Summary
In Dowty’s use, following Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, the appropriation and secularization of traditional religious symbols as part of Israeli national identity, in which religious symbols play an increasing role in public or collective life while Judaism has no great significance to the individual in terms of spiritual and personal self-definition or behaviour (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 3581-3685).
Details
- Dowty presents its growth as a third factor, alongside closer bloc balance and the religious subculture’s increased assertiveness, that makes Israel appear more religious than it is: holidays once observed mainly in prayer have become national commemorations marked by public ceremonies, while holidays that were once only secular, such as Independence Day, have begun to acquire religious connotations and symbols. Israelis, he argues, are not becoming more religious but simply more traditional in some collective rituals (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 3581-3685).
- Its rise is made more significant and visible by the decline of Labor Zionist and “statist” ideologies, which served as competing civil religions and left a vacuum for the reassertion of symbols rooted more deeply in Jewish history and ritual, and by the growing Sephardi contribution to Israeli culture and politics (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 3581-3685).
- In Chapter 6 Dowty had already treated “civil religion”, in Liebman and Don-Yehiya’s account, as part of Menachem Begin’s New Zionism, in which religious symbolism was assimilated into a nationalist civil religion, and its later growth as testimony to dissatisfaction with both total secularism and unchanging orthodoxy (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 2212-2948).
Related pages
The Jewish State: A Century Later, Religious status quo, Gush Emunim