Summary
Irene Tucker’s name for a tradition of Jewish publicness, recovered from Moses Mendelssohn and rabbinic practice, in which collectives are deliberately created out of heterogeneous citizens grappling with contingent historical time, and in which republican self-government is a longstanding, essential element of Jewish practice rather than a departure from it (A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler, PDF p.22-25).
Details
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Republicanism is taken from Michael Sandel’s distinction from individualist liberalism: “Central to republican theory is the idea that liberty depends on sharing in self-government”, requiring deliberation about the common good, knowledge of public affairs and a moral bond with the community (Sandel, quoted PDF p.22-23).
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The tradition uses ritual, or Ceremonial law, to hold the heterogeneity of perspectives constitutive of democratic process together with unity and agreement as coincident modes of political being, not steps in a linear process; making, implementing and following the law are forms of a single ritual practice (PDF p.23).
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On this account, “the Jewishness of Israel can be seen to lie first and foremost in its methods of generating a civil collective out of a diverse citizenry rather than in the identities of its individual citizens” (PDF p.22), and Israel could be reimagined “not as the ethnocracy it threatens to become, but rather as the most recent historical instantiation of a contingently heterogeneous collective organized around common — and continuously reinterpretable — law” (PDF p.23).
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Forming heterogeneous — not exclusively Jewish — coalitions is a crucial component of the tradition, and Tucker makes a case for continuity between such coalition politics and a two-state solution, against relegating binational alternatives to the margins of Zionist intellectual history (PDF p.13).
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Heterogeneous coalitions are motivated epistemologically, not only by interest: they let members understand their political, social and economic environments multiply (PDF p.13-14).
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The tradition’s representative structure is the Minyan: drawn anew from various sectors for each ceremonial occasion and charged with compensating for the limits and divergences of its members’ experiences, it models representation, while the provisionality and iterativeness of the Sabbath and Ceremonial law model republicanism’s process, “the shufflings and reshufflings of a parliament’s coalition politics” (PDF p.69).
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Applied to Israel, the tradition requires that the republicanism established in the state “incorporate Jews and non-Jews in full equality” (PDF p.73); it would eliminate the requirement that parties identify themselves as Zionist in order to serve as members of a governing coalition (PDF p.75), and it makes the occupied territories’ arrangement — Jewish settlers voting, Palestinian residents not — a renunciation of the tradition its right-wing advocates claim to instantiate (PDF p.75).
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Tucker is explicit that the tradition is not “a model for Israeli democratic practice limited only to its Jewish citizens”, and that her reading of ceremonial law is formal: a model for imagining how groups craft a shared world in conscious relation to past efforts (PDF p.71).
Related pages
A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler, Ceremonial law, Identitarian model of belief, Binationalism, Ethnocracy