Shas and the resignification of the intersection between ethnicity and religion

ABSTRACT

Current analyses of ethnicity and religion emphasise the subordination of the one to the other in the construction of collective identities. One line of research perceives religion as a resource of political mobilisation, while another conceptualises religion as the essence of ethnicity. As opposed to these analyses, this article explores how these two markers intersect and constitute each other in the process of identity formation. I centre on the ways Shas, an ethno-religious movement in Israel, mobilises hegemonic ethnic and religious markers of Middle East and North African (MENA) Jews in order to construct its collective identity. The analysis of Shas’s newspapers shows how, by suffusing religious traditions with ethnic meaning and marking an ethno-class collective as religious, Shas interweaves ethnicity and religion and resignifies their relation. This identity project is intended to redefine the symbolic boundaries of the Jewish nation and to redeem MENA Jews from their marginality. Intersectional analysis as applied in this article explains why different ethno-class and religious collectives imagine themselves as sharing a common identity, illumines why particular identity markers are chosen out of the numerous existing categories, and provides an explanation for the flexibility of social movements.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnicity
• religion
• collective identity
• social movements
• intersectionality

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sara Helman for her guidance in the writing of the article. I would also like to thank Nissim Mizrachi, Orna Sasson Levi, Joseph Ringel, Murray Rosovsky and the anonymous reviewers for their thought-provoking comments. I wish to express my gratitude to Dana Selinger-Abutbul Amir Ben Porat, Keren Hansen, Laura Miller, Ronit Grossman, Pinhas Shtern, Ofer Mualem, Udi Sommer and Ester Cohen for supporting the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The term Sephardim originally referred to the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula and their religious traditions. Expelled from Spain in 1492, the Jews reached various places – Greece, Yugoslavia, Morocco, the Land of Israel. While the link to a shared Jewish heritage was preserved, there developed in each country a unique Judeo-Spanish culture (Alexander-Frizer 2008). However, local custom and rabbinic rulings often trumped the rulings of the Sephardic tradition, so that there was a large degree of halakhic variation within the MENA region.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Jewish community in the Land of Israel consisted of three main categories. First, Jews of European origin and who adhered to the religious tradition re-codified in the seventeenth century by Rabbi Isserles; they regarded themselves as Ashkenazi. Secondly, Jews expelled from Spain and who saw themselves as pure Sephardi. Thirdly, Jews who came from Muslim countries prior to the establishment of the state of Israel and known as Mizrahi Jews (Morag-Talmon 1980); they were part of the Sephardic religious milieu. Relations between that faction and the Ashkenazi Jews were tense, mainly with regard to economic resources. The symbolic separation between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews was institutionally reinforced in 1920 with the establishment of the Chief Rabbinate in Israel. It had two heads: the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi and the Sephardic Chief Rabbi.

2. In the years when Shas was active, control of the newspapers as well as the Council of Sages by the Shas elite narrowed the scope of expression of alternative narratives. Among other things, this led to the departure of spiritual and political leaders such as Rabbi Zini and Rabbi Mazuz. They detached their educational organizations from the Shas movement.

3. Shorashim, June 1986, Letters to the Editor, 17.

4.

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5. In the early days of the Israeli state the Labor party expected the new emigrants to join the workers federation and through it the party. The symbol of affiliation was the so-called red registry. The general opinion is that being a party member helped the immigrants to find jobs in the civil service. Through this mechanism the Labor party recruited immigrants to its ranks and maintained political dominance.

6. Shas discourse on the concept of Sepharadiut varies, concerning issues such as whether Yemenites are Sephardic, attitude to Zionism, etc. These diverse models are key for shaping the imagined Sephardic collective as each re-signifies its own boundaries. Under the leadership of Rabbi Yosef, Shas eliminated exclusive models of Sepharadiut in favour of the integrative approaches. In contrast to approaches hostile to Zionism, Rabbi Yosef’s attitude was ambiguous. He perceived Zionism as having messianic potential, but he vigorously opposed its secularism and the view that redemption could come through Zionist activists. This discourse enables Shas to incorporate Mizrahi Jews, Yemenite communities and ultra-orthodox Jews into its collective. This model is well reflected in the way Shas periodicals interweave ethnicity and religion to construct the flexible Sepharadiut. True, narratives constructing Sephardi-ness as ultra-orthodox or as originating in exclusive geographic areas appeared between1988 and 1997 too. However, these narratives were insignificant in the given period. This is related mainly to the political aspirations of Shas to expand its constituency in that period.

7. Theodor Herzl, Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist and father of the modern political Zionist movement.