Pan-Jewish Solidarity and the Jewish Significance of Modern Israel: The 1958 “Who Is a Jew?†Affair Revisited

Ofer Shiff and David Barak-Gorodetsky

Contemporary Review of the Middle East, 2019, vol. 6, issue 3-4, 266-279

Abstract: Abstract The focus of this article is the 1958 “Who is a Jew?†controversy and David Ben-Gurion’s inquiry into Jewishness leading intellectuals from Israel and the Diaspora regarding how to register a child born to a non-Jewish mother in the Israeli identity card. The article’s main claim is that this correspondence must be understood not only as reflecting a continuous struggle between diaspora and Israeli Jews or between Jews of various religious persuasions, but rather as reflecting a built-in tension between pan-Jewish solidarity and Israeli Jewish sovereignty. This built-in tension seems to prevail today as well, and thus our analysis of the 1958 event may enable a more complex understanding of the continuous and seemingly unresolved tensions within today’s Jewish world.

Keywords: Israel; religion and state; David Ben-Gurion; diaspora nationalism; diaspora-homeland relations; Who is a Jew? (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:crmide:v:6:y:2019:i:3-4:p:266-279

DOI: 10.1177/2347798919872829

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