Summary
A community court system in the Yishuv (pre-state Palestinian Jewish community), detailed by Ronen Shamir and read by A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler as a missed opportunity: pointedly distinct from existing religious institutions, it was envisioned as a step toward a permanent secular legal authority undergirded by historically shared communal practices and the existing body of Jewish legal scholarship (PDF p.70).
Details
- Both the orthodox religious establishment and the British mandatory government resisted its establishment — the orthodox rabbinate because such a system threatened their monopoly over the power to interpret and make sense of religious texts; the British because the establishment of community courts ran against their colonial strategy of centralizing authority (PDF p.70).
- After the British passed the 1922 “Advocates’ Ordinance” regulating and professionalizing the training of lawyers, the Hebrew Law of Peace Movement and its nascent institutions largely faded away (PDF p.70).
- Tucker: “We might thus see the demise of the Hebrew Law of Peace system as a missed opportunity, a path marked out and then wandered from in the push-and-shove of colonial political skirmishing” (PDF p.71). Her argument does not, however, rest on the actual historical role of Jewish law in the Israeli legal system (PDF p.71).
- Source as cited by Tucker: Ronen Shamir, “The Hebrew Law of Peace: The Demise of Law-as-Culture in Early Mandate Palestine,” in The History of Law in a Multi-Cultural Society: Israel 1917–1967 (Ashgate, 2002), 110; and Colonies of Law: Colonialism, Zionism and Law in Early Mandate Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2000) (footnote 37, PDF p.70).
Related pages
A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler, Ronen Shamir, Jewish republicanism, Ceremonial law