well-known introduction to a collection of ethnographic case studies (1998b), which is still widely cited today (e.g. Wimmer 2008; Hummell 2014). Following Barth, the question of boundaries has shifted from the study of stable categorisations and immutable identities to a delineation of the situations and contexts in which differences and categories of selfhood are evoked and wielded (Tavory 2010). The crucial facet is not culture as an essential property but the social organisation and construction of identity. Ethnic identifications may be based on ascription but they also require self-identification and are subject to change and dichotomisation formed through the boundaries of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. Ethnic identities are therefore relative, situational and dependent on multiple spheres of interaction. Naturally, Barth’s conceptualisation has since been both critiqued and developed – particularly towards better understanding of the increasing fluidity and constructed nature of boundaries and belonging. Rather than see ethnic boundaries as dichotomous, much subsequent work has emphasised the potential for multiple, partial, double identities (e.g. Gilroy 1993) especially among Diasporas where there are often long histories of separation, interaction and assimilation. Richard Alba finds that in contemporary American society, ‘many Jews seek forms and expressions of identity that are compatible with navigating unhindered in social and professional worlds that are ethnically and religiously mixed’ (Alba 2006). By contrast though, Lamont and Molnár (2002) show how feelings of communality may be mobilised against outsiders but also to draw symbolic boundaries within groups where communities might be defined as much by internal segmentation as by their external perimeters. This is similarly noted in relation to dress codes by Iddo Tavory in his ethnography of an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood in Los Angeles. He found that

for members there are many gradations of dress and attire, signifying degrees of observance and membership in a specific Orthodox sub-group – a round hat means something different than a flat one, a shaggy beard is different than a well-trimmed one.

(Tavory 2010: 56)

These differentiations might be invisible to outsiders but are of considerable importance to members of the community. Attention to the role of dress in defining boundaries indicates the growing emphasis on performance and performativity as a further development from Barth in the study of boundaries. Rather than treating the self as a constant and immutable construct, many theorists ask in which situations are certain identifications performed, and how (e.g. Butler 1999)? From this viewpoint identity is not given as some essential quality, but has to be repeatedly constructed and performed, which Lynne Scholefield (2004) found in food observance at an English Jewish secondary school. This way of understanding identity draws partly on ethnographic literature. This concept moves further from the static notions of ‘groupness’ that predated Barth and enables us to view the making and remaking of Jewish identities as situated in interactions and public performances that summon or downplay the signs of membership.

Such notions of fluid identity though reflect the claims of the once fashionable postmodern accentuation of the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge, the ironic, knowing and the playful. These ideas have since lost ground and it is probably fair to say that the concept ‘never made it into the 21st century’ (Matthewman and Hoey 2006) although this does not mean that the fluidity of boundaries it evoked has disappeared. However, we should pay attention to harder processes of power, policing, closure and gate-keeping in religious communities. Central to Judaism is what Max Weber (1968: 389) attributed to an ethnic group, namely, that they are rooted in a ‘subjective belief in common descent’, that is in a shared history based on a common point of origin in the past, which may be real or putative. Symbolic boundaries separate members from others and are an essential medium through which people acquire status and monopolise resources (Lamont and Molnár 2002). Boundaries are therefore policed by authorities, such as in Judaism a rabbinic court controlling conversion. Thus boundaries have the connotation of enclosure and while they might be a ‘conceptual fence’ over which ‘neighbours may gossip or quarrel’ they could also be a ‘Siegfried line across which any but the crudest communication is impossible’ (Wimmer 2008). At the same time though boundaries should not just be seen as constraints, separating people and activities, but also as facilitating and enabling. For example, the eruv enclosures constructed in many cities mark ‘a symbolic wall’ that does not exclude but rather facilitate the performance of everyday life within ritual times under Talmudic law (Carney and Miller 2009). Boundaries then are contested, multiple and varied in their permeability but also at the centre of definitions of identity.

Setting boundaries

To turn to the chapters in this collection we begin with the observation that the most physical marker of the boundary between ‘Israel and the nations’ is the circumcision, commanded in Genesis 17 to Abraham for him and the male members of his household to mark the covenant and those who are included in it. The physical act sets male Jews apart from women but, more significantly, distinguishes Jewish men from Gentile men. The hidden ‘wound of the Jew’, in the words of Edmond Jabès, made Jewish boys and men particularly vulnerable during the Holocaust, because their bodies were marked as different, as Lia Deromedi demonstrates in her discussion of novels exploring the sense of self of young survivors who had to hide their Jewish origins during the Holocaust.

However, the drawing of boundaries between Jews and Gentiles has always involved negotiations. These boundaries are permeable and can be crossed. Several chapters in this volume discuss conversion experiences in different contemporary contexts and how gatekeepers manage and control access to Judaism in a process that is supposed to turn ‘outsiders’ into ‘insiders’. Nechama Hadari notes in her discussion of conversion as a theologisation of boundaries that while Ex 12:49 stipulates that there should be ‘. . . one law for [all of] you: for the natural-born citizen as for the foreigner’, the word ‘ger’ (‘foreigner’) is the same word that refers to somebody who has completed the process of conversion, which seems to suggest that the convert remains ‘strange’ or ‘estranged’, never fully crossing the boundaries of Judaism. An indication of this is Hadari’s observation that matchmakers, acting on behalf of observant families as ‘gate-keepers’, do not consider converts or their children as appropriate marriage partners for ‘good’ families. Hadari argues that this reluctance to consider marriage with a convert or their offspring creates a situation where converts are marginalised in their new community and do not receive the support they would need to integrate successfully and become full ‘insiders’. Fiona Frank discusses in her study of several generations of a Scottish-Jewish family the case of an Orthodox conversion where the Jewish partner of the conversion candidate challenged the family that introduced her to an observant life style over a particular religious issue. This led to them no longer being allowed to take in converts. Frank notes that in this case an ‘insider’ was able to negotiate with the ‘boundary police’ on who was allowed to be an ‘insider’ and who was an ‘outsider’. Frank also demonstrates with an example from the same family how a rejected conversion can put not only the prospective candidate but also their Jewish partner off Judaism for good. In this way the authority’s power to ‘police, defend and define’ who is and who is not Jewish is asserted. In recent decades, more Polish people have discovered Jewish ancestry and this has lead in some cases to active outreach work by rabbis and Jewish organisations and to the conversion of individuals. Joanna Cukras-Stelągowska notes in her study of younger people with Jewish affiliation in contemporary Poland that a conversion to Judaism is often more social than religious, attempting to improve the status of people with a ‘hidden’ or secret Jewish ancestry in the community. She observes that the reactions to such conversions are mixed. Some worry that in a few years Gentiles will be making decisions in the Jewish community while others comment that they do not mind the presence of converts as long as they do not ‘make a display of their religion’. Jan Lorenz also observes in his study of the Jewish community of Wrocław that while the official gate-keepers of the community, the rabbi and his wife, were welcoming of converts and stressed that ‘every Jew is a convert or a descendant of a convert’, calling for ‘respect to those who became Jewish via conversion’, some individual community members were sceptical of these attempts to draw in people with only distant affiliation to the community. They felt that Jewish ancestry, a specific Jewish culture and the collective historical experience as Jews in Poland in the twentieth century as the persistent and essentialised ‘Other’ had little to do with religious observance that can be achieved only by conversion and that lasting solidarity, trust and commonality were seen as what tied Jews together. This hints at conflict at different levels but, as several contributors have noted, the ethnic dimensions of the conversion process reflect particular Israeli concerns. None of the British conversion candidates interviewed by Hadari said they wanted to become part of the ‘Jewish people’ (am Israel), rather they wished to join a specific Jewish community. Lorenz notes the theology of ‘zera Israel’ (‘seed of Israel’), as expressed in the outreach activities of the Israeli NGO Shavei Israel that actively searches for ‘hidden Jews’ in contemporary Poland, and argues that people with some Jewish ancestry are not Gentiles but should be brought into the Jewish fold.

While conversion to Judaism means accepting a Jew by choice into the Jewish community, intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews raises the complex issue of accepting a Gentile into a Jewish family or, indeed, into the State of Israel. Dani Kranz demonstrates in her chapter that attitudes towards intermarriage in the State of Israel are often very negative because it is regarded as a consequence of assimilated life in the Diaspora that should be avoided in Israel. This attitude is reflected in the different stances towards non-Jewish partners and spouses of Diaspora Jews who immigrate to Israel (who do not only get citizenship but also benefit from practical absorption support) and those are partnered or married to Jewish Israelis who do not received any practical support and are actively discouraged by the Ministry of Immigration. Frank discusses several cases of intermarriage in her case study of a Scottish-Jewish family. She demonstrates that despite the feared and expected sanctions (including in extreme cases, mourning children who had married out as if dead) the reality often seemed quite different and more nuanced and the reception of a non-Jewish partner in a Jewish family could be warmer than of a Jewish spouse in a British-Gentile family.

Traditional Judaism also requires very distinctive boundaries between men and women that are expressed in distinct roles, spaces, access to learning, clothes or the boundaries drawn around a menstruating woman. Several contributions discuss the drawing and negotiating of gender boundaries. Hadari argues in her chapter on Orthodox conversions at the London Beth Din that while more women than men undergo the conversion process they seem to be treated with more suspicion than men, even after the completion of the process. Hadari suggests that this marginalisation and suspicion can create a situation in which converts become less observant, which increases the criticism of the gate-keepers. She also notes the ‘transitive’ conceptualisation of the conversion, according to which the rabbinic court is the subject and the convert the passive object of ‘contested (rabbinic) power’ in the process which implies a powerlessness that does not reflect the agency of the person seeking a conversion and is deeply gendered. However, in some contexts women were seen as the best agents to reach across boundaries. Hannah Ewence notes the role Jewish women played in breaking down the boundaries between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours in North London suburbs and elsewhere in the post-war period. The sharing of food played an important role in this process of mediation, exchange and transmission of religious, cultural and ethnic differences. Kranz makes the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: belonging and identity in modern Judaism
• 2 Homeland, exile and the boundaries of Jewish identity
• 3 Varieties of Jewish political identity: notes on Hannah Arendt’s Jewish writings
• 4 Identity and negotiation of boundaries among young Polish Jews
• 5 Shades of closeness: belonging and becoming in a contemporary Polish-Jewish Community
• 6 Mimicry, translation and boundaries of Jewishness in the Soviet Union
• 7 ‘Which self?’: Jewish identity in the child-centred Holocaust novel
• 8 Reality gaps: negotiating the boundaries of British-Jewish identities in contemporary fiction
• 9 Deviance, polyvalence and musical ‘third space’: negotiating boundaries of Jewishness at Palestinian Hip Hop performances in the Tel Aviv-Yafo underground
• 10 ‘Don’t be a stranger’: Giyur as a theologisation of the boundaries of (Jewish) identity
• 11 ‘Hands across the tea’: re-negotiating Jewish identity and belonging in post-war suburban Britain
• 12 ‘I always felt on the edge of things and not really part of it’: fuzzy boundaries in an extended Scottish-Jewish family
• 13 Probing the boundaries of Jewishness and Israeli identity: the situation of non-Jewish partners and spouses of Israeli Jews
• 14 Pushing the boundaries: contemporary Jewish critics of Israel and Zionism
• 15 Conjuring crypto-Jews in New Mexico: violating ethnic, scholarly and ethical boundaries
• Index