Diaspora in the homeland: homeland perceptions regarding diaspora Jews in Israel’s discourse around its collective identity

ABSTRACT

Homeland-construed perceptions of the diaspora can yield valuable insights into the discourse around the homeland's collective identity. I illustrate this claim using the debate surrounding the Kotel Compromise, a government plan designed to regulate pluralistic and non-Orthodox Jewish prayer at the Western Wall (Kotel in Hebrew). This plan has recently become a subject of contention between the State of Israel, where Orthodox Judaism has an institutional monopoly, and Diaspora Jews, many of whom identify with non-Orthodox Jewish denominations, such as Reform and Conservative Judaism. Drawing on protocols of the Knesset (Israeli parliament), I show how the different participants in this debate used their perceptions of Diaspora Jews not only to reaffirm external boundaries relating to Jewish peoplehood, but also to reconstruct internal boundaries relating to Judaism as religion. This paper suggests that analyzing homeland perceptions of the diaspora can widen our understanding of the construction of homeland identities and boundaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Diaspora
• homeland
• religion
• peoplehood
• collective identity
• Israel

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments. I would also like to thank the members of the “Israel and the Jewish World” research lab at the Azrieli Centre for Israel Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev for useful discussions about the topic of this paper. A deep gratitude goes to Professor Ofer Shiff for providing valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this article. I am grateful to my partner in life, Dr. Dana Zarhin, for her continued support and encouragement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the following lines, I use “Diaspora Jews” or “Jewish Diaspora” as generic terms for World Jewry.

2 I do not address Jewish-Arab and other intergroup intrinsic tensions within Israeli society, which constitute an important dimension of my discussion and deserve a full and comprehensive treatment in their own right.

3 It is worth noting that Orthodox Judaism is the most prominent denomination among Jews in France as well as in the UK (the two biggest Jewish communities in Europe). In the UK, for example, only 19% of Jews identify with Reform Judaism whereas 8% identify with Liberal Judaism (parallels Conservative Judaism in the US). For more information about Jews in the UK, see the report by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) (Casale Mashiah and Boyd 2017). https://www.jpr.org.uk/documents/Synagogue_membership_in_the_United_Kingdom_in_2016.pdf

4 All excerpts from Knesset protocols were translated by the author.

5 Many thanks to Professor Ofer Shiff for sharing his insights about the who-is-a-Jew and what-is-a-Jew distinction in Israel’s public discourse.

6 Tallit is a prayer shawl worn by religious Jews, whereas Tefillin is a set of small black leather boxes containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah. In Orthodox communities, Tallit and Tefillin are only worn by men, while in non-Orthodox communities they may be worn by men and women.

7 On January 31, 2016, Yariv Levin, the Minister of Tourism in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government (2015-2020), said that Reform Jews represent “a dying world,” due to the high rate of inter-faith marriages among them. Levin also blamed Reform Jews for not doing enough to “back up Israel’s policies” in the world (Ravid 2016). For more about Reform Judaism, see Tabory 2004.