The rabbinical courts in the evolving political culture of Israel
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10280724 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Martin Edelman (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1980 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 145-166 |
| Publication date | 1980-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Middle Eastern Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0026-3206 • E-ISSN: 1743-7881 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00263208008700442 |
| OpenAlex | W1970465381 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 7 |
Long before the establishment of the State of Israel, Jews living in that piece of the world's territory were subject to the jurisdiction of rabbinical courts. From ancient times the prevailing pattern of government in the Middle East was to grant each religious community a considerable amount of internal autonomy. Under the law of the Ottoman Empire, Jewish religious courts had complete authority within their community to resolve questions of personal status as well as matters of a purely religious nature. This practice was carried over by the British Mandate and later by the Israeli legal system, so that today many matters of personal status involving Israeli Jews are within the jurisdiction of the rabbinical courts. This tradition and history, however, have not made those courts an accepted part of the Israeli political-legal system. Rather, the rabbinical court system is one of the most problematic parts of the evolving political culture of Israel. This paper aims at exploring that relationship and commenting on it. A fuller understanding of the situation requires a brief discussion of: (a) the role of Judaism in the Zionist movement which created the State of Israel; (b) the place of the Jewish religion within the state and (c) the institutional setting of the rabbinical courts within the Israeli system. A. Like other new states, Israel is the result of a nationalist movement which however had many unique characteristics. Not the least of these was the 2,000-year-old national-religious tradition of the return to Zion. While the dominant forces and leading actors in the zionist movement were clearly secularists, it was the historical tradition which provided the affective ties of unity needed by the modern nation-builders. The origins of the Jewish people are rooted in their religion which sustained a sense of peoplehood through the long exile. Until the nineteenth century all Jews, wherever they happened to reside, lived according to the norms of the tradition. Not only did those norms specify the relation of man to God, but in specifying the relation of man to man, particularly within the Jewish community, those norms also defined the Jewish people. Traditional Judaism makes no distinction between religious belief and national identity: it entails both a religious and a national commitment. A secularist could certainly point to other factors which sustained Jewish national identity-persecution, obstacles to assimilation, etc.-but the centrality of religion in the history of the Jewish people cannot be ignored. Without it * A slightly different version of this paper was presented at the Tenth World Congress of the
Political science · Politics · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law
| Citations per year | 0.03 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1992 - 1992 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |