RABBI OVADIA YOSEF AND HIS
"CULTURE WAR" IN ISRAEL
By Omar Kamil
doctoral candidate at the Institute of Political
Science,
Department of International Relations, University of Leipzig, Germany.
His dissertation deals with the role of Oriental Jews (Mizrahim) in Israeli
society.
Summary: Rabbi Ovadia Yosef has emerged
as one of the most powerful figures on Israel's political and cultural
scene. Aside from trying to organize Sephardi Jews politically, he has
sought to gain equality or even superiority for Sephardi religious
interpretations. In these efforts, he has enjoyed a fair degree of
success and has changed Israeli society and the self-perception of much
of its population.
Keywords: Israel, Jewish religion, Sephardi, Shas party
"Shas: It's not a platform, it's an identity."
(Shas party election slogan in 1996 Knesset election)
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of
Shas,(1) the haredi(2) Sephardi(3) party, has an agenda much broader
than mere politics. His goal is to change Israeli culture and ideology,
as well as Jewish religious practices, in a number of ways.
The best-known of Rabbi Yosef's recent public
interventions include his frequent attacks on secular Israeli Jews of
European origin (Ashkenazim) and their way of life. His unflattering
remarks about Palestinians and Arabs, as well as statements that those
killed in the Holocaust were atoning for sins from previous lives, have
also set off public furors.(4) In February 1999, he declared that the
justices of Israel's Supreme Court were bo`alei nidot, meaning literally
that "they are all [men who] have intercourse with menstruating
women,"(5) and heaped scorn on secular women who "do not practice
[ritual] purification" and therefore give birth to "sons born of
uncleanness." The secular public was also outraged when Rabbi Yosef, in
June 1997, said, "A man must not walk between two women or between two
asses or between two camels. Why? Because women aren't concerned with
the Torah and whoever walks near them will be like them."(6)
A leading figure of the secular Israeli left
also came under fire from Yosef. On March 3, 2000, in a sermon about the
Meretz leader and education minister, Yossi Sarid, Ovadia Yosef said
"God will uproot him just as he uproots Amalek [a historic enemy
particularly repugnant to Jews]; that is how he will uproot him. Haman
is cursed? Yossi Sarid is cursed."(7) This statement was made just
before the Jewish holiday of Purim, which highlights the hanging of the
Persian minister Haman after he tries to exterminate the Jews.
Rabbi Yosef crusades vigorously not only
against the Israeli Ashkenazim secular establishment but also against
the Ashkenazic religious establishment. In his battles against
Ashkenazic Halacha (Jewish holy law) rulings in Israel, Rabbi Yosef
fought to forge a united front of the Sephardim to ensure that their
religious law has equal status--or prevails--against Ashkenazic
interpretations. Thus, Yosef wages a bitter battle against the
Ashkenazim on both the religious and secular fronts.
This article explores the roots and
implications of Rabbi Yosef's role in Israeli society, especially for
our understanding of inter-cultural and inter-ethnic relations in
Israel. The central question is how can we explain Rabbi Yosef's
behavior and intentions when he attacks the religious and secular
Ashkenazim in Israel?
The answer to this question is given us by the
Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling.(8) According to him, the Israeli
state is built upon hegemonic ideology, culture, and social order.
Kimmerling emphasizes that "this ideology was shaped in order to
preserve the character of the collectivity and the position of the
original ruling elite, ethnic and national groups."(10) Founders and
beneficiaries of the hegemony were particularly the veteran Ashkenazic
parties and elite groups. Losers and casualties were the Sephardi
immigrants of the 1950s and 1960s, who had and still have a marginal
position in terms of the elite.
Right-wing parties were also excluded from the
center of the power until Menachem Begin, himself Ashkenazic, played the
"ethnic card" by mobilizing Sephardim against the Ashkenazic
establishment. With the support of the Sephardim, Begin was elected
prime minister in 1977, an event that began the breakup of the hegemonic
culture. Four competing Jewish countercultures appeared on the scene to
challenge the original Zionist ideology:
First, there is the Jewish Ashkenazic haredi
culture, which strives to change the Israeli state into a religious
Jewish state, ruled in keeping with the Halacha, according to Ashkenazic
customs (minhagim). Second, there is a smaller but vocal secular
counterculture that supports a civic state for all its Jewish and Arab
citizens. The third counterculture is that of the Arab minority using
the Arabic language. Finally, there is what is known as traditionalist
culture (masorti), which encompasses the Jews from Arab and Muslim
societies, the so-called Sephardim.
Both social and geographic boundaries between
these countercultures are blurred. Some Israelis define themselves as
secular, but keep some of the 613 commandments (mitzvot). Another group
sees itself as religious (datim or modern Orthodox Jews), but are
nationalist and accept most aspects of "modern" culture. At the present
time, all these countercultures are waging a battle among themselves and
against the still-dominant culture, in order to establish their own
culture as the leading one.(11)
Table 1: The Jewish population of Israel and its religious affiliation
-
a. Ultra-orthodox (haredi) 3.9%
-
b. Religious (dati) 11.0%
-
c. Traditional (masorti) 26.8%
-
d. Secular but maintain some traditions (hiloni hamekayem masoret)
23.4%
-
e. Secular (hiloni) 30.3%
-
d. Anti-religious 4.4%
Source: Moore and Kimmerling 1995: 387
THE MASORTI COUNTERCULTURE
OF THE SEPHARDIM
Kimmerling defines the Israeli-Jewish
traditionalism of the Sephardim as a "separate belief system, which
includes ingredients from the formal religion alongside other popular
and folkloric beliefs and practices. Such elements of popular religion,
which are considered as `proper' simply because they are rooted in newly
invented history, include cults of saints and holymen, holy sites,
superstitions, conservative mores, wearing of `modest' clothing, and
voting for 'traditional parties.'"(12) In addition, this Israeli-Jewish
traditionalism is ethnically based since it is overwhelmingly that of
Sephardim.
Upon arrival in Israel, the traditional culture
of the Sephardim was looked down on because the dominant Israeli
ideology put a strong emphasis on the Negation of Exile (shelilat
hagalut), the Israeli version of the melting pot. Accordingly, the state
applied considerable pressure in favor of cultural homogenization via
public schools and the universal draft into the army.
The goal was "to create a new autonomous and
genuine Israeli culture, which is implicitly counterpoised to the
discredited 'exile mentality' putatively characterizing Jewish groups
before immigration to Israel."(13) Furthermore, the state viewed the
traditional culture of the Sephardim as hindering their integration into
the Western-style modern democratic society that was emerging. Ben
Gurion, for example, stated that "those [Jews] from Morocco had no
education. Their customs are those of Arabs....The culture of Morocco I
would not like to have here....We don't want Israelis to become Arabs.
We are duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which
corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish
values as they are crystallized in the Diaspora."(14)
The cultural gap was supposed to close with the
modernization of the Sephardim, meaning their integration into the
mainstream Israeli culture. But this effort to absorb the Sephardim
through modernization met with only partial success. The failure of the
melting-pot policy and the inability of the political left and right,
and the cultural and religious Ashkenazic establishment to integrate the
Sephardim completely into Israeli society led the Sephardim to develop
their own version of the Israeli culture. Furthermore, the Sephardim
lost confidence in the secular Ashkenazic-dominated state institutions
and turned more and more to the charismatic figure of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef
as a new hero on whom to pin their hopes.
RABBI YOSEF AND 'LEHACHZIR
ATARAH LEYUSHNAH'
According to Kimmerling's analysis, Rabbi Yosef
is waging a bitter cultural war in the name of the Sephardim in order to
establish an Israeli culture based on the Sephardi minhag. Apparently,
the goal of rabbi Yosef's culture war is to bring the Israeli public,
both religious and secular, to recognize Sephardi culture as a new
ideology and social order in Israel. In order to "beat the Ashkenazim,"
Yosef has built a strategy based on two pillars: his astounding
knowledge of the Torah and the Halacha on one hand, and the Shas Party
on the other.
On the first point, Yosef seeks to take on the
Ashkenazim regarding Torah and Halacha. His religious authority comes
from his mastery of the Torah and no one in the Jewish world doubts that
he is one of the most important halachic sages of our time.(15) He has
already revolutionized the Sephardi legal approach within Halacha and
revitalized the observance of Halacha within the Sephardi community.
Now, he is striving to create a hegemony of the Sephardi minhag as the
basis for Israeli identity. This is exactly what Rabbi Yosef means when
he talks of "lehachzir 'atarah leyushnah," meaning, literally, restoring
the crown to its rightful place. This sentence, which has become a
central motto of the Shas Party, does not refer--contrary to what many
secular Israelis think--to bringing the Jews in general back to religion
and tradition. Rather, it refers to restoring the primacy that Sephardi
Halacha once enjoyed within the Torah world.
To put it in concrete terms, he insists on the
restoration of the dominance of the Halacha according to the Sephardi
minhag in Israel. In Rabbi Yosef´s view, the Ashkenazim deprived the
Sephardim of the seniority that is theirs by halachic right. Rabbi Yosef
does not want equality with the Ashkenazim; he wants full dominance of
the Sephardi minhag. In his book "Yabia Omer," he formulates his goal:
"It is known that the Sephardi chief rabbis
before me were subordinated to their colleagues, the Ashkenazic rabbis.
And for the sake of peace, they said nothing, but I, who am not
subordinate, praise God, will uphold my mission to restore the crown to
its rightful place and have ordered that the ruling of Maran [Rabbi
Yosef Karo (1488-1575), author of the standard halachic book of the
Shulchan Aroch] be adopted."(16)
Most spiritual leaders of the Sephardim in
Israel, and Rabbi Yosef and his scholars in particular, claim a direct
line of spiritual descent back to some of the greatest sages of Judaism.
These include Rabbi Yosef Karo,(17) who stands in the tradition of Moses
ben Maimon (Maimonides, 1135-1204)(18), Rabbi Yitzhak Alfasi
(1015-1103),(19) the Babylonian ge´onim (leaders of academies there)(20)
and the authors of the Talmud. Consequently, they are convinced that the
Ashkenazic Halacha is no more than a branch that sprang from a deeply
rooted tree. But their primary claim to hegemony in Israel, and their
dream of a state of Israel based on the Halacha, is anchored in the
precepts laid down by Rabbi Yosef Karo. Karo was born in Spain and after
expulsion the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 he settled in Safed(21).
When asked about the Ashkenazim who came to live in the Sephardi
community, Karo replied, unequivocally: "Because they [the Sephardim]
were the first to settle in the city, all those that come to reside
there (afterward) are subordinate to them....Even if the Ashkenazim were
to outnumber the Sephardim, the Ashkenazim must follow the Sephardi
customs, for the first Ashkenazim who arrived were secondary to those
Sephardim and had to follow their customs, as I proved. If so, they are
all Sephardim."(22)
That indeed was the case for hundreds of years.
Ashkenazic rabbis who settled in the Holy Land from the 16th century
onward were compelled to join an existing Sephardi community and abide
by its precepts and maintain its customs. At the head of the rabbinical
establishment in the Land of Israel was the Rishon Lezion (the first of
Zion), a Sephardi rabbi, who was chosen by a rabbinical council and
whose appointment was then authorized by the Ottoman authorities.
However, in the 19th century, Ashkenazic communities were established in
Palestine that were able to effect a break with Sephardi halachic
dominance with the help of donations from Jews in Europe and the backing
of the consuls from their countries, notably czarist Russia, which
leaped at every opportunity to intervene in the internal affairs of the
Ottoman Empire.
The dominance of Ashkenazic Halacha was sealed
in 1911 when Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel (1880-1953)(23) agreed to
serve not as the sole rabbi but to work together with an Ashkenazic
rabbi, Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook (1865-1935)(24), who had held the
post since 1904. Rabbi Uziel thought he would be able to persuade his
colleague to take a unified approach, which would allow rulings to be
issued that would be acceptable to both communities. But Rabbi Kook did
everything he could to consolidate Ashkenazic customs in Palestine, even
over Sephardi customs, while the weaker Rabbi Uziel capitulated and made
far-reaching concessions to Ashkenazic Halacha. Now Rabbi Yosef is
seeking to reverse this situation.
The other pillar of Rabbi Yosef's strategy is
the Shas Party, which was formed in late 1983 by disappointed Sephardi
members of the Ashkenazic haredi party of Agudat Yisrael. Though
initially hesitant, Rabbi Yosef soon gave his blessing to the new party,
which he saw as a means of redressing discrimination against religious
Sephardim. In Shas' political challenge to both Agudat Yisrael and the
Zionist, modern Orthodox alternative, the National Religious Party, he
saw his chance to gain revenge for previous slights, even within his own
party. Originally, it was not Yosef but the Ashkenazic Rabbi Shach,(25)
the head of the Ponevezh Yeshivah in Bnei Brak, who ultimately ruled
Shas. Some of the party's leading politicians, including Aryeh Deri, had
studied in the Shach-affiliated yeshivot and owed their allegiance to
him. When Yosef tried to separate Shas from Shach in 1984, it was Deri,
Yosef's own closest associate in the party, who frustrated him.
In March 1990, Shas, encouraged by Yosef,
toppled the government of national unity by withdrawing its support and
planned to join a narrow Labor party-led coalition. Yosef was invited
(in effect summoned) by Shach to attend a mass rally in Tel Aviv's Yad
Eliyahu stadium. There, before the TV cameras, Yosef heard, for the
first time, that Shach was nullifying the Shas-Labor agreement. Still,
Yosef was not yet strong - some say courageous - enough to fight back.
His moment came just before the June elections in 1992, when Shach made
the speech fatal to his political power by insulting his key allies.
"The Sephardim are not ready yet to manage affairs of religion and
state....They are growing and developing and returning to their roots
but they still need more and more to learn."(26) After nine years of
playing second fiddle to Rabbi Shach in Shas, Rabbi Yosef sharply and
completely ended his relations with him. From this point on, Ovadia
Yosef has reigned supreme in the Shas Party.(27)
Shas' 17 years of history as a political party
on the Israeli scene can be described as a series of successes. Its
growth and parliamentary influence is impressive.(28)
Table 2: The results of the Shas-Party in Israeli elections since 1984
Year of elections Number of Votes Percentage Seats
-
1984 63,600 3.1% 4
-
1988 107,000 4.7% 6
-
1992 130,000 4.9% 6
-
1996 260,000 8.7% 10
-
1999 430,676 13% 17
Sources: Peled 1998:703 and the Homepage of the Knesset, <www.knesset.gov.il>
Shas' success is not only restricted to the
political arena; the real success of the Shas Party has been in Israeli
society at large. Shas has brought a return to religious faith according
to Sephardi practices as a normative option among the Israeli people.
With a well-organized network of different sub-organizations, Shas Party
is present in the whole country.(29) By far Shas' most influential
branch is its El Hama'ayan (To the Wellsprings) organization, a
countrywide school system, which utilizes both state funding and party
financial resources. According to its incorporation statutes, the goals
of El Hama`ayan are "to promote the traditional and Jewish values of
religious Jewry in Israel ...to improve religious service, to help
improve the quality of religious life, to supply the religious needs of
the haredi religious Jewry."(30)
In order to achieve its goals, El Hama´ayan
runs after-school clubs for what organizers estimate to be anywhere
between 30,000 and 40,000 children in its kindergartens and elementary
schools, many of them from secular Sephardi families. For a monthly fee
of just $185, far less than any public school,(31) Shas schools offer a
school day three hours longer than that of public schools, hot lunches,
transportation, and intensive schooling in the Sephardi tradition.
Furthermore, these schools offer tutors for bar mitzvahs, adult/rabbi
lessons, women's support groups, youth activities, immigrant absorption
programs, and scholarships for yeshiva students.(32) Shas community
organizers function as surrogate social workers, mediating in family
disputes, and even finding jobs for the unemployed.(33)
The other key instrument behind the success of
Shas is its effort to foster the tshuva, or return-to-faith. Through
tshuva, Shas claims to have inspired innumerable ba'alai teshuva, Jews
who changed from a secular to religious way of life.
It is common among Israelis to argue that the
Sephardi identity Rabbi Yosef is attempting to forge is a separatist
one. It is suggested here, however, that Rabbi Yosef is seeking to forge
an integrated Jewish identity. The adjective Sephardi in this context
has a religious meaning only. Of course, Rabbi Yosef seeks to forge a
Sephardi identity against a dominant "other." As one Israeli researcher
writes, "That other, however, is not the Ashkenazim, in general, but the
Zionist, especially the Labor Zionist establishment that has
marginalized Sephardim--in his term, Mizrahim--since the beginning of
Zionist settlement in Palestine."(34) Rabbi Yosef´s wisdom, and
simultaneously the secret of his success, lies in his ability to
mobilize his supporters, not against the Ashkenazim in general, but
rather against the secular and non-Jewish components of their ideology.
In other words, Rabbi Yosef seeks to replace the secular elements of
Zionism as the official state ideology with a Zionism built only on the
Jewish religion according to the Sephardi minhag. Under this redefined
Zionism there would be a place for all Jews.
At the same time, it should be stressed that
while Yosef seeks to unite and lead all "Sephardim," his most active
political and social following has been among the Jewish immigrants from
Morocco and their descendants. This is no accident as immigrants from
Morocco came last in the independence area, mostly during the 1950s and
even early 1960s, and were the poorest and least-educated of all the
Jewish immigrants to Israel. Yosef, of course, is from Iraq. But just as
Begin was an Ashkenazic Jew who mobilized the Sephardim politically,
Yosef is a Sephardic Jew from Iraq who mobilized the Moroccans. This
factor is the basis of his success but also limits Shas's appeal among
the majority of Sephardim.
CONCLUSION
It appears that the role of Rabbi Yosef in
Israeli society can be explained in the framework of an Israeli culture
war in which he battles against the Ashkenazic establishment, both
religious and secular, to gain hegemony for a Jewish cultural identity
based on the Sephardi minhag. In order to "beat the Ashkenazim," Rabbi
Yosef has built a strategy based on two pillars: his intimate knowledge
of the Torah and Halacha on the one hand and the Shas Party on the
other. Based on his unique knowledge of the Halacha and the Torah, he
has revitalized the Sephardi tradition (minhag) in accordance with Rabbi
Yosef Karo.
Further, Ovadia Yosef has succeeded in gaining
an impressive presence in Israeli political and social life through his
political party, Shas, and its social sub-organizations. Nevertheless,
he will not be content with this partial victory. Rabbi Yosef wants to
impose Sephardi cultural identity not only on his flock (the Sephardim)
but on all Israeli Jews. According to Rabbi Yosef, this identity should
serve as the basic ideology of the state, instead of the Zionist secular
belief. In other words, Rabbi Yosef seeks to redefine Zionism in
connection with religion, and not with secularism.
NOTES
-
1. Shas is derived from the Hebrew Sephardim Shomrei Torah, meaning
literally "Sephardi Torah Guardians." Shas is also another name for
the Talmud, which is short for "the six orders of Mishna." The
selection of the same name for the party of Sephardi Guardians gives
Shas more authority among its supporters.
-
2. Haredi, Pl. haredim meaning literally god-fearing. I use the Hebrew
term in order to avoid the imprecise English 'ultra-orthodox
believer', as haredi emphasizes "a way of life" rather than a "very
extreme theological commitment."
-
3. Sephardi, plural Sephardim; one of the most debatable terms in
Israeli sociology; meaning literally Jews who came originally from
Spain. In the Israeli context nowadays, there is a difference
between what Shas and its supporters understand under Sephardi and
what the rest of the secular public understands. When the leaders of
Shas speak of Sephardi, they intend to emphasize the importance of
the Spanish Jewish customs (minhag) as opposed to the Ashkenazic
customs as the authentic one for all Jews in Israel. On the other
hand, from the point of view of the Ashkenazic Israelis "Sephardim"
means Jews who came from Spain and from Arab and Muslim countries.
The Jews of Spanish origin called themselves "pure-bred Sephardi"
(Sephardi tahor). The "pure Sephardim" considered themselves a
distinct people, separate from and above Jews who had arrived in the
Holy Land from Arab and Muslim countries. In this paper, I prefer to
use Sephardim instead of other terms such as Mizrahim or oriental
Jews, precisely because it is the term with which Shas identifies
itself. See Ha'aretz, August 31, 2000 and Daniel J. Elazar, The
other Jews: the Sephardim today, New York 1989, pp. 15
-
4. For a general view of the remarks of rabbi Yosef, see Ma'ariv,
March 19, 2000, Yedioth Ahranoth, March 19, 2000, Ha'aretz , March
28, 2000 and Jerusalem Report,
http://jrep.com/info/Ovadia/
-
5. Cited in Ma'ariv, March 19, 2000
-
6. Cited in Jerusalem Report,
http://jrep.com/info/Ovadia/
-
7. Ma'ariv, March 19, 2000
-
8. See Baruch Kimmerling, Between hegemony and dormant kulturkampf in
Israel, Israel Affairs, vol. 4/1998, pp. 9-72, p. 48
-
9. Ibid., p. 51
-
10. Since the beginning of 1990s Israeli scholars have entered into a
debate about an internal Jewish "culture war". For an overview see
Moshe Zimmerman, Wende in Israel: Zwischen Nation und Religion,
Berlin 1997, pp. 115-120, Ezra Kopelowitz, Jewish Culture Wars:
Changing Attitudes Towards Religion and Ethnicity Among American and
Israeli Jews, in
http://www.geocities.com/debbieandezra, Walter Laqueur, Acute
Culture War in Israel: Chasms Between the Intelligentsia and the
Netanyahu Government,
http://www.nzz.ch, Michael Wolffsohn, Inner Tensions in Israeli
Society: A Jewish-Arab State - an Internal Jewish Culture War,
http://www.nzz.ch,
and Baruch Kimmerling. I stress the work of Kimmerling for this
article because Kimmerling is the only Israeli scholar which pick
out the theme of the Jewish culture war as a central topic in his
work.
-
11. Baruch Kimmerling, p.62
-
12. H. Goldberg, Introduction: Culture and Ethnicity in the Study of
Israeli Society, ethnic Groups, 1(3), 1977, pp. 63-186, p.170
-
13. Cited in Sami Smooha, Israel, Pluralism and Conflict, Berkely,
University of California Press 1978, p. 68
-
14. See Moshe Kaveh, The flip side of Ovadia Yosef, Jerusalem Post,
Ausgust 23, 2000 and Shahar Ilan, Second only to Joseph Caro,
Ha'aretz October 6, 2000
-
15. Rabbi Yosef, according to Yair Sheleg, Rabbi Yosef and his war
against the Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Ha'aretz, February 25, 2000,
p. b5 (Hebrew)
-
16. See Encyclopaedia Judaica (EJ) , vol. 5, pp. 194-201
-
17. Ibid., vol. 11, pp. 754-781
-
18. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 600-604
-
19. The geonim were recognized by the Jews as the highest authority of
instruction from the end of the sixth century or somewhat later to
the middle of the 11th In the 10th and 11th centuries this title was
also used by the heads of academies in Erez Israel. See EJ, vol. 7,
pp. 315-317
-
20. A town of Upper Galilee. For the religious importance of Safed for
the Jews see EJ, vol. 14, pp. 626-631
-
21. Rabbi Yosef Karo, Yosef Karo: Questions and Answers of avkat
rochel, no date, (Hebrew), no. 212. See also H.J. Zimmels,
Ashkenazim and Sephardim: Their Relations, Differences and Problems
as Reflected in the Rabbinical Responsa, London 1976, p.304.
-
22. See EJ, vol. 12, pp. 1527-1528
-
23. Ibid, vol.6 , pp.
-
24. Rabbi Eliezer Menahem Shach is widely considered to be "the last
word" on affairs for the Lithuanian communities inside the haredi
milieu. Rabbi Shach is also respected among the Sephardim, because
many of the religious leaders of the Sephardim were trained in
either Shach's Yeshiva or in one associated with him. Shas was also
a "product" of a clever political play by rabbi Shach. He knew that
there were thousands of Sephardi voters who were either graduates of
the Lithuanian educational system or were dependent upon the care
provided to their relatives by the Ashkenazic rabbis. For more
details about rabbi Shach, see S. Heilman and M. Friedman, Religious
Fundamentalism and Religious Jews: The Case of Hardim, in
Fundamentalism Observed, Marty and Appleby (eds.), Westview Press,
Boulder 1991, pp. 206-210 and Aaron Willis: Sephardic Torah
Guardians: Ritual and the politics of piety, unpublished
dissertation, Princeton University 1993, pp. 160-161 and 197-221
-
25. Ha'aretz June 14, 1992
-
26. Aaron Willis, p. 221
-
27. See Yoav Peled, Towards a redefinition of Jewish nationalism in
Israel? The enigma of Shas, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 21, pp.
703-727, 1998, p. 703 and the Homepage of the Knesset,
www.knesset.gov.il
-
28. See Aaron Willis, p. 189
-
29. See Yoav Peled, p. 717
-
30. For the school year 2000/2001 the fees of the public schools are
about 1300 Shekels; see Ha'aretz, September 15, 2000
-
31. See Aaron Willis, p. 195
-
32. See Y.K. Halevi and N.C. Gross, Religious revival, Jerusalem
Report, pp. 14-18, 1996, p. 16
-
33. See Yoav Peled, p.720
MIDDLE EAST REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
(MERIA) http://www.meria.biu.ac.il
besa@mail.biu.ac.il
Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-IlanU
Copyright MERIA
Please credit if quoting; ask permission to reprint.
Theodor Much und Karl Pfeifer,
Bruderzwist im Hause Israel.
Judentum zwischen Fundamentalismus und Aufklärung.
Kremayr & Scheriau, Wien 1999
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