Let us note first of all that Zionism, out of which the State of Israel was born, was immediately tied to the question of modernity. This political movement inscribed itself fully in the nineteenth-century current of nationalities, a modern reaction against the colonial Empires and the colonial grip.
Today, when Zionism is widely decried by left and Third-Worldist movements as a form of colonialism and racism, it is too often forgotten that it was precisely a movement of national liberation fundamentally anti-colonialist, directed against the subjection and persecution of the Jewish minorities in the Empires of the time… The first Zionist ideologues were fascinated by the national phenomenon and by the will of peoples to emancipate themselves from the imperial yoke (at the time, especially that of the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire). One thinks of Moses Hess, or of the rabbinical precursors of Zionism such as Alkalai. One can rightly say that the Risorgimento, the Italian unity achieved by Piedmont and by Cavour, followed by German unity in 1870 with Bismarck, was the major source of inspiration for the first ideologues of Jewish national renewal. Beyond that, the dream of practically all the thinkers and founders of Zionism was to create one day a liberal, emancipated, modern, democratic State, on the model of the Western democracies they wished to copy. Their unbounded admiration went out to England, France, the United States, and they saw the Jewish State as a State of separation of powers, with free elections and a parliament representing all tendencies of the people. Some emphasized above all an independent judiciary; all rejected the European autocratic systems in which liberties were trampled and minorities persecuted. Of course, the law of separation of religion and State adopted by France in 1905 had impressed them enormously, and it was obvious to most of the actors of the Zionist movement that such a separation, and French-style laïcité, would be put in place in the future State.
Let us not forget either that the Zionist movement, especially in Eretz Israel, was very largely dominated by the socialist parties. While the first aliyah, beginning in 1881 (the so-called “dreamers”), was rather diversified, with a good number of traditionalist pioneers, from the second aliyah onward socialism dominates very largely, whether of Marxist tendency with *Poalei Zion**, or of reformist tendency with the *Hapoel Hatzair** of A.D. Gordon and his “religion of labor.” The socialist tendency will be reinforced still further with the third aliyah, in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the First World War. Finally, while the fourth aliyah (1924–25) brought mainly petty-bourgeois elements from Poland to Eretz Israel, the divergences among them bore on the type of economy that the future Jewish State would practice, on its structure and social organization, but there was no contestation (notably between Ben Gurion and Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky) over the modern, secular and Westernized character it ought to have.
It is precisely because of its modernity that the Orthodox religious forces in Europe, the great rabbinical authorities of the time — whether of Hasidic tendency or anti-Hasidic (like the *mitnagdim**, or the *Lithuanians**) — radically condemned Zionism, and organized against it by founding *Agudat Israel**. Of course, in their absolute condemnation of Zionism, there were also theological reasons: exile was imposed by God on the Jewish people as a chastisement for its sins, and it is not for the Jews to decide to put an end to it on their own — that would be a false messianism, like Christianity or Sabbateanism*.
And according to the three oaths of the Song of Songs, it is forbidden to the Jews to hasten the end of times.
But the principal reason for the absolute hostility of the rabbis of Europe toward Zionism came above all from the hard-line laïcité and the aspiration to modernity of its promoters (most of them having passed through the Orthodox system they were now rejecting). It must be acknowledged that one finds a great many texts by the Zionist leaders which, in their absolute rejection of tradition and religious practice, openly verge on antisemitism.
Among these texts, which call for the emergence of a “new Jew” — young, beautiful, strong and courageous, sound in body and mind, absolutely modern and totally emancipated, freed from the chains and the ugliness of the diaspora — one finds descriptions of the traditional Jew that the Drumonts of the era would not have rejected: the religious Jew dressed in “dirty” traditional clothes, with his lousy beard, his caftan and his ridiculous *shtreimel**; the parasitical Jew who can do nothing with his hands, who only whines while seeking a patron, and so on. Whether it be the famous “pyramid” of Borochov that aimed at “normalizing” the Jewish people, or a Ben Gurion who also spoke of a “normal” State with “policemen and prostitutes,” this State would not be a traditional State! What the Hasidic *admorim** and the masters of the great *yeshivot** of Europe understood very well was that the future Jewish State which the Zionists wanted would be a far cry from Jewish tradition, would be a State of “unbelievers,” and would adopt the “infamous” rules of laïcité and of the separation of Religion and State (in which they were completely mistaken…). As for the minority rabbis who chose to accompany Theodor Herzl and to support him — like Rav Reines, founding thereby the current known as religious Zionism — they had taken great care to specify to Herzl that they supported him only on the plane of his political efforts, and that they would not support him if he included in the Zionist movement’s action any “cultural” elements (that is, in fact, tied to modernity). Indeed, when the Zionist Organization began to include such cultural elements in its program, several rabbis chose to distance themselves from religious Zionism.
The case of Rav Abraham Itzhak Hacohen Kook should be mentioned; it is quite particular, first because of the stature of the man, who was one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the modern era. Chief Rabbi of Palestine under the British Mandate, major thinker of religious Zionism, he had — as in many domains — a very complex relation to modernity. On the one hand, he certainly did not want the Zionist movement and the future Jewish State to move away from tradition, and he preached firmness on this point. On the other hand, his messianic eschatology accorded a fundamental place to the return of all Jews to Eretz Israel, whatever their attitude toward tradition and religion; and we know that he assigned the modern, even anti-religious, Jew a role in the messianic process, by virtue of his very rootedness in the land of Israel.
As the creation of the State of Israel approached — indeed, from the 1930s on — a number of elements contributed to progressively change the attitude of the Zionist leaders toward the modernity of the future State.
First of all, shortly before the Second World War, before the gates of Palestine closed with the White Paper, a great many Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews arrived from the communities of Eastern Europe. One can mention in particular the Hasidim of *Gur**. Faced with the situation in Palestine and the clashes between Jews and Arabs, they often drew closer to the Zionists, if only for reasons of security. The softening of the positions of *Agudat Israel** notably provoked the secession of the harshest fringes of the *haredim** of Palestine, around the *Neturei Karta**, the *Edah Haredit** of Jerusalem and the *Satmar Hasidim**. This was an ultra-traditionalist population, of which account would have to be taken.
On the other hand, the Fifth aliyah, of German origin, arriving after Hitler’s rise to power — the so-called *yekkim** aliyah — comprised diverse currents, some very favorable to modernity, science and laïcité, others more reserved. The Orthodox current often called “Torah and Derekh Eretz,” faithful to the teaching of Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, sought to combine strict religious practice with modernity. After the war and the Shoah, with the arrival of the survivors, then around the creation of the State with the beginning of what would be the mass immigration of Jews from the Arab countries (Jews of Iraq and Yemen), it became more and more evident to all that it would not be possible to create a State “à la française” or even according to the norms of the Western democratic countries. One may ask why.
First of all, because part of the Jews who were arriving and would arrive in this State, while they accepted the instruments of modernity, rejected the ideology of modernity. The instruments of modernity are all that science creates as tools of a modern State. Whether it be a government or a parliament, hospitals or means of transport, work instruments or machines of every kind — or today the computer. On these tools, which are a priori neutral, there is no controversy; they have no ideological content; they make human life easier and bestow well-being. By contrast, from its outset the Jewish State will count among its population a not insignificant number of citizens who entirely reject the ideological content and the characteristic ideas of modernity: they want to keep patriarchal structures, the authority of the father, the precedence of the man and the effaced role of the woman; they want the traditional man-woman-children family and reject any deviation from it; they reject homosexuality as much as abortion; they believe in old, traditional ideas, and even when they are not practicing they want to preserve at all costs the place of religion in the State.
Faced with this de facto situation, the partisans of modern ideas and of a Western-style State could in theory have said: we secularists, whether we are of the left or of the right, are the majority; the religious and the traditionalists are a minority; we will therefore impose on them a liberal and modern State, and inscribe the separation of religion and State in a written Constitution similar to those of the Western countries.
But it is here that we must dwell on the political thought of David Ben Gurion — on what is called in Hebrew mamlachtiut, or in French étatisme (statist ideology). David Ben Gurion, founder of the State and head of the dominant party *Mapai**, was certainly a secularist, but a secularist very learned in Jewish matters, and he was a very erudite connoisseur of the biblical texts he had studied in his childhood. Now he had a very precise idea of his State: he wanted at all costs that the State should manage to encompass — by giving them a minimum of satisfaction — all the segments of the Jewish people who would come to settle there. He absolutely did not want certain Israeli Jewish citizens to feel “outside,” excluded from the system, unintegrated. That, he thought, is exactly what would happen if the State imposed its modernity on people who did not want it. They would take refuge in their ghettos, their separate towns, and would constantly undermine the regime. Thus, to integrate them, one had to make concessions, even large concessions, scarcely compatible with modernity. One consequence of this choice will be that the State of Israel will have no Constitution.
In 1947, exhausted by the incessant clashes between Jews and Arabs and by the attacks of the Jewish extremist organizations the *Irgun** and the *Lehi** (Stern Group), England referred the “Question of Palestine” to the United Nations Organization for it to decide on a solution. To form its opinion, the General Assembly sent to Palestine a Commission of Inquiry, UNSCOP, which was to interview and gather the views of all segments of the population, Jewish and Arab. It was clear that the Commission would also ask their position on a Jewish State to the ultra-Orthodox of Agudat Israel, until then declared anti-Zionists. While David Ben Gurion was about to take a decision of enormous importance for the future of the State of Israel and its modernity, he sent to Agudat Israel — in order to win the *haredim** to his cause and to be sure that they would not oppose the State, or in any case would not speak ill of the Zionist State to UNSCOP’s people — the famous letter of the “status quo.” Let us note straightaway that this letter expressed in itself a rejection of modernity, since it guaranteed the perpetuation in the State of Israel of religious and traditional rules as they existed in the *Yishuv**. Where there is status quo, there is no change… I recall the terms over which so much ink has flowed:
The Sabbath and Jewish holidays will be the rest days of Israel and no one may be obliged to work on those days. In practice, this meant that what functioned somewhere on the Sabbath would continue to function, but where, before the State, something did not function on the Sabbath, it would continue not to function. … So, for example, in most cities, there would be no public transport on the Sabbath or on a holiday. A visitor coming from a “modern” State like France would be astonished to learn that an inhabitant of Jerusalem wishing to go to the sea on the Sabbath has no alternative but his private car or a taxi… or to stay home.
All the State’s canteens can serve only kosher food. In practice, this means that, in the army as well as at the university, at school or in an administration, there will be no freedom to eat what one wants.
All currents of education will be recognized and subsidized, and there will be no interference by the State, either in the choice of teachers or in the content of teaching. In practice, this allowed the ultra-Orthodox never to teach to the young the subjects that any modern State would judge indispensable, in particular for entering the labor market: modern Hebrew, mathematics, English, etc.
And above all, Ben Gurion decided to “dispossess” the State entirely of one of its fundamental regalian functions, which by itself represents the essence of modernity: the civil status of the Israeli citizen. How is this choice linked to modernity? Because all possible advances, the access of persons to progress and to their development, all the important changes liable to emancipate the individual, lie in the domain of civil status. Now Ben Gurion handed this domain over in its entirety to the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and to the Orthodox rabbinical courts, so that they should reign and decide in this domain according to the halakha. Who is a Jew and has the right to citizenship? How does one become a Jew? What is a family? What is fatherhood? Who has the right to marry and to divorce, and so on.
One may of course add to these promises of the status quo other concessions made subsequently to the most traditionalists, such as the exemption of *yeshiva** students from military service, or later the prohibition on the airline El Al from flying on the Sabbath.
What the head of Zionism was accepting was that the State of Israel would be governed ad aeternam by rules fixed in the past: people could only marry religiously, they could only become Jews according to the rules laid down by the traditionalist rabbis, and the family would forever be defined as composed only of a man-woman couple.
What must be well understood is that the rules of the status quo did not prevent Israel from being a modern State, even a start-up nation. The State of Israel, despite the enormous difficulties of integrating immigrants or of the conflict with the Palestinians, has become, from the technological standpoint, one of the most advanced States in the world. The status quo did not prevent exceptional economic growth, cutting-edge technology, and a very high-level army. The Israeli universities are at a level placing them in the highest category. All this is well known and incontestable. By contrast the status quo has blocked any evolution in essential domains concerning the status of the person. In 2022, there is still no public transport on the Sabbath where there was none in 1948. In 2022, in the great majority of Hasidic and Lithuanian yeshivot, thousands upon thousands of young people still have no access to profane knowledge.
When they wish to enter the labor market they are totally helpless.
Those among them who one day decide to leave the Orthodox world and to “lahzor besheelah” (to become non-religious) are completely lost in a secular world they do not know. And above all, in 2022 it is still impossible to marry civilly, or to convert if one does not promise to observe strictly all the commandments… There lies a mystery. Israel is a democratic country, which has a parliament — the Knesset — that could very well, in 73 years, have changed these rules and defined new laws adapted to the modern State. And one may ask why this gulf, then, between the incredibly modern and advanced “start-up nation” and rules of life unchanged, many of which were fixed hundreds of years ago?
The first reason is simply linked to the Israeli political system. The electoral system chosen for this country is a fully proportional system (with a low threshold of representation, 3.25%). The objective of this system was to permit a representation in the Knesset — the single chamber representing the people — of all the important segments of the Israeli population: religious, secular and ultra-religious Jews, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, workers and employers, industrialists and farmers, and of course Arabs of all tendencies (communists, Islamists, Christians, Druze, etc.). Ben Gurion — who, let us recall, reigned as master over the archi-dominant party — could have chosen another system, a majority system. But here again his conception of mamlachtiut, integrative statism, pushed him to want a parliament representative of all (while of course maintaining the supremacy of his own party). The result of a fully proportional system in a country not divided into voting districts is very clear: since the first Knesset of 1949, the Israeli parliament has been splintered among a great number of parties, some of small or medium size. Never has one of the two large parties of Israel (the Labor Party and Likud) managed on its own to obtain a majority of seats in parliament, or even to come close to it. For example, today, in 2022, one finds in the Knesset a far-right party called “Religious Zionism,” a right-wing party — the Likud — a semi-religious right-wing party, *Yamina**, two ultra-Orthodox parties *Yahadut Hatorah** (which itself comprises two parties, Agudat Israel and Degel Hatorah) and the Shas, a liberal right-wing party Tikva Hadasha, two centrist parties, Blue-White and Yesh Atid, two left-wing parties, the Labor Party and Meretz, an Islamist Arab party, Ra’am, and The Joint Arab List which groups three Arab parties.
And again, in the past the fragmentation has been much greater. The result is that all Israeli governments — even when Ben Gurion, Begin, Rabin or Netanyahu were at the summit of their power — have been coalition governments, often with the ultra-Orthodox parties.
Now it is clear that the sine qua non condition for the participation of the religious parties has always been not to touch the status quo and to continue indefinitely the rules accepted by Ben Gurion in 1947. This threat of bringing down the government if any breach were inflicted on these rules has always been extremely effective: thus the first government of Itzhak Rabin fell because military planes ordered from the United States landed in Israel a little after the hour of the Sabbath… For a long time, doing business with the most traditionalist parties — the ones most opposed to modernity — was very convenient. Since all that interested these parties was the absolute maintenance of the status quo, they did not (or did not too much) get in the way of the government’s domestic or foreign policy.
The consequences of this system are very clear: the modern religious movements, Conservative and Reform, which believe in modernity, are excluded; the status of woman is practically unchanged (the divorce, the get, must still be “granted” by the husband; the rabbinical courts that decide on each person’s civil status are still composed exclusively of ultra-Orthodox men, etc.). There are few examples in the world of a State so modern with so many pockets of “anti-modernism.” It should nonetheless be added that with the current Israeli coalition Bennett-Lapid (at the hour I write these lines), “small” changes are taking place. Indeed, for the first time, no religious party forms part of the government. The religious ministers of the Yamina party belong to the religious-Zionist current and would like to bring small modern adaptations to the status quo: making conversion to Judaism a little easier, making the kashrut networks more competitive, etc. Nothing revolutionary, nothing really very “modern,” but… a little fresh air.
However, the Israeli political system is not the sole responsible for this situation. Sociologically, religious or not, the Israeli population remains in the majority very “traditional.” The mass immigration from the Arab countries brought a population, today the majority in Israel, that believes in traditional values: the family, the father, the rabbi, the man, the importance of Judaism, etc. That is why, even though many Israeli Sephardi Jews watch television, drive their car and go to a soccer match on the Sabbath, they continue to support the rules of the status quo, such as the exclusivity of Jewish religious marriage, because, for them, it is the very essence of the Jewish character of the State.
One may conclude this article on modernity (or the absence of modernity…) in Israel by once more emphasizing the difference between the instruments and the ideology of modernity. A good example is the controversy that exists between ultra-Orthodox circles and the authorities on the question of the smartphone. As I have said, the haredim very willingly accept all the technological instruments of modernity. In recent years, in all Israeli universities and university colleges, computer classes for haredim have been created and developed, where they learn with great ease to use all the IT tools. The ultra-Orthodox have nothing against these tools, and throughout the current Covid period they were vaccinated and treated in hospitals with the most sophisticated medical technologies. But the mobile telephone poses a problem. On the one hand, the first mobile telephones, which permitted only telephone calls, are indispensable to daily life, whether for the yeshiva student or the rabbi. One must after all speak with one’s wife and children, and tell them what to buy at the supermarket! By contrast, the smartphone connected to the internet introduces, as does television, an ideological element that is entirely unacceptable: films, forbidden images, etc. That is why the authorities of the haredim authorize only the “kosher telephone,” in the old style.
Obviously any haredi caught by his colleagues or neighbors with a smartphone is set aside and ostracized (his daughters will find no one to marry; his sons will not enter the best yeshivot, etc.).
Such, it seems to me, is the balance sheet of modernity in the Israel of 2022.
Glossary
Admorim (Hasidic): Jewish religious leaders.
Agudat Israel: Jewish political party founded in 1912 in Poland as the political arm of Orthodox Judaism. Today, a political party in Israel which opposes secular tendencies.
Aliyah: designates immigration to Palestine or to Israel; Hebrew word meaning ascent (toward the Holy Land).
Hapoel Hatzair (in Hebrew: the young worker): first socialist Zionist party founded in Palestine in 1905 by Russian Jewish émigrés.
Haredi: literally “God-fearing,” very religious Jews, sometimes called ultra-Orthodox.
Hasidism: mystical current of Judaism founded in the eighteenth century by the rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov or Besht (master of the Good Name). Centered on piety and charity, on the individual in his direct relationship with God, Hasidism stands in opposition to the erudite and rigid tradition of rabbinic Judaism.
Hasidim of Gur: Hasidic obedience, originally dependent on the rabbi of Gur, a small Polish town.
Hasidim of Satmar: Hasidic obedience founded in Transylvania. This sect is very anti-Zionist and is established especially in the USA.
Irgun: Jewish far-right nationalist movement, whose founder was Vladimir Jabotinsky, head of the Revisionist Zionist Movement, and Jewish terrorist group before the creation of the State of Israel, whose principal leader was Menachem Begin, future Prime Minister of Israel.
Lehi (Stern Group): Jewish anti-imperialist terrorist group in Palestine.
Mapai: Israeli left-wing political party which was the principal force in Israeli politics until its merger within the Israeli Labor Party Avoda in 1968. It was the party of Ben Gurion, founder of the State of Israel and its first Prime Minister.
Mitnagdim: literally “the opponents,” movement of opponents of Hasidism, born at the same time as the latter, and existing at the time essentially in Lithuania.
Neturei Karta (in English: the guardians of the city): ultra-religious anti-Zionist sect existing especially in Jerusalem.
Poalei Zion (“Workers of Zion”): Marxist and Zionist movement created in 1901, gathering circles of Jewish workers founded in various cities of the Russian Empire after the rejection of Zionism by the Bund (General Union of Jewish Workers).
Sabbateanism: messianic movement, of partisans of the Jewish kabbalist Sabbatai Zevi, who proclaimed himself the Messiah in 1648. Under the threat of the Sultan he ended by converting to Islam. The Sabbateans, his disciples, interpreted their leader’s conversion to Islam as a commandment to practice a hidden and secret religion.
Shtreimel: fur hat worn by many Jews, particularly by members of Hasidic groups during the Sabbath and religious holidays.
Yamina (from the word Yamin, “right” in Hebrew): far-right political party, close to the settlers, founded by Naftali Bennett, current Israeli Prime Minister.
Yahadut Hatorah: coalition of parties that present themselves as the defenders of the values of the Torah, defending the rights of the religious in Israel, the Torah and respect for the Sabbath.
Yeshivot: Jewish religious Talmudic schools.
Yekkim: Jews of German origin; singular yekke.
Yishuv: name of the Jewish community in Palestine before the creation of the State of Israel.