Language:
English
Year of publication:
2020
Titel der Quelle:
Jewish Political Studies Review
Angaben zur Quelle:
31,3-4 (2020) 44-69
Keywords:
Ultra-Orthodox Jews Politics and government
;
Ultra-Orthodox Jews Social life and customs
;
Ultra-Orthodox Jews Social conditions
;
Fake news
Abstract:
Today, particularly following the election campaign to the presidency of the United States in 2016 and the introduction of the phrase “Fake News” to the daily vocabulary, the concept of “Post-Truth Politics” is well established. The phrase “post-truth” was defined by Oxford Dictionary as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” This phrase was elected the dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2016. Wikipedia (October 20, 2020) defines “Post-Truth Politics” as: “a political culture in which a debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored.” In this article, the term “Politics” is used in its broader sense to indicate the quest of prominent Haredi rabbis to establish a society based on extraordinarily strict religious characteristics which, save for a very small minority, were never accepted as binding norms by the majority of observant Jews. One of the key elements used to achieve this goal was the use of Post-Truth Politics. For many centuries, observant Ashkenazi Jews slowly developed unique religious norms and traditions, which were later known as Jewish Orthodoxy. Contemporary scholars referred to those who observed the rules more strictly as ultra-Orthodox or Haredi. Until the beginning of the 19th century, observant Jews consisted an absolute majority among the Jews. Then, social trends of urbanization, enlightenment, acculturation, and secularization diminished their share to a relatively small minority. The percentage of Orthodox, and especially ultra-Orthodox Jews, continued to drop until the Holocaust. Prior to the Holocaust, the number of Jews in Eretz Israel—Palestine—was only a few hundred thousand, most of them secular. So, despite being known as the Holy Land, it had only a small number of important rabbis and yeshivas. In addition, since among the millions who immigrated to the United States, only a small fraction continued to observe the Jewish laws strictly, Jewish Orthodoxy was almost completely concentrated in Europe, while ultra-Orthodoxy prevailed mainly in Eastern Europe. Since the ultra-Orthodox were more reluctant to immigrate to other countries in which living as observant Jews was more difficult, the Holocaust not only caused the death of most ultra-Orthodox Jews but also devastated all their social and educational institutions. After the Holocaust, ultra-Orthodoxy had to rebuild itself in two locations in which Orthodoxy never really flourished—the United States and Israel. The State of Israel was established in 1948 by the Zionist movements, which, by and large, were secular. Immediately after its establishment, it faced the War of Independence, and once it was over, it had to absorb hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including many destitute Holocaust survivors. This triggered a deep and prolonged economic recession. In addition, both the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel drove many of the young ultra-Orthodox either to completely abandon religion or to become religious-Zionists. Consequently, following the Holocaust, ultra-Orthodox Judaism was in a catastrophic state and the remaining rabbis had to find new ways to revive it. In the introduction to the book he co-edited, titled Invented Traditions, Eric Hobsbaum writes: “Traditions” which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented... “Invented traditions” is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inoculate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past... We should expect it to occur... when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which the “old” traditions had been designed, producing new ones to which they were not applicable, or when such old traditions and their institutions carries and promulgates no longer prove sufficiently adaptable and flexible, or are otherwise eliminated. Several studies reviewed the rise of ultra-Orthodoxy in America and the ways in which contemporary Haredi authors dealt with inconvenient historical, biographical, and scholarly texts. This article will describe how in order to re-establish ultra-Orthodoxy in post-Holocaust Israel, Haredi rabbis and spokesperson presented new norms and costumes while claiming they were old traditions. These, however, were invented traditions that were part of the Post-Truth Politics employed in order to establish and strengthen Haredi society in the State of Israel.
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