The Maintenance and Transmission of Ethnic Identity: A Study of Four Ethnic Groups of Religious Jews in Israel (review)

Book Reviews 169 The Maintenance and Transmission ~f Ethnic Identity: A Study of Four Ethnic Groups of Religious Jews in Israel, by linda Begley Soroff. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995. 248 pp. $44.00. Linda Begley Soroff has rather ambitious aims in this book. She sets forth three goals in the Preface: the evaluation of the n"le of religious expression, of gender, and of regional affiliation, in the maintenancb of ethnic identity. She intends to test four I hypotheses about the maintenance of et~ic identity in general, using material she has gathered among four groups ofreligious: Israelis ofdifferent origins. Those groups are, in her words, Ashkenazim, Sephardiril, Veteran Ethiopians, and New Ethiopians. Unfortunately her reach greatly exceed~ her grasp; neither the design of the study nor the' data are equal to the task she has set herself. I Soroff conducted the field work in1 1987-l989 among religious Ashkenazim in a I neighborhood ofJerusalem and among her populations of"Sephardim" and Ethiopian I Jews in a pseudonymous city along the coast. She relied heavily on interviews with ten to eleven families from each group, su~plemented by a questionnaire administered to each family focusing on their backgrou~d and current religious practices. But she never really brings data to bear to test her hypbtheses effectively. For one thing, her samples I are too small and her fmdings too ambfguous. For another, she doesn't compare nonreligious Israelis from the same countries of origin so she cannot say what phenomena are due to religion and what to othe~ cultural factors. Nor did she exercise good judgment in the choice ofthe representative families she chose for each ofher groups. I For example, more than half of her "Ashkenazim" were born in the U.S. (or their parents were) and apparently came as ideologically committed immigrants. Soroff presents profiles of three families in :order to exemplify "the life experiences and attitudes" of this population; all of them came from the United States. Several of the other families in this group are ofRomanian origin, but we never get any sense of their I country oforigin ethnicity and what it rrjeans, and how they feel about being linked with those Americans. Thus, at most we get some vignettes oflife among a few ex-American I families, but hardly a sample of "Ashk~nazi"ethnicity in Israel. Her treatment of "Sephardim" is just as egregious since she never bothers to ask whether Jews from Yemen, Iraq, Morodco, Tunisia, and Libya all want to be or should be put in this one group. Yemenites, for one, usually don't (they aren't Sephardim, of course), and yet her prime example ofahypical" Sephardi family is a Yemenite family. I The description she presents is based on Yemenite practices and culture-which may not apply to the families from other countries. While her discussion of "Sephardim" I seems predicated on the Moroccan immigration experience (e.g., p. 31), her presentation of "Sephardi c11lture" is based on the Yemenites she knew and read about. She gives the reader brief summaries ofthe background ofthe Jews in Yemen, Tunisia, and Tripolitania, but none at all of the JeWs of Morocco and Iraq, who make up a more 170 SHOFAR Spring 1998 Vol. 16, No.3 substantial proportion of the Jews of Asian and North African background in Israel. Presumably the former material was more readily available to her, but this is not a sufficient reason for this imbalance. Again, in her sample of"Veteran Ethiopians," the author includes a family, said to be "typical," in which the husband is from London, while the wife is half Yemenite! In another, the husband is from Baghdad and university educated, and in a third the husband is from Morocco. Now this may bear out Soroffs point about the tendency of veteran Ethiopians to marry out, but it doesn't fill one with confidence about the rest of her portrayal of this group. Although Soroff wants to test hypotheses, she fails to bring together the same sort ofmaterial about each of her four groups, other than the results of her questionnaire on religious observance and practice. The tables presenting these data are...