Boundaries of Jewish Identity

2. Who Is a Jew? - Categories, Boundaries, Communities, and Citizenship Law in Israel

27 2 Who Is a Jew? Categories, Boundaries, Communities, and Citizenship Law in israel gaD BarZiLai Sociopolitical categories construct, shape, and reproduce identities in compound ways. In defining who is in and who is outside a group, different communities may use various categories contingent on specific needs, expectations, interests, and visions of the “good” society and the desirable state. Similarly, any attempt to comprehend citizenship as an exclusively legalistic issue resulting in rights and duties may miss opportunities to look further into state-society relationships and various sociopolitical aspects of citizenship. Citizenship itself, what it grants and what it entails, may be constructed through sociopolitical categories that differently conceptualize the meaning of state-society relations for individuals and communities.The case of Israel represents an example of the gap between official legal entitlements and social arrangements that transgress the boundaries of identity laid out by the state. In this essay I explore several dimensions of citizenship law that tend to contradict the compound structure of Jewish identities. I examine this conflict in the context of struggles among and between various social groups that are wrestling with the definitions and practices of citizenship while also marking the boundaries with one another, among their own members, and between themselves and the state. Concretely and empirically, I base my analysis here on research I have conducted among Jewish and Palestinian communities in Israel. The main purpose of these studies has been to analyze the convergence and divergence of the lived experience of identities, legal consciousness, social being, and state policies and ideologies. In other words, I am 28 gaD BarZiLai interested in the ways that debates over seemingly legalistic issues are in essence conflicts over sociopolitical boundaries and power.This is a project aimed at unveiling, deconstructing, and in turn theorizing the political interests that propel legal categorizations in identity politics. Debates about identities,including the contentious question of “who is a Jew” revolve around more than religious and cultural practices; they are constructions that emerge from complex, in-depth realities, especially where communities have tended to impose sociopolitical boundaries. Accordingly, while most studies have related to the issue of “who is a Jew” as a given dilemma, an autonomous ontology with legalistic and political ramifications, my research attempts to move in another direction. It argues that “who is a Jew” is not a static question or a fixed dilemma but rather a dynamic construction of political interests amid struggles of communities over political power.Thus the issue of “who is a Jew” is not an autonomous problem waiting to be politically and legally resolved but rather a social language that serves the political purposes of social engineering. This essay explains how the tendency to assign categories of identity has shaped and reproduced , and also challenged and reformed, sociopolitical boundaries between communities. My argument is not intended to suggest that Judaism does not have an authentic history. Nor am I implying that Jews are not distinct from other religious peoples. My point is that in Israel, the question of “who is a Jew” is as much about power as it is about religion. The communities in question are nomos groups, meaning groups that are in conflict regarding the desirable vision and practices of the “good” society.1 Accordingly, various communities in Israel have never approached the issue of “who is a Jew” in an attempt to find an intersubjective solution to this dilemma in ways that may engender public consensus. Rather, those communities have sought to monopolize the public debate on who is a Jew to colonize it, even to manipulate it, for purposes of social engineering and political control. In the following section I consider state law in the context of public discourse on “who is a Jew.”Then, the essay moves to examine intercommunal interactions before reaching some general conclusions. Who Is a Jew? 29 the republican/state Dimension Zionism, as an aggregate of various Jewish national aspirations, has not clearly differentiated Jewish ethnicity from religion or from nationality. Consequently, public contentions over the issue “who is a Jew” have been paramount for allocations of citizenship rights in Israel since the formal inception of the state in 1948. One of the major national projects was to entrench Jewish domination in the state, preventing the possibility of its territory being settled by an Arab Palestinian majority. Based on the Law of Return (1950) and the Citizenship Law (1952), defining someone...