The Jewishness of Israelis: Responses to the Guttman Report

3. Academics and Other Intellectuals

3 Academics and Other Intellectuals CHARLES S. LIEBMAN THE VAN LEER CONFERENCE On December 26 the Avi-Chai Foundation convened a conference at the Van Leer Institute to discuss the Guttman Report. Thirty-two individuals were invited to prepare written responses to the report. Sixteen responded . Five additional individuals, most of them among the thirty-two invited to offer written responses, delivered oral presentations at the conference . In other words, twenty-one written and/or oral papers were presented at the conference. Fifteen of the twenty-one authors are eminent scholars. Their fields of expertise includeJewish literature and history, Jewish thought and contemporary philosophy, and the social scientific study of religion. The remaining six include a community rabbi, two heads of organizations devoted to secular-religious relations, the former editor of Davar, the chancellor of Bar-Han University who has written widely in the field of Jewish law and theology, and a prominent leader of a religious-Zionist yeshiva. Of the twenty-one individuals who presented papers, eleven could be classified as "religious," that is, fully or almost fully observant ofJewish law. The fact that more than half the papers were prepared by religious Jews appears to render the choice of academic respondents unrepresentative and the responses, taken as a whole, biased. In fact, of the sixteen academics who declined to prepare written papers only two are "religious." Had they all participated, the balance between religious and nonreligious would look considerably different though I do not believe it would have made any difference in the overall nature of the responses . With the exception of two papers, one by a "fully observant" Jew 59 60 Liebman and the other by an ardent secularist, none of the papers expresses a distinctly religious or nonreligious point of view. These two papers aside, one cannot determine the religious orientation of an author from the content of the paper. What should also be clear, however, is that the academic authors who are religious (this is less true of the rabbis) are in no way representative of Israel's religious community. On the other hand, the greater willingness of religious intellectuals to respond suggests that the topic is of greater concern to them than to nonreligious intellectuals. The written responses were circulated to roughly sixty additional individuals who accepted an invitation to attend the conference. There were questions and comments from the floor, generally by scholars of considerable reputation. It is unlikely that so distinguished a group of social scientists and Judaica scholars had ever before gathered to discuss one specific topic. Ten of the written papers are reprinted in the Appendix . The choice of papers was based on an effort to provide the reader with a range of responses to the Guttman Report, not on any judgment concerning the relative merits of the papers. Whereas the media saw its primary role as presenting the results of the Guttman Report, the scholars and intellectuals who participated in the Van Leer conference were asked to discuss the implications of the Guttman Report and to offer any additional comments they wished to make. Hence the papers and the discussions at the conference itself often extended beyond the Guttman Report findings. The purpose of this chapter is to understand what twenty-one very distinguished Israeli intellectuals had to say about Jewishness in Israel as it was reflected in the Guttman Report. The discussion here is further informed by the comments and questions from the floor. Most authors focused their attention on one or two Guttman Report findings that they perceived as central. First, the "traditional bent" of IsraeliJewish society, that is the high degree of religious observance and religious belief among Israeli Jews, and second, the absence of religious polarization among Israeli Jews. THE TRADITIONALISM OF ISRAELI JEWS Only one paper seriously questioned the reliability of the data rather than its interpretation. Shlomo Deshen, professor of anthropology and a foremost authority on contemporary SephardicJewry in Israel, noted the distortion that occurs in grouping respondents by four levels of observance. Deshen pointed out that respondents who grouped themselves in the category "observe nothing" may resemble, in all other respects, those located in the category "observe some of the commandments." On the Academics and Other Intellectuals 61 other hand, respondents who grouped themselves into the same category, for example, into the category of those who observe all the commandments , may be very different from one another. Deshen cited as...