Critical Essays on Israeli Society, Religion, and Government: Books on Israel, Volume IV

8. Localizing Israeli Judaism

8. Localizing Israeli Judaism Kevin Avruch Tamar EI-Or. Educated and Ignorant: Ultraorihodox Jewish Women and Their World (Boulder: Lynne Heinner Publishers. 1994). Susan Starr Sered. Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives oj Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem (New York: Oxford University Press. 1992). I ~eferring to the study of Muslim society. Ernest Gellner ~wrote. Orientalists are at home with texts. Anthropologists are at home in villages. The natural consequence is that the former tend to see Islam from above. the latter from below. I remember an anthropologist specialising in a Muslim country telling me of his first encounter with an elderly and distinguished Islamicist. The old scholar observed that the Koran was interpreted differently in various parts of the Muslim world. The young anthropologist remarked that this was indl~ed obvious. "Obvious? Obvious ?" expostulated the old man angrily. "It took years of careful research to establish it!" 152 Localizing Israeli Judaism 153 Gellner's anecdote points to what is arguably the major contribution made by anthropology to the study of so-called world religions-that is, the ethnographic documentation of religious diversity in the face of sCriptural unity, and the importance of studying locally manifested historical and cultural variations in belief and practice. Even when Gellner published the story, in 1973, this insight was widely accepted . Thus, we could smile indulgently with him at the old orientalist.2 Robert Redfield's delineation of the Great and Little Traditions3 -a way of connecting literate and elite centers with illiterate and peripheral village peasantries-already had been applied productively to Hindu India by Milton Singer,4 and critiqued and refined by McKim Marriott. Melford Spiro explored the distinction between what he later called "religionin -doctrine" and "religion-in-use" in a Theravada Buddhist society in Burma.5 And Clifford Geertz "observed" Islam as an expression of differing historical and cultural exigencies in two very different Muslim societies. Moroccan and Javanese.6 Each of these writers meant slightly different things by their distinctions. Spiro, for example, was interested in the psychological uses of Buddhism by Burmans, which lead them to cognitive and behavioral reconfigurations of normative , nibbanic doctrine. However, all were agreed that the relationship between a literate, normative, religious doctrine and the ways in which the religion was lived by the often semiliterate or illiterate "folk," was neither transparent nor unproblemmatical. The very nature of the relationship was, indeed, an area richly deserving of study. II There is no reason to suspect that Judaism, as a world religion, is immune from this insight. Both of the books under discussion here also deal with Judaism's local manifestations among specific folk and their communities. Moreover , both extend the insight differentiating normative, 154 Religion text-based "religion-in-doctrine," to use Spiro's terms, and the locally lived "religion-in-use," to focus on women's religious lives in particular as another form of in-use local variation -a form especially deservi ng of analysis as it had been, hitherto, largely ignored.7 Finally, both authors focus on Judaism in Israel-and this is worth noting because most of the earlier discussions of localized Judaism have emphasized the influence of diasporic conditions. What of the diaspora? On the one hand, Jacob Katz, for example, has long argued that what is impressive, given the immensity and duration of the Jewish dispersion, are the basic and underlying similarities among Jewish communities -or at least among traditional ones.8 Where striking dissimilarities occur, Katz maimains, they are the results of disruptive and differentially experienced modernizing processes . Premodern Jewish communities--be they Yiddishspeaking or Ladino or Judeo-Arabic speaking-were more fundamentally alike than they were different. Modernity, Katz asserts, sundered the essential unity of Judaism and Jewish life. On the other hand, Katz espouses a more generic and monodimensional sense of what modernization consists of, and its apparently metacultural properties, than is perhaps warranted.9 Looking around at Judaism in different Jewish communities one is also impressed by the variations-especially at the folk or popular level-and the ways in which these variations align with and mimic the religious practices of the non-Jewish, as well as culturally dominant, majorities. Many have commented on the distinctive Judaism of the Maghreb, for example, with its thaumaturgical, maraboutisitic, and pilgrimage-oriented beliefs and practicesIO that closely mimic and overlap with North African Islam. II A world away, and on the other side of the...