6 - Jewish Law and Legislation in Israel

Summary

Chapter 6 addresses Israeli legislative policy concerning Jewish law and identity. Like the Zionist movement did early on, Israel’s national governing and judicial institutions refused until the 1980s to allow questions of identity and culture to impinge on political and legal deliberations. The Knesset and the Ministry of Justice did not base Israel’s laws on Jewish law. It was not that they were alienated from Jewish heritage and its legal element; rather they realized that these could not really be translated into laws, simply because there was no consensus on what constituted Jewish culture, and what were the proper ways to constitute a Hebrew-Israeli legal system on its basis. Even those who sought with all their might to base Israeli law on Jewish heritage did not know how to do so in practical terms. Once again, it was a meta-cultural decision to circumvent such cultural conflict