History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Hence when the state was about to be founded, Agudah demanded that it should have a Torah legal basis. This was rejected. The Jewish Agency wrote to Agudah, 29 April 1947: ‘The establishment of the state requires the confirmation of the UN and this will be impossible without a guarantee of freedom of conscience in the state for all its citizens and without it being made clear that it is not the intention to establish a theocratic state.’ The state had to be secular. On the other hand the Agency agreed to bow to the religious viewpoint on the Sabbath, food laws and marriage, and to allow full religious freedom in the schools. This compromise made it possible for Agudah to belong to the Provisional Council of Government at the inception of the state and, as a member of the United Religious Front, to form parts of governing coalitions 1949-52. The Agudah viewpoint was set out as follows (10 October 1952):

  The world was created for the sake of Israel. It is the duty and merit of Israel to maintain and fulfil the Torah. The place where Israel is destined to live and, therefore, to maintain the Torah is Israel. This means that the raison d’être of the world is the establishment of the regime of the Torah in the land of Israel. The foundation of this ideal has been laid. There are now Jews living in their homeland and fulfilling the Torah. But completion has not yet been attained, for all Israel does not yet live in its land and [not even] all Israel is yet fulfilling the Torah.50

  In short, Agudah pledged itself to use Zionism to complete the ingathering and transform the result into a theocracy.

  Just as Mizrachi’s compromises produced Agudah’s, so Agudah’s in turn produced a rigorist group which called itself the Guardians of the City (‘Neturei Karta’). This broke away from Agudah in 1935, opposed the foundation of the state root-and-branch, boycotted elections and all other state activities, and declared that it would rather Jerusalem were internationalized than run by Jewish apostates. The group was comparatively small and to the secular mind extreme. But the whole history of the Jews suggests that rigorous minorities tend to become triumphant majorities. Like Judaism itself, moreover, its members exhibited (granted their initial premise) strong logical consistency. The Jews were ‘a people whose life is regulated by a supernatural divine order…not dependent on normal political, economic and material successes or failures’. The Jews were not ‘a nation like any other nation’, subject to the factors ‘which cause all other nations to rise and fall’.51 Hence the creation of the Zionist state was not a Jewish re-entry into history, a Third Commonwealth, but the start of a new and far more dangerous Exile, since ‘full licence has now been given to tempt through the success of the wicked’. They frequently quoted the statement of a group of Hungarian rabbis who, on their arrival at Auschwitz, acknowledged the justice of their punishment from God for their too feeble opposition to Zionism. The Zionist masqueraders, pretending to represent the people of Israel, were incinerating Jewish souls, whereas Hitler’s ovens only burned their bodies and released their souls for eternal life. They deplored alike the Sinai and the Six Day Wars as calculated, by their glamorous success, to lure Jews to Zionism and so to eternal destruction. Moreover, such victories, being the work of Satan, would merely culminate in colossal defeat. The Guardians rejected the ‘deliverance and protection’ of Zionism, together with its wars and conquests:

  We do not approve of any hatred or hostility and above all any fighting or war in any form against any people, nation or tongue, since our Holy Torah has not commanded this of us in our Exile, but the reverse. If, through our many sins, we are apparently joined in the destiny of these rebels [against God], Heaven forbid! All we can do is to pray to the Holy One, blessed be He, that He may release us from their destiny and deliver us.

  The Guardians saw themselves as a ‘remnant’ who ‘refused to bow the knee to Baal’ as in ‘the time of Elijah’, or to ‘dine at Jezebel’s table’. Zionism was ‘a rebellion against the King of Kings’ and it was implicit in their theology that the Jewish state would end in a catastrophe worse than the Holocaust.

  Hence from its inception the secular Zionist state faced a tripartite religious opposition: from within the government coalition, from outside the coalition but within the Zionist consensus, and from outside the consensus but within the country. The opposition took an infinite variety of forms, from the childish to the violent: sticking stamps on letters upside down and omitting ‘Israel’ from the address; tearing up identity cards; boycotting elections; demonstrations; full-scale riots. The Israeli state, like its Hellenistic and Roman predecessors, faced a section of the population, especially in Jerusalem, easily and often unpredictably outraged by minor and unconsidered government decisions. As a rule, however, religious power expressed itself by fierce bargaining within the Knesset and especially within the cabinet. In Israel’s first four governments no less than five cabinet crises were provoked by religious issues: in 1949 over importing forbidden food, in February 1950 over the religious education of Yemeni children in transit camps, in October 1951 and again in September 1952 on the conscription of girls from Orthodox homes, and in May 1953 over schools. This pattern continued for the first forty years of Israel’s existence, religion proving a far greater source of coalition disharmony than differences over ideology, defence or foreign affairs.

  The Jewish religion being rich in strict moral theology, the area of conflict was very wide. Thus, on the Sabbath, which was given legal and constitutional status, there are thirty-nine principal and many subsidiary categories of forbidden work, including riding or travelling in a vehicle, writing, playing an instrument, telephoning, turning on a light or touching money. Moreover, the commonest of Judaic codes states that ‘everyone who openly desecrates the Sabbath is like a non-Jew in all respects, his touch causes wine to be forbidden, the bread that he bakes is like the bread of a non-Jew, and his cooking is like that of a non-Jew’.52 Hence the Sabbath law, with its knock-on effect, raised serious problems in the armed forces, the civil service and the huge public and collective sector of industry and agriculture. There were bitter battles over Sabbath milking of cows in kibbutzim and TV broadcasting, massive legislative enactments and conflicts of bye-laws. Thus buses ran in Haifa but not Tel Aviv; cafés were open in Tel Aviv but not in Haifa; Jerusalem banned both. There was another cabinet crisis over El-Al, the state airline, flying on the Sabbath. There was an even more protracted struggle within the government over the serving of non-kosher food on the state shipping-line, the food laws being a fertile field for political rows. Hotels and restaurants needed a ‘certificate of correctness’ from the rabbinate. Under a law of 1962 pig-farming was banned except in Christian Arab areas near Nazareth or for scientific purposes; and in 1985 a legislative campaign began to ban the sale and distribution of pork products also. Government and rabbis alike examined the credentials of the East Indonesia Babirusa hog, declared by its breeders to be a mammal, have hooves and chew the cud. There were cabinet rows over autopsies and over burials in consecrated ground.

  Education raised immense complexities. Under the mandate there were four kinds of Jewish school: General Zionist (secular), Histadrut (secular-collective), Mizrachi (Torah-secular) and Agudah (Torah only). The 1953 Unified Education Act conflated these into two types: government-secular and government-religious schools. Agudah withdrew its schools from the system, but found it lost its government grants if it failed to devote sufficient time to secular subjects. Secularists complained that Agudah schools devoted eighteen periods out of thirty-two a week to Bible, Talmud and Hebrew (girls getting more Bible, less Talmud, than boys), at the expense of science, geography and history. Religious Jews complained that state schools gave only eight out of thirty-two to religion, three of which were Hebrew, and that the Bible was taught in a secular spirit, as myth, except for certain bits presented as early Zionist history.53 In the late 1950s, a muddled cabinet compromise plan, to promote ‘Jewish consciousness’ in secular schools and ‘national-Israel consciousness’ in religious schools, led to more trouble.54 In 1959 there were riots in thre
e places against secular propaganda among the children of Orthodox orientals, one of whose rabbis complained bitterly:

  [They] raised the youth that was lacking in wisdom to the heights, and clothed them with pride, while casting in the dust the elders who had acquired wisdom. They taught the child at school that here—in the land of Israel!—there was no need to observe the commandments of the Torah. When the boy came home from school and his parents told him to pray, he answered that the teacher said it was unnecessary or that the instructor had called it nonsense. When the rabbi came and told the boys to observe the Sabbath, they would not listen to him because the club was organizing a football match or the car was waiting to take them to the beach…if the Rabbi pleaded and wept, they laughed in his face, because that was what the instructor had ordered…. Sages of the Torah were thrust into a corner while boys rose to greatness because they held party cards.55

  The Orthodox were also outraged over the way in which many institutions broke the ancient rules over segregation of the sexes. Near centres of Orthodoxy there were angry scenes over dance-halls and mixed bathing. Over the conscription of girls into the army the Council of the Great Men stigmatized the law as one to be defied even at the risk of death. That was one of many battles the religious element won.

  They also won on the central issue of marriage. The secular state of Israel was obliged to forego the institution of civil marriage. It imposed Orthodox law even on secular unions, under the provisions of Sections 1 and 2 of the Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law of 1953. Secularist members of the Knesset voted for the law because otherwise Israel would gradually have split into two communities which could not intermarry. But the law led to hard cases and protracted litigation, involving not only non-Jews and secularized Jews but Reform rabbis and their converts, since the Orthodox rabbinates enjoyed the sole right to recognize conversions and would not accept Reform ones. The Orthodox marriage and divorce experts, quite legitimately from their point of view, subjected entire categories of Jewish immigrants to the strictest tests. Thus in 1952 the divorce practices of 6,000 Bene Israels (Jews from Bombay) were scrutinized as irregular (though eventually validated) and the marriages of the Falasha Jews from Ethiopia were queried in 1984.

  There were many bitter disputes over remarriage and divorce. Deuteronomy 25:5 imposes levirate marriage on a childless widow and the brother of the deceased husband. The obligation is ended by the halizah or refusal of the brother-in-law. But if he is a minor the widow must wait. If he is deaf and dumb and cannot say, ‘I do not wish to take her’, she may not remarry. This case actually occurred in 1967 in Ashdod; moreover, the deaf and dumb man was already married. So the rabbinate arranged a bigamous marriage and supervised the divorce the next day.56 Hard cases also arose when one party to a marriage refused a divorce. If the refusal came from the woman, a divorce became difficult but if it came from the man it was impossible. In a 1969 case, for instance, a husband was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for six indecent assaults and three rapes. The wife sued for a divorce, the man refused and the couple remained married under rabbinic law, the wife having no civil remedy in Israel. On such cases, Rabbi Zerhah Warhaftig, a former Minister of Religion, took a relaxed view: ‘We have a legal system which has always sustained the people. It may contain within it some thorn that occasionally pricks the individual. We are not concerned with this or that individual but with the totality of the people.’57

  The point might have been better put but it contained the truth, to which the difficulties of the new state drew attention, that Judaism is a perfectionist religion. It contains the strength of its weaknesses. It assumes that those who practise it are an elite since it seeks to create a model society. That made it in many ways an ideal religion for a new state like Israel, despite the fact that its law was in process of being formed about 3,200 years before the state was founded. Because of Judaism’s unique continuities, many of its most ancient provisions were still valid and observed by the pious. They often reflected the form rather than the content of religious truth but it must be stressed again that ‘ritualistic’ is not a term of reproach for Jews. As Dr Harold Fisch, the rector of Bar-Ilan University, put it:

  The very word ‘ritual’ in English carries a pejorative quality derived from the Protestant tradition. The word in Hebrew is Mizvot (religious command) and these have the same moral force whether involving relations between man and man or between man and God. It is the latter part of the code that embodies the so-called ritual commandments and these are on any proper appraisal as indispensable as the ethical commandments.58

  The essence of the ritual spirit is punctilious observance, and that again is a Judaic strength particularly well adapted to a new state. All states need to hallow themselves with the dignity of the past. Many of the hundred or more countries which became independent after 1945 had to borrow institutions and traditions from their former colonial rulers or invent them from a past which was largely unrecorded. Israel was fortunate because her past was the longest and richest of all, was copiously chronicled and kept fresh by absolute continuities. We have noted that the Jewish genius for writing history lapsed between the time of Josephus and the nineteenth century. Once the Zionist state was founded it expressed itself not merely in history but above all in archaeology. Statesmen and generals, like Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan and Yigael Yadin, and thousands of ordinary people, became passionate archaeologists, both amateur and professional. The study of deep antiquity rose to the height of an Israeli obsession.

  That was an important element in creating an organic nation. But it was insignificant compared to the living force of a religion which had formed the Jewish race itself and whose present custodians could trace their rabbinical succession back to Moses. The Jews had survived precisely because they were punctilious about their rituals and had been prepared to die for them. It was right and healthy that the respect for strict observance should be a central feature of the Zionist community.

  The outstanding example was the attitude of the Jews towards the Temple Mount, when courage and providence at last restored it to them, along with the rest of the Old City, during the Six Day War of 1967. It was a simple decision to restore the ancient ghetto, from which the Jerusalem Jews had been driven in 1948. But the Temple posed difficulties. It had been completely destroyed in antiquity. But no less an authority than Maimonides had ruled that, despite the destruction, the site of the Temple retained its sanctity, for all time. The Shekinah never departed, and that was why Jews always came to pray near the site, especially at the Western Wall, traditionally believed to be close to the west end of the Holy of Holies. Since the Temple site retained its sanctity, however, it also required Jews to be ritually pure before actually entering it. The purity rules surrounding the Temple were the strictest of all. The Holy of Holies was banned to all except the high-priest, and even he entered it only once a year on the Day of Atonement. Since the Temple area was equated with the Mosaic ‘camp of Israel’ which surrounded the sanctuary in the wilderness, the purity provisions of the Book of Numbers applied to it.59 In this book, God defined to Moses both the causes of impurity and its cure. A person became defiled by touching a corpse, a grave or a human bone, or by being under the same roof as any of these. Then it adds: ‘And for an unclean person they shall take of the ashes of the burnt heifer of purification for sin, and running water shall be put thereto in a vessel: And a clean person shall take hyssop, and dip it in the water, and sprinkle it upon the tent, and upon all the vessels, and upon the persons that were there, and upon him that touched a bone, or one slain, or one dead, or a grave.’60

  The heifer had to be red and ‘without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke’. Most important of all, the critical part of the operation had to be carried out, to avoid defilement, by Eleazar, the heir-apparent of Aaron. When he had produced the mixture, it was stored ‘in a clean place’ and kept for when needed. The authorities insisted that the heifers were rare
and costly: if only two hairs of the animal were not red, its ashes were invalid. They disagreed on how many heifers had been burned. Some said seven. Others said nine. After the destruction of the Temple it was impossible to prepare new ashes. A supply remained, and it was apparently used to purify those who had been in contact with the dead as late as the Amoraic period. Then it ran out, and purification was no longer possible until the Messiah came to burn the tenth heifer and prepare a new mixture. Because the purity rules, especially over the dead, were and are so strict, rabbinical opinion agrees that all Jews are now ritually impure. And, since no ashes exist for their purification, no Jew can enter the Temple Mount.61

  The Law of the Red Heifer has been cited as an outstanding example of hukkah, a Judaic statute for which there is no rational explanation but which must be strictly observed because divinely commanded in the clearest possible manner. It is just the kind of rule for which gentiles always derided the Jews. It is also the kind of rule which Jews insisted on observing whatever the disadvantages, and so retained their Jewish identity. So, from 1520 at least, Jews prayed at the Western Wall but not beyond it. After the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem fell in 1948, Jews were prevented by the Arabs from using the Western Wall or even from looking at it from afar. This denial lasted nineteen years. With the recapture of the Old City in 1967, the Wall was available again and on the first day of Shavuot that year a quarter of a million Orthodox Jews tried to pray there at once. The entire area in front of it was then cleared and a fine, paved open space created. But nothing could be done about Jews entering the Temple Mount itself. All kinds of ingenious rabbinical arguments were put forward to allow Jews to enter at least part of the area. But in the end the consensus of rabbinical opinion was that the entire site had to remain out of bounds to Jews who really believed in their faith.62 So the Chief Rabbinate and the Ministry of Religions put up notices forbidding Jews to go on the Mount under pain of Karet (‘extirpation’ or loss of eternal life). The fact that thousands of Jews ignored the warning was cited as evidence of the impotence of the rabbis. Its observance by large numbers of pious Jews, despite their intense anxiety to enter the area, was equally if not more significant.