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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Israel
Index
In 1988 two-thirds to three-quarters of Jewish Israelis were
not religious or Orthodox in observance or practice. Among the
minority of the religious who were the most extreme in their
adherence to Judaism--the haredi--the very existence of
Israel as a self-proclaimed Jewish state was anathema because
Israel is for them (ironically, as it is for many Arabs) a wholly
illegitimate entity. Given these facts--the large number of secular
Israelis, and the sometimes fierce denunciation of the state by a
small number of the most religious extremists--one might expect the
traditionalists to play a modest role in Israeli society and
culture. But the opposite is true; traditional Judaism has been
playing a more dominant role since the late 1960s and affecting
more of the political and economic dimensions of everyday life
(see Prospects for Electoral Reform
, ch. 4).
The relation between traditionalists and the Jewish state has
always been ambivalent and fraught with paradox. In the nineteenth
century, Zionism often competed with Orthodox Judaism for the
hearts and minds of young Jews, and enmity existed between Orthodox
Jews of Eastern Europe and the Zionists (and those residing in
Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).
Orthodox Jews resented the dominantly secular nature of Jewish
nationalism (for example, the desire to turn the holy tongue of
Hebrew into an instrument of everyday discourse), whereas the
Zionists derogated the other-worldly passivity of Orthodox Jews.
Among the most extreme Orthodox Jews, the Zionist movement was
deemed heretical because it sought to "force the End of Days" and
preempt the hand of God in restoring the Jewish people to their
Holy Land before the Messiah's advent.
Nevertheless, for all its secular trappings, Zionism as an
ideology was also profoundly tied to Jewish tradition--as its
commitment to the revival of the Jews' biblical language, and,
indeed, its commitment to settle for nothing less than a Jewish
home in biblical Palestine indicate. Thus, secular Zionism and
religious Judaism are inextricably linked, and hence the conceptual
ambivalence and paradoxes of enmity and attraction.
In any case, conceptual difficulties have been suspended by
world events: the violence of the pogroms in Eastern Europe
throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the
Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany, in which approximately 6
million Jews were killed, nearly destroying Central and East
European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s. In the face of such
suffering--and especially after the magnitude of the Holocaust
became known--Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews devised ways to work
together in Palestine despite their fundamental differences. When
the advent of the state was followed immediately by invasion and
lasting Arab hostility, this cooperative modus vivendi in the face
of a common enemy continued.
The spearheads of cooperation on the Orthodox side were the
so-called religious Zionists, who were able to reconcile their
nationalism with their piety. Following Rabbi A.I. Kook
(1865-1935), the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine, many
believed that Zionism and Zionists, however secular, were
nonetheless instruments of God who were engaged in divinely
inspired work. On a more pragmatic level, under leadership such as
that of Rabbi I.J. Reines (1839-1915), the religious, like the
secularists, organized in political parties, such as the Mizrahi
Party
(see Religious Parties
, ch. 4). They were joined in the
political arena by the non-Zionist Orthodox, organized as the
Agudat Israel Party. Although Agudat Israel was originally opposed
to the idea of a Jewish state, it came to accept the rationale for
it in a hostile gentile world (especially after the Central and
East European centers of Orthodoxy were destroyed in the
Holocaust). Because Orthodox Jews, like secularists, were organized
in political parties, from an early date they participated--the
religious Zionists more directly than the religious non-Zionists--
in the central institutions of the Yishuv and, later, the State of
Israel. Indeed, since 1977 and the coming to power of Menachem
Begin's Likud, Orthodox Jews have been increasingly vocal in their
desire not just to participate in but also to shape--reshape, if
need be--the central institutions of Israeli society.
Data as of December 1988
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