A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler

Summary

Irene Tucker’s A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler (punctum books, 2016) argues that Judith Butler’s Parting Ways (2012) and her 2013 Brooklyn College defence of BDS rest on an identitarian model of belief — borrowed, Tucker argues, from a Lockean, Christian-derived secularism in which beliefs are the inalienable self-expression of individual subjects — and sets against it a Jewish republican tradition, recovered through Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1783) and the rabbinic institutions of the Minyan and the Sabbath, in which Jewishness is constituted by public, collective, law- and ritual-centred practice (“ceremonial law”), so that Israel’s Jewishness could lie in its methods of generating a civil collective out of a diverse citizenry rather than in its citizens’ identities (A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler, PDF p.22-23). Applied to Israel/Palestine, the tradition is held to require full equality for Jews and non-Jews, to rule out both the exclusion of non-Zionist parties from governing coalitions and the voting asymmetry in the occupied territories, and — as a matter of likelihood rather than demonstration, “likely-tos” in place of QEDs — to favour withdrawing settlers’ votes toward a two-state settlement over extending the vote to West Bank Palestinians toward a one-state settlement (PDF p.72-78).

What the file is

First published in 2016 by dead letter office, babel Working Group, an imprint of punctum books; copyright © 2016 Irene Tucker; Creative Commons by-nc-sa 4.0 International licence (PDF p.5). ISBN-13: 978-0-9982375-9-6; ISBN-10: 0-9982375-9-0 (PDF p.5). Book design by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei. 92 PDF pages; printed pagination runs from printed p.11 at PDF p.12, so printed page = PDF page − 1. The text copy is complete and legible, with page markers; the cover (PDF p.1) is image-only in the text copy and was read in the original, and PDF p.3, 7, 9 and 11 are blank in both the text copy and the original. The work is a single continuous essay, divided by unnumbered section breaks, with no table of contents. The essay ends at PDF p.78 (printed p.77); a Bibliography follows at PDF p.80-83 (printed p.79-82). PDF p.79, 84, 85 and 87-91 are blank in both the text copy and the original; PDF p.86 carries only a publisher’s epigraph from Lars Iyer, and PDF p.92 is the closing publisher’s page, giving the DOI 10.21983/P3.0159.1.00 and the ISBN without hyphens (9780998237596). Read in full: PDF p.1-92.

Section by section

• Front matter (PDF p.1-10). Cover, donation appeal for punctum books with Fig. 1, Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) (PDF p.4), imprint and licence page, title page, and Acknowledgments (PDF p.8) thanking the press’s two anonymous readers and named colleagues, and recording earlier presentations at Tel Aviv University and the USC Center for Law, History and Culture.
• Opening: the 2013 election and Butler at Brooklyn College (PDF p.12-25 / printed p.11-24). The 22 January 2013 election for the nineteenth Knesset: Netanyahu called elections eight months early, his Iran focus having drawn Jewish Israelis’ attention from the occupation for three years; the electorate swung left on economic justice and national service as well as security, his unity list Likud–Yisrael Beitenu ending eleven seats down, yet the coalition formed after nearly two months governed no more progressively, largely because of the Yesh Atid–HaBayit HaYehudi partnership (PDF p.12-13, with footnote 1 extending to the 2015 election, the Joint List, and the Zionist Union). One stated goal is “to delineate a tradition of Jewish publicness in which the formation of heterogeneous — which is to say, among other things, not exclusively Jewish — coalitions is a crucial component” (PDF p.13), linking coalition politics to a two-state solution and resisting the relegation of binational alternatives to the margins of Zionist intellectual history, with heterogeneous coalitions understood as epistemological as well as interest-based (PDF p.13-14). Just over two weeks after the election, Butler addressed a Brooklyn College conference organised by its political science department and Students for Justice in Palestine alongside Omar Barghouti, after New York politicians had pressed the college to withdraw departmental endorsement (PDF p.14). Butler’s defence of academic freedom is quoted: academic freedom bars outside powers from controlling curriculum or extra-mural speech and protects platforms “in which we might be able to reflect together on the most difficult problems” (PDF p.15). Tucker argues Butler then redescribes that sphere, when she turns to BDS, as a locus of “cultural forms of power” exercised to compel “the enforcement of international laws” (PDF p.16), shifting the criterion from honing autonomous judgment to whether power is well exercised; her case against the academic boycott’s coherence — a sphere of rigorous testing cannot also preemptively exclude scholars by citizenship or institutional association — is stated, with the qualification in footnote 6 that the incoherence charge applies only to academic, not economic, boycott (PDF p.16-18). The two versions of the academic sphere imply two structures of subjectivity: collective and heterogeneous, or consolidated into expressive unity (PDF p.18). The same frame governs Parting Ways: Butler assembles Levinas, Benjamin, Arendt and Primo Levi, but, Tucker argues, the individual arguments matter less than the frame’s general fact that Jewish thinkers opposed some form of state-based Jewish national identity; that Judaism and Zionism are non-identical is an obvious claim, already documented for 1942–1948 by Thomas Kolsky’s Jews Against Zionism (1990), and critics have noted Butler’s failure to engage Zionist writers from Herzl and Berdichevsky to Buber and Jabotinsky (PDF p.18-20). The chapter “Is Judaism Zionism?” treats prying the terms apart as critique accomplished, on a logic in which beliefs operate like identities — belief as the unitary expression of a unitary subject (PDF p.19-20). The essay addresses two audiences — Butler’s readers, for whom Judaism and republicanism are at odds, and readers who accept Jewish sovereignty in principle but have severe misgivings about Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens and its occupation (PDF p.22) — and sets out its thesis: a Jewish tradition of republicanism using ritual or “ceremonial law” to hold heterogeneity and agreement together as coincident modes, in which making, implementing and following law are one ritual practice, so 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). Republicanism is defined through Michael Sandel’s distinction from individualist liberalism (footnote 9, PDF p.22-23). The identitarian model is traced to the default US understanding of secularism and to Locke, to be read with Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem as its Jewish counter-model (PDF p.23-25).
• Close reading of Parting Ways (PDF p.26-38 / printed p.25-37). Butler’s own framing is quoted: the book became “a meditation on the necessity of tarrying with the impossible. If I succeed in showing that there are Jewish resources for the criticism of state violence, the colonial subjugation of populations, expulsion and dispossession, then I will have managed to show that a Jewish critique of Israeli state violence is at least possible, if not ethically obligatory” (PW, 1; PDF p.26). Tucker argues what matters in the book is that the writers are Jewish, so positions turn out not anti-Semitic so long as their articulators are Jewish; “Jewish resources” is never defined beyond texts written by Jews (footnote 11, PDF p.27-28, quoting Butler’s 2015 “Response” at length). Butler relabels her own identitarianism as “Zionism”: “Even the critique of Zionism, if exclusively Jewish, extends Jewish hegemony for thinking about the region and becomes, in spite of itself, part of what we might call the Zionist effect” (PW, 3; PDF p.29). Her future-perfect grammar (“then I will have managed to show”) displaces the moment of arguing (PDF p.29-30). Her appositional strings — “State violence, the colonial subjugation of populations, expulsion and dispossession” — make distinct, interruptible policies imply one another necessarily, and her list of possible critical objects (Jewish sovereignty since 1948, the occupation from 1967, the 2008–9 assault on Gaza, settlements, the current regime; PW, 118–19) is treated as interchangeable “in each and every case”, displacing historical contingency and the possibility of intervention (PDF p.31-32). Tucker records agreement with Butler that supporters of Israel often conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism — some from what Seyla Benhabib called Jews’ “continuing paranoia of extinction”, others cynically — and discusses Yoav Shamir’s documentary Hashmatza (Defamation, Channel 2, December 2009) as a powerful indictment of that conflation which Parting Ways’ frame cannot accommodate, because it would require an Israeli citizen to escape determination by his identity (PDF p.33-35). The objection is not to historicism but to a framework in which only certain people can have certain ideas, converting distinctions into mutual exclusions (PDF p.34-35). Footnote 17 (PDF p.36-37) situates the essay in post-secularism (Asad, Mahmood, Taylor), and the main text argues Jewish practice — law-based, public, as much civil as theological, pre-existing Christianity — fits neither Taylor’s genealogy nor its postcolonial critiques: 1492 joins the start of European colonial enterprise to the expulsion of Spain’s Jews; the Balfour Declaration’s recipients were not colonial emissaries, Britain’s own subsequent record (Sykes–Picot, the Churchill White Paper, the Peel Commission’s fifteen percent proposal of 1937, the MacDonald White Paper of May 1939) was circuitous, and the 1947 UN Partition Declaration’s passage cannot be separated from the Nazi genocide of European Jews (PDF p.37-38). Tucker states explicitly that this does not make the current occupation of the West Bank anything other than “a morally indefensible and politically unsustainable colonial regime” (PDF p.38).
• Locke: property, belief and toleration (PDF p.39-51 / printed p.38-50). Against Hobbes’s absolute-monarch state, Locke’s Second Treatise makes the right to property pre-exist the state, grounded in property in one’s own person and in labour mixed with the common (quoted, PDF p.40). Property is thus individual self-expression whose alienation in labour nothing secures until government is imagined to keep property with its owners (PDF p.41). The “Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689) extends the analogy to belief: civil government secures “the just possession of these things belonging to this life” (“L,” 172; PDF p.41-42), while belief is the ideal self-expression because, unlike property, it cannot be stolen — its non-fungibility marks and produces the subject’s absolute individuality, and its meaning presupposes no common culture (PDF p.43-44). Government’s policing role is to approximate faith’s non-appropriability in the civil realm, a politics that can never achieve its end (PDF p.44-45). This non-appropriability, Tucker argues, undergirds Butler’s mutual exclusiveness of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism (PDF p.45). Locke then swerves: the magistrate cannot care for souls not because beliefs cannot be changed by “the rigour of laws and the force of penalties”, but because, “there being but one truth, one way to heaven”, coerced belief might be the wrong one (“L,” 220; PDF p.46) — so toleration rests both on formal grounds (beliefs are one’s own) and on the singularity of true belief, the doubled nature of Christian faith (PDF p.47-48, with footnote 21 on Akeel Bilgrami). Both aspects are worlds without politics: where belief is self-expression there is no scarcity and nothing to adjudicate; where belief is singular truth, the shared world’s truth is already determined beyond human negotiation (PDF p.49-50). Butler’s rhetoric echoes the second world: her authority, like Locke’s divine power, renders historical events inevitable consequences of one another and makes politics impossible and unnecessary (PDF p.51-52, with footnote 22 on Julie E. Cooper’s critique of Parting Ways’ diasporic ethics).
• Mendelssohn: Jerusalem and ceremonial law (PDF p.52-61 / printed p.51-60). Mendelssohn (1783) puts religious liberty on new footing: freedom grounded in practice’s continuity with state activities, not in the state’s irrelevance to conscience (PDF p.52). The compositional context is given in detail: August Friedrich Cranz’s anonymous 47-page pamphlet of 1782 challenging Mendelssohn over Jewish ecclesiastical law and excommunication and urging conversion; the earlier Lavater inquiry; Mendelssohn’s 1782 re-edition of Menasseh Ben Israel; and Christian Wilhelm Dohm’s On the Civil Improvement of the Jews, which had endorsed a Jewish power of excommunication Mendelssohn rejected (PDF p.52-54). Mendelssohn distinguishes action and conviction — “Action accomplishes what duty demands, and conviction causes that action to proceed from the proper source, that is, from proper motives” (J, 40; PDF p.54) — but refuses Locke’s taxonomy: public institutions can direct both actions and convictions, and the link between inner conviction and outward action cannot be known, so religious authority must not regulate belief by excommunication; what matters is how people act (PDF p.54-56, quoting J, 44). Against Locke’s eternal realm, “man’s eternality is merely an incessant temporality” (J, 39; PDF p.56); the finite lifetime is itself a material resource — “Time constitutes a part of our property, and the man who uses it for the common good may hope for compensation from the public purse” (J, 60–61; PDF p.57) — and finitude makes people depend on one another’s witnessing: “Our lifespan is not sufficient for us to experience everything ourselves and we must, in many cases, rely upon credible fellow men” (J, 92; PDF p.58). Alongside natural religion’s rationally knowable truths stands “revealed legislation” (J, 95): Judaism “knows of no revealed religion in the sense in which Christians understand this term” (J, 95), being constituted as divine legislation — “laws, commandments, ordinances, rules of life” (J, 97) — revealed only to those present, hence an historical truth depending on testimony (PDF p.59). Belief thus names the everyday dependence on others’ knowledge, and ceremonial law’s ritual registers and transcends that historicism: “The ceremonial law was the bond which was to connect action with contemplation, life with theory” (J, 128; PDF p.61).
• Mendelssohn concluded: ritual, idolatry and the public (PDF p.62-63 / printed p.61-62). Within ritual’s structure, any absolute distinction between historical truths and eternal truths comes undone, as the singular and the serial collapse into one another. That undoing positions ceremonial law, for Mendelssohn, as a superior instrument against the idolatry to which all belief is vulnerable: against the Pauline charge that Jewish law is “dead letters”, the Christian claim to an eternal, unchanging truth is itself a literalism or idolatry, while Jewish ritual, registering the irreducibility of truth to any particular moment of legibility, is “a living mode of writing”, a kind of figuralism (footnote 29, on Weber and Jeffrey Librett). Ceremonial law is both predicated upon a community and constitutive of a public: it distributes roles according to differing historical location (some witnessed the giving of the law, others learn of it secondhand) and is restructured by each new performance. To find a model for governance, Tucker turns from the laws publics follow to the laws governing the structure of publics themselves.
• The minyan (PDF p.64-66 / printed p.63-65). The requirement to assemble a Minyan — “a group of ten adults (not necessarily adults)” — for certain ritual and liturgical acts. Footnote 30 gives the history of women and the minyan: the Shulhan Arukh specifies ten men, while the Mishnah (Megillah 4:3) and Maimonides specify only the number; Rabbi Phillip Sigel (also spelled “Sigal” in the same footnote) argued the exclusion of women was a minhag (custom), not law; other members of the 1973 Conservative law committee justified inclusion instead as a takana, a repair, “to correct an injustice or to improve the religious and ethical life of the community”, and David Weiss HaLivni (1979 review committee) would codify inclusion only after a generation of women understood themselves obligated to pray; Rabbi David Fine is quoted at length on halakha as the historical concretization of the spirit of the people. Mishnah Megilla derives “congregation” (eida) from “to witness”: the witnesses are the twelve spies of Numbers 13, one from each tribe, who after forty days agreed on Canaan’s fertility but split ten to two on its inhabitants; the ten’s report led Israel to demand a leader back to Egypt, and God sentenced the people to forty more years of wandering, one for each day of scouting, while the dissenters Caleb and Yehoshua Ben Nun lived. The minyan is thus a doubly heterogeneous ritual unit — the fundamental religious unit is not the individual believer — and carries an implicit argument for democratic decision-making: a registration of the epistemological limits imposed by the historicity of experience, and an instrument for compensating for them.
• Governance, the Sabbath and practice (PDF p.66-68 / printed p.65-67). The minyan also operates as a structure of governance (fair valuation; Rambam (Maimonides) suggests that the practice of praying in a minyan allowed public readers well-versed in the relevant texts to read for the benefit of the illiterate, Maimonides, “The Laws of Prayer,” 8:8–9), and Exodus 18 lays out collective governance explicitly: Yitro advises Moses to appoint administrators, and the medieval Itturei Torah generalizes the lesson — no Jew can fulfil all the commandments, some being fulfillable only by priests or Levites, others only by householders, so all must consent to be governed, because only as a collectivity are Jews capable of fulfilling all their covenantal responsibilities. The Sabbath is paradigmatic: Yehuda HaLevi’s Kitab al Khazari (completed around 1140) calls it “m’ayn ha’olam ha’ba” — “a taste of the world to come” — a recurrent temporal moment, not a separate eternal realm, so ethics, evaluated by behaviours rather than beliefs, becomes practice in both senses; footnote 34 sets out the shevut laws, ancillary prohibitions (playing instruments, riding animals) that foreclose temptation, showing law conceived as a mode of practice rather than a doctrine. Tucker restates her project — Butler’s argument and methodology rest on an identitarian logic borrowed from a Christian conception of belief — and poses the political question: what does the longer historical arc of Jewish collective life imply for the conflict in Israel/Palestine?
• Coalition politics and Jewish law in Israel (PDF p.69-71 / printed p.68-70). The minyan models republicanism’s representative aspect; the provisionality and iterativeness of the Sabbath and ceremonial law model its process, “the shufflings and reshufflings of a parliament’s coalition politics”, alliances being provisional and policies revisable. Jewish law’s place in the Israeli legal system was debated before and after statehood: much of the system was borrowed from British common law in Mandatory Palestine; early Supreme Court members were divided over whether rabbinic language merely named British concepts or should in cases take precedence; Simcha Assaf, a rabbinic scholar without formal training in any modern Western legal tradition, was appointed to the first Supreme Court, and an informal “religious chair” has generally existed since (footnotes 35-36). Ronen Shamir’s account of the Hebrew Law of Peace, a community court system in the Yishuv envisioned as a step toward a secular legal authority, resisted by both the orthodox rabbinate and the British mandatory government and faded after the 1922 Advocates’ Ordinance, is read as a missed opportunity. Tucker’s argument, however, reads ceremonial law formally, as a model for imagining how groups craft a shared world, and is expressly not a model for Israeli democratic practice limited only to Jewish citizens.
• Voting, coalitions and the closing argument (PDF p.72-78 / printed p.71-77). Footnote 38 expounds Seyla Benhabib’s “jurisgenerative politics” and democratic iteration (Another Cosmopolitanism, 2006) through “L’Affaire du Foulard”; footnote 39 sets Bonnie Honig’s Democracy and the Foreigner against Philip Pettit’s republicanism. The republican tradition instantiated in Israel must incorporate Jews and non-Jews in full equality: ceremonial law describes the practice of politics, the Minyan its mode and reach of representation. The twelve-to-ten slide in the spies narrative is read neither as an ideal of homogeneity nor simply as a floor for heterogeneity, but as a tension meant to be sustained — an acknowledgment of the enduring allure of political purity and of the importance of resisting it. Within pre-1967 Israel, Arab and Jewish citizens both vote, but non-Zionist parties are excluded from ruling coalitions: their implicit support kept Yitzhak Rabin’s post-Oslo coalition in power, yet their MKs may not serve as cabinet ministers (Ahmed Tibi serves as deputy speaker of the Knesset), an absolute split between executive and representative functions that a republican parliament would end. On voting in the occupied territories, where Jewish settlers vote and Palestinian residents do not, the state must reconstitute itself in one of two ways: limit the vote to voters within its internationally recognized boundaries, requiring settlers east of the Green Line to cede their vote while outside (footnote 44: on David Makovsky’s estimate, excluding settler votes would have changed the 2009 election arithmetic — Likud 27 seats to Kadima’s 28 becoming 26 to 29); or extend the vote to all Palestinians living there, a configuration resembling the one-state solution. In purely formal terms neither structure is preferable, but as “likely-tos” in place of QEDs the two-state version is more likely to yield a functioning, relatively civic political life, letting two peoples “step away from one another for a moment, to step away in order to build”, toward a possible future reengagement: “It is a gesture of political modesty, a vision of civic life that engages the insurmountability of the past by refusing, for the moment, to try to surmount” (PDF p.78).
• Bibliography and back matter (PDF p.80-92 / printed p.79-82 and unnumbered). The Bibliography (PDF p.80-83) lists the works cited, including the Parting Ways forum pieces, Shamir’s two books, Benhabib, Honig and Pettit, and Fine’s “Women and the Minyan” (dated 1979 there). PDF p.86 carries a publisher’s epigraph from Lars Iyer, and PDF p.92 the closing publisher’s page with the work’s DOI, 10.21983/P3.0159.1.00.

Key passages

• “One of the goals of the essay that follows is to delineate a tradition of Jewish publicness in which the formation of heterogeneous — which is to say, among other things, not exclusively Jewish — coalitions is a crucial component” (A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler, PDF p.13).
• “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).
• Butler, quoted by Tucker: “If I succeed in showing that there are Jewish resources for the criticism of state violence, the colonial subjugation of populations, expulsion and dispossession, then I will have managed to show that a Jewish critique of Israeli state violence is at least possible, if not ethically obligatory” (PW, 1; PDF p.26).
• Mendelssohn, quoted by Tucker: “man’s eternality is merely an incessant temporality” (J, 39; PDF p.56).
• Mendelssohn, quoted by Tucker: “The ceremonial law was the bond which was to connect action with contemplation, life with theory” (J, 128; PDF p.61).
• “we need to look more closely at the laws governing the structure of publics themselves, not just the laws that such publics are charged with following” (PDF p.63).
• Rabbi David J. Fine, quoted by Tucker: “The law as it develops through history is the concretization of the spirit of the people, and perhaps, of God’s revelation” (PDF p.65).
• “we can discover, I want to suggest, republicanism’s process, the shufflings and reshufflings of a parliament’s coalition politics” (PDF p.69).
• “It is a gesture of political modesty, a vision of civic life that engages the insurmountability of the past by refusing, for the moment, to try to surmount” (PDF p.78).

Evidence the work relies on

• The 2013 and 2015 Israeli election results and coalition formations, as narrated in the opening and footnote 1, with Yonaton Lees, “Sof haMercaz Smola” (“End of the Center Left”), Haaretz (Hebrew), 22 Nov. 2013, cited for Yesh Atid voters’ motivations (PDF p.13).
• Judith Butler’s Brooklyn College remarks, “Judith Butler’s Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS”, The Nation, 8 Feb. 2013 (PDF p.15-16), and the Salon report of the politicians’ letter (footnote 2, PDF p.14).
• Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (Columbia University Press, 2012), quoted and page-cited as PW throughout, and the 2015 Political Theology forum on it (Braiterman, Hammerschlag, Lloyd, Reznik, Cooper in Political Theory, and Butler’s “Response”) (PDF p.19-20, p.27-28, p.32, p.50-51).
• John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 287–88, and “Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689), cited as “L” from Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (Yale University Press, 2003) (PDF p.40, p.42).
• Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism (Brandeis University Press, 1983), cited as J, with Alexander Altmann’s introduction, Leora Batnitzsky’s How Judaism Became a Religion (2011) (spelling as printed throughout the book, byte-checked) and Gideon Freudenthal’s No Religion without Idolatry (2012) for its compositional context (PDF p.53-54).
• Work on secularism and toleration: Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent (1996); Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (2007); Saba Mahmood, “Can Secularism Be Other-wise?” (2010); Akeel Bilgrami, Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (2014) (PDF p.22-24, p.36-37, p.48-49).
• Yoav Shamir’s documentary Hashmatza (Defamation), first broadcast on Channel 2 in December 2009 (PDF p.33-34).
• Rabbinic and medieval sources for the minyan and the Sabbath: Mishnah Megillah 4:3; Numbers 13:1–15:41 and Exodus 18:1–20:23; Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, “The Laws of Prayer,” 8:4 and 8:8–9, and “The Laws of Shabbat”; the Shulhan Arukh; Parashat Yitro, Itturei Torah, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Yavneh, 1987); Yehuda HaLevi, Kitab al Khazari (completed around 1140) (PDF p.64-68).
• The 1973 Conservative movement decision on women and the minyan and its 1979 review, through Rabbi Phillip Sigel’s position paper, David Weiss HaLivni’s dissent and Rabbi David J. Fine, “Women and the Minyan,” Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly (footnote 30, PDF p.64-65).
• Work on republicanism and democratic iteration in the closing argument: Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press, 2006), on “jurisgenerative politics” and “L’Affaire du Foulard” (footnote 38, PDF p.71-72); Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, and Philip Pettit, On the People’s Terms (2012) (footnote 39, PDF p.72); Tucker’s own The Moment of Racial Sight (2012), ch. 3, on John Stuart Mill (footnote 40, PDF p.73-74).
• Israeli law and coalition history: Shimon Agranat, “Jewish Law As Reflected in the Decisions of the Supreme Court of Israel,” Dine Israel 5 (1974), and Assaf Likhovsky, Law and Identity in Mandatory Palestine (2006) (footnote 35); Ronen Shamir, “The Hebrew Law of Peace: The Demise of Law-as-Culture in Early Mandate Palestine” (2002) and Colonies of Law (2000) (footnote 37, PDF p.70); Danny Korn and Boaz Shapira, Koalitziot (1997), and Korn, “The Presidentialization of Politics” (2010) (footnote 43, PDF p.75); David Makovsky, “Imagining the Border,” and Nitzan Goldberger, “West Bank Settler Voting Trends, 2006 and 2009,” Settlement Report 19, no. 4 (2009), for the estimate that excluding settler votes would have made the 2009 result Likud 26, Kadima 29 in place of 27 and 28 (footnote 44, PDF p.76).

Analysis

Tucker’s method is close rhetorical reading — of Butler’s verb tenses, appositional syntax and framing, and of Locke’s shifting rationales for toleration — set inside a genealogy of the concept of belief from Locke through Mendelssohn. Her central distinction, between belief as inalienable individual self-expression and Jewish practice as public, collective and law-centred, is argued from the texts she quotes at length; her historical claims about Zionism’s relation to European colonialism rest on the sequence of British decisions she narrates and on the one secondary history she cites for it, Jonathan Scheer’s The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (PDF p.37-38). She states her own positions directly: she opposes the academic boycott while accepting the case for an economic boycott (footnote 6), and she calls the occupation of the West Bank a morally indefensible and politically unsustainable colonial regime (PDF p.38). The alternative tradition she proposes — Jewish republicanism — is expounded first from Mendelssohn and then, in the closing movement, read formally off the structures of the Minyan and the Sabbath rather than off doctrine, and applied to Israeli coalition practice and voting rights. That application is expressly non-demonstrative: Tucker states that in purely formal terms neither of her two constitutional options is preferable, and that her preference for the two-state version rests on likelihood (“likely-tos” in places of QEDs, PDF p.77) rather than on evidence the essay marshals. Her election claims rest on the secondary sources she cites (Korn and Shapira for coalition history; Makovsky, quoted through Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism, for the 2009 counterfactual), and her rabbinic claims on the codifications and committee papers quoted in footnotes 30-34. The essay’s normative claims about present Israeli practice — the exclusion of non-Zionist parties from cabinets and the settlers’ vote — are stated as descriptions of arrangements in force at the time of writing, without an as-of date later than the 2013 election with which the essay opens.

People, organizations, places and events

Irene Tucker · Judith Butler · Moses Mendelssohn · John Locke · Benjamin Netanyahu · Yair Lapid · Omar Barghouti · Hannah Arendt · Walter Benjamin · Emmanuel Levinas · Theodor Herzl · Martin Buber · Vladimir Jabotinsky · Students for Justice in Palestine · BDS movement · Balfour Declaration · Peel Commission · Sykes–Picot agreement · Ronen Shamir · Yehuda HaLevi · Simcha Assaf · Seyla Benhabib · Bonnie Honig · Yitzhak Rabin · Ahmed Tibi · Green Line

Concepts

Jewish republicanism · Ceremonial law · Identitarian model of belief · Zionism · Antisemitism · Academic boycott · Academic freedom · Secularism · Binationalism · Ethnocracy · Settler Colonialism · Minyan · Hebrew Law of Peace · Two-state solution · One-state solution

How it relates to other sources

• Against Rhetorics of Belonging, which uses Butler’s Parting Ways (2012) affirmatively at its close to link quasi citizen, occupied subject and exile, Tucker subjects the same book’s framing logic to a sustained critique: for Tucker its argument rests on the Jewishness of its assembled writers rather than on their arguments (PDF p.18-19, p.26-27).
• On the academic boycott, Tucker stands between the positions already in the wiki: she rejects the boycott, as Written Testimony of Kenneth S. Stern (2017) does, but on a different ground — the incoherence of treating the academic sphere both as a space for testing preconceptions and as an instrument of cultural power (PDF p.17-18) — and, against both, she accepts Gideon Levy’s case for an economic boycott (footnote 6, PDF p.18). Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights defends the academic boycott as an institutional, not individual, measure.
• On Settler Colonialism: Tucker reports that Parting Ways takes political Zionism’s status as “settler colonialism” as axiomatic (PW, 16, cited PDF p.38) and argues the early Zionists cannot straightforwardly be cast as emissaries of a European colonial project, while calling the present occupation of the West Bank a colonial regime (PDF p.37-38) — a distinction the settler-colonial sources in the wiki (for example Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics and The Other Shift: Settler Colonial Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict) do not make in those terms.
• Her use of Ethnocracy is prospective: Israel is “the ethnocracy it threatens to become” (PDF p.23), where Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine and For Palestine — Essays from the Tom Hurndall Memorial Lecture Group apply the term to the existing regime.
• On the franchise in the occupied territories, Tucker and the One-state solution advocates she cites (Butler and other BDS advocates, PDF p.77) start from the same fact — settlers vote, Palestinian residents do not — but Tucker prefers the opposite remedy on likelihood grounds: withdraw the settlers’ vote toward two states rather than extend the vote toward one state, while holding that in purely formal terms her own tradition recommends neither over the other (PDF p.76-78).
• Her account of the Hebrew Law of Peace follows Ronen Shamir’s: a secular community court system in the Yishuv defeated jointly by the orthodox rabbinate’s defence of its interpretive monopoly and by British centralization, and extinguished by the 1922 Advocates’ Ordinance (PDF p.70).

Open questions

• Parting Ways’ date: the main text calls it “Butler’s 2013 monograph” (PDF p.19), while footnote 7 gives Parting Ways as Columbia University Press, 2012 (PDF p.19). Both dates are recorded as printed, not reconciled.
• “Immanuel Levinas” (PDF p.19) is the spelling printed for the thinker whose page in this wiki is Emmanuel Levinas. Recorded as printed, not reconciled.
• “Jonathan Scheer”, author of The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (PDF p.37-38), is a spelling as printed (byte-checked); no other spelling is given in the work.
• Acknowledgments: Eileen Joy’s “fearlessless” (PDF p.8) is as printed (byte-checked).
• “one can never been too vigilant” (PDF p.33) is as printed (byte-checked).
• Cranz’s pamphlet title is given in the main text with “Borrede” for Vorrede (PDF p.53) and in footnote 23 with “Screi-ben” for Schreiben and lower-case “moses Mendelssohn” (PDF p.53); all forms byte-checked and recorded as printed.
• Mendelssohn is described parenthetically as “both a congregational rabbi and an academic philosopher for most of his working life” (PDF p.57); the work offers no support for the description, and it is recorded as Tucker’s claim only.
• “Menasseh ben Israel” (PDF p.52-53) and “Menasseh Ben Israel” (PDF p.53) both appear; recorded as printed.
• The rabbinic sources and the minyan, announced at PDF p.25, are developed at PDF p.64-68, and the extension to Israeli democracy at PDF p.69-78, as promised in part 1; that part 1 question is closed by the text of part 2.
• Rabbi Phillip “Sigel” (footnote 30, PDF p.64) is spelled “Sigal” twice later in the same footnote (“Sigal cites this history”; “rejected Sigal’s claim”), all byte-checked and recorded as printed, not reconciled. The same footnote prints “the existing of dissenting voices did not a tradition make” (byte-checked).
• Bonnie Honig’s Democracy and the Foreigner is dated 2003 in footnote 39 (PDF p.72) and 2001 in the Bibliography (PDF p.81); both dates are recorded as printed, not reconciled.
• The minyan is introduced as “a group of ten adults (not necessarily adults)” (PDF p.64), as printed; the wording reads as self-contradictory, and the text gives no other wording for it.
• Peter Beinart’s surname is printed “Beinert” in footnote 14 (PDF p.33) and in the Bibliography (PDF p.80) and “Beinart” in footnote 41 (PDF p.74) and in footnote 44’s “quoted in Beinart” (PDF p.76); recorded as printed at each location, not reconciled.
• Assaf Likhovsky’s surname is printed “Likhovsky” in footnote 35 (PDF p.69) and the Bibliography, and “Likhovski” in the footnote 36 thanks (PDF p.70), in footnote 37’s citation of Shamir (PDF p.70) and in the Bibliography’s Shamir entry (PDF p.83); recorded as printed, not reconciled.
• Maimonides is printed “Maimonedes” in the Bibliography’s Mishneh Torah entry (PDF p.82), byte-checked, against “Maimonides” in the main text and footnotes; recorded as printed.
• Korn and Shapira’s Koalitziot is placed at Modi’in in footnote 43 (PDF p.75) and at Tel Aviv in the Bibliography (PDF p.81); recorded as printed, not reconciled.
• Fine’s “Women and the Minyan” is dated 1979 in the Bibliography (PDF p.81), while footnote 30 discusses Sigel’s paper as one basis of the 1973 decision and HaLivni as a member of a committee convened in 1979 to review it, without dating Fine’s paper in the footnote; recorded as printed.
• The closing page (PDF p.92) prints the ISBN unhyphenated (9780998237596) against the hyphenated ISBN-13 and ISBN-10 on the imprint page (PDF p.5); the numbers are the same.

Coverage

Read in full, PDF p.1-92 of 92 (parts 1-2 of 2).