Sovereign Jews

Israel, Zionism, and Judaism

Yaacov Yadgar

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781438465357
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

The question of Jewish sovereignty shapes Jewish identity in Israel, the status of non-Jews, and relations between Israeli and Diaspora Jews, yet its consequences remain enigmatic. In Sovereign Jews, Yaacov Yadgar highlights the shortcomings of mainstream discourse and offers a novel explanation of Zionist ideology and the Israeli polity. Yadgar argues that secularism's presumed binary pitting religion against politics is illusory. He shows that the key to understanding this alleged dichotomy is Israel's interest in maintaining its sovereignty as the nation-state of Jews. This creates a need to mark a majority of the population as Jews and to distinguish them from non-Jews. Coupled with the failure to formulate a viable alternative national identity (either "Hebrew" or "Israeli"), it leads the ostensibly secular state to apply a narrow interpretation of Jewish religion as a political tool for maintaining a Jewish majority.

Part I

Religion, Judaism, Tradition

The theoretical, or rather epistemological ground upon which I wish to base the interpretive analysis I shall present in this book is encapsulated in the argument that in order for an understanding of the ways in which the Zionist project and the ensuing Israeli nation-state have coped with Jewish traditions that preceded them to be accurate, it must first be liberated from the shackles of the worldview, epistemology, and politics of a set of concepts and distinctions that constitutes the self-perception of the modern West. These include, among others, the binary couples of West vs. East, modern vs. traditional, enlightened vs. benighted, and also—or maybe first—religious vs. secular. These conceptual dichotomies form a complex array of mutual opposites, which constitute the Western, colonial subject as modern, secular, and enlightened. Although they present themselves as neutral, ahistorical, and universal, or cultural-context-independent conceptualizations of human life, these distinctions propagate a specific, power-driven, political-ideological agenda. Ultimately, they function to justify, if not simply necessitate, colonialism, while presenting the modern, sovereign nation-state as natural, and color its uses of power as rising above moral and ethical doubt.

The current section of the book presents this critique and offers an alternative. Chapter 1 discusses the problematic nature of the modern concept “religion.” Chapter 2 studies the historical application of this concept to the Jewish case. And Chapter 3 discusses the notion of tradition as the foundation of an alternative interpretive framework.

1

Religion—The History and Politics of an Ahistorical Concept

“Religion is a constructed category, not a neutral descriptor of a reality that is simply out there in the world.”1 A growing field dedicated to the study of the historical roots and development of the concept “religion” has convincingly shown that “there is no transhistorical or transcultural concept of religion. Religion has a history, and what counts as religion and what does not in any given context depends on different configurations of power and authority.”2 Indeed, in some corners of the wider field of the study of religion(s), the claim that we should forego the use of the term “religion” is an age-old convention. During the last few decades this claim has matured into a full-fledged deconstruction of the epistemology of the mainstream study of religion(s), coming from scholars such as Talal Asad,3 Daniel Dubuisson,4 Tomoko Masuzawa,5 and Jonathan Z. Smith.6 This list is far from being exhaustive.7

The critics all challenge (each in her or his way, of course) the universal use of the concept “religion.” They often do so by deconstructing “the Western construction of religion,”8 studying the history and politics of the evolution of the term and its contemporary uses. Moreover, the critics show that the main object of the field should be an exposition of the specific historical-political motives behind this construction, and a critical assessment of their implications to contemporary political reality.

Such a study focuses our attention on the modern, “secular” nation-state as the main generator of the Western invention/construction of religion:

[T]he attempt to say that there is a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is separable from secular phenomena is itself part of a particular configuration of power, that of the modern, liberal nation-state as it developed in the West. In this context, religion is constructed as transhistorical, transcultural, essentially interior, and essentially distinct from public, secular rationality. To construe Christianity as a religion, therefore, helps to separate loyalty to God from one’s public loyalty to the nation-state.9

The definition of what is religious and what is secular touches directly upon the configuration or distribution of power, since it dictates which practices (and, specifically, what kinds of violence) are legitimate, and which are illegitimate. Thus, as noted by the closing sentences of Cavanaugh’s quote above, in the Western, Christian context the conception of Christianity as a religion and of nationalism as secular guarantees the Christian individual’s fatal loyalty to the nation-state, and not to the Church.

The construction of the concept “religion” necessitates that it can be, at least theoretically so, distinguished from other historical institutional powers; the term is meaningless unless it can be distinguished from that which is not religion. The critical historical readings mentioned above all show that such a transhistorical category of religion, which is distinguishable from other political institutions, is nowhere to be found. In premodern eras, the distinction between (what is seen as) religion and other realms such as politics or culture was meaningless.

This, it should be reiterated, is not a specifically novel argument. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, whose 1962 book, The Meaning and End of Religion, has become a “Modern Classic,”10 shows that religion, as a distinct category of human activity, such that it is separate from culture, politics, and other realms of life, is an invention of the modern West. Smith shows that outside of the modern West there is no equivalent, meaningful concept—not even a proximate one—to what “we,” in the West, understand as religion.11 This argument is further amplified if we keep in mind that the view of “politics” and “political thought” as a distinct realm of human inquiry and practice—i.e., as a category of human activity separate from religion—is also a clearly modern notion.12

As we will see later on, this invention of religion as distinct from the political—indeed, as apolitical “by definition”—is a central move in the history of modern European-Jewish history; furthermore, its negation is one of Zionism’s central constitutive arguments. But let us not jump ahead too fast; the history of the concept “religion” demands further clarification.

A Few Chapters in the History of Religion

While a full-fledged exploration of the history of the term “religion” is beyond the scope of the current discussion, a short review of some of the main chapters in the genealogy of the term can be highly informative, especially in explicating the dynamic nature of the history of a term that is currently widely misconceived to be ahistorical.

Pre-Christian Latin, from which the English term is commonly seen to be derived, used religio for identifying a social duty. Ancient Christianity tended to ignore the term religio, which had no equivalent concept in the Semitic, non-Latin world from which the early Christians originated. When the early Christians did use the term in their Latin writings (or translations), they used religio in several meanings, including “ritual practice, clerical office, worship (religio dei), and piety, or the subjective disposition of the worshipper toward God.”13 For Augustine, in the late fourth century, “religio means worship, the action by which we render praise.”14 This was an expression of man’s natural inclination to worship, and could be directed equally either to the One True God or to false idols.

The term tended to be absent from the European-Christian discourse of the Middle Ages. As Smith notes, while this age is commonly viewed today as “the most religious” in the history of Christianity, “[d]espite this or because of it, throughout the whole Middle Ages no one, so far as I have been able to ascertain, ever wrote a book specifically on ‘religion.’ And on the whole this concept would seem to have received little attention.”15 When it was used, the term no longer denoted duty, but rather signified various rules, which had to do mainly with the covenantal life in Christian orders.

For Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, religio had to do with virtue; it is ethical, not theological, as “God is related to religion not as matter or object, but as end.”16 We may, following Cavanaugh, stress those meanings of religio, which are rather absent from the Christian understanding or usage of the term in the Middle Ages. First, religio does not denote a general notion, of which Christianity is supposedly a specific case; “for medieval Christians, religion was not a universal phenomenon: religion was a site on which universal truth was produced, and it was clear to them that truth was not produced universally.”17 Second, religio of the Middle Ages is not a set of statements of beliefs regarding reality. Third, religio is not some pure inner impulse, borne by the soul. And, fourth, it is not an institutional power that can be distinguished from the “nonreligious” powers. The distinction between the religious and the political is wholly absent from this world of thought: “Religio was not separable—even in theory—from political activity in Christendom. Medieval Christendom was a theopolitical whole […] [T]he end of religio was inseparable from the end of politics.”18

This, then, is the background for the modern invention of religion. The rise of modernity brought about a new concept, which carries a much wider and different meaning from those reviewed above. “Religion in modernity indicates a universal genus of which the various religions are species; each religion comes to be demarcated by a system of propositions; religion is identified with an essentially interior, private impulse; and religion comes to be seen as essentially distinct from secular pursuits such as politics, economics, and the like.”19

Crucially, this concept renders Christianity apolitical, as it is now understood as a matter of the person’s internal life, which has very little, if anything, to do with the political realm. This comes hand in hand with the emergence of “the secular,” and is the basis of the (Western) notion of separation of state and church.

The invention of this modern notion of religion began in the Renaissance.20 It is then that for the first time the notion that religio denotes the varying ways in which people worship God appears. Religio is a universal, inner impulse; rituals and ways of life are but an expression of it. God gave humanity various prophets, and they offered humanity various ways in which to study their insights. Thus, “there is, in spite of many varieties of rites, but one religion.”21 Religio is seen here is a constant, a timeless human characteristic: “all opinions of men, all their responses, all their customs, change—except religion.”22 It is, in other words, a Platonic ideal; the various manifestations of it, prevalent among human beings of all sorts, are its impure appearances.

Religion’s transformation into a signifier of an inner, universal impulse—a “state of mind”23—was completed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the emphasis shifted from practice and a way of life to belief as capturing the essence of religion; it is now understood as a set of propositions. This transformation was facilitated by the prevalence of a certain binaries, mainly those separating the inner (personal, apolitical) from the external (public, political), and belief from action or practice, which are also constitutive of the dichotomy separating those “Siamese twins”24—the secular and the religious.

Indeed, the story outlined above is not just the story of the invention—or birth—of religion. It is also, and maybe primarily, the story of the invention/birth of the secular. The history of this concept is wide, and it is the subject of a whole field of academic studies, often termed post-secularism.25 This is not the place to retell this narrative. What is crucial for the current discussion is the historical fact that the secular, or its predecessor, saeculum, did not have an independent meaning or existence prior to the invention of the modern notion of religion. During the Middle Ages, saeculum had a spatial and temporal meaning: it referred to what we might call “this world”—the limitless whole of God’s creation of the current epoch. It had not, then, referred to some specific realm outside of the interests of the Church. Modernity brought about the construction of the secular as the opposite of religion.26

The Reformation was, in this regard, a catalyst for the invention of religion, as we commonly understand it today. Moreover—this prevalent understanding of religion is a Protestant, Calvinist notion, which is taken to be a universal concept. It is the Reformation who put the emphasis on a “rational” understanding of Christianity and developed the notion of a list of core beliefs as essential to it. The seventeenth century thus witnessed a proliferation of books presenting “Christian religion,” which were driven by the polemics of the competition between rival traditions and interpretations of Christianity.27

This, in other words, is a wholly Christian discourse. It is conducted among Christians, and understands Christianity as the highest, ultimate model of religion. Critically, it also imports the political history of a Christian notion of religion into the “general” discussion, and enforces this history on what it identifies as other “religions.” Thus, the early seventeenth century also saw the publication of one of the first attempts at formulating that which is common to all religions. According to this, the religious common core is composed of five basic arguments:

1. That there is some supreme divinity. 2. That this divinity ought to be worshipped. 3. That virtue joined with piety is the best method of divine worship. 4. That we should return to our right selves from sins. 5. That reward or punishment is bestowed after this life is finished.28

Note that this understanding of religion cannot be disproved. If one was to present a case of a certain society that has not held up to the abovementioned five core principles, this will not amount to an undermining of the univ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Jewish Sovereignty?
• Part One Religion, Judaism, Tradition
• Part Two Zionism and Jewish Traditions
• Part Three The Israeli Nation-State and Jewish Traditions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover